Written September 9 2023, before Finn5ter came out as trans.
I watched Sarah Z's new video about "can celebrities queerbait" and it made me think about this classic hot topic of queer discourse called "Are straight kinksters queer?" There's this whole framework that I'm a known hater of where queerness is treated as a typology or flowchart where your innate qualities assign you to a specific label, flag, etc. and there's another framework of queerness where it's a verb you do whenever you transgress against the norm. And there's another framework where it's a community that you exist within.
To use gay men as an example, according to these three frameworks, one is queer because:
- You are queer because you are gay because you are a man who is exclusively sexually and romantically attracted to other men.
- You are queer because, as a man, you are actively having sex with other men
- You are queer because you are a part of the LGBT community, in your case gay men especially. You spend time in queer spaces, with queer people, living an all around queer life.
I don't want to decide that one of these is the correct one to the exclusion of others. I have too much of a concussion for that. It's all semantics. There's arguments to be made for and against all of them. But I do think something important is that when you're doing queer stuff you're transgressing in some way against the societal normal script and will probably face some repercussions for that. And that we have very much communities and cultures that important to our queerness.
Sarah Z brings up the example of Finn5ter who is for all intents and purposes living as a trans lesbian. He is presenting 24/7 as a conventional woman and dating a trans woman. But he is insistent that this is a cishet man. But, you know, he absolutely is facing transmisogyny and existing within our community of trans women including who he chooses to date and whose videos he is showing up in. He is doing the act of transition. Absolutely I think Finn5ter counts as queer. A queer cishet man. Sure!
I remember that like idk ten-ish years ago or slightly less than that there was this very loud discourse about how straight kinksters are calling themselves queer and appropriating queerness. A similar discourse has been never ending about the mythical "cishet asexuals taking up space in our community and stealing our resources." But in the same way that I am increasingly in favor of putting an A for Allies in the LGBTQIAAP+ acronym and celebrating Legit Allies like PFLAG Mama Bears, I am increasingly looking at who these straight queer people actually are and asking the question: Maybe they are queer? Kinda?
Like, my answer to the cishet asexuals question has always been like, if a cishet asexual is in your queer community space and they are your friend and community member then that cishet asexual is objectively a member of a queer community. It's so rare that there will even be more than one cishet asexual in a queer space anyway but like, if they're there, and y'all are getting along, then yes, they are a part of the community, because, well, there they are! They're our friends? They're our friends! If you look at who asexual people actually are and not just the typological chart of what a hypothetical cishet asexual would look like, then you can pretty clearly see that they're generally queer. They're usually some like, neurodivergent gender nonconforming nerd who spends all their time with queer people. Yeah, that person is absolutely a part of the queer community. Hypothetically they can go camouflage and live a normie life and receive privileges but... isn't that true of all white queer people? Isn't that just choosing to be closeted your whole life? Pursuing being their genuine selves and living the life they feel called to brought them to our community, I think that means they belong.
Looking at the kink community: Who is in the kink community? Like Dr. Devon Price writes in Unmasking Autism, the community is predominantly neurodivergent people who don't exactly fit the norms of gender and sexuality. Yes, there's straight people who do kink privately in the bedroom and imitate some fifty shades nonsense but those people don't identify as "kinksters." They don't have leather pride flags in their closets. The people in the community? Well who is in the community? It's a buncha queer bisexual transsexuals on the autism and ADHD spectrum talking about their dungeons and dragons games and sometimes rope or floggers come into the picture.
There's this linguistic quirk I noticed where the cishet people in kink spaces have another term for trans people. It's "my friends." When they talk about stuff like transphobic laws being passed in Florida, the way they say it is almost always "They're passing laws that target my friends." They're spending all day on discord hanging out with trans people and feel passionately about standing up for their friends. They're going to local munches and meetups and flying across the country to cons where they're hanging out in spaces that are generally majority queer people. and they're doing things and spending big chunks of their life focused on and in community centered on things that their families can never know about or they'd suffer a great deal of social consequences. There's a lot of people who say that if their family ever found out about what encompasses their entire social life, they would be absolutely disowned. I've even met cishet people who were disowned and ended up moving in with houses full of trans women who took them in! There was this one cishet guy who lives in a red state and was telling me how when his trans roommates go out and about they always travel in packs and he like, makes a point of being the intimidating strong looking man in the pack to scare off bigots. I mean, like, this dude might be cishet but he's like, in the trans community 'ain't he? There's this whole squad of trans women who he has made the center of his life because they took him in when he got disowned for being kinky. This person seems to be living a queer life to me, even if they're not, by the dictionary definition, a queer.
So I ask this question: Not in a sweeping, categorical, typological manner, whereby doing kink or being in the kink community makes someone queer, absolutely, all of them. But, just thinking about actual people, it does kinda seem like these people are having a queer experience yes? There was this middle aged cishet woman I was talking to the other night who lives in a red state and whose eldest kid is questioning their gender and she was talking to me about how she was having trouble connecting with her terrified kid about it. And she had said like "Don'tcha know mom spends all day hanging out with trans people on the internet while she folds the laundry? I will always be on your side no matter who you turn out to be." And, like, yeah no I'm not gonna say that this cishet woman isn't part of queer community, yeah? Like she's cishet but she's an ally, she's a mama bear, she's our friend! She's a real fuckin' friend of Dorothy! And this solidarity of hers is born out of how she feels a compulsion towards behaviors outside of the norms of gender and sexuality and it is through pursuing her truest desires and genuine self in life that she has come to spend her time in queer community spaces full of queer people and internalized our values and centered us in her life to the point that this is what she's saying to her trans kid, despite living in an area where being supportive of this kid is actively dangerous to the entire family. That whole family is having a queer experience.
A lot of my changes as I've gotten older in how I feel about including straight allies as people who think of as valued community members has come from meeting more and more mama bears, honestly. Like, when I was most against this it was when I was 18 years old and just really bitter that it was easier to meet straight people who said they supported gay people than it was to meet actual gay people. Bitter about people who said they supported gay people, but didn't actually support gay people and used their apparently support as some sort of bargaining chip they could withhold or withdraw at any time if they weren't happy with us. But those people aren't real allies anyway they're just random straight people. As I've gotten older, I've met so many straight allies who actually have truly centered queerness and transness in their lives. They're legitimately in our communities.
When I have to stand up for trans youth in libraryland, there are cishet librarians who stand up even louder and brighter than I can and at the expense of their professional image and careers, and they're not afraid to do things outside the gender norms, and they're not afraid to get in trouble for us. You know what? I want to claim those people as our people. I want them to be one of ours because they clearly want us to be one of theirs. Queer people are always on about chosen family because so often we don't have traditional nuclear families to fall back on, and so we build our own families. There is a concept where family abolition means the expansion of your mental modal of your family to include more and more people. If your family is the people whose welfare you feel is important in your life, expanding your family, to choose people to be in your family, means prioritizing people outside of the cisheteropatriarchal nuclear family unit as being just as important to you. So often I have been meeting cishets who have chosen queer and trans people who they aren't even related to as part of who they feel fully personally responsible for. People they'll fight so hard for they'll take big risks. And you know what? If they're choosing me, then I'll choose them too.
"But if we expand the queer umbrella to include too many people won't it lose its specificity? Doesn't it become meaningless?" In Yiddish there's no word for leg. In Yiddish the whole damn thing is your foot. But there's still words for thigh, knee, and calf. If you want to specify a part of your foot that isn't what English speakers call your foot, you can just say thigh. Not gate-keeping "queerness" and gender non-conformity to only belong to the "real queers" who meet the eligibility criteria doesn't take away our more specific words like gay, lesbian, trans, bi, etc. and it doesn't decenter us either as the people more heavily impacted by these systemic forms of oppression. But a mama bear who had to move to another state for her trans kid? And shaved her head and gets misgendered every day? And spends her whole life advocating for trans kids she's not even related to? She's in our fucking community! I'm totally down to claim her. She's queer af as far as I care. She don't need to eat this much pussy to ride!
I think being accepting and loving instead of hostile and weird towards these people can only be a good thing. Solidarity is so beautiful. I love my cishet allies. I love my weird neurodivergent kinky leftist weirdos who are technically cishet but wear "DEFEND TRANS WOMEN" shirts. I don't think it's fun to be pessimistic and misanthropic about them. I just think they're neat!
And yes duh of course my personal context of recently starting to identify as a heteroflexible trans woman is a part of this. I was really truly terrified to accept my own sexuality for a long time because i was afraid identifying as straight would result in me being ostracized from the trans community. I had genuine good reasons to think it would given some of the things I'd heard other trans people say tbh! I oversold my bisexuality and attraction to women in order to reassure other trans people that I still belonged in the community. It was pretty stupid and I'm so grateful that when I finally "came out as straight" all my friends were super supportive of me. But like, I genuinely don't think that's the reaction I would've gotten in some of the other trans spaces I've been in. This intense misanthropic antagonism towards anyone on the borderlines of queerness just made me so afraid to be "not queer enough" even though, among white trans people, it's trans women who date men that face the most violence (because men are terrible and awful and violent. And I specify white because obviously among all trans people, it's Black and Indigenous trans people that will always face the most violence regardless of their specific sexuality or gender). But exploring these border areas of queer spaces, rather than only ever being in homogenous spaces of nearly entirely white trans women working in tech, has caused me to interact more with straight allies and to appreciate them more as being very supportive and welcoming people as well (in addition to other queer and trans people who are oh so lovely and good!)
Anyway that's my concussed brain ramble on this. Not my usual high quality writing because my brain literally has a big dang bruise on it. But writing a little bit is a part of healing cuz I gotta do a little thinking as a treat to encourage recovery. If this whole post turns out in retrospect to have been really fucking stupid then in a few months we can all laugh and say "remember when Shel hit her head and wrote that dumb post about loving straight people in a concussed stupor?" and I can say "haha what post I have amnesia of that incident from the brain damage."
I just think human beings are so lovely and diverse and wonderful and it's so good that so many people in the world are so fucking weird and I love when the weird people love each other.