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Back in the early 1990s, “queer�� became an important branch of and . Some elements of the community objected to the use of a by then rather antiquated slur (note it has also been an in-community term since if not ). Possibly not coincidentally, those same people who didn’t like the use of the word, also tended not to like what it represented. Those folks were generally inclined toward an assimilation rather than liberation narrative, tended to be bi and trans exclusionary, and just generally didn’t like the whole direction queer organising and theory was taking the conversation. Queers have always been the rebel faction, refusing to be respectable.

Many folks are aware of how this discourse has been reanimated by TERFs and is wandering around 2020s LGBTQA+ spaces with its arms outstretched, looking for brains to feast on.

It doesn’t always come wrapped up in TERF ideology, or accompanied with trans hate, but they are very much the originators of this new wave of an old discourse that seeks to erase a liberation movement over 30 years in the making.

I get it. Many of us have had the word queer thrown at us in harmful and hurtful ways. Some people feel extra uncomfortable when they hear this word. But it’s probably worth raking through the depths of our internalised queerphobia to discover why this word carries an extra charge.

Are “lesbian�� and “gay�� slurs?

I felt uncomfortable with the word lesbian for years. It was nothing but a negative back in the 80s, so many ugly associations, so much bullying went with it. I couldn’t bear to hear it. And of course the word was originally coined by a cishet man in pathologising ways, and then reclaimed, but continued to be used back then as a term of abuse and accusation.

I hated it. It was the last thing I ever wanted to be called. And here’s the point �� as a bi person I was fine with people loving who they wanted, but I associated “lesbian�� with refusal to conform to social norms, militancy, gender non-conformity, loudness, body hair, aggressiveness, predatory behaviour, Greenham common and unapologetic, tear-down-the-patriarchy feminism. I was all for quiet, respectable, assimilated gay womanhood, but I’d yet to become comfy with any radical deviations from the norm (even though, ironically, I was a gender non-conforming punk and an anarchist �� such was the political muddle of the late 80s).

“Why on earth does anyone want to be called a lesbian��, I thought, back then. I remember so clearly the move in the 90s to erase that word and just have the word “gay�� instead for men and women, and I was on the side of that. “Lesbian�� was something grotesque and horrible to me, so much pain attached to the notion. Then slowly, I realised “Lesbian�� had come to mean something politically very important at the time. It was about not erasing the difference in people’s experiences, it was asserting the presence of people marginalised in the gay rights conversation. I had to do a lot of listening and allow people’s self-experience to matter, as it differed from my own. 

I never grew completely comfy with the word and free of it’s negative associations, but now, I’m glad the word wasn’t erased, because it came to mean something important to those who claimed it, and eventually I accepted it as an umbrella term I fell under for a while, and claiming it for myself helped me work through a whole lot of internalised lesbophobia. It let me grow my leg hair and stop plucking my eyebrows, be openly feminist, be unapologetically loud and unfeminine, all the “ugly�� associations that lurked beneath the name.

Then of course for a lot of millennials, “that’s so gay�� was the slur the bullies threw�� so should we consider removing gay as an umbrella term too? Especially because it, too, originally had . For many of my millennial clients this is the word that’s associated with the most trauma. “Gay�� was a widespread slur so much more recently than “queer�� was, they both originated ex-community as slurs, so why is queer the one that people fiercely attempt to exclude as an umbrella term?

Who decides on the umbrella terms?

And then later, around 2010, I was in the camp that was against “non-binary�� becoming our umbrella term. I don’t like it, but I accept that it did become an umbrella term in the same way I accept that Keir Starmer is Labour leader. Sometimes we get outvoted. I can not like Keir Starmer and the word non-binary, but I can’t pretend they weren’t the voter’s choice.

So, what do we do about the fact that queer is an established umbrella term for queers, and some folks still object to us using it as such? And it very much does mean something different than LGBT: There are plenty of people who are LGBT but not queer. Some of us very specifically want to know we are in a safe space and will know this when people are accepting of the word queer and will worry we’re not safe when people are not accepting of this word and its import. Just like many women in the 90s would perhaps be wary of anyone calling herself a “gay woman�� not a lesbian �� because the distinction is politically meaningful and profound. 

And what are we supposed to do when “queer is a slur�� is a way of ensuring we get censored out of the discourse? When unassimilable queers get left out of organising? When the point of “queer is a slur�� becoming currency thirty years after the emergence of queer theory is that queer spaces have always been bi and trans and ace inclusive and against gatekeeping, borders and policing in a way “LGBT�� spaces have very much not.

To quote queer poet Vron McIntyre on this: “LGBT is so not inclusive even of its own letters��. (source: private correspondence).

Or to put it another way �� you’ve worked on your internalised homophobia, yes, but have you worked on your internalised queerphobia? Because they’re very different things, and just as 1990s me didn’t get why “lesbian�� is important, so some folks might not be getting this distinction or why it matters so very much.

Misusing people’s trauma

But what if someone has trauma attached to the word queer? Well, that’s a very hard place to be, and looking back, I see that’s where I was with the word lesbian. But, there are triggers all over this world, and likely just as many folk triggered by the words gay and lesbian, but somehow there’s no discussion to remove these words from our organising or deny the validity of them as umbrella terms. So something is different about the word queer, despite the fact that lesbian, gay and queer were all once pejoratives from outside the community that we reclaimed.

No matter how painful queer is for some people to hear, it is more than just an individual label, it’s a branch of theory, an academic term, and a tool for organising in ways that are far more meaningful to some of us than “LGBT��. It does harm to keep having it snatched away from us, or told we can’t use it as an umbrella term. We can, and when we use it, it’s up to those listening to understand, “if I don’t identify with this word, it’s for me to exclude myself from this umbrella��. Because queer is inherently inclusive, but it isn’t coercive. You’re not queer? Well, okay, you’re not queer.

Exposure therapy works for some traumas but not for all. It worked (mostly) for me and the word lesbian, but that also took me a lot of listening and reflecting, to identify where internalised oppression and trauma met. Sometimes people have the structural power to take their trauma and use it to erase the spaces others need to thrive. When TERFs and their unwitting allies in this discourse weaponise trauma �� be it survivors of violence from men, or survivors of queerphobic bullying, they are disingenuously pushing back on minorities to pay for the violences of the patriarchy. 

People who identify as queer are not responsible for the pain of queerphobic bullying, just as the trans community are not responsible for the scale of violence against women, which is rooted in structural power. Queer and trans and bi and ace people do not owe these survivors accommodations that harm us because we are not responsible for these traumas, and we’re survivors too.

Queer has specific and important meanings

Gay and lesbian are also words that came from outside of our community and had negative connotations, just like queer. The difference is not the way the word has been applied with violence, because so many words have. The difference is the connotations. While assimilationist LG(bt) organising seeks to prove how very normal we all are, queer suggests everyone on earth could stand to be a little less normative. And oh, the joy I feel in the coining of the term , because hell yes we should challenge neuronormativity as hard as we challenge cisheteronormativity. 

Queering never was and never will be solely for people who identify unambiguously with an L,G, B, T or A, it’s everyone’s work to do and no other word will say all the important things queer now encompasses.