I've been trying to find queer community where I live for almost 4 years now, both online and in person. I had a great community on the West Coast but ever since moving back to my hometown, it's been abysmal. I assumed it was in some way related to my autism, maybe COVID, it was hard to be sure. But now, I have a word and a framework for why it's felt so difficult. As an Annoying queer I fully understand I'm not the intended audience of this article. But, it has had a big impact on me.
I get it now and I am finally ready to stop trying so hard. That is a weight lifted for me for sure, but only because I am in a decent place with depression. If I wasn't this realization might be dangerous. My gay Uncle who was still closeted in many circles would have also been an Annoying queer by definition of this article, but he took his life last month. We had many conversations about how we both felt way too queer for our family and never queer enough in queer communities.
The fact remains that I and many other Annoying queers remain community-less. People who are Annoying queers (nonbinary, bisexual, etc) by way of identity versus lack of experience aren't going to just get less Annoying over time unless their identity changes. I get and respect what you are trying to do by writing this article, but also reading it from the perspective of someone who will never cease to be Annoying is fucking rough. That said, I also really, really appreciate it for saying the quiet thing I've long suspected out loud.
One more somewhat related thing to add: Unlearning Shame was extremely helpful for me in processing the death of my Uncle. Thank you for writing it.
I am so, so sorry for your loss aka. I'm glad you're in a decent place to be able to process this topic. I'm sorry that the way that I've framed the topic still makes it incredibly painful regardless. I have masqueraded as a less Annoying Queer for a while in hopes of finding belonging, and most other trans and queer people do now accept me, but that acceptance is based on them projecting qualities onto me that I don't actually hold. Realizing that my acceptance was always so tentative and letting go of that fight to be an acceptable, Cool Queer person is part of what motivated me to write this essay. I hope that us Annoying Queers can continue to work on finding one another and carving out our space -- even if it is on the margins of what can feel like an unwelcoming community. For me, the hope and the withdrawal come and go in waves.
If it helps at all, I personally found the very liberal and broad use of "we" in the opening paragraphs to be... well, annoying. Very annoying. As much as I like the essay and agree with the general thesis and what it expresses, I think the liberal use of "we" there might not be as broad as the author imagines.
It reminds me a little bit of now-adult people who used to be hateful jerks online saying "that was just how it was, everyone was like that back then" and thinking, no, we really weren't. I wasn't. My friends weren't. You want to tell them no, sorry, it definitely wasn't just you, but it also wasn't all of us. Maybe you were just mean.
I know plenty of perfectly acceptable cool queers who never, ever scratched an internalized itch by bullying and excluding and doing a discourse about "annoying" queer people. That's why I'm rather exasperated by the forced teaming in the opening paragraphs. No, I'm sorry, "we" don't all do this, "we" don't all feel this way, "we" don't all react to "annoying" queer people in the way the author describes. It's not that you don't get exasperated or confused sometimes, because you do, it's that you don't automatically process those responses by feeling threatened and lashing out with discourse and small private cruelties to scratch that itch. Some people really do just react with "well, it takes all kinds, life is a rich tapestry" and move on with their lives.
Don't be discouraged. Not everyone needs to go on an arduous personal journey to not feel threatened by "annoying" queer people. Not everyone sees wounded people and reacts with revulsion. Not everyone places queer people into categories ranked by conformity. Not everyone places that "we" against "them." Most people I meet just think of queer people as queer, one group, one team, us, and then go about their day.
I also think we need to point out to the gatekeepers that they are being entirely unserious about the rising fascism that the queer community is facing. We are way stronger if every economically-privileged "hetero"-married bisexual/demisexual/non-transitioning trans person comes out and bonds with and identifies with our community than we are if those people stay quietly in the closet while the rest of us deal with onslaught after onslaught.
Queerness is *supposed* to dismantle notions of gender and sexuality that keep people stuck performing social roles they don't come fully alive in, not create new rigid categories in which a few gay and a few trans people will be permanent discriminated-against minorities. Maybe the gatekeepers are out here to have exclusive little clubs where they have drinks with people as exactly like themselves as possible, but I'm here to organize against cisheteropatriarchy so we can *all* survive and thrive.
Another thing that factors hugely into being seen as an annoying queer person: neurodivergency. Society at large already sees us as weird and annoying, and the queer community is no stranger to this either. I can't count the amount of times a queer person, especially a trans woman, has been labelled as cringe or weird or problematic, when they were just visibly autistic. However, it goes beyond just replicating those patterns.
I'll speak mostly from my own experience as an autistic person but feel that it applies broadly to other flavors of neurodivergency. Because we are so often isolated from any sort of community growing up, we have no idea what it's like to be in one. Which leads to a lot of awkwardness as we have to learn how to be in very little time. Even if we somehow did already have experience with being in community, the queer community has its own plethora of unwritten rules and codes, and violating them will get you labelled as annoying at best. Autistic people also are wildly disproportionately unemployed, or to put it bluntly: poor as shit. Which makes participating in much of queer life tricky, as most events seem to be centered around upper middle-class income level people in expensive areas. Or when it comes to aesthetics, dressing visibly queer is cool as fuck, but it comes at a cost. Financially, as nice clothes are just plain more expensive, and socially, because if you're not living in a chill area, being very visibly queer can lead to really undesirable attention from exactly the wrong people. Lastly, there's also the participation in certain rituals that affirm one's identity. Specifically, there is (or at least was around when I figured myself out) the whole "throw out old wardrobe, get all new one" thing in trans circles. Which is fraught in both a financial sense (clothes expensive, especially nice ones if your body is outside mainstream parameters), and in its harkening to gendered norms (how do you acknowledge a non-binary identity like that, or for that matter, a binary female identity without going full 50s suburban housewife?)
Also, don't disregard the trauma from interfacing with the medical system. Speaking really for trans people here, but it's rough. I still flinch when thinking about when I pursued mine. The gatekeeping process was already intense, but I got the extra helping of having to argue for myself to be allowed a medical transition because I'm autistic. Because somehow being autistic means you're not capable to make such decisions for yourself. The infantilization inherent in such a thing hurts. It's been a few years, but attacks on trans people in the public arena have been focusing on autistic people which makes it hard to let the trauma heal because people with very real and tangible power are intent to inflict their hateful views on us.
Thank you for all of this. And I don't mean to discount the trauma of interfacing with the medical system, I experience it quite heavily myself. The total lack of agency we experience in such systems is so harrowing that sometimes not accessing care at all feels like the only source of freedom for me, which is not good at all. It's a massive source of systemic oppression for trans people and one of the major fronts on which we are attacked. My only point is that such systemic oppression is also a huge part of what keeps non-transitioning trans people from transitioning (should they want to, or even if they're just curious!), and it also creates barriers to their identities ever being recognized regardless. It has a chilling effect on all queer people who are paying attention too, I think.
Oh totally. I didn't read your article as discounting this trauma at all, I just wanted to share my perspective. I don't doubt it has a chilling effect on any queer person paying attention either, trans people may be the politically expedient choice of victim for now, but we all now that to the forces opposing us, *any* queer person existing is an offense.
Devon, I was not ready to re-confront myself in reading your post, but thank you. Especially in the section about "annoying bisexuals". As a Black agender femme who has mostly dated folks who aren't cishet, I have had to get super clear about my resentment and my own pain in order to not be dismissive of the pain of cis and afab bisexuals who only date cis men. I pinpointed that a lot of my pain was being told that I am "intimidating" and hearing how "intimidating" it is to date non-men by cis bisexual women. It is pain from hearing constantly that "men are easier to date", that the problem is who the cis bisexual person is dating, not the insecurity of the cis bisexual who is generalizing. I felt like my courage to be forward and take risks in love was not seen or held and that was why I was resentful. Relationships take work and don't just magically happen. I wish that more folks would have owned their feelings and were clear that they are "intimidated" or insecure about the prospect of not dating cishet men, rather than putting that on me or people like me. I am still working on the grief of being told I am "intimidating", in essence "too much", of being pushed away or put on a pedestal I don't fuckin' want for so much of my life. In being clear about my pain, I can hold a little more space for the "annoying bisexual". It is still hard when they do not own their fear. It sounds like you have had more interactions with folks who have been able to do that.
You are right that these annoyances of closeted, questioning and cringe queers do not hurt us. What I hear is that there is a need for more intracommunity care, as well as care for our own processes and journeys, and that we can't use oppression olympics as a way to justify our callousness or internalized shame.
I think at the end of the day, when I find myself the most annoyed, it is usually tied to 1) lack of self-compassion for an older version of me/unaddressed pain and 2) I am struggling with internal boundaries around where I pour my attention.
The last thing I will say, I think there might be a lot of vulnerability our community might feel, especially when a lot of the prominent and online voices skew young and are figuring themselves out still. They're still learning about themselves, how to talk about themselves, still learning conflict skills, emotional regulation skills, etc. We live in a society where a lot of non-queer reporting on queer and transness erases older folks and the wisdom of aging and experienced queerness. We are also still dealing with the loss of who would have been elders in our community. So perhaps the impulse to feel annoyance and shame over the folks who are still working through the identity formation has to do in part with how deeply vulnerable our community is. Not an excuse, though. While newer folks are not dangerous to us or oppressing us, having a lot of folks in our community that are not solid on themselves leaves us more vulnerable than if more of us were more grounded and experienced. That also puts a lot of pressure on those of us who do carework and care about the development of younger queers. (I work directly with younger folks in higher ed). I am glad to support folks who are still forming their identity, but this can be harder for older queers in carework within a landscape that doesn't value carework.
Very powerful and important, but there is one thing that I feel like needs to be touched upon. Part of the reason that older queers or those with more traditional labels often find younger queers and microlable-users not just annoying but disturbing is because of a sort of unsettled ontology. When someone adopts a label, they are implicitly adopting a body of theory that gives it meaning, and a lot of old queers may have a completely different idea of what their own identities even mean. There are femme gay men for whom being feminine and calling yourself a woman sometimes are just part of being gay, so when people started making gender identity and sexuality separate axes they pushed back. Similarly, for a lot of older trans-women, their sexual attraction to men was an essential component of what solidified their gender identity, and the identity of a trans-lesbian was hard to wrap their heads around, especially if they knew old bulls for whom being gender non-conforming was the first sign that they were lesbian.
In the era before stonewall, a lot of these terms weren’t codified the way they are now. Historically speaking, we aren’t all that far from the days when the phrase “the third sex” referred to those we now referred to as gay men, and even into the early 2000s there were elder activists who maintained that view. The introduction of concept like “gender identity” “sexual orientation” “romance orientation” actually redefined words that predated them, and some folks weren’t on-board. To this day, what exactly a gender identity means can be very hard to put into words, and some of the ways fresh queers are disrespected arise from the fact that their identities only make sense within a paradigm that older queers haven’t adopted yet, and still might not. To someone who accepted and made peace with the idea that he was gay because his mother was a strong influence in his life or his brain was exposed to xenoestrogens during prenatal develop, and that the trans women who also hung out at gay bars just got more of it than he did, convincing him that “stargender” is conceptually related to what makes the trans women transgender is just as much of an up-hill battle as it would be for any straight grandpa.
It seems to me that some labels come about—and some people adopt pre-existing labels—to facilitate self-reflection and self-understanding, while arise from a violent clash with hegemonic forces within society. There’s this paradox where we don’t want to define ourselves by oppression alone, but the only reason any of our identities are worth labeling or even contemplating is because of a cultural hegemony that defines certain identities as more normal than others. Fluid identities are made less fluid when the police knock at the door.
When you consider how systemic oppression is a large but not all-encompassing part of how identities come to be defined, it definitely troubles the way we label them. Take a kid who became homeless when his parents kicked out of the house for being gay 50 years ago, a kid born into a wealthy, progressive family today who take a weird, uncomfortable pride in having a successful gay son, and an autistic trans puppy-girl who lives with her parents and struggles to find work because she can’t tolerate the environment of an office. Which two have the most in-common? The two that are both being excluded from the workforce by a world that doesn’t understand them? The two born in the same generation? Or the two who officially fit into the same category of sexual orientation?
I thought about this a lot when reading Stone Butch Blues. It’s obviously a novel about queerness and the intersection of different identities, and the interplay of gender and sexuality orientation was a central focus. But there hasn’t been nearly as much discussion about how it could arguably fit into a discussion of asexuality. I remember two conversations about whether femme’s would ever be able to “melt your stone” and whether that was something you would want in the first place. It was taken for granted that most young butches are still learning and something might come along to change their minds, although sexual trauma could also play a role. I’ve often wondered whether “stone butch” fits onto the asexual spectrum, and also what it says about our modern paradigm of identity that we might want it to.
I love all these comments, thank you Zac. What I especially appreciate about everything you've raised here is how unresolved and unanswered the questions that you've posed are. Is Stone an asexual identity? I'd certainly put them in the same family, in the sense that I feel a kinship even though my sexuality and gender identity are totally different from that of any stone lesbian. Other writers like Cosima Bee Concordia have talked about how many leather identities fit within in the asexual spectrum but don't necessarily require or want that label, and I've drawn similar connections to figures in the gay male leather community like Peter Berlin. There's both commonalities and it's also impossible to transmute a person's thinking from the past onto present terms and structures.
I think a lot of genderfuck and radical queer people of the past could have vibed pretty well with the stargender of today, though. Like, would the Sisters of the Perpetual Indulgence had any beef with their ilk in the 70s? Probably not. I've certainly met senior citizens who use neopronouns, identify as nonbinary, etc, and so I'm reticent to say that older generations of queer people can't get because they are coming from a different time with different frameworks. A lot of people got left out by the old frameworks, too, and some even recognize it at the time. And I think it's mostly always been respectability politics and assimilationism at work within our communities when we have reflexively judged that a person can't be trans if they are gay, can't be bisexual if they are married, etc etc etc.
I don't know! I used to feel so certain about how everything could be categorized and about there being a clear continuity from queerness and transness of the past (including the ancient past, and Indigenous societies whose histories have been devastated by colonialism), but the more I learn, the more it humbles me. I used to need the validation that people like me "always existed," and now I don't so much. Now i take a lot of comfort in how unknowable the interiority of every other person who has ever been alive really is.
I feel like a lot of the awkwardness in queer discourse emerges because it’s caught between the ambiguous, unknowable interiority within the human psyche and a social movement that seems to want to have hard lines and clearly demarcated boundaries. Our boundaries were once demarcated clearly by a social hegemony that would met out violence on the basis of observably traits and behaviors, but as that pressure ebbs and changes to take new forms, we’re finding that it didn’t really know what it was talking about. A hundred-million different inclinations and choices could lead you to a gay bar, and none of them mattered once the police arrived. We developed a vocabulary to describe in precise detail sexual attraction, aesthetic attraction, romantic attraction, sexual orientation, gender identity, sexual identity, and anything else I might be forgetting, mostly for the purpose of combating discrimination, and that largely became the litmus test. When fighting a rhetorical battle for our lives, we used whatever worked against the specific people we were arguing against, be those our parents or doctors or the military. Almost inadvertently, those arguments became the basis of our self-concept, thus the tragedy when a trans person who relied on brain-scan/born-this-way mets a social-construct/abolish-it-all and both felt threatened by the other. Both define their existence and experience in ways that undermine the other’s self-concept, while they were both just trying to survive.
After reading a lot of queer theory and history and anthropology, I actually find it very satisfying to be almost contrarian, to identify in a way that’s only possible in our particular social and cultural environment. My life is one long-running experiment in queer and feminist theory, for which I am defining a premise, a hypothesis, and operational definitions which can be adopted for use by other researchers if they find them useful. The fact that this identity will never persuade anyone of my right to exist is a feature, not a bug. It’s actually been quite miraculous how well it’s alleviated the dysphoria that plagued me throughout high school. There will never be a micro-label for it and I don’t need anyone else’s acknowledgment to be valid.
I agree and also want to add that I think the ontology of queer identities as labels-and-pride-flags *intentionally* obscures the fact that the existence of each identity suggests an underlying theory (or at least has more and less popular ontologies attached to it) that people may agree with or reject.
For example, romantic orientation suggests that romantic attraction is natural and not a result of capitalist individualism that tries to force people to get their needs met through partners and nuclear families rather than through larger communal structures. It's clear that people mean very different things when they talk about their romantic attractions, but I also think it's clear that in *many* cases romantic attraction is the result of meeting someone you imagine could get your needs met in a more-or-less amatonormative way. I think that some of the people who are skeptical of romantic orientation as separate from sexual orientation aren't simply willfully ignorant, but may have a politics of rejecting amatonormativity in a way that would require extreme nuance to synthesize with the actual experiences of people who use a romantic orientation label––and those folks should probably pay attention to the political critiques of romance too and question how socialization and buying into that impacts how they experience attraction. But the way people see (at least their own) queer identities is often that they offer moral protection from having any aspect of that identity questioned, failing to distinguish between reactionary critiques and important ones. It's this taboo on questioning anyone's identity that I think is an intentional (or at least explicit) part of the queerness-as-pride-flags ontology, which has its own politics but is depoliticized when it comes to questions about society that can't be understood in terms of individual identity.
It's a conversation that asks a lot from each side and both have ingrained political responses to reject the demand that they have it. "You're reifying this system I've spent my life trying to dismantle" vs "You're invalidating my identity which should be sacrosanct!". I think it's tragic that feminism and trans activism ended up butting heads over whether gender should be dismantled or should be treated as a sacrosanct individual identity rather than articulating a vision of gender liberation that synthesizes the concerns of both sides (which many have done, to be fair, but which I think still hasn't become mainstream in either camp).
Also I'll add that I know multiple ace-spec people who identify as stone.
This is such an incredible comment. I think about stuff like this (amanonormativity, the nuclear family, etc) constantly but I’ve never thought of or heard someone describe romantic orientation like this! Thank you!
And when you get out of a contemporary Anglo or US-hegemonic framework and start digging in to both history and to bigger global currents and micro-situations, the possibilities keep growing. Something an anthropologist will ask is - what are the socio-cultural conditions that are underpinning this specific sex-gender ecosystem? Taking a long cool look at how heteronormativity behaves and what it does in society can be another useful 'flipped script' way of thinking about our queer lives and lifeways.
Thanks for this essay - a lot of great points, and I really appreciate your willingness to examine your past behaviour in a new light.
"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."
As an Annoying they/them that's usually just seen as a cis woman, that hit hard. I indeed, do not need to transition, not because of internalized transphobia, but because I don't aspire to be anything else than what I already am.
"I cannot view any less-experienced queer person as carrying more privilege than me."
What kind of experience are we talking about? The experience of being part of a group that doesn't want me and therefore doesn't have much to offer me? Of experiencing bisexuality in a specific way? Otherwise, I'm 41 and have been out as bi for 26 years, so I have quite a bit of experience in that. I happen to also be an Annoying they/them and demisexual, so I guess I win the Annoying Bingo - lucky me. But although having a non-binary vocabulary is newer to me, it hasn't changed how I perceive myself - it has just given me a shorthand to communicate that to someone who might be interested. To the rest of the world, I'm still a cis woman, and compared to the pain of maybe never finding love because of biphobia, it really doesn't matter much. I wish it were different, but the way things are, I don't want to have more experience in a community that is hostile to me, and I don't see what I would get from it since people like me are nowhere to be found.
I hear what you're saying and I see who you're talking about (I feel too old to use the label demisexual, because it doesn't serve me. I do identify mostly as tired, as the Hannah Gadsby joke goes). But generalizing by considering the Annoying as inexperienced isn't very helpful to those who just have a different experience. I've been out for a long time. I have an experience, and it is queer because I am queer, even if I was not considered or felt part of the community.
I appreciate you making explicit how those identities are perceived. The irony isn't lost on my autistic ass either that once again, I'm being considered annoying just for existing -- and by those who are supposedly my community.
There are a variety of reasons why queer people get called "annoying" -- inexperience, having a rare/niche/new identity, feeling insecure about their position within the community, coping with some denial or internalized bigotry, lots of things. Not everyone who is an Annoying Queer is newly out or inexperienced. And sometimes the "newness" is more that the identity is new to the world/the community. I've folded a lot of things into one general phenomenon here, for the sake of drawing commonality and efficiency, otherwise the piece would be like 20,000 words instead of 5,000, but that does mean some nuance gets flattened for sure.
thank you so much for this piece!! a few years ago when it was really popular to be an ace exclusionist, it never really sat right with me. i don’t think gatekeeping queerness does us any favors! i eventually slowly phased out anyone in my life who was saying ace ppl aren’t queer.
i actually fit into most of the categories you named here (bi person in a “straight” relationship, non-transitioning trans person, and tenderqueer lol) and … i’ve been really fortunate to only be welcomed by community, but there’s definitely a lot that happens internally that makes me think i should just excuse myself from community spaces even though no one has ever told me to do that. i also often think of how bi people make up most of the queer community, and the health disparities faced by bisexual ppl. we carry so much!
this perspective was really validating to read, so thank you again. 💖
As a Sapphic Gen X Transfeminine Demigirl Riot Grrrl who finally realized they were on the feminine spectrum and needed to transition in their late 40s, and even having been an activist with ACT-UP and Queer Nation in the early 90s spent most of their adult life until 47 appearing to be a straight dude, I have to say I feel this oh so much and wonder what could have been if we'd had the language we have today back in the early 90s when I read The Left Hand of Darkness and wished I were Gethenian...
Thank you so much for writing this piece, from a Very Annoying Queer Demisexual Woman Married to a Straight Man who Recently Discovered She is Neurodivergent. THE MOST ANNOYING!
I sort of came out on my Substack a while back and it was about the most fucking petrified I've ever been. What's saddest to me is that I feared the judgment from my queer friends (who are the vast majority of my social circle) than the straight ones.
oh wow I could have written that first part except for the aspect that I'm not out to anyone but my husband and my therapist. ha. good to know I'm not alone ha!
Thank you for talking about ace people on here - this is my experience. Before I felt aware that that label existed I thought I was ‘broken’. Now I know I’m ace (or grey ace, or demi, whatever, I tend to say ‘ace spectrum’) I know I’m not.
Thanks for another great essay! Reminds me of how I embraced respectability politics when I was newly out and still struggling to reject the conservatism that had been my identity for so long up to that point.
Thank the universe for all "annoying" queers! I am one of them, no doubt. But in my younger years, I felt compelled to fit in, to belong, to be accepted, especially by my own community. I needed that, I thought. It's been a while now since I see things in quite a different way. I no longer seek permission to be me. Thank you for this wonderful piece.
At the personal level, it is also okay to feel exasperated running into, say, timid bisexuals while dating. It IS a real phenomenon across genders, as both I and my bisexual fem partner can attest. Having said that, all I do is ghost such bis and complain about them privately. There's nothing wrong with them, I just feel annoyed (sorry) at a wasted date.
I wanna say something really smart and analytical about this entire essay, but all I'm left with his a head nod and a "yeah, definitely." So... thank you for articulating all of this so eloquently.
I had to take this in pieces, reading some and walking away, coming back and reading more. My wife and I are sitting in the living room and both working on our computers, and every so often I'd have to pause the movie we have on in the background and read her another highlight from it.
I started reading her the entire section after the last tweet, and had to stop twice because my voice cracked a couple of times, hardest when I got to "Nothing was worse than being unable to name my suffering or locate other people like me. "
Next month, I turn 47. I grew up in the mountains of northeast PA, in coal country, in an Evangelical family. It's a little more built up now, the place where I grew up, but it's still remote. By the time I figured out that wanting to kiss girls was Wrong, I'd figured out that I couldn't be Han Solo, either, and I'd have to be Princess Leia. Boy, I didn't want either of those things, and in my desperate desire to hide how Wrong I was, I turned into a "boy-crazy" teenager. Risky, obsessive behavior crashed me out of college and gave me a first marriage at 21 and a kid at 23, but also a reputation that my husband would "let me" kiss girls, so watch out! Because, you know, I'd never leave him. I was one of Those Bisexuals: femme, nerdy-girly in an outdoorsy way, married to a dude.
Except I'm not. I'm a transmasculine butch lesbian. See, I told a single cis bi dude friend at 21 that I thought 'genderqueer' made sense to me, and that I wanted a 'dimmer switch' for my gender. I thought he would understand. He laughed at me -- oh, you're so silly, you Annoying Bisexual, look at you, trying to find another way to be Special! -- and I never told anybody else for at least ten years.
I didn't actually get to fully embrace that until after my *daughter* came out at 15. Once she came out -- at fifteen! -- I felt so ashamed and cowardly for hiding all those years, for not saying who I really am. For those of you who can do math, that means I didn't come out publicly as anything other than cis until I was 38 years old. The first time I told someone I was bisexual, using those words, I was 13. It literally took me another *quarter of a century* to be able to tear apart the protective artifices I put around the scared Weird Kid, the one that all the other kids at school instinctively picked out as Queer long before the rumors started that I was one of the dreaded "lezzies."
It's been a long time since something hit me quite this hard in a queer way. Probably Transgender Warriors, honestly, was the last thing that knocked me on my ass like this.
I've been trying to find queer community where I live for almost 4 years now, both online and in person. I had a great community on the West Coast but ever since moving back to my hometown, it's been abysmal. I assumed it was in some way related to my autism, maybe COVID, it was hard to be sure. But now, I have a word and a framework for why it's felt so difficult. As an Annoying queer I fully understand I'm not the intended audience of this article. But, it has had a big impact on me.
I get it now and I am finally ready to stop trying so hard. That is a weight lifted for me for sure, but only because I am in a decent place with depression. If I wasn't this realization might be dangerous. My gay Uncle who was still closeted in many circles would have also been an Annoying queer by definition of this article, but he took his life last month. We had many conversations about how we both felt way too queer for our family and never queer enough in queer communities.
The fact remains that I and many other Annoying queers remain community-less. People who are Annoying queers (nonbinary, bisexual, etc) by way of identity versus lack of experience aren't going to just get less Annoying over time unless their identity changes. I get and respect what you are trying to do by writing this article, but also reading it from the perspective of someone who will never cease to be Annoying is fucking rough. That said, I also really, really appreciate it for saying the quiet thing I've long suspected out loud.
One more somewhat related thing to add: Unlearning Shame was extremely helpful for me in processing the death of my Uncle. Thank you for writing it.
I am so, so sorry for your loss aka. I'm glad you're in a decent place to be able to process this topic. I'm sorry that the way that I've framed the topic still makes it incredibly painful regardless. I have masqueraded as a less Annoying Queer for a while in hopes of finding belonging, and most other trans and queer people do now accept me, but that acceptance is based on them projecting qualities onto me that I don't actually hold. Realizing that my acceptance was always so tentative and letting go of that fight to be an acceptable, Cool Queer person is part of what motivated me to write this essay. I hope that us Annoying Queers can continue to work on finding one another and carving out our space -- even if it is on the margins of what can feel like an unwelcoming community. For me, the hope and the withdrawal come and go in waves.
If it helps at all, I personally found the very liberal and broad use of "we" in the opening paragraphs to be... well, annoying. Very annoying. As much as I like the essay and agree with the general thesis and what it expresses, I think the liberal use of "we" there might not be as broad as the author imagines.
It reminds me a little bit of now-adult people who used to be hateful jerks online saying "that was just how it was, everyone was like that back then" and thinking, no, we really weren't. I wasn't. My friends weren't. You want to tell them no, sorry, it definitely wasn't just you, but it also wasn't all of us. Maybe you were just mean.
I know plenty of perfectly acceptable cool queers who never, ever scratched an internalized itch by bullying and excluding and doing a discourse about "annoying" queer people. That's why I'm rather exasperated by the forced teaming in the opening paragraphs. No, I'm sorry, "we" don't all do this, "we" don't all feel this way, "we" don't all react to "annoying" queer people in the way the author describes. It's not that you don't get exasperated or confused sometimes, because you do, it's that you don't automatically process those responses by feeling threatened and lashing out with discourse and small private cruelties to scratch that itch. Some people really do just react with "well, it takes all kinds, life is a rich tapestry" and move on with their lives.
Don't be discouraged. Not everyone needs to go on an arduous personal journey to not feel threatened by "annoying" queer people. Not everyone sees wounded people and reacts with revulsion. Not everyone places queer people into categories ranked by conformity. Not everyone places that "we" against "them." Most people I meet just think of queer people as queer, one group, one team, us, and then go about their day.
I also think we need to point out to the gatekeepers that they are being entirely unserious about the rising fascism that the queer community is facing. We are way stronger if every economically-privileged "hetero"-married bisexual/demisexual/non-transitioning trans person comes out and bonds with and identifies with our community than we are if those people stay quietly in the closet while the rest of us deal with onslaught after onslaught.
Queerness is *supposed* to dismantle notions of gender and sexuality that keep people stuck performing social roles they don't come fully alive in, not create new rigid categories in which a few gay and a few trans people will be permanent discriminated-against minorities. Maybe the gatekeepers are out here to have exclusive little clubs where they have drinks with people as exactly like themselves as possible, but I'm here to organize against cisheteropatriarchy so we can *all* survive and thrive.
Another thing that factors hugely into being seen as an annoying queer person: neurodivergency. Society at large already sees us as weird and annoying, and the queer community is no stranger to this either. I can't count the amount of times a queer person, especially a trans woman, has been labelled as cringe or weird or problematic, when they were just visibly autistic. However, it goes beyond just replicating those patterns.
I'll speak mostly from my own experience as an autistic person but feel that it applies broadly to other flavors of neurodivergency. Because we are so often isolated from any sort of community growing up, we have no idea what it's like to be in one. Which leads to a lot of awkwardness as we have to learn how to be in very little time. Even if we somehow did already have experience with being in community, the queer community has its own plethora of unwritten rules and codes, and violating them will get you labelled as annoying at best. Autistic people also are wildly disproportionately unemployed, or to put it bluntly: poor as shit. Which makes participating in much of queer life tricky, as most events seem to be centered around upper middle-class income level people in expensive areas. Or when it comes to aesthetics, dressing visibly queer is cool as fuck, but it comes at a cost. Financially, as nice clothes are just plain more expensive, and socially, because if you're not living in a chill area, being very visibly queer can lead to really undesirable attention from exactly the wrong people. Lastly, there's also the participation in certain rituals that affirm one's identity. Specifically, there is (or at least was around when I figured myself out) the whole "throw out old wardrobe, get all new one" thing in trans circles. Which is fraught in both a financial sense (clothes expensive, especially nice ones if your body is outside mainstream parameters), and in its harkening to gendered norms (how do you acknowledge a non-binary identity like that, or for that matter, a binary female identity without going full 50s suburban housewife?)
Also, don't disregard the trauma from interfacing with the medical system. Speaking really for trans people here, but it's rough. I still flinch when thinking about when I pursued mine. The gatekeeping process was already intense, but I got the extra helping of having to argue for myself to be allowed a medical transition because I'm autistic. Because somehow being autistic means you're not capable to make such decisions for yourself. The infantilization inherent in such a thing hurts. It's been a few years, but attacks on trans people in the public arena have been focusing on autistic people which makes it hard to let the trauma heal because people with very real and tangible power are intent to inflict their hateful views on us.
Thank you for all of this. And I don't mean to discount the trauma of interfacing with the medical system, I experience it quite heavily myself. The total lack of agency we experience in such systems is so harrowing that sometimes not accessing care at all feels like the only source of freedom for me, which is not good at all. It's a massive source of systemic oppression for trans people and one of the major fronts on which we are attacked. My only point is that such systemic oppression is also a huge part of what keeps non-transitioning trans people from transitioning (should they want to, or even if they're just curious!), and it also creates barriers to their identities ever being recognized regardless. It has a chilling effect on all queer people who are paying attention too, I think.
Oh totally. I didn't read your article as discounting this trauma at all, I just wanted to share my perspective. I don't doubt it has a chilling effect on any queer person paying attention either, trans people may be the politically expedient choice of victim for now, but we all now that to the forces opposing us, *any* queer person existing is an offense.
Devon, I was not ready to re-confront myself in reading your post, but thank you. Especially in the section about "annoying bisexuals". As a Black agender femme who has mostly dated folks who aren't cishet, I have had to get super clear about my resentment and my own pain in order to not be dismissive of the pain of cis and afab bisexuals who only date cis men. I pinpointed that a lot of my pain was being told that I am "intimidating" and hearing how "intimidating" it is to date non-men by cis bisexual women. It is pain from hearing constantly that "men are easier to date", that the problem is who the cis bisexual person is dating, not the insecurity of the cis bisexual who is generalizing. I felt like my courage to be forward and take risks in love was not seen or held and that was why I was resentful. Relationships take work and don't just magically happen. I wish that more folks would have owned their feelings and were clear that they are "intimidated" or insecure about the prospect of not dating cishet men, rather than putting that on me or people like me. I am still working on the grief of being told I am "intimidating", in essence "too much", of being pushed away or put on a pedestal I don't fuckin' want for so much of my life. In being clear about my pain, I can hold a little more space for the "annoying bisexual". It is still hard when they do not own their fear. It sounds like you have had more interactions with folks who have been able to do that.
You are right that these annoyances of closeted, questioning and cringe queers do not hurt us. What I hear is that there is a need for more intracommunity care, as well as care for our own processes and journeys, and that we can't use oppression olympics as a way to justify our callousness or internalized shame.
I think at the end of the day, when I find myself the most annoyed, it is usually tied to 1) lack of self-compassion for an older version of me/unaddressed pain and 2) I am struggling with internal boundaries around where I pour my attention.
The last thing I will say, I think there might be a lot of vulnerability our community might feel, especially when a lot of the prominent and online voices skew young and are figuring themselves out still. They're still learning about themselves, how to talk about themselves, still learning conflict skills, emotional regulation skills, etc. We live in a society where a lot of non-queer reporting on queer and transness erases older folks and the wisdom of aging and experienced queerness. We are also still dealing with the loss of who would have been elders in our community. So perhaps the impulse to feel annoyance and shame over the folks who are still working through the identity formation has to do in part with how deeply vulnerable our community is. Not an excuse, though. While newer folks are not dangerous to us or oppressing us, having a lot of folks in our community that are not solid on themselves leaves us more vulnerable than if more of us were more grounded and experienced. That also puts a lot of pressure on those of us who do carework and care about the development of younger queers. (I work directly with younger folks in higher ed). I am glad to support folks who are still forming their identity, but this can be harder for older queers in carework within a landscape that doesn't value carework.
Very powerful and important, but there is one thing that I feel like needs to be touched upon. Part of the reason that older queers or those with more traditional labels often find younger queers and microlable-users not just annoying but disturbing is because of a sort of unsettled ontology. When someone adopts a label, they are implicitly adopting a body of theory that gives it meaning, and a lot of old queers may have a completely different idea of what their own identities even mean. There are femme gay men for whom being feminine and calling yourself a woman sometimes are just part of being gay, so when people started making gender identity and sexuality separate axes they pushed back. Similarly, for a lot of older trans-women, their sexual attraction to men was an essential component of what solidified their gender identity, and the identity of a trans-lesbian was hard to wrap their heads around, especially if they knew old bulls for whom being gender non-conforming was the first sign that they were lesbian.
In the era before stonewall, a lot of these terms weren’t codified the way they are now. Historically speaking, we aren’t all that far from the days when the phrase “the third sex” referred to those we now referred to as gay men, and even into the early 2000s there were elder activists who maintained that view. The introduction of concept like “gender identity” “sexual orientation” “romance orientation” actually redefined words that predated them, and some folks weren’t on-board. To this day, what exactly a gender identity means can be very hard to put into words, and some of the ways fresh queers are disrespected arise from the fact that their identities only make sense within a paradigm that older queers haven’t adopted yet, and still might not. To someone who accepted and made peace with the idea that he was gay because his mother was a strong influence in his life or his brain was exposed to xenoestrogens during prenatal develop, and that the trans women who also hung out at gay bars just got more of it than he did, convincing him that “stargender” is conceptually related to what makes the trans women transgender is just as much of an up-hill battle as it would be for any straight grandpa.
It seems to me that some labels come about—and some people adopt pre-existing labels—to facilitate self-reflection and self-understanding, while arise from a violent clash with hegemonic forces within society. There’s this paradox where we don’t want to define ourselves by oppression alone, but the only reason any of our identities are worth labeling or even contemplating is because of a cultural hegemony that defines certain identities as more normal than others. Fluid identities are made less fluid when the police knock at the door.
When you consider how systemic oppression is a large but not all-encompassing part of how identities come to be defined, it definitely troubles the way we label them. Take a kid who became homeless when his parents kicked out of the house for being gay 50 years ago, a kid born into a wealthy, progressive family today who take a weird, uncomfortable pride in having a successful gay son, and an autistic trans puppy-girl who lives with her parents and struggles to find work because she can’t tolerate the environment of an office. Which two have the most in-common? The two that are both being excluded from the workforce by a world that doesn’t understand them? The two born in the same generation? Or the two who officially fit into the same category of sexual orientation?
I thought about this a lot when reading Stone Butch Blues. It’s obviously a novel about queerness and the intersection of different identities, and the interplay of gender and sexuality orientation was a central focus. But there hasn’t been nearly as much discussion about how it could arguably fit into a discussion of asexuality. I remember two conversations about whether femme’s would ever be able to “melt your stone” and whether that was something you would want in the first place. It was taken for granted that most young butches are still learning and something might come along to change their minds, although sexual trauma could also play a role. I’ve often wondered whether “stone butch” fits onto the asexual spectrum, and also what it says about our modern paradigm of identity that we might want it to.
I love all these comments, thank you Zac. What I especially appreciate about everything you've raised here is how unresolved and unanswered the questions that you've posed are. Is Stone an asexual identity? I'd certainly put them in the same family, in the sense that I feel a kinship even though my sexuality and gender identity are totally different from that of any stone lesbian. Other writers like Cosima Bee Concordia have talked about how many leather identities fit within in the asexual spectrum but don't necessarily require or want that label, and I've drawn similar connections to figures in the gay male leather community like Peter Berlin. There's both commonalities and it's also impossible to transmute a person's thinking from the past onto present terms and structures.
I think a lot of genderfuck and radical queer people of the past could have vibed pretty well with the stargender of today, though. Like, would the Sisters of the Perpetual Indulgence had any beef with their ilk in the 70s? Probably not. I've certainly met senior citizens who use neopronouns, identify as nonbinary, etc, and so I'm reticent to say that older generations of queer people can't get because they are coming from a different time with different frameworks. A lot of people got left out by the old frameworks, too, and some even recognize it at the time. And I think it's mostly always been respectability politics and assimilationism at work within our communities when we have reflexively judged that a person can't be trans if they are gay, can't be bisexual if they are married, etc etc etc.
I don't know! I used to feel so certain about how everything could be categorized and about there being a clear continuity from queerness and transness of the past (including the ancient past, and Indigenous societies whose histories have been devastated by colonialism), but the more I learn, the more it humbles me. I used to need the validation that people like me "always existed," and now I don't so much. Now i take a lot of comfort in how unknowable the interiority of every other person who has ever been alive really is.
OMG DEVON PRICE MENTIONED ME BY NAME!!!
Anyway
I feel like a lot of the awkwardness in queer discourse emerges because it’s caught between the ambiguous, unknowable interiority within the human psyche and a social movement that seems to want to have hard lines and clearly demarcated boundaries. Our boundaries were once demarcated clearly by a social hegemony that would met out violence on the basis of observably traits and behaviors, but as that pressure ebbs and changes to take new forms, we’re finding that it didn’t really know what it was talking about. A hundred-million different inclinations and choices could lead you to a gay bar, and none of them mattered once the police arrived. We developed a vocabulary to describe in precise detail sexual attraction, aesthetic attraction, romantic attraction, sexual orientation, gender identity, sexual identity, and anything else I might be forgetting, mostly for the purpose of combating discrimination, and that largely became the litmus test. When fighting a rhetorical battle for our lives, we used whatever worked against the specific people we were arguing against, be those our parents or doctors or the military. Almost inadvertently, those arguments became the basis of our self-concept, thus the tragedy when a trans person who relied on brain-scan/born-this-way mets a social-construct/abolish-it-all and both felt threatened by the other. Both define their existence and experience in ways that undermine the other’s self-concept, while they were both just trying to survive.
After reading a lot of queer theory and history and anthropology, I actually find it very satisfying to be almost contrarian, to identify in a way that’s only possible in our particular social and cultural environment. My life is one long-running experiment in queer and feminist theory, for which I am defining a premise, a hypothesis, and operational definitions which can be adopted for use by other researchers if they find them useful. The fact that this identity will never persuade anyone of my right to exist is a feature, not a bug. It’s actually been quite miraculous how well it’s alleviated the dysphoria that plagued me throughout high school. There will never be a micro-label for it and I don’t need anyone else’s acknowledgment to be valid.
I agree and also want to add that I think the ontology of queer identities as labels-and-pride-flags *intentionally* obscures the fact that the existence of each identity suggests an underlying theory (or at least has more and less popular ontologies attached to it) that people may agree with or reject.
For example, romantic orientation suggests that romantic attraction is natural and not a result of capitalist individualism that tries to force people to get their needs met through partners and nuclear families rather than through larger communal structures. It's clear that people mean very different things when they talk about their romantic attractions, but I also think it's clear that in *many* cases romantic attraction is the result of meeting someone you imagine could get your needs met in a more-or-less amatonormative way. I think that some of the people who are skeptical of romantic orientation as separate from sexual orientation aren't simply willfully ignorant, but may have a politics of rejecting amatonormativity in a way that would require extreme nuance to synthesize with the actual experiences of people who use a romantic orientation label––and those folks should probably pay attention to the political critiques of romance too and question how socialization and buying into that impacts how they experience attraction. But the way people see (at least their own) queer identities is often that they offer moral protection from having any aspect of that identity questioned, failing to distinguish between reactionary critiques and important ones. It's this taboo on questioning anyone's identity that I think is an intentional (or at least explicit) part of the queerness-as-pride-flags ontology, which has its own politics but is depoliticized when it comes to questions about society that can't be understood in terms of individual identity.
It's a conversation that asks a lot from each side and both have ingrained political responses to reject the demand that they have it. "You're reifying this system I've spent my life trying to dismantle" vs "You're invalidating my identity which should be sacrosanct!". I think it's tragic that feminism and trans activism ended up butting heads over whether gender should be dismantled or should be treated as a sacrosanct individual identity rather than articulating a vision of gender liberation that synthesizes the concerns of both sides (which many have done, to be fair, but which I think still hasn't become mainstream in either camp).
Also I'll add that I know multiple ace-spec people who identify as stone.
This is such an incredible comment. I think about stuff like this (amanonormativity, the nuclear family, etc) constantly but I’ve never thought of or heard someone describe romantic orientation like this! Thank you!
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781793601254/The-Everyday-Makings-of-Heteronormativity-Cross-Cultural-Explorations-of-Sex-Gender-and-Sexuality
And when you get out of a contemporary Anglo or US-hegemonic framework and start digging in to both history and to bigger global currents and micro-situations, the possibilities keep growing. Something an anthropologist will ask is - what are the socio-cultural conditions that are underpinning this specific sex-gender ecosystem? Taking a long cool look at how heteronormativity behaves and what it does in society can be another useful 'flipped script' way of thinking about our queer lives and lifeways.
Ooohhh I have so many thoughts about this. Not sure I’m up for sharing, but thank you for this beautiful defense of queer messiness!
Messy can be good!
Thanks for this essay - a lot of great points, and I really appreciate your willingness to examine your past behaviour in a new light.
"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."
As an Annoying they/them that's usually just seen as a cis woman, that hit hard. I indeed, do not need to transition, not because of internalized transphobia, but because I don't aspire to be anything else than what I already am.
"I cannot view any less-experienced queer person as carrying more privilege than me."
What kind of experience are we talking about? The experience of being part of a group that doesn't want me and therefore doesn't have much to offer me? Of experiencing bisexuality in a specific way? Otherwise, I'm 41 and have been out as bi for 26 years, so I have quite a bit of experience in that. I happen to also be an Annoying they/them and demisexual, so I guess I win the Annoying Bingo - lucky me. But although having a non-binary vocabulary is newer to me, it hasn't changed how I perceive myself - it has just given me a shorthand to communicate that to someone who might be interested. To the rest of the world, I'm still a cis woman, and compared to the pain of maybe never finding love because of biphobia, it really doesn't matter much. I wish it were different, but the way things are, I don't want to have more experience in a community that is hostile to me, and I don't see what I would get from it since people like me are nowhere to be found.
I hear what you're saying and I see who you're talking about (I feel too old to use the label demisexual, because it doesn't serve me. I do identify mostly as tired, as the Hannah Gadsby joke goes). But generalizing by considering the Annoying as inexperienced isn't very helpful to those who just have a different experience. I've been out for a long time. I have an experience, and it is queer because I am queer, even if I was not considered or felt part of the community.
I appreciate you making explicit how those identities are perceived. The irony isn't lost on my autistic ass either that once again, I'm being considered annoying just for existing -- and by those who are supposedly my community.
There are a variety of reasons why queer people get called "annoying" -- inexperience, having a rare/niche/new identity, feeling insecure about their position within the community, coping with some denial or internalized bigotry, lots of things. Not everyone who is an Annoying Queer is newly out or inexperienced. And sometimes the "newness" is more that the identity is new to the world/the community. I've folded a lot of things into one general phenomenon here, for the sake of drawing commonality and efficiency, otherwise the piece would be like 20,000 words instead of 5,000, but that does mean some nuance gets flattened for sure.
thank you so much for this piece!! a few years ago when it was really popular to be an ace exclusionist, it never really sat right with me. i don’t think gatekeeping queerness does us any favors! i eventually slowly phased out anyone in my life who was saying ace ppl aren’t queer.
i actually fit into most of the categories you named here (bi person in a “straight” relationship, non-transitioning trans person, and tenderqueer lol) and … i’ve been really fortunate to only be welcomed by community, but there’s definitely a lot that happens internally that makes me think i should just excuse myself from community spaces even though no one has ever told me to do that. i also often think of how bi people make up most of the queer community, and the health disparities faced by bisexual ppl. we carry so much!
this perspective was really validating to read, so thank you again. 💖
As a Sapphic Gen X Transfeminine Demigirl Riot Grrrl who finally realized they were on the feminine spectrum and needed to transition in their late 40s, and even having been an activist with ACT-UP and Queer Nation in the early 90s spent most of their adult life until 47 appearing to be a straight dude, I have to say I feel this oh so much and wonder what could have been if we'd had the language we have today back in the early 90s when I read The Left Hand of Darkness and wished I were Gethenian...
Thank you so much for writing this piece, from a Very Annoying Queer Demisexual Woman Married to a Straight Man who Recently Discovered She is Neurodivergent. THE MOST ANNOYING!
I sort of came out on my Substack a while back and it was about the most fucking petrified I've ever been. What's saddest to me is that I feared the judgment from my queer friends (who are the vast majority of my social circle) than the straight ones.
oh wow I could have written that first part except for the aspect that I'm not out to anyone but my husband and my therapist. ha. good to know I'm not alone ha!
Thank you for talking about ace people on here - this is my experience. Before I felt aware that that label existed I thought I was ‘broken’. Now I know I’m ace (or grey ace, or demi, whatever, I tend to say ‘ace spectrum’) I know I’m not.
Thanks for another great essay! Reminds me of how I embraced respectability politics when I was newly out and still struggling to reject the conservatism that had been my identity for so long up to that point.
Thanks Devin! I'm glad to hear it resonated. We all have a lot of baggage to work through I think.
Thank the universe for all "annoying" queers! I am one of them, no doubt. But in my younger years, I felt compelled to fit in, to belong, to be accepted, especially by my own community. I needed that, I thought. It's been a while now since I see things in quite a different way. I no longer seek permission to be me. Thank you for this wonderful piece.
Interesting and good take.
At the personal level, it is also okay to feel exasperated running into, say, timid bisexuals while dating. It IS a real phenomenon across genders, as both I and my bisexual fem partner can attest. Having said that, all I do is ghost such bis and complain about them privately. There's nothing wrong with them, I just feel annoyed (sorry) at a wasted date.
I wanna say something really smart and analytical about this entire essay, but all I'm left with his a head nod and a "yeah, definitely." So... thank you for articulating all of this so eloquently.
Yes, yes, yes. One hundred percent yes.
I had to take this in pieces, reading some and walking away, coming back and reading more. My wife and I are sitting in the living room and both working on our computers, and every so often I'd have to pause the movie we have on in the background and read her another highlight from it.
I started reading her the entire section after the last tweet, and had to stop twice because my voice cracked a couple of times, hardest when I got to "Nothing was worse than being unable to name my suffering or locate other people like me. "
Next month, I turn 47. I grew up in the mountains of northeast PA, in coal country, in an Evangelical family. It's a little more built up now, the place where I grew up, but it's still remote. By the time I figured out that wanting to kiss girls was Wrong, I'd figured out that I couldn't be Han Solo, either, and I'd have to be Princess Leia. Boy, I didn't want either of those things, and in my desperate desire to hide how Wrong I was, I turned into a "boy-crazy" teenager. Risky, obsessive behavior crashed me out of college and gave me a first marriage at 21 and a kid at 23, but also a reputation that my husband would "let me" kiss girls, so watch out! Because, you know, I'd never leave him. I was one of Those Bisexuals: femme, nerdy-girly in an outdoorsy way, married to a dude.
Except I'm not. I'm a transmasculine butch lesbian. See, I told a single cis bi dude friend at 21 that I thought 'genderqueer' made sense to me, and that I wanted a 'dimmer switch' for my gender. I thought he would understand. He laughed at me -- oh, you're so silly, you Annoying Bisexual, look at you, trying to find another way to be Special! -- and I never told anybody else for at least ten years.
I didn't actually get to fully embrace that until after my *daughter* came out at 15. Once she came out -- at fifteen! -- I felt so ashamed and cowardly for hiding all those years, for not saying who I really am. For those of you who can do math, that means I didn't come out publicly as anything other than cis until I was 38 years old. The first time I told someone I was bisexual, using those words, I was 13. It literally took me another *quarter of a century* to be able to tear apart the protective artifices I put around the scared Weird Kid, the one that all the other kids at school instinctively picked out as Queer long before the rumors started that I was one of the dreaded "lezzies."
It's been a long time since something hit me quite this hard in a queer way. Probably Transgender Warriors, honestly, was the last thing that knocked me on my ass like this.
Fucking stellar. Just fucking stellar.