#also if you clown on this post you get blocked no ifs ands or buts

[mister13eyond]

I think something about that last post I reblogged, is like- there's a kind of thought I see exclusionists buck back against, and it's something I think we all need to wrap our head around for things to ever improve, but it's also a kind of revolutionary thought, so bear with me:

Queerness is a normal and common part of the spectrum of human experience because there is no standard human experience.

We spent a long long time in our lives being told that to be queer is to be deviant, to be outside the norm, to be outside the Standard [tm] for human development. And I think there are two reactions to this, neither of which fully works: The first is to say "actually, being queer is JUST LIKE being straight! Look how normal and acceptable we are. We're just like you, we also want families and marriage and houses in the suburbs, there's nothing about being Queer that makes me any Different from a straight person." I've heard this called assimiliationism, and this is a survival tactic we present to straight society: we NEED them to believe that we're not a threat to their hegemony, because otherwise they'll never stop attacking us. This tends to be the angle that exclus come at things from- "are you a Normal, Acceptable queer person or are you one of those Confusing queer people that makes cishetallo society not take us seriously?" But many, many MANY queer people get left behind by this kind of thinking, because- well! Many of us never WILL fit the cishetallo model of 'normalcy' and have no interest in it. The second is to say "alright, well, fuck you! If you say I'm weird and deviant and bizarre, then I'll own it- I'll wear it, I'll wear it with pride, I'll revel in being a weird unsightly queer who isn't part of your squeaky-clean suburban image." I tend to fall more here; there's a degree of comfort and safety in owning the weapons thrown at us, and this kind of thinking usually leads to queer solidarity and intra-community acceptance, in that- anyone who DOESN'T fit at the cishetallo table is welcome to sit with us. Anyone who doesn't feel that they belong with cishetallo definitions of relationships, self, body, sexuality, attraction- they're all allowed here; our only measurement is "left behind by these narrow definitions." But I think that's still not far enough because it misses the root thing- the central issue, the one that made me realize why clinging to hardline definitions of who Is and Is Not queer will never work: Cishetallopatriarchal norms are artificially constructed and enforced and are not in any way natural human behavior. That's the issue. When I realized that, it became perfectly understandable why so many more people are seeking out their own definitions, trying to understand themselves, finding they're queer, increasingly drawn to queer communities: the things cishetallopatriarchal society enforces as Inherent, Gendered Behavior simply aren't true. Human experience is, in fact, a largely messy, complicated, subjective and individual experience. We share a LOT of things- there is, inherently, very little in the human brain or body that separates men and women. Our secondary sex characteristics are easy to change. Intersexuality is as common as redheads. Behavior is almost entirely from nurture and not nature; cultural values do more to define men and women than any degree of inherent Instinct. Possibly the only example AT ALL i can think of is that birthing parents tend to have different instincts/needs after giving birth than inseminating parents, as- you know- it's pretty natural for the person who just carried and pushed out a whole human child to instinctually need to rest, recover and feed the child with their mammary glands while the inseminating parent is more motivated to go bring home food and supplies. And that's a Pretty Specific set of circumstances. Historically, humans have... been a pretty mixed bag. We have some strong commonalities and we're socially-motivated, inclined to keep the peace in our group, and to create settlements and in-groups, but we're not naturally straight, or cis, or sexual. It just doesn't make any sense- if every single person was naturally driven to pair up into a breeding pair and focus on raising children and their family alone, who would be left to take care of needs outside the family? Who would be there to practice medicine, to assist the family unit with childcare, to tend sheep, to act as midwives, to contribute weaving and sewing and

pottery? Humanity needs as broad a range of genders, sexualities, ace-allo spectrum experiences, even just PERSONALITIES as possible- we're not meant to be identical and all go after the same goal because we were not meant to exist alone. We were not meant to be individual, a single family who never cares for or interacts with another family, a breadwinner and a child-rearer and nothing else to the community. We were always meant to have groups- some who don't want children, some who don't want sex, some who pair off into households with two men or two women or three people or god knows what else- so that, as a community, we had diversity and a broad range of helpers and levels of involvement.

Queerness is a normal part of the human experience. Being someone who doesn't neatly tick cishetallopatriarchal boxes of gender and sexuality is a normal part of human experience. More people are queer than any of us know, because queerness is not a deviation from the norm, because the norm is fake.