lezgem:

theunitofcaring: lezgem: ask me how much I care about cishet atheists ‘coming out’ to their families as non-religious There are communities where coming out as nonreligious will get you kicked out of the house, sent to reparative therapy, beaten, ostracized, and in some parts of the world jailed. There are communities where your parents will decide you’re unsafe to have around your siblings, and judges who will rule that you shouldn’t have custody of your children. Ironically, those are similar risks faced by LGBT+ kids. So, yeah, I don’t know about you, but I’m inclined to care always about people who need my support. ask me how I feel about people who claim to ~care always about people who need my support~ but who are totally ok with the idea of appropriating the phrase ‘coming out of the closet’ for things other than being lgbtq, which is incredibly homophobic and implies that being same-gender attracted or trans is a belief system or political stance, an idea that denies our reality and often puts us in incredible danger?

you know what? appropriation is a horrible destructive concept that directly makes it harder to fight oppression. I used to think I was just confused about it but the more I see it used the more I am convinced that, nah, it’s just terrible.

It directly serves the interests of oppressive power structures to set marginalized people at each others’ throats over who is stealing from who instead of relating to each other and thus helping each other. It feeds a simplistic understanding of privilege where no one has overlapping marginalizations or benefits from comparing aspects of their own experiences. It suggests that every kind of harm is completely independent and could never be understood in relation to other harms, which stops us from getting at the roots of harmful systems. It is evil and it is malicious and it is bullying masked as activism.

Kids who realize that they can’t live the lives their parents envision for them, and can’t tell their parents the truth without risking bodily harm, have a great deal in common with each other no matter what specific lie they are living. It is entirely a positive thing for those kids to feel solidarity with the entire vast broad community of people with similar problems. Is being trans at all the same thing as being gay? No. But is it useful to have a word that applies to both experiences? Hell yes. In this thread there were dozens of LGBT+ atheists who said that coming out as an atheist was much harder than coming out as LGBT+. There are also LGBT+ people who found it much easier. Do you know how you navigate something like that? You give everyone access to solidarity. You say “we have things in common, let’s fight for each other”.

You don’t say “how dare you have the nerve to compare /your/ experience of being kicked out of your home and disowned by your parents at the age of 14 to my experience of being kicked out of my home and disowned by my parents at the age of 14.” No one benefits from that. Literally no one.

As for the idea that it’s ~bad politics~ to suggest that being LGBT+ is a choice, guess what? Some people choose to be trans. Some people choose to be gay. Some people do think of their sexuality or their gender identity as a choice, and that is okay, because the actual fundamental point is that there isn’t anything wrong with it. It’s not okay to tell people that feeling like their identity is political or is a belief is an evil and malicious act against you.

As for me being incredible homophobic, sure, I’ll cop to that. The Incredible Homophobe, equally good at oppressing gay and bi girls and at kissing them. I should put it on a t-shirt.