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i really find it funny when people try and act like the “queer community” exists as a single entity and not, you know, thousands of fractured insular microcommunities each convinced that their values and politics are universal across queer spaces.
the first “queer community” i was in was, on the whole, incredibly privileged & isolated from the rest of the city. it was extremely rich, white, and demographically monolithic enough that i, a white trans woman from a socioeconomically privileged home, was constantly tokenized.
there were a lot of trans people there but almost no transfeminine people there, resulting in an extremely privileged environment where nobody had worked through their transmisogyny and i got to be the one they worked it out on, treated as both an exotic object and gross dude.
and i totally convinced myself that i was being a gross, entitled male-socialized tranny to want to be treated like a fucking human.
then i found another queer community in the same city. one where i wasn’t the only transfeminine person in the room 99% of the time.
then i found another queer community in the same city. one where i wasn’t the only transfeminine person in the room 99% of the time.
and the difference in how i was treated was incredible.
suddenly, i had people viewing me as an actual human. affirming me when i needed it, calling me on my shit when i needed it. and giving me the respect to actually engage with me as a real, emotional being, and not just the representation of a concept to split on and discard.
the first “community” had treated me simultaneously like a beautiful goddess and human waste, marked for disposal. the second just treated me like a person. these two communities existed in the same city, yet my experience with them couldn’t have been more polar.
after i left the first community, i had some pretty damaged and wild views on the nature of queer communities. i thought the place i had left was everywhere, that its problems were universal, inescapable. i was pretty detached from reality there. eventually, i came to see that.
there’s no universal queer communities, just fractured microgroups with diverse ethos and, usually, inflated egos. your experience in one place is not necessary a universal problem, and your lack of experience with a problem somewhere doesn’t mean it’s not widespread elsewhere.
it’s easy to conflate where we live with the world, because to us, it is. but your world isn’t necessarily everyone’s. and any conversations about problems in the queer community that fail to acknowledge this will just end in us talking past each other
