Queer folx, we need to have a chat about what makes someone queer, because I have been hearing some messed up ideas about this and it needs to stop. We've been letting this exclusions rhetoric take hold for too long, and it's time to pull it out from the root.

Here's my summary of what makes someone queer, and please feel free to add or correct if you think I can word it better:

If you experience gender, sex, sexuality, or attraction differently than the majority group of that category? You belong here.

That's it.

Deprogram your own exclusionary ideas, please. If your thought is "straights don't belong," you've already forgotten about all the straight trans, NBi, and intersex people. How does this help? Who does this protect? Literally no one. But it does hurt a lot of us.

Cw: rape, abuse, conversion therapy

Corrective rape and conversion therapy are used as tools against far more than just cis gay people. Trans folx, aces/aros, etc. Why should we be excluding people who suffer the same abuses for the same reasons? What is the point?

By demanding you understand and relate directly to the people who want to be a part of this community, you're already doing exactly what is done to us over and over, and you're missing the whole point of being queer: we're different, and that's what makes us amazing.

Think about what your life was like before you found this community, before someone finally told you that you aren't broken. Why on earth would you insist on denying that to someone else who's hurting just like you were? The whole point is celebrating differences.

The 'general' flag for our community is a rainbow, but have you ever thought about why? A rainbow is a result of light being split into its individual pieces. We are one community, made up of many different and equally beautiful pieces. That's who we are. So be that.

We have a chance to break the cycle of abuse and exclusion, and we *need* to take it. You aren't going to understand everyone in this community. You're not going to know every identity. That doesn't mean they don't belong, and we need to stop demanding that as an every fee.

Especially now, we need to actually stick together. Every piece of that rainbow is needed to make the whole. Who are we if we exclude people based on who they are, things they can't change, that they're already being excluded for? We want them to live through that TWICE?

We're the ones who understand what that shit is like, and y'all really want to do that to someone else? Think about that. You're just handing down the pain you were given. That pain is easier to carry, and cast off, TOGETHER.

Do better. And it's ok to say you were wrong.