People think of themselves as more legitimate when they operate under solidarity instead of in coalitions. The cool thing about the LGBT(QQIAPP+) mess of an acronym is that it defines different kinds of groups that belong together, without making an attempt to justify how one relates to another.
What REG’s did was try to ascribe solidarity to a coalition. When they said “the community is about fighting homophobia and transphobia,” they decided that every member of the group should have the same experiences, thus unifying them through something tangible.
The problem I have with solidarity (read as: shared experiences as the basis for unity in activist groups) is that if the criteria for entry is having a certain experience, the group is inevitably going to reject somebody who would benefit from access to a community and to resources, but who isn’t up to snuff. You can see this in racial activist groups, for example, when they kick out mixed folks for being too white, or adopted folks for not having the right cultural upbringing.
The point of coalitional politics is to be a community. If you think of a community like a street of small apartments, nothing really unifies the people on that street except that they live there, and living there is something that could easily change. But people are nonetheless friendly to their neighbors and try to help one-another out. They take turns being on neighborhood watch duty and they pool their resources to maintain a community garden. One guy who lives there has a daughter who doesn’t; she comes to visit every so often and all the neighbors still welcome her with an open embrace even though she isn’t technically one of them, but she’s close enough, and that’s what a community is. If somebody shows up to their block party uninvited, they’re not going to say “go away,” they’re going to say “we have plenty of food, enjoy yourself! Do you know somebody here, or are you just stopping by? Either way is great, the more the merrier!” And people who move away are still treated like family and welcome back at any time, thus increasing the pool of people-who-don’t-live-here-but-are-still-part-of-our-community. And at some point, one of the apartments catches on fire, and only the people who lived there know the true pain of their own experiences; plenty of others can’t relate at all, but they still show compassion and try to be good allies, even if it’s not an issue that affects them personally.
I think about this street metaphor a lot when I’m trying to organize a group, because that’s how activism should be–lots of different people with any or no amount of similarity should rally behind causes together and give one another support, even though they may not have any shared experience. Having compassion doesn’t require you to have felt the pain of oppression, whether it’s internal or social. You don’t need dysphoria to be trans and you don’t need to have faced outright transphobia to be trans.
A lot of people think that queer, as a community identifier, is about people who don’t fit elsewhere. And to some extent, this is true–it aligns with the historical context of queer meaning weird. However this kind of thinking leads to the idea that it’s a solidarity group centered around fighting queerphobia and normative Straightness. With solidarity groups, there always has to be a line. Some people draw the line “monogamous able-bodied neurotypical peri-cis-allo-hetero vanilla white person,” whereas others get into passionate arguments, asserting that polyamory, kink, drag, etc aren’t queer.
The way to fix this is to make it very very clear that queer is for people who want to call themselves queer. The queer community is firstly a community for one another (in that it provides comfort and support to its members) and secondly an activist group. People call themselves queer when they need a community and when they are ready to defy norms that box people in (thus choosing a definitionless identifier over a concrete one like you would find in the LGBT acronym).
Given the nature of what a community is, who is allowed in a community, and how activism is most effective, it makes sense not to police who can call themselves queer. So with regard to polyam//kink/drag/etc, proximity to queerness and a willingness to identify as queer is all it takes to be welcomed into the community, and rightfully so. I think this model is the best way to not only form productive, meaningful communities, but also to respect the autonomy of each individual member, by giving them the choice to enter or not.
The way I see it, LGBT was historically a solidarity group (which started with G, then LG, then LGB), but as the smaller identity categories started voicing their unique experiences and creating more precise solidarity groups within the larger one, the entirety of LGBT expanded to be a coalition. Identity politics became a bigger thing and people realized that their behaviors didn’t have to reflect their attractions, so attraction became the root of identity. Thus, entry into LGBT was definitional; if you were lesbian, gay, bi, or trans (or another letter in whatever acronym is being used), then you were given automatic entry. And when people are automatically enlisted, no matter their life experiences or politics, you can’t be an activist group. So LGBT was successful at giving people resources and emotional support, but it was never supposed to be the face of queer politics. And that’s why “homophobia and transphobia” (or “SGA and trans”) doesn’t make sense–because LGBT as a coalition/solidarity group can’t fight anything on a unified front, because they aren’t truly unified.
The thing that unifies the queer community is the choice to be queer and the choice to respect that each other queer individual has just as much right to call themselves queer as the next person. That’s what makes queer politics so successful, is that if you’re not onboard, you’re not going to join; queer is as much an ideology as it is an identity. It’s a community of people who come from all walks of life but prioritize compassion over empathy because they understand that they may never actually understand, but that doesn’t mean bad things can’t end.
(Source: miseriathome)
