Annoying Queer People Are Not Why We're Oppressed

An apology to the closeted, questioning, newly out, and cringe.

This Tweeting child is not doing anything to hurt you.

There’s a type of within-community queer discourse that’s happened quite a lot in the past few years, wherein we determine the importance of attacking another queer person based on how annoying we find them to be.

It is a common pastime for many of us to join together and loudly complain about the Annoying kinds of Queers, how they dress, their affectations, the words they use to describe themselves, the types of sex they have or aren’t having, the insecurities they hold, and the most cringe-inducing opinions they express, typically when they’ve just begun on their queer self-discovery journey. Though going after the Annoying Queers feels sickly satisfying, we tell ourselves we do it for a righteous cause.

We sometimes treat avoiding Annoying Queer People as if it’s essential to the LGBTQ community’s self-preservation. We agonize over event descriptions and identity-based admittance policies, wondering how to discourage all the Annoying (and often, it’s implied, fake) Queers from attending without restricting any actual queers. (This always fails, because it turns out that actual queer people are humans, and therefore pretty annoying. And being annoying, by the way, is not a crime.)

In order to fortify ourselves against Annoying Queers, we mock all their signifiers and regard them as massive social red flags: straight husbands, bolo ties, sexual inexperience, ukuleles, rainbow pins from Target, misconceptions about what hormones do, and Picrew avatars all somehow get treated with equal venom, no matter where they are coming from and why.

The problem is, none of these traits tell us anything about how safe a person actually is to be around. Only observing their patterns of behavior can do that. The seasoned and effortlessly cool gay person can be an abuser just as easily as the unfamiliar and awkward one; the person with the most social awareness, cultural cachet, and knowledge of on-trend talking points in the room can still be a self-centered, sexist, racist, elitist bore. By demonizing “cringey” and irritating attributes as the signs of a deep character flaw, we ignore the fact they tend to cluster among the closeted, questioning, or newly-out for a reason.

I Don’t Feel Safe Around Cis Women.

When a socially isolated queer person in the suburbs feels that nobody sees them as they are, they might cover themselves in rainbow swag from the local big-box store to an ‘annoying’ degree. When a closeted lesbian teen hasn’t had the chance to form genuine relationships with LGBTQ people, all her reference points might come from shows like Our Flag Means Death and Heartstopper which yeah, might seem fangirlish and irritating to a more seasoned adult. When a profoundly repressed trans divorcee still believes the misinformation about hormones they’ve been fed by the press, they might repeat some downright offensive myths about pelvic floor damage or body hair being disgusting. This too, is incredibly exhausting to help someone process again and again.

Isolated, lonesome queer people who lack fully crystallized identities can be very Annoying. Their self-conscious gestures give us vicarious embarrassment, and their worst opinions remind us of our most ignorant past selves. But they are not a threat to us. They are us, in a more nascent form. And we do our community no favors in trying to exclude them outright.

Don’t underestimate the ability of both ketamine gays AND Steven Universe gays to be exhausting.

I am not above hating the Annoying Queer Person. Online, I’ve snarked at gender-neutral terms like “nibling” and “nuncle,” because pretending I was above needing such things made me feel strong. I’ve torn into other trans mascs for having the wrong opinions on gender socialization and male privilege with a fervor that didn’t match the size of the offense. Sometimes I was fighting against a genuine transmisogyny problem in our spaces. But other times, I was just trying to feel smarter than the guy next to me in a way that helped nobody else.

I’ve been triggered by the existence of Annoying Queer People, if I’m being honest, and in their foibles seen the shadow of a younger, dumber, less confident me, a person who was in a psychologically far worse place, and then punished them for that resemblance.

How dare a nineteen-year-old trans boy claim that everything in his life would be different if he were amab. I can’t stand him reminding me that when I was his age, I used to think and say the very same thing. And so, instead of helping him work through the mess of resentment that sometimes appears early in transition, I attack him, and draw him away from me. This hardly protects any trans women from having to deal with his shit. It just helps me keep my conscience clean.

We don’t want there to be any Annoying Queers in our midst, because we all want to get past the uncomfortable phase of identity-formation that took us longer than we wanted and involved us experiencing so much pain. We also fear how the Annoying Queers make us look to the cisgender, heterosexual world.

I don’t think any of us literally believe that the more irritating a person is, the more of a pressing political threat they are. But we behave as if we do. We devote huge amounts of time to complaining about the types of queer people that irritate us, and develop complex taxonomies for describing why they are so annoying and why defeating that annoyingness matters. This person is a tenderqueer, that one is a tucute, and in their style of dress and annoying mannerisms we can tell that they represent all that we hate most about ourselves and how we are seen.

It’s easy for us to wind up directing more attention toward the queer people that annoy us than we do to our shared enemies.

It’s not a good use of our time. It’s not good for our shared futures. And it’s all rooted in internalized shame.

…

A recent piece in the magazine Airmail exemplifies the popular commentary against Annoying Queer People. Though I’ll have a lot of negative things to say about the piece, I don’t intend to single its author Kat Rosenfield out — what she says is nothing that I haven’t heard a dozen times before at the gay bar, the LGBTQ potluck, the nonbinary dance party, or sitting on a dear friend’s couch.

Rosenfield’s target is Annoying Fake Bisexuals, a common category of Annoying Queer Person that many LGBTQ folks feel the need to malign. Specifically, Annoying Fake Bisexual Women.

In her piece, Ronsenfield argues that bisexuality has become so popular a label as to be meaningless — she’s claiming that a lot of bisexuals are faking their identity for popularity and attention, hardly a novel prejudice. Bisexuals have faced accusations that they are faking their identities from straight and queer people alike for decades.

But by claiming that pretending to be bisexual is a newly emerging trend among member of Gen Z, Rosenfield gets to present a standard diatribe against Annoying Queer People as if it were a bold, novel stance in defense of the actual queer community.

Rosenfield’s article is a marvel of make-up-a-guy-to-be-mad-at writing. She opens her piece with the description of a blandly liberal, vaguely yuppie-ish woman who identifies as bisexual but has never had any sapphic sexual experience. In the references she uses, Rosenfield primes the reader to find her made-up bisexual Annoying. She also implies that there are droves of real-world women out there who are exactly like the fictional “Emily” of her creation; it’s just that Rosenfield couldn’t find any living examples to interview, for some reason.

There is not one single profile of a bisexual person in the entire piece.

Alt text is not working on this site right now, but you can read the full article here.

Rosenfield is engaging in what Freddy DeBoer would call Person Guy writing. She’s drawing a cartoonish archetype that we’ve all heard of before, making a story out of regurgitating a pre-existing cultural trope. But as is typical of Person Guy writing, Rosenfield never offers any proof of real-life Emilies, or explains how their existence negatively affects the queer community in any way.

Why should we care that some women identify as bisexual who haven’t had much sexual experience? What’s the fucking issue here? The only problem with Emily is that she is Annoying. But if you believe in the fallacy of the Annoying Queer Person, then Emily’s very existence (if she were real) would be a threat. She’s a little exhausting to deal with, and she makes our community look bad, and that is a serious problem we should treat with the same severity as Don’t Say Gay bills and bans on puberty blockers.

(Also, bizarrely, the Annoying Queer Person that Rosenfield describes in her piece is a Millennial, despite the headline claiming that the bisexual label is a popular trend among members of Gen Z. But I will blame the editor who wrote the headline for that one.)

Rosenfield goes on to cite the robust data showing that younger people are identifying as queer in higher numbers than have ever been observed before. This is a real trend, and like the rise in Autistic identity we have seen in the last few decades, it can be easily attributed to greater public awareness and social acceptance.

But a sharp rise in the number of LGBTQ identified-folks necessarily means more newly-out and inexperience queer people fumbling their way along in our shared spaces— and that means more Annoying Queers the rest of us might feel some anxiety and misplaced resentment about being around.

Rosenfield capitalizes upon these anxieties by noting that the rise in total LGBTQ-identified folks can largely be attributed to a rise in the number of bisexual women — and she calls the bisexuality of all of these women into question.

It is at this point in the piece that Rosenfield reveals herself to be a completely bad-faith actor, a straight woman who doubts the identities of bisexuals and can’t manage to get a single bisexual person to trust her enough to weigh in on the reporting.

Any astute queer reader should be able to identify this article for the needless, unsubstantiated take-down that it is and dismiss it. But I only encountered this article because I saw several trans acquaintances sharing it online and agreeing with its premise.

I can’t tell you how many times I have heard queer people state matter-of-factly that a bisexual woman who has not dated any women yet isn’t really queer, and that she shouldn’t be welcomed into queer spaces because her straight privilege and her boorish straight husband will make everyone else feel “unsafe.”

Whether bisexual people in “straight” relationships are affected by structural homophobia is a debate that gets kicked up all the time in queer spaces, but the actual bisexuals in question are rarely allowed to weigh in. If they attempt to speak about their experiences of oppression and exclusion, they get insulted, branded Annoying, and laughed out of the discussion much of the time. How dare they claim to know what it’s like to suffer from social stigma and shame when they… have internalized it so deeply they haven’t been able to have sex?

Lisa is a married bisexual woman in her mid-forties, and tells me she is haunted by the community’s mistrust of the Annoying Bisexual.

“I knew I liked other girls when I was young, but didn’t know what it meant. I had these really intense romantic friendships,” she says. “But seeing myself as queer was not something I had any conception of. Because I could respond to attention when men gave it to me, I was put on the escalator pushing me at marriage and children. No one saw my liking girls as being as serious, and so I didn’t.”

Lisa wound up in a “straight” marriage that failed to fulfill her, surrounded by straight couples who didn’t understand her. Once, at a barbecue, one of Lisa’s neighbors made a joke about lazy, horny husbands harassing their ‘neurotic’ wives for sex, and Lisa became so triggered that she threw a glass platter at the wall. She’d gritted her teeth through painful, unwanted sex far too many times.

At night, while the children and her husband slept, Lisa sometimes contemplated suicide. A life of being shunted into a straight female role was killing her slowly every day. But even as her desperation grew, Lisa didn’t feel she could seek out queer spaces to find some understanding. She didn’t feel that she deserved to claim a bisexual label for herself.

“I felt that it was too late for me,” she says. “I have a spouse with a straight man’s income. Nobody attacks me on the street for who I am. I wish I had been brave enough to take a risk with my life when I was younger, but maybe I dug my grave and have to lie in it.”

Photo by Nick Owuor, from Unsplash.

Over the years, I have met many bisexual people (primarily women) who feel that they have no right to enter the LGBTQ community because they have too much privilege, too little experience, and run the risk of being far too Annoying. I’ve met them during moments of crisis, in support groups they weren’t sure they had the right to attend. They’ve divulged their identities to me after multiple rounds of drinks, choking back tears in the darkened corners of bars. And they’ve wandered into my social media DMs, apologizing for taking up so much space despite never actually claiming any for themselves.

When the writer Nicole Cliffe came out as bisexual in her mid-thirties, she tweeted that she’d never mentioned her sexuality before because she didn’t want to be “one of those annoying married bisexual women who suck up all the air in the room.” She’d had multiple relationships with women, many of her dearest friends were queer, and for years she had run one of the most beloved queer magazines on the internet. And yet even she feared being an Annoying Queer Person.

What does it even mean for a bisexual woman to “suck up all the air in the room”? Talking too much about her husband, the one romantic and sexual touchstone she’s been allowed to have? Repeatedly asking for reassurance that her identity is “valid,” as if other queer folks have the ability to rubber-stamp her life? Bemoaning how hard it is for her to date because she is not “visibly queer,” not realizing that all queer relationships require agency and hard work?

These are minor offenses committed by people new to a community and who are still in an emotionally tender spot. I fail to see how excluding them does anything to get them better acculturated, or to help them thrive. In their insecurity and obliviousness, I do not see signs of fake-queer interlopers who threaten to tear our spaces apart and sideline real gay people. I see a marginalized population that has never gotten to learn their own history or know their own ancestors, and whom we must find ways to welcome, even if they sometimes get on our nerves.

Photo by Delia Giandeini of Unsplash.

Another group of queer people that often get written off as Annoying Queers are transgender people who are not medically transitioning. A lot of ire gets expressed toward them in trans circles on the internet. They’re afraid to try hormones, they’re in denial about their true identity, they’re transphobic, they’re the reason we are losing access to HRT. These are all common claims that I see made about the most Annoying of these folks.

And I do get it: in their search to justify their choice not to transition, some of these trans people repeat damaging myths about the “risks” of HRT, or say downright offensive things about how disgusted they would feel growing breasts or a larger clitoris, or changing their body to become more visibly gender-weird but never “passing.”

I find those comments outrageous and irritating! But I have to ask: why do these trans people feel such a strong need to justify what they do with their bodies in the first place? Who made them think that transitioning bodies are disgusting, and how might those prejudices taint their relationship to their own bodies?

Non-transitioning people do not have to deal with the difficulty of accessing gender-affirming healthcare, and that is a massive privilege, it’s true. They can be oblivious to the struggles of trans people who must interface constantly with the medical and legal systems. But they do know how it feels to be socially illegible and dysphoric. Being unhappy with the social role that’s been written upon your body is a painful experience, regardless of whether you can transition out of it or not.

For years I was friends with a nonbinary trans guy, Asher, who told me that he never wanted to go on testosterone. He claimed that he was too fat and thick-thighed to every possibly “pass” as a man. He also believed that vaginal atrophy would ruin his sex life, and that going bald would make him undesirable. 

It pained me to hear Asher internalize such fatphobic and transphobic ideas about himself. It hurt my feelings and Annoyed me, too. But I’d also delayed transition for many years out of uncertainty myself, so I could understand how he felt. I focused on correcting misinformation when I heard it from him, and on sharing how my own transition had benefitted me. 

Asher ultimately worked through his internalized self-loathing in his own time, and began a medical transition that he now loves.

“Finding the bear community has saved my life,” Asher says. “Big fat hairy men with tits are beautiful, now I just want to get fatter and hairier!” And thanks to his medical transition, Asher discovered he prefers to top during sex. As a non-transitioning person, he erroneously believed that his vagina was his sole source of sexual currency. Today, he derives far greater pleasure from sex that doesn’t involve that body part at all. 

Just as Asher’s love affair with testosterone is really taking off, mine seems to be ebbing. I love the strength that T has given me, and the lower voice, but I have stopped recognizing or finding joy in the person I see in the mirror. My gender dysphoria is ultimately something a medical transition alone cannot satisfy. No currently existing human gender is the right one.

I have no regrets about taking testosterone, it truly repaired my relationship to my body. And it is thanks to that repair that I can accept I am not meant to be a man or a woman, I’m meant to be dissatisfied with a world that owes us all more options than that.

Detransition is Gender Liberation, Too

People who say that “you don’t need to transition to be trans” are often considered Annoying Queers, because such statements center the trans people who are not targeted for oppression by the legal and medical systems. And some transitioners cringe at non-transitioners who remind them of their younger selves, wrapped up in denial and internalized transphobia, delaying the medical interventions that saved their own lives.

But this is a projection of one’s past unhappiness onto another person’s present. We can’t ever actually know what will make another trans person happy, even if we regret having delayed transition for ourselves.

I hope it goes without saying, but non-transitioning people are not responsible for the rising legal attacks on trans healthcare. They are victims of it, as us medically transitioned people are. Cisgender evangelicals and reactionary TERFs are the ones responsible for the growing suppression of all forms of gender non-conformity.

In the recently published Cass Report, a 400-page document criticizing gender-affirming healthcare in the UK, non-transitioning people are singled out as a reason to prevent youth access to medical transition. The study author, pediatrician Hilary Cass, claims that because most youth who are placed on hormone blockers eventually go on to transition, that blockers do not “work” at providing youth more “time to think.”

Throughout her report Cass claims to support trans and nonbinary youth in “exploring” who they are, and yet it’s clear she considers not transitioning at all to be the neutral, default, and more desirable choice. She even views children socially transitioning to be a danger that puts them on an “altered trajectory” toward being trans:

Hers is a perspective that harms all transgender people, including the subset of us who might not want to transition yet. If any gender exploration including a shift in one’s name and pronouns or the delaying of puberty is considered a risky proposition that puts kids on a “changing trajectory of psychosexual development,” then there is no space in the medical system left for nonbinary people either, let alone anyone else trans.

As some flavor of nonbinary trans man, I wish I could have had access to blockers as a teen. That would have been the closest option to a nonbinary medical transition that I could’ve had. But in a world where transition-related care is only available after puberty, when a patient is a legal adult, a less-fitting, more stereotypically “binary” transition is the only option I have left. This is not a policy that honors or prioritizes the needs of nonbinary or non-transitioning people. It is an assault on all our rights to self-determine.

The social conditions that trans people currently face can make it impossible for us to make the decisions we need to about our own bodies and lives. This is true whether a person needs hormones and surgery, or to be able to enter a bathroom in a dress and heels without getting beat up. Regardless of where our identities and transitions ultimately take us, all trans people are harmed by rhetoric that treats gender-nonconforming bodies and binary-breaking presentations as disgusting, discordant, and undesirable.

When our trans siblings make incorrect claims about the “dangers” of medical transition we should correct them, and if they insult the bodies of other trans people, especially trans women, we must call that out.

Beyond that, the fact some trans people harbor internalized transphobia or have identities not well suited to the current medical transition options does not make them our chief political enemy. Usually, it just makes them Annoying Queer People, still developing their self-concepts and working through social stigma, and in that way they are no different from any of us.

The demisexual flag, from Wikimedia Commons.

The final group of unfairly maligned “Annoying Queer People” that I’d like to talk about today are demisexuals, members of the asexual spectrum who only experience sexual attraction after they have formed a close intimate connection with another person.

Critics claim that demisexuals are simply trying to seem “special” by claiming a niche sexual orientation label for themselves, when in reality the feelings they experience are completely “normal” in society, and thus not deserving of any specific term. Everybody needs some time to figure out who they are attracted to, demisexuals are told. So there’s no need to make such a big deal about it!

Demisexuals are also frequently accused of being straight people who adopted a queer microlabel in order to worm their way into the LGBT community. And if being accused of being both “totally normal” and a “gross faker” sounds similar to what gets hurled by bisexual people, that’s not a coincidence. Acephobia and biphobia have an interesting tendency to rhyme with one another, a phenomenon I discussed in a 2019 essay that you can read here.

Others critics of the label claim that demisexuality (and other asexual spectrum identities) have only become popular because antidepressants have suppressed many people’s libidos to an unhealthy degree.

It is interesting that the identities of ace-spectrum people are called into question both for being pathological and for being “too normal.” And it’s virtually always fellow queer people questioning their right to identify as they do. It seems as though their greatest sin is being Annoying.

Micro-identity labels are frequently criticized as a hallmark of the Annoying Queer Person. Terms like “stargender,” “demiboy,” “grey-ace,” and “demisexual” have garnered a reputation for being unserious labels for children, fake identities for straight interlopers, and the final veils of denial for people who can’t just accept that they are gay or trans. The people who adopt such labels do tend to seem new, unfamiliar, and unmoored within the queer community, likely because we have not consciously made a space for them before.

As a group, we LGBTQ people mistake our own confusion with new labels as proof that the people adopting them must be confused. Sometimes, we even claim that people who use super-specific identity terms are somehow a threat to “queer unity” and are “tearing the community apart.”

But if the existence of bisexuals, pansexuals, and gays does nothing to threaten queer unity, then why would the existence of stargender people? If queer men have a responsibility to learn about the harassment and sexual coercion faced by queer women, why shouldn’t non-asexuals have to learn about the corrective rape faced by asexuals? How dare any of us claim that our fellow queers are not oppressed, when we know nothing about what it’s like to be them?

The Asexual-Bisexual Mirror

A few years ago, an ex I’ll call Ryan came out as demisexual. Ryan had lived as a mostly-straight guy for the majority of his life; he is exactly the kind of newly queer-identified person that so many other LGBTQ folks find so Annoying and Fake. But life as a straight man never served Ryan. His partners could not understand when he didn’t immediately find them attractive or see their relationship in a sexual light. And for most of his life, Ryan forced himself to have kinds of sex that “straight men” were supposed to like, though it never felt right.

Realizing that he was demisexual finally freed Ryan to date fellow queer people who could respect his particular needs, and more importantly, it gave him permission to be true to himself.

“I experience an aesthetic attraction to many kinds of people, but when it comes to sex, it takes a lot of time and trust, and there is a lot that I can’t do,” he says. “It’s very complicated, but at least I’ve finally figured myself out.”

I think users of micro-identity labels get criticized because they’re complicated. Even other LGBTQ people can find their complexities Annoying, because they challenge existing stereotypes about who is and is not queer, and what sexuality even is. And because their identities are so rarely spoken of, it does take demisexuals and others like them a long time to sort out who they are — and there may be a lot of discomfort and Annoyingness along the way. But that doesn’t make them any less queer. In fact, having a sexuality or a gender identity that transcends all naming is just about the queerest way for a person to be.

I think we do Annoying Queers a major disservice by focusing on how insulated and privileged they supposedly are. Their insulation comes from isolation — and from a profound alienation from themselves.

If it is not a privilege for a gay person to be closeted, then it is not a privilege for a bisexual person to live unrealized, unfulfilled, and mistaken for straight. If it is psychologically damaging for a trans person to be unable to transition, then it is also damaging to have a nonbinary dysphoria for which no transition options quite fit. And if growing up without any gay elders ravages the self-esteem of queer men and women, then it can easily do the same to omnisexual or stargender people who have never met anyone like them.

The more obscure or complex a queer person’s identity is, the less we know as a community about what their needs are. But that does not make their needs fake. Just because their difference cannot always be easily seen does not mean it isn’t always there, affecting everything about how they move throughout the world.

The greatest violences of queerphobia happen to us quietly, every single day of our lives. Our trauma begins the moment our infant bodies are slid into onesies that read Ladies Man or Daddy’s Girl, and follows us into slumber parties, health classrooms, camping trips, locker rooms, and family weddings. Homophobia is written into our laws, taught in our standardized tests, printed on our government forms, passed around in nearly every watercooler conversation.

You don’t have to be openly queer to be terrorized by it. In fact, remaining closeted for a very long time is one of the greatest signs of queer trauma there is.

Personally, I cannot view any less-experienced queer person as carrying more privilege than me. Even if their lack of self-actualization means they’re less likely to be hate crimed or discriminated against, I still feel a lot better off than them. I recall how it felt to starve and beat myself daily because I couldn’t reconcile my true feelings with the person society demanded that I be. Nothing was worse than being unable to name my suffering or locate other people like me.

When I was freshly out as queer, I was quite wounded and confused, and I still harbored many ignorant points of view. I’m certain that made me pretty Annoying to be around. But it never made me straight, or an oppressor, or a threat to the queer community’s progress. My messy self-discovery was a credit to the queer community’s progress, and by choosing to support the next generations of confused, vulnerable, and yes, Annoying Queers, I can help ensure that such progress will continue.