cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/2089998
Archived version: https://archive.ph/X5D30
Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20230830081318/https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66654134
I get that for older gay people in English-speaking countries and i appreciate that you shared this. My perspective on this is rather different, as i’m from Germany and completely out-of-date English slurs are obviously not something people here normally have a personal trauma from. On this side of the North Sea, the people who take objection to the term queer are mainly assimilationists who don’t want to be lumped in with anybody who is too flamboyant, loud and gender-nonconforming for their straight friends and business partners, or they’re outright terfs who love to make up stuff about how lesbianism is erased by the queer agenda (ofc most of the time these aren’t even lesbians, and if you see them at a counterprotest to a Dyke* March, odds are they are paid to be there by one of the European fronts for the Heritage Foundation). So i’m not used to needing to pay attention to who i piss off with the term, because my experience is that it reliably pisses off people i want to piss off.
Likewise, i’m feeling kinda icky because my previous opinion towards the term kind of brushed over the trauma queer elders had to endure. Because it originally wasn’t the international term it is now, it was something that gay people abroad probably knew about, but definitely not something your average bigot in a rural central-European village yelled at you when he thought your pants where too fancy to make him feel secure in his fragile masculinity. So i was under the impression that people still alive today just had no direct, hurtful experience with it like with other slurs.
