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May. 29th, 2019 09:17 amBrian Aldiss has a story called “Becoming the Full Butterfly.” It’s about a transgender mystic who starts a movement of embracing the body you were meant to have. It’s very utopian in its view of a world where everyone has a single true self just waiting to be uncovered. It offended me, but not for the reason the author would have expected.
It didn’t seem like there was any room for genderfluid people in the author’s vision. There was no neutrois, or two-spirit, or butch for that matter. There were just the old two boxes, and new ways to fit people into them. And if neither box felt like you, it was because you hadn’t realized it yet.
I call myself queer because it’s a word that cannot be contained. It overflows its bounds, washing away boxes. Anyone can be queer, but queer doesn’t have to be anything. All it asks of you is to allow other people their chance to be queer too, in whatever form that takes for them.
P.S. I’ve seen those posts about how kinky people aren’t really queer and are trying to “steal” queerness. I don’t trust arguments made from disgust, and these posters keep coming back to the idea of kink as something socially unacceptable, “greasy” people do. Queer is as much a movement as an orientation, and I have no interest in making the tent smaller.
It didn’t seem like there was any room for genderfluid people in the author’s vision. There was no neutrois, or two-spirit, or butch for that matter. There were just the old two boxes, and new ways to fit people into them. And if neither box felt like you, it was because you hadn’t realized it yet.
I call myself queer because it’s a word that cannot be contained. It overflows its bounds, washing away boxes. Anyone can be queer, but queer doesn’t have to be anything. All it asks of you is to allow other people their chance to be queer too, in whatever form that takes for them.
P.S. I’ve seen those posts about how kinky people aren’t really queer and are trying to “steal” queerness. I don’t trust arguments made from disgust, and these posters keep coming back to the idea of kink as something socially unacceptable, “greasy” people do. Queer is as much a movement as an orientation, and I have no interest in making the tent smaller.
