Thursday, April 3, 2014

LEARN ALL THE WORDS D8

Or don't.


(Context: This train of thought was brought about by a talk about how intimidating and confusing the queer lexicon is given at a panel on personhood and identity by a straight cisgender woman whose name escapes me and who very likely has no idea this post exists so I guess it doesn't matter all that much.)

I've heard (at least presumably straight/cisgender in the instances where they don't disclose their gender identity and sexual orientation) people express frustration and confusion about the vast queer lexicon that's been building up at a more rapid pace than ever over the past couple decades enough times to make me want to actually process my reaction to their frustration in writing, so here goes. It doesn't matter if the queer lexicon intimidates straight/cisgender people because the lexicon is a tool for queer people to figure out who they are. We understand ourselves and our world in words, and when there are no words for something that is an essential part of yourself, it can be extremely disorienting and result in feelings of living as someone you're not, not belonging, or in my case confusion regarding other people's identities (as a child I warped my internal definition of what the gender binary was to make it fit myself because I didn't know nonbinary genders were possibilities, which meant I was misunderstanding something relatively small but nonetheless important about the people around me until I was sixteen or so.)

However, the feeling of being intimidated is still a good sign because it shows that the people who feel intimidated care about the queer people in their lives enough to want to understand them (as mentioned by another panelist at the above-mentioned panel.) Because words are normally consciously used for communicating to other people and you don't notice their value in your own thought processes until you find some crucial word you've has been missing to describe yourself for your entire life up to that point and you realize that you're not just "weird" or bad at being straight/male or female, it's easy to develop the misconception that you're expected to know all these words (and probably easy for people who've just found their miracle word to expect that everyone else will learn it, too.) But I think giving enough of a shit to look up a word (or, for the more courageous, ask) is enough. It shows that you care about us as people enough to want to know about our sexual orientations, which is all that really matters for people you aren't sexually or romantically attracted to. The same can be said for gender--while it's nice when people understand what I mean by "nonbinary" or "gender neutral" (and kind of annoying when they seem completely unable to wrap their heads around it, if I'm being totally honest--it's really pretty simple, at least in my case), as long as you don't use the wrong pronouns, you've done what you need to do to convince me that you care about who I am. (And yes, I do mean NOT using the WRONG set of pronouns--I obviously can't speak for all trans people here, but although I prefer singular "they," as long as you avoid "she/her" and "it," I'll probably be okay with whatever other pronoun set you come up with, including "he/him/his" since it wasn't used in a way that hindered my understanding of myself when I was a kid like "she/her" and it's not used as a dehumanizing insult like "it." I don't believe I'm the only one who feels this way about pronouns.)

When prompted to talk about consent, the panelist brought up the lack of consent to the queer lexicon on the part of straight, cisgender people. To me, that indicated a crucial lack of understanding of the importance of the queer lexicon. We don't need consent from straight people to develop ways to talk about ourselves, especially considering that we only need a lexicon because the very things we're defining are things that we've been oppressed and alienated for by the heteronormative society we all live in. If that had never been a problem, then these aspects of our identity wouldn't need to be defined to such a specific degree because they wouldn't be significant enough to cause us so much angst in the first place. The lexicon is made to counteract an aspect of the violence perpetrated against people by heteronormative society--it gives us power to understand ourselves objectively instead of by how we measure up to a narrow idea of "normal."* Privilege by nature makes this an unlikely insight for most straight, cisgender people to come up with by themselves, so it's understandable that they feel intimidated even as they care about their queer friends and family. But the sooner they recognize the lexicon's real purpose, the closer we will be to a society where no one needs to learn all these words because the things these words are defining will no longer incite so much violence and angst, and we will be able to accept the existance of all genders (or lack** thereof in some people's cases) without batting an eye and see less common sexual orientations as mere tendencies and preferences instead of the world-shaking, identity-influencing social factors they are today.

*(And I was sooooo glad that another panelist brought that up because I couldn't think of a way to put that into a question o__o;.)

**Ugh. I can't find a word for this with a neutral connotation. More linguistic limits to beat back, I guess.

No comments:

Post a Comment