“The label ‘non-binary,’ and the political demands that such a label ought to entail, have become so watered down and stripped of their material resonance that cisgender designers have managed to eloquently capture its contemporary meaninglessness,” Green wrote.
By detaching transness and queerness from politics, from in-person community, from physical touch, from the things we produce when we are together, and attaching it instead to things that were produced without us in mind — like blockbuster movies and coffee with ice cubes in it — we invite the exploitation of our identities and our communities for profit.
We have pushed for representation, but mostly what we’ve gotten are Pride parades sponsored by missile companies and predatory lenders.
But, as Nakhoul noted, perhaps none of this even matters: by claiming everything as lesbian, or queer, or trans, maybe we’re simply discarding with the notion that representation is at all liberatory. Perhaps there’s a layer of self-awareness behind the tweets that’s actually worthwhile.
Maybe we’re all in on the joke.
“We know that it isn’t in any way a serious pastime to look at the world around us trying to recognize parts of ourselves in it,” Nakhoul wrote. “It doesn’t mean anything for the bigger picture — it won’t help us to eliminate the way our world is structured to discriminate against women and those who aren’t heterosexual. But it’s fun.”
I think she’s half right: This kind of superficial representation doesn’t really matter at the end of the day. But I think we have reached a fever pitch of describing everything as queer, trans, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and all the rest because we have so little that is actually queer in our lives.
Gay bars have been closing for decades, sex (which, lest we forget, is an integral part of being gay), has been on the decline. Our Pride parades have become corporate monstrosities that function more as vehicles to sell us vodka and airline tickets than as opportunities to push for liberation.
The pandemic did not create these conditions, it simply exacerbated them. We now live in an exponentially bleaker environment where near-constant isolation is the norm. This loneliness is compounded by the fact that trans and queer people, especially young trans and queer people, must constantly push to find communities that have been hidden from them.
In a world where social media platforms ban LGBTQ+ content, where schools refuse to teach kids about queer history or queer sex, where you must often leave your home and hometown simply to find friends, it makes sense that queer people, especially young queers, would latch onto anything that could possibly be claimed as queer.
It’s the same reason so many people online call everything an ADHD symptom, and why images of common objects like backyard chairs go viral: we are all starving for actual community, for materiality in our lives, to be able to relate to each other across this vast, alienating expanse of the internet.
It’s a perfectly understandable impulse, but it distracts us from our need for friends, lovers, and community, leaving us to rely on with cheap and unfulfilling knockoffs of queer culture instead.
I will not lambaste anyone for participating in these trends, as I have done it, too. But I think we can allow ourselves to hold two thoughts in our heads at once: it’s okay to find solace in banal and trivial things while we get through this bleak period, but we also need to push for more.
From now on, every time I have the impulse to call something T4T, or to call an inanimate object trans, I will simply ask myself the following question: Wouldn’t I be better off spending this energy finding someone to have sex with? Isn’t that the queerest thing of all?
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