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Paying the Queer Tax

Paying the Queer Tax

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 It has been really hard for me to write lately. My mood and my creativity are low. It is hard to explain why, but I got an easy example of the problem. Yesterday, a stranger left a review of our restaurant, giving us one star and telling us they would never return because we are welcoming to “freaks and cross dressers.” Not long ago, I would have laughed and brushed it off as a bigot self-selecting out of our clientele, but given the current state of the world, I can’t let it go. Fear and anxiety flooded me. “Is this the forewarning a bigger problem, a threat, or just a Karen acting out?” I hate how much of my thought process is, yet again, focused on basic safety and security. Many of my friends say they wish I would move near them for my safety, but this problem is everywhere and nowhere is safe.The Invalidation of IdentityThe way I feel is why these people act out like this. They want us to be afraid, to be anxious, to be silent. Knowing that doesn’t help push through the fear. In some ways, it makes it worse. No one is invalid because a bigot says they are and no one is a failure for feeling fear, anxiety, or invalidated. It is difficult to keep going when the truth doesn’t matter to any party in this. Yes, it is true that most of the transphobes that speak out are broken and injured people that are acting out of their pain. It is also true that they are wrong on the science and the science is on our side. The problem is, this is not an argument about facts, no matter what they say, it is about emotional validation. Those in power don’t want to lose that power, so it is in their interest to make us fight amongst ourselves, so we don’t see and point out what they are doing.For cis, heterosexual people, they have grown up in the cultural default that supports and encourages them to see their experience of themselves and the world as normal and normative. This is even more true for those who are male and white. They never experienced their sexuality as compulsory or their gender as assigned. This world was made by and for them to justify and celebrate their existence. Anything outside these narrow, normative bounds is rendered invalid, aberrant, and repugnant.Anyone outside of these norms is taught to mask and deny their differences. They define us as the other, as a danger to the normative standard. Why?Control, I will not sugarcoat it. The sole purpose of this validation structure is to exert dominance over society as a whole. If a person or group can control individual gender roles and sexuality, they control the whole person. It is a powerful kind of mind control to gas light an entire population into suppressing their own innate characteristics to be seen as acceptable in society. Remember always that this is about policing identity, not actions. They may speak with disgust about or even legislate against particular actions, but those are used as evidence of the declared invalid state. Freedom is a virus The primary excuse for laws against queer people and activities is the old classic, “Won’t somebody think of the children.” Why? With the cultural defaults defined not only as normative, but nature, that requires them to believe that everything else is unnatural. If something is unnatural, then the only way it can propagate is through contagion. Somehow, in some way, people must catch the gay or whatever other queerness they are wanting to attack.The science has been in for a long time that homosexuality, asexuality, and transgender people are born the way they are and are not made that way through societal or psychological contagion. Honestly, that should be the end of the debate, but science denialism and grifting pseudoscience will always run to the rescue of power to elevate their own clout in the culture. Queerness is not contagious, but freedom and liberation are. This is why it is so important for them to double down on the hatred, the misinformation, and the demonization right now because all liberation movements are dangerous to the status quo. The Power of Freedom Fear is poisonous to freedom, and the best way to stoke fear while making money from the people infected. It is too easy to package fear in a box labled freedom to trick people into sacrificing one for the other.If your freedom is so fragile, it can be taken away because someone exists or you have to show them basic civility, your freedom is an illusion. Gender and sexuality are basic building blocks of all tyrannical hierarchies. Heterosexuality is flattened into a sterile system of control with dominant penetrators and submissive receptacles. This bolsters the misogynistic gender system in an endless feedback loop. Nobody wins in a destructive system like this. Queerness of every kind breaks gender and shows the lies built into cis heteronormativity at its heart. Just the idea of a submissive male and a dominating woman breaks the lie, but the more normative axioms you question, the ...
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