Queer keyboard atrocities

Busybodies on Twitter

It could have been a bruising encounter but before it upset me too much, I nipped it in the bud. Twitter provides an asymmetric engagement with a global audience with whom the exchange of opinions and ideas can be life-enhancing and affirming.

Yesterday, I posted a response to an organisation postulating on Twitter completely oblivious of the crux of the matter. My riposte as the organisation is local was to suggest charity begins at home and issues of discrimination and representation need to be addressed in our community.

The privilege of petty

For some comfortably well-off and privileged people, with fingers twitching at their keyboards seeking the slightest thing to take offence at, the community qualifier was too much to handle, so, they latched on the qualifier and left the issue of discrimination and representation untouched. With that came a pile on from others who had an aversion to the word that many others were happy and ready to identify with.

After a few exchanges in which I desperately tried to reason with them, they were implacably unreasonable political ideologues immersed in gender identity politics to the exclusion of anything else. There was no other option than to expunge them from my purview by blocking them on Twitter. Our brief encounter was just that, as we were not followers of each other.

Q is for Queer

It is funny that the letters of LGBTQ refer to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and the Q is for those who identify as Queer or who are still Questioning their sexual or gender identity. Whilst Queer to some might be derogatory and disgusting to some for the history that comes with persecution, prosecution, violence, ostracism, and worse.

For those that choose to identify as queer, they cannot be ignored, erased, disappeared, or cancelled, just because some are uncomfortable with the word. It is their prerogative not to be identified as such even as it is every right for those who desire to choose the queer identity. We need to find co-existence rather than antagonism, the weaponization of identity serves no one any good.

I eventually concluded, our humanity has been hijacked by the politicisation of identity, such that the substantive issues are completely ignored for open warfare on gender identity. Is there any wonder it is literally impossible to be represented because you have to fit a mould, or you don't belong?