Queer is a term that members of the LGBTQ community often love or hate vehemently.  Especially some older gay men seem to struggle with the word, as it was a common and effectively painful slur many of us heard growing up. 

Some younger folks embrace it, and think it means, just them. As if Queer is an identity, like Gay or Lesbian, or Bi. I had this one young queer person chastise me on Social Media for referring to myself as Queer.  I thought, guuuurrrrl, Some of us older folks where working to reclaim this term back in the early 90’s before you were even born. You don’t get exclusive rights to this or any other word.

I’ve been saddened, over the past 12 or so years, at the way some parts of the rainbow communities have begun to try and exclude others. In the Gay and Lesbian communities, there are those who don’t think the T for trans, ought to be included. They claim that L,G, and B refer to sexual orientations, and so Gender doesn’t belong. And there are members of the trans community, who throw around the term CIS as if it were a pejorative, and a way to dismiss or invalidate people who are not trans.

But underneath it all, in my opinion, we are all the same queer. 

The rainbow communities do include the LGBTQ and more if we are a healthy, self-aware and really inclusive community. Gender expression, identity and sexual orientation are all connected, even though they aren’t the exact same thing.

I identify as a cisgender white gay man. I like many others, spent a bunch of our childhood in tremendous fear of people learning my secret. When any of us, were bullied, it wasn’t because we were found to be having sex with a member of the same sex. It was almost always because we were seen as too flamboyant, or girly, or a sissy.  We were bullied because we weren’t “boy/man”  or enough.We liked dolls, or playing house, or any number of things that are traditionally deemed as girlish or feminine.

I’ve heard lesbian friends describe a similar past. They were shunned, ridiculed, or bullied for being too butch, or not being feminine enough.

In other words, so much of bullying of non-heterosexual kids, is based on gender expression. Hell, even heterosexual kids get bullied surrounding gender expression, and the far too rigid expression of restrictive gender norms.

We see this playing out as conservatives seek to ban drag queens and drag story hours. Drag queens are simply people who do drag, and can be cisgender or trans. These folks are seen as so dangerous, not because of their orientation or even their identity. They are so dangerous to heteronormativity because they demonstrate that everyone can explore a fluid expression of gender.

A few weeks ago, I read an op-ed, written by the person, who coined the term, cisgender. Their effort was never meant to create a different binary, although in my opinion, that is what they accidentally did.  The term cisgender helps articulate the differences between folks who understand their gender to be consistent with their body, as opposed to those who see their insides not matching their outsides. But regardless, CIS as a label still fails to grapple with the real chasm in our modern culture.  That chasm is between those who are heteronormative and those who are not. I like to think that Queer, is a pretty good word to understand all those whose behavior falls outside and perpetuates heteronormativity. In that way, gay, lesbian, bi, non-binary, trans, butch, fem, and lots of others all fit well in a very non-rigidly defined group, called queer.

We have so much in common!  We are feared or disliked or misunderstood as different, not because of what we do in private, but because of how we express ourselves and how that expression confronts and combats rigid gender roles that heteronormativity relies upon.

We are not all alike. We are not all the same. What makes each of us identify, as gay, trans, bi, non-nary, lesbian, queer, or any other label we self-select: these are rich, valid, meaningful differences that we would be better to celebrate more often.  Our diversity is our greatest strength when we see it, respect it and celebrate it. And, we can see ourselves belonging, or see how we are connected, when we recognize that our willingness to express our gender in many diverse ways is why we are shunned, feared and challenged.

And this isn’t a matter of straight people vs the rest of us.

Recently, I saw a news story about a cisgender, white, straight, married, man, who is a professional baseball player. He is wearing red nail polish!  And some are clutching their pearls because of it! His sexual orientation isn’t the issue. He is rattling people because of his willingness to display or express gender outside traditional rigid gender norms.

All of us can unite and accomplish more if we stopped trying to decide what letters do and don’t belong alongside L,G,B, and T. We will get further, when we see the challenges and attacks against us are about our gender expression predominantly, and the we don’t support rigid heteronormative expression. In that way, for me, we are really al the same queer- all of us on the outside.  

The artwork for this post is an original image by me, but it uses an image found on Flickr, under a creative commons license, by gaelx.