#Mspec discourse

[rhad-barks]

how on earth are we still having aspec and mspec and neopronoun discourse it's almost 2024 do you guys understand that we need to embrace all sides of the queer community or the infighting will get us all killed. do you get that. lawmakers want all of us dead whether we're queers with palatable easy to understand identities or cishet alloaro men or he/him lesbians or genderfluid fagdykes with emojiself pronouns. in a world that's trying to erase us all we have is each other Do You Understand That. please be kind to people with identities you might not understand or agree with because they deserve to live freely as much as you do.

[hiiragi7]

Regardless of what the discourse is, there's a really uncomfortable trend I've noticed regarding the language people use in these discussions.

"Roleplaying", "pretending", "faking", and the usage of "real"/"actual" are all, quite honestly, really inflammatory language and I've never seen it end well.

Even for points I may otherwise somewhat agree with or find interesting, the usage of this language and the act of assuming in/authenticity in this way (as well as the assumption that one can determine who is and is not in/authentic) makes me not want to engage at all, because it's just a very cruel way of framing it to me. I've seen this language really hurt people. I've seen people really spiral and become suicidal over it. It's not language that should be tossed around.

[bisexualsafespace]

"nobody says gays can be attracted to women"

thats because gay men aren't really into twitter/Tumblr discourse, so as a result the mspec lesbian's get talked about more, gays can be attracted to women, hello i am a mspec gay, I am homoflexible, one of the many terms under the "mspec gay" terminology, I am occasionally and rarely attracted to women. btw to any mspec lesbians and mspec gays reading this, you aren't invalidating anyone, you have a beautifully complex and hard to understand sexuality, don't let anyone tell you your "phobic" for that. one of the main reasons I started this blog was because im tired of people saying "nobody says gays are attracted to women!!!! must be proof of lesbophobia" i'm a mspec gay. we exist.

[ohpassenger]

teach young queers that "i don't personally understand/support [this specific "arbitrary"/complex identity], therefore i'm gonna write about how much violence i'm gonna commit against you, [identity], in my dni post on tumblr.com" is, in fact, professing a hate crime against a queer group, regardless of whether or not you 1) are serious 2) consider that identity """morally correct""" 3) are queer yourself.

first and foremost, please acquaint yourself with the idea that not every thought, opinion, idea you form is absolutely necessary to be shared online. then, understand that even if things don't make sense to you, it is not normal nor good to go around spouting about violence against queer people - and do not let that be normalized to you, for the love of god.

everyone has prejudice. i have prejudice. i think certain things in our community are stupid, pointless, and make no sense. policing your every subconscious thought is not normal behavior, but see the line is drawn when you're writing in big bold letters about how much you hate x queer group in graphic details. that makes you no better than raging homophobes.

[leafytaffy]

If the queer online spaces of today learn about the terms homo/heteroflexible and how common and accepted the terms were years ago they would have a collective aneurysm

[baradyke]

hatred for bisexuals is so normalized in this community i knew ppl would be pushing even more to invent/redefine labels that just mean bisexual bc pan- omni- poly- multi- abro- ambi- mspec lesbian are all symptoms of the Bi Label Avoidance Syndrome! everyone loves to defend labels that helps no one and harms everyone as long as they never have to respect bisexuality

REAL REAL REAL, like as if the pansexual label wasn't enough (acting as if bi people can't date trans/nb people or have a gender preference? so stupid) then they had to go make up a million more that mean the EXACT same thing. why are you so scared to just say bi???

[michaelmilkers]

"can men be lesbians?" bestie in 100 countries women can't be lesbians is this really the most pressing issue rn

[cloudboundcritters]

"we need more weird queers!!"

you start parroting TERF talking points the milisecond someone says they are a lesboy or gaygirl

you cry when mspec lesbians/gays exist

you refuse to use neopronouns or it/its, even when those are a persons only set of pronouns

you expect a-specs to experience attraction in some way (yes, that includes platonic attraction)

you exclude intersex people

you can't even accept furries.

[bisexualsafespace]

we are still in that era, mspec lesbian and gay discourse is still flaming hot and sadly, although shifting, the majority opinion on discord and twitter, with a large minority on reddit, and many on this website, still opposing mspec gays and lesbians.

we're now far enough past the major 2016-18 tumblr Discourse Era that I fairly often see people posting retrospectively about branches of it, both in a poking-fun way ("if you're seriously still mad about asexuals in queer spaces then I mean this deeply: get a life") and a more serious way ("the 'su critical' community was an astounding display of ridiculous double-standards for diverse media"), but I rarely see people step back and address what I think was the root of it: these harassment movements weren't just silly teen leftist infighting, for basically every big weird tumblr discourse back then that made you go "hang on this sounds like a basic conservative talking point with some vocab swapped out," you could almost always trace it back to a source from the 2014-16 online fascism boom. prominent transmed youtubers were consistently vocal republicans, "q slur" discourse came to us by way of terfs, the first crop of popular "su critical" videos were explicitly fascistic, etc., and all those discourse cycles can still be clearly felt in the today's topical tumblr tussles.

[januscorner]

It’s so weird when people act like cishet people know about queer discourse, I don’t think that frat bro hit on you cus of bi lesbians he hit on you cus he’s a dick

[imjunebitch]

i think that some people in the queer community need to learn the difference between tolerance vs. acceptance/support.

a lot of the sentiment "in support" of weird queers is really just tolerant of them. idk how many times ive seen posts like "lesboys/multigender folks/people with neopronouns/whatever might be cringe, but they're better than exclusionists! let kids be cringe!" and like. you have to see that this isn't actually supportive. it's tolerant, sure, and that's better than outright exclusion but... ok.

I don't think any of those groups are cringe. i think they're wonderful and beautiful.

i think it's awesome that transmasc folks can hold on to the label of lesbian if they like. he/him lesbians have been around for a long time. historically, some lesbians have taken testosterone, used nonbinary and masculine pronouns, preferred masculine terms... that isn't gonna stop because some people decided it's specifically cringe when transmascs do it! im mostly sapphic, and I'm fucking proud to stand with my sapphic sisters, brothers, and siblings!

multigender and genderfluid people are awesome as fuck. therians are cool as fuck. i love boygirls and fagdykes and girlfags and girlboys and genderfuckery of all kinds. don't let people treat you like a kid for wanting an identity of that kind. fuck em, you're great.

neopronouns are cool as fuck too. i keep hearing people saying that everyone who uses them is a kid, and that's sinister shit. you hear it on both sides too. exclusionists say it derisively, and people who think they're being supportive say it to defend them... but it's really, genuinely cool. people want to act like being nonbinary is only one experience, and that we have gone from there being only two genders to there now being a third gender, which is called nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns. but hey, fuck that sentiment in particular. gender is a spectrum, and it makes total fucking sense for people to want to create pronouns and terms to describe their own experiences! hell yeah!

you hear a lot of "well, these people are just kids, we should give them a space to learn," or "they're not doing anything wrong i guess," but these are not genuinely supportive statements! so how's this: I fucking love all of these people, and i hope our community gets more of them. I pray for a day when they outnumber the grim, humorless exclusionists who want to gatekeep acceptance by the thousands. fuck exclusionists, pride is for everyone.

(pre-emptive note: no this post isn't for MAPs or radqueers or anyone like that, obviously, grow up. hurting and preying on defenseless people/animals is obviously not a valid identity, don't even try to compare those things.)

[bisexualsafespace]

veganism and sexuality have nothing to do with each other and using veganism to explain why homoflexibility isn’t valid is dumb af

[anarcho-catboyism]

Sorry but you're not a "totally progressive radical queer" if everytime you see a gender or sexuality you don't understand you become a fucking Conservative about it.

[lovelydisgusting]

no more infighting over identity labels. i just saw a post where op listed various queer identity microlabels, sorted into two categories under "support" and "don't support". It was super silly, but also made me frustrated and sad. so here's my message to my fellow severely online queers: other queer people are not your enemy. you might think their labels are nonsense, or contradictory, or even offensive - learn to accept this. remember what you are fighting for: freedom of identity, freedom of expression, bodily autonomy, liberation from binary-hetero-patriarchy. FOR ALL! playing identity cop is utterly counterproductive to the cause.

[gray-ace-space]

recently encountered a post where someone said "gender is fluid but sexuality isn't". (they were talking about bi lesbians.)

my first thought was: does that person, like. hear what they're saying? how can you explicitly hold two beliefs that are so logically inconsistent and not see it? how can you simultaneously think gender is this fluid and complex thing, but sexuality, much of which is defined around gender, is simple and stationary and its boundaries need policing?

but like, fuck, why even argue against it, right? there is no internal logic because there is no logical thought behind it. these are not genuine beliefs. this person is repeating what is currently acceptable in their (small) specific social circle. this is the same person who, a few years back, would be excluding nonbinary lesbians, but nonbinary lesbians are cool and normal on queer tumblr now, so they'll exclude bi lesbians instead, and not even pause to reflect on the difference.

oh, and if you read this and thought "these people don't even actually accept nb lesbians either", ding ding ding! because it's not a real, deep belief, that acceptance is extremely shallow and conditional. so as soon as someone is an nb lesbian in a way these people find odd (like being both a man and a lesbian) they will exclude them too and find a way to justify it.

why do we have to endlessly go through this cycle with queer identities. can we not? can we just not. i'm tired.

[michaelmilkers]

i'm regularly astounded by the cognitive dissonance some of yall have to accept that gender is a social construct with infinite possibilities with the capacity to be deeply personal and individual but still think there's a list of like 4 acceptable sexual orientations and if you go outside of that list or mix entries on that list or relate to them in a non-traditional way not only are you Breaking The Rules you're personally directly harming people who follow them