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I understand the compulsion to label your sexuality as some variety of queer when it doesn’t quite fit into the standard image of what straight female sexuality looks like, but that doesn’t make you queer.
It just means that we suffer from a lack of imagination when it comes time to understand what female sexuality really is. That straight can come in a wide variety of flavours and kinks. This shit makes you a little different, not so different and separated from heterosexuality that you can try to disown it entirely.
Except the problem comes in when we try to label other people’s sexuality for them, especially when we take it as something especially static. There are enough problems with that in the world, I don’t think contributing to it by pointing and going ‘you have shown me one aspect of your sexuality ergo you *can’t* be what you are thinking you are because that doesn’t line up with my definition of queer’ is helping anything.
Queer is a huge label that can encompass so many views and flavors of sexuality, just because it’s not lining up with what someone considers it to be doesn’t give anyone the right to go, no you’re wrong.
Except that these things have a political dimension to them. Its not just about what feels right on the individual level. Queer isn’t just a label for one’s sexuality — its a political umbrella that encompasses people who have non-heterosexual sexualities.
The original context for the OP was a reaction to a woman who said she didn’t think she was straight because she was only attracted to effeminate men. That is some straight-up appropriation happening. And its appropriation of a marginalized sexuality on the part of a less marginalized person. I don’t think saying that she isn’t queer is the same as “policing someone’s sexuality”.
I’m cool with people finding new and better ways to label themselves, even if that’s something I’m personally not interested in. I see how that can help people find themselves, and sharing a label is a great way to find a community. But I don’t want to see people latching onto a political identity that already has a specific definition, simply because they don’t feel quite at home with heterosexuality as defined by the dominant culture. Because non-queer alternate sexualities are not marginalized in the same ways as queer ones are.
This, this, forever and ever.
It is never wrong for members of a marginalised group to set up clear boundaries about who is in-group for them. I am queer. I’m sorry if you feel weird about liking dudes who are not stereotypically masculine while being a cis lady, but you have not and do not face the oppression that actual queer people face, and you are not welcome to call yourself queer. It is fucking appropriative and not okay.
