#forgive how rambly this is im still sick w covid and my head has been hurting fucking constantly since i took dayquil last night

[idiealotdontworry]

i really hate this trend on here of assuming any queer person with exclusionary or reactionary beliefs is just a Young And Stupid Teen Who Doesn't Know History. sorry to say, but I've been harassed by more late-20s-early-30-somethings on here than any other age group. it's not usually teenagers telling me to die because im aroace or a trans guy or because i think mspec lesbians are fine actually. Way more "young people" are decent about it than you think. (I put young people in quotations cuz, yknow, your 30s is still pretty damn young actually, but nobody treats it like it is.)

that's not to say these people don't exist or aren't especially prone to absorbing misinformation through no real fault of their own. (let's not pretend any of us were better when we were teenagers, and let's especially not pretend that they're coming up with these ideas on their own. Exclusionism and bigotry far predate any 16 year old.) But I think it's really shitty to chalk it up to being young instead of addressing the actual root of the problem, which is isolation.

Reactionary mindsets of any kind thrive when the person in question is isolated and alone, feels like its them against the world, etc. And no amount of "you're too young to Get It, go read a history book" is going to remedy that. You can't be mad that people aren't learning Queer History ™ (specifically American Queer History ™ bc that's all anyone on this website seems to care about) when the only people telling them to are condescending as fuck about it, denying their struggles, and dismissing their concerns. (Even if those concerns are stupid. which, yeah, the concerns of exclusionists usually are. But people who just have genuine questions deserve genuine answers.)

You wanna know why I've mostly been harassed by people older than me? Because those people went unchecked for that long*. Because the people older than them didn't teach them shit. If you don't want that to keep happening, you need to do better. If you actually want kids and teens and early-20-somethings to be better, you can't condescend to them about it. You can't pretend like being older actually means you Know Better, because it really doesn't, certainly not Inherently, if all the prominent terfs on this site and in academia are proof of anything.

What I'm saying is this: You seriously can't expect that giving the queer equivalent of the "Kids These Days" speech is ever going to get through to anyone. Did it ever get through to YOU when you were a kid? No! And for good reason! Most people who have that attitude about kids and teens are complaining about things that aren't a real problem. If you want to bring actual issues to light, you can't talk about it the same way that your dad talks about millennial's supposed lack of work ethic. Change tactics.

I'm also really tired of people pretending that exclusionism and bigotry and in-fighting doesn't happen IRL, or that it wasn't a problem until recently. As united as the queer community at large has always been, there's also always been people inside the community who have felt the need to tear each other down. That shit is not new, especially not when you remember that white queer people have always been shitty to queer poc. "Kids these days" are not inventing this shit. They learned it from the seeds set by people decades older than them.

It's just exhausting. Post over.

*Also because they grew up on Wild West Internet where you could literally do and say nearly anything with zero consequences. I also grew up on that kind of internet, but at the tail end of that era, so it phased out pretty much as soon as I'd grown accustomed to it.

#queer #lgbtq #personal #eh kinda #for the record I am very much a 'other people's identities are not my business' kind of person #and all of my friends are too! even the ones younger than me! shock and gasp I know #treating that like it's rare to see from anyone under 28 is really fucking weird #and shows that the only experience you have with current queer youth culture is the minority of people who are shitty to each other online #which is sad bc we as a community should be learning from each other. not putting the youngest of us down for the crime of being young #forgive how rambly this is im still sick w covid and my head has been hurting fucking constantly since i took dayquil last night #wtf do they even put in that shit that makes my head hurt so bad