I really don't want to jump to conclusions but I'm pretty darn sure an increasing amount of the feedback this thread is getting today is coming from the teens that undercover fascists have been spreading the lie that queer is a slur to.

And I have to keep reminding myself I do
have enough followers that I'm going to see the statistical outliers leaving comments, but for real kids. I am like twice your age, and the usage of "queer" as a slur was already basically extinct before I was born, and never had any magical extra hateful connotation that isn't
still present when people use "gay" derisively.

The only reason to find one more offensive than the other is if you consider being any of the other various identities under the umbrella to be objectively worse things than being gay, and it is, in fact, not OK to think that.
And if you have people telling you that older people consider it a very bad word to ever use, far more likely than not, you are hearing that from fascists, who are actively trying to pull some divide and conquer crap on you.

There were indeed people who referred to themselves as
"lesbians" in the '70s who would take violent offense to the notion of lesbians falling under the greater queer umbrella because back then rather than calling themselves "gender critical" they called themselves "political lesbians." And they didn't want people to think that meant
they were actually women who were into women, finding the concept to be quite repulsive. Because again, queerphobic fascists appropriating and attempting to redefine a term.

Alienating such people is one of the reasons you should be trying to say "queer" over "LGBTQIA+" etc.
And again, to be super super clear, definitely not accusing anyone of acting in bad faith or anything. Mainly it's just that education on general queer history is virtually non-existent so it's easy to get bad info is the whole issue.

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More from @SecretGamerGrrl

25 Jun
So today's quick glance at my feed shows that a whole hell of a lot of people just within the past day or two had their first encounter with a bigot referring to herself as a "trans widow."

"Widow" means "woman whose spouse has died," so "trans widow" thus means "trans woman
whose spouse has died" and there is absolutely no circumstance, not even when when talking about bigots creative language choices, where it is ever remotely OK to use that phrase to mean anything other than that, and absolutely fuck anyone who ever does so, you horrible monsters.
Obviously, when bigots appropriate the term, they use it to mean something completely different, but now that you've read the above let's proceed just saying The Term, shall we?

Anyway bigots use The Term to describe hypothetical cis women who somehow manage to marry trans women
Read 29 tweets
22 Jun
You know what would be cool? Normalize just saying "queer" whenever you're broadly referring to queer people. It's a single syllable, it covers everyone, and it shuts down several different disinformation campaigns/bigoted dog whistles.

It's also less confusing all around.
LGBTQIA+ already has a lot of redundancy to it. Written out longform that's Lesbian, Gay (and honestly it's a little weird we have two different terms for roughly-exclusively same-gender attracted especially when only the one is really functonally gendered), Bi/Pan (into multiple
genders), Transgender (pretty straightforward), Queer (a really good catch-all that covers literally anything any of these other letters do plus a lot of other things, some of which don't really have specific terms established), Intersex (again, pretty basic), Asexual/Aromantic
Read 20 tweets
10 Jun
Here's a subject I haven't really gotten directly sermonizing about for a bit, in large part because of the chilling effect of what I'm going to lay out in the rest of this thread.

For a good long while, one of the most popular public faces of the modern fascist movement was a
creep whose name I'd prefer not to directly invoke, both because I know it's still a trauma trigger, and because he changed his name to a long one from a culture he does not actually have roots in with the intent of encouraging people to normalize racist parodies of it. Wrote for
Breitbart, bunch of scandals, you probably remember him.

And you may also remember, or maybe not, that the moment the tide turned on him and his ability to get anyone to pay him any attention started to plummet when, in doing a background check because he was slated to speak at
Read 26 tweets
25 Apr
I'm still not in a place where I feel safe looking at this here website, which means I've been doing a lot more binging of youtube stuff to keep me distracted, and somewhere in doing that my better judgement lost out and I watched this here "Mask Off" video from Lindsay Ellis and
A- This felt like seriously cheating on my big break from looking at this awful website.

B- This is a very bad video that she really should not have produced and uploaded and I'm a bit compelled now to get into it, again, against my better judgement.

Apologies if I'm preaching
to the choir, and also I cannot stress enough that I am not trying to open a dialog/start crap/anything else like that here.

I would advise against watching the video for context because, again, it is very bad, and no good can come of that, and it's worth noting that I have no
Read 35 tweets
15 Mar
So my whole thread today has been people talking about how monstrously transphobic Linehan and Singal are, and I would kind of appreciate it if people stopped that.

When you name someone's prejudice in that way, you're making the central issue one of motivation. Did this jerk do
this thing for a bigoted reason, or for some other reason? And it's generally implied with the framing that if they did not do the thing for bigoted reasons, it is OK that they did the thing.

So you know, when someone fires someone for coming out as trans? Yeah, it's important
there to prove that they were motivated by bigotry, because that's a pretty horrific reason to take someone's job away, and there generally isn't a consequence to firing someone normally because the rest of the standard reasons are like, they were bad at their job and such.
Read 15 tweets
6 Mar
You know what, let's sit here a moment and talk about the harassment I receive on a daily basis as a trans woman. This isn't about broad trends, this is focused on me, and I want everyone who sees it to retweet this whole thread far and wide.

I have a policy to never post or let
others post photographs or videos of me on the internet. This is a policy I have in place because since mid-2014, I have had neo-nazis constantly plotting to murder me, and not knowing what I actually look like, or where I live, makes for a pretty sizable barrier to their efforts
Being frustrated by this, and the various other ways that I really am entirely too boring to make for an engaging stalking target, several of these nazis set up a website they make up all kinds of ridiculous nonsense about me, and fill it with "photos they've collected" which are
Read 30 tweets

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