Category Archives: homophobia

Why I’m An Assimilationist

[Assimilation = Death sticker.]

So the Supreme Court has started to talk about Prop 8, which means that my Twitter feed is suddenly full of people using the word “assimilationist” in cold blood. Unfortunately, shouting at people in incoherent rage does not actually get them to stop using the word, so ugh.

Worry about assimilation is a common thread that runs through a lot of social justice movements– race, disability, even atheism– but I’m going to specifically be talking about it in a queer context, because that’s the one I’m most familiar with.

The assimilationist mindset is “we’re people just like you, you should give us rights.” Which, as strategies go, has the advantage of totally working. Seriously! The single thing that correlates best with having changed your mind to support same-sex marriage is knowing a queer person– that is, your mental image of queers shifts from “Pride Parade and anonymous bathroom sex” to “Joe down the street who grows really nice roses.” It also really cleverly defangs a pretty major squick-based anti-queer argument: it’s hard to argue that LGBT people are sick disgusting perverts who live loveless lives full of casual sex when observably the queer rights movement is advocating for their right to have spouses, children, a white picket fence, and a golden retriever. 

The problem here is that if you say “we fall in love and want to get married! We’re people just like you!”, you’re implicitly saying that people who don’t fall in love and get married are not people just like you. Which is kind of a dick move. Assimilationism sanitizes queerness to make it more acceptable to Jane Homophobe: if she’s still vaguely threatened by Ellen, she’s just not ready for “and also anonymous bathroom sex is a totally valid lifestyle choice.” This is simultaneously an understandable political tactic and really, really shitty.

Where this gets absolutely toxic is that, for various reasons, Joe Homophobe tends to find a lot of the most marginalized queer people the most threatening. Trans people are scary and confusing! It is much easier to sweep us under the rug and just focus on same-sex marriage, particularly if the activists involved are kinda transphobic themselves. The HRC in particular has a history of being shitty to trans people.

But trans people, don’t rest on your laurels, we totally pull this shit too– the trans movement as a whole regularly ignores trans addicts, mentally ill people, sex workers, homeless people, survivors, and other groups, partially because they’re alien and scary and partially because we’re afraid embracing these issues will just reinforce the stereotypes and make us look alien and scary. If the only time you talk about trans women and sex work is to criticize the idea that all trans women are sex workers, you need to check yourself.

As it happens, the basic strategy is the same. I’m a nonbinary kinky poly queer sex worker and I’m basically a normal person. I have shitty customers and sometimes don’t really want to go to work! I like cuddling my partners a lot! I have deep feelings about Hey There Delilah! I sometimes eat a pint of ice cream in one sitting! I am basically a person, not a Terrifying Monster or a Pitiable Creature Who Needs To Be Saved or a Horrible Slutty Slut Slut, and my life is neither alien nor scary. The problem with assimilationism is that the tactics haven’t been applied enough.

Occasionally people will object to LGBT people getting the right to marry because marriage is a highly problematic institution, and then they will proceed to talk about misogyny and rape culture and capitalism and elevating monogamous romantic-sexual relationships over other forms of love and make a lot of really salient critiques most of which I agree with. 

The problem with this line of thought is that, near as I can figure, about 98% of married people are cishets. Therefore, to be fair, solving the problems of marriage is 98% cishet people’s job. I don’t see why I should have to not get married just because cishet people fucked it up.  

…Also even in a society where we didn’t have any misogyny or rape culture or capitalism or elevation of monogamous romantic-sexual relationships over other forms of love, people would still probably want to be life partners with each other sometimes, and there are certain rights the government should give to people who want to be life partners. We might as well call that “marriage,” and we ought to extend it to all genders. (Some people think that these rights should be extended to everyone regardless of relationship status– but that ends up obviously absurd. Married couples don’t have to testify against each other in court, which is fair and just. Making everyone not have to testify against anyone in court seems like it would end poorly.) 

The final form of anti-assimilationist thought, using the term generously, I wish to address is the idea that queer people are radical and rebellious and fighting the patriarchy and wanting to get married and have kids is like, so not cool man. To which I say:

FUCK.

OFF.

The whole point is that people end up with more choices. Sometimes, if people have more choices, it means they make choices you don’t like. You do NOT get to take away their choices because YOU disapprove of them, as long as they are not hurting anyone else. If you do, you are basically the same thing as the homophobes– just with less political power.  

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A Bunch Of Incoherent Thoughts About Queer Fetishization, Mostly In Fandom, Coming To No Particular Conclusion


["No Homo: Two White Men Touch Each Other. Thursdays 9/8c. "So gay" -- Fandom. "I can't" --Tumblr." Source.]

Trigger warning for discussion of sexual coercion.

1) I have a problem. I am, as a bisexual and female-presenting person, against bisexual fetishization. My sexuality is not for the consumption of straight dudes! I don’t like being a prop in someone else’s fantasy!

But also I really like watching boys kiss?

2) I see a lot of people complaining about how femmeslash and het are so much less popular than slash fic and attributing this to internal misogyny on the part of fic writers. But… most fanfic writers are straight girls. Of course straight girls are not really interested in porn starring women. It kind of comes with the “straight girl” territory. It’s like saying that straight men not wanting to watch gay porn is proof of their internal misandry.

3) One of the amazing things about watching Avatar: The Last Airbender is that I finally got to ship femmeslash.

(Note: I put off watching Avatar for years and years because people kept telling me about how amazing it was on a social justice level. I don’t watch TV for social justice points, I watch it for fun. So since I’m talking about amazing Avatar is on a social-justice level I feel duty-bound to mention that it also has astonishingly detailed and well-researched worldbuilding, fabulous characters, well-choreographed fight scenes, and clever writing, and you should go watch it.)

But like. There were female characters? More than one of them? And they talked to each other? And they had different personalities and flaws? And none of them were Strong Female Characters or damsels in distress? And holy shit Azula. You don’t get a lot of manipulative violent hypercompetent complete monster female characters who aren’t femme fatales, which is too bad because the “manipulative violent hypercompetent complete monster” characters are basically my favorite.

And suddenly all my OTPs are femmeslash, when previously I’d managed to go about a decade in fandom without the slightest femmeslashy impulse.

Which makes me wonder how much my previous slashy impulses, and the popularity of slash in general, were just because everything I watched was A Bunch of Guys and Black Widow, or A Bunch of Guys and Lieutenant Uhura, or A Bunch of Guys and We’re Not Even Bothering To Half-Ass A Female Character.

4) The first time I told a boyfriend I was bi, back when I was scared and closeted and still thought I was monogamous and a girl, his immediate response was that he didn’t like threesomes.

The second time I told a boyfriend I was bi, his immediate response was to ask me about my sexual fantasies of women.

I once dated a girl who for months only kissed me when there was a boy in the room to get off on it. I went along with it so at least I’d get to kiss her.

5) It’s one thing to consume lesbian porn. I mean, Some Of My Best Friends Like Watching Two Girls Get It On ™. I don’t care about your fondness for yuri! I really don’t! And I feel like most queer dudes probably have a similar attitude towards slash.

But at this point some asshole dude deciding that your sexuality is for his entertainment is pretty much a universal experience for those queer and read as female. (And some straight women too. Anyone get the “women are naturally more sexually fluid than men” line pulled on them?) I feel like a lot of that is because people get this sort of sexual fantasy from porn and then when they meet a queer woman they expect her to fulfill it. And shit man, it’s bad enough that we have to put up with it, I would be deeply unhappy if queer dudes had to put up with that too.

I dunno what the solution is. Maybe poll the non-asshole straight people that like watching queer people have sex and see how they manage to maintain the reality/porn distinction.

6) Maybe it’s different because fandom is mostly women and men historically have power over women. Maybe it’s different for me because I’m bisexual myself, because when I look at two boys kissing I imagine myself as one of the boys, because…

I dunno. I don’t like rules where it’s not okay to do something because you’re privileged but because you’re part of a marginalized group it’s okay. Seems to me if it’s wrong to make someone a prop in your fantasy it’s wrong no matter what group you’re part of.

7) I am deeply creeped out by dudes who are more attracted to me because I’m bi. I’m more attracted to dudes if they’re bi. And, okay, maybe some of it is shared experience of queerness, and some of it is ability to look at cute boys together, and some of it is not having to have that sneaking suspicion that the straight dude really sees me as a girl and is putting up with the whole “genderqueer” thing as one of my eccentricities. But a lot of it is “eeeeee boykissing!”

Never let it be said I’m not vastly hypocritical.

8) The accusation of queer baiting is weird. Like, yes, it would be really shitty if shows habitually hinted at characters being queer without actually making them queer as a calculated attempt to draw in slash fangirls. But I kind of feel like a lot of the accusations of queer baiting come from people who have their slash goggles permanently stuck on their foreheads and are just pissed their ships aren’t canon.

9) I think it’s awesome when straight girls make out for the hell of it. I think it’s awesome when straight girls make out to turn on guys, even, as long as they’re doing it because they want to and not because they feel like they have to to be sexy. I’ve kissed straight girls because kissing is fun and I’ll basically make out with anyone who asks. And I think that straight boys should be equally free to make out with each other and queers to make out heterosexually for the hell of it or to turn someone else on or because kissing is fun.

I’d just rather people stop assuming that when I kiss girls I’m doing it to get into his pants instead of hers. And I don’t want it to be that when some queer dude kisses a boy people assume he’s doing it to get into her pants instead of his.

Sexuality Is Culturally Influenced

Okay, in this blog post I’m going to be talking about “nature” to mean “stuff that happens before you leave the womb, like genetics and epigenetics and womb environment and stuff” and “nurture” to mean “stuff that happens after you leave the womb, like your parents and who your friends are and The Patriarchy and stuff.” I realize this is vastly oversimplified and all the biologists and psychologists in the audience are tearing their hair out.

Given this definition: I think that the kinds of people one is sexually attracted to are primarily the result of nurture, not nature.

As the Internet has shown, people are attracted to a lot of really weird shit. I mean, there exist people who are sexually attracted to cartoon ponies. Lots of them. I find it extremely difficult to figure out how anything even vaguely nature-y would lead a physical attraction to cartoon ponies. Like, sure, you could maybe explain liking humanoid cartoons because they’re heavily caricatured and thus a superstimulus of traits you find attractive because of nature, but what the fuck kind of attractive trait is a cartoon pony stimulating? Mane color? So nurture definitely influences people’s sexuality at least some.

“Well,” you might say, “so a few weirdos have a sexuality that is pretty clearly nurture-related. But surely nurture wouldn’t affect, as a completely random example, an entire society for a thousand years!” To which I say: footbinding. To me– just like to any other modern American– footbinding is less attractive and more incredibly squicky body horror. But men wrote poems about the beauty of lotus feet; for a thousand years families crippled their daughters so they would be beautiful. I mean. That is serious commitment there. Your options here are “sexually is culturally influenced in an enormous way,” “for some reason Chinese people evolved to find footbinding beautiful and no one else did and they’ve mysteriously stopped in the past hundred years,” or “Chinese people spent a thousand years breaking their daughters’ feet for no reason.”

There is also more circumstantial evidence! What people are sexually attracted to changes very quickly. In the 1920s, women wore breast binders to flatten their chests; today, Ask Men heralds their hottest woman of 2012‘s cleavage and “obvious assets.” Within less than a century, in the same country, we went from an ideal woman who had A cups to an ideal woman with F cups, both of which presumably reflect the desires of the average man of the time equally well. (…Seriously? F cups? That poor woman.) Admittedly, while genetics can’t change that fast, some nature-y things could (hi epigenetics), so it isn’t perfect.

Also, people are often attracted to traits that offer no fitness-maximizing benefit at all. The Victorians fetishized the tragically beautiful woman dying of tuberculosis. It is difficult in the extreme to imagine how dying of tuberculosis maximizes one’s ability to have healthy offspring. Or if you want to get closer to home– look at the nigh-universal geek male thing for girls in glasses. Having eye trouble is not obviously fitness-maximizing; on the other hand, glasses are a common signal in Western culture for intelligence, so liking girls with glasses is a logical outgrowth of liking smart girls. Of course, there are a lot of things that are nature-influenced and not fitness-maximizing– genetic drift is a thing– so this is not conclusive evidence.

On the other hand, look at the most proverbially born this way kind of sexual attraction: homosexuality. Twin studies have shown that between 17% and 39% of one’s sexual orientation is explained by genetics. While womb environment (especially prenatal hormone levels), which falls into my “nature” category, is also hypothesized to have an effect, that’s not a great case for the Born This Way side.

So. Here is my Grand Theory of Sexual Attraction: what people are attracted to might be based partially on nature, especially for things like sexual orientation, but it is primarily a result of this miasma of individual psychology, peer group, media, porn, early sexual partners, et cetera, et cetera. A lot of that stuff is influenced by cultural artifacts such as the patriarchy and beauty constructs on a level that might be hard to see on an individual level but is clearly evident on a population level. Women’s attraction to socially dominant men is a result of patriarchy, but that doesn’t mean that it’s bad or fixable; it just is.

What “Being Gay Isn’t Natural” Actually Means

Every time you say “people say being gay isn’t natural, but [insert case of animal homosexuality here], which proves that it’s natural, and anyway we use [insert technology here] which isn’t natural” an angel gets lit on fire.

Okay, probably most of the Christian people who say “being gay isn’t natural” actually mean something along the lines of “being gay doesn’t exist in nature.” That is because most people don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to Catholic theology. (Also, every time they say that? Two angels.) (If they’re Catholic, anyway. Protestants can say any damnfool thing they like. Damn schismatics.)

“Being gay isn’t natural” is not actually a statement about nature, it’s a statement about natural law. Basically, St. Thomas Aquinas ripped off Aristotle’s idea of the telos, which is basically a thing that any given thing is supposed to do (for instance, knives are made for cutting). He argued that God made everything with a telos and that through reason we can discover the telos of things and then use them in accordance with the purpose God made them for. This is called the “natural law” because you can deduce it from nature, as opposed to the law God revealed.

Catholic theology of the body argues that the genitals have a twofold telos: the unitive purpose (i.e. the bonding of lawfully wedded spouses) and the procreative purpose (i.e. making babies). Every time you have sex, you have to fulfill both teloi, or it violates the natural law. It is, in most circumstances, impossible to have children from homosexual sex; therefore, homosexual sex is immoral. (This is also why the Catholic church opposes birth control. Now You Know ™.)

Now, there are lots of arguments you can make against this thought process, started with “the telos doesn’t actually exist” and moving on from there. “Gay animals exist” is not one of them. Now stop using it, because I have a flamethrower and those angels are fucking trembling.

Why Orson Scott Card Should Keep His Job

You are absolutely free to buy or not buy Orson Scott Card’s Superman comic or tickets to the Ender’s Game movie. It’s your money, you’re allowed to spend it however you like, and “I don’t want to watch anything written by a homophobe” is exactly as valid as “I don’t want to watch anything with a romance subplot” or “I don’t want to watch anything with Bendydick Cummingsnatch in it, I hate his face.”

But I think that it’s wrong to petition DC Comics to fire him or to refuse to stock his books in your store. (I was wrong about this– see comments.) 

Firing Orson Scott Card punishes the wrong thing. Not giving money to Orson Scott Card doesn’t punish being a homophobe; it punishes being public about being a homophobe. Homophobic authors who never wrote about their homophobia are not going to suffer from the boycotts. Personally, I don’t want the homophobes to be quiet about their homophobia, smugly self-satisfied about how oppressed and persecuted they are by the pro-gay mafia. I want them to stop being homophobes. I am unclear how harming Mr. Card’s career will persuade him that homophobia is wrong.

Second, I believe that it is wrong to punish writers with loss of career for expressing controversial ideas.

You know why? Because “homosexuality isn’t a sin” is controversial. Because “black people should learn to read” was, and “atheists should be allowed to testify in court,” and “people other than white male landowners should have the right to vote,” and… look, name anything we consider obviously a good idea, it probably went through a period of being controversial. “A lot of people dislike this idea” is absolutely no evidence about whether it’s a good idea or not.

The only way that anyone has figured out to sort out whether controversial ideas are good or bad is to argue about them until a majority of people are convinced. In order to argue about ideas, you have to have people who are willing to support them. And you’re not going to have that if the smartest and most articulate supporters of any given idea– that is, the writers– are punished for expressing ideas that disagree too much with what the majority holds sacred.

–Of course, it’s possible that you just happen to be the only person on the entire planet who is magically correct about everything, in which case you can infallibly sort out which controversial ideas are good and which controversial ideas are bad and punish anyone who disagrees. How lucky we are that you have this power.

I suppose you could say “well, free and open debate is all very well for some things, but homophobia hurts real people! We should stigmatize beliefs that hurt people!” On the other hand, it was the consensus belief for a long time that accepting atheism would lead people to become atheists and thus suffer an eternity of torture in hell. Homophobia does not cause eternal torture. “Yes, but they were wrong about that.” And how the fuck would they have known that they were wrong about that unless atheists were allowed to say their piece?

If homosexuality, as Mr. Card believes, risks destroying society itself via destroying the institution of marriage, this is information I would like to have. At the moment, I have read the best arguments anti-homosexuality people have to present, and I have found them scientifically and anthropologically laughable, morally bankrupt, and utterly unjustified unless you accept the premises of a certain brand of Christianity. But I am glad that I had access to those arguments, and I oppose anything that is going to significantly punish people for offering them up.

On Gendered Oppression

Memo To The Social Justice Community At Large: the privilege/intersectionality model of how oppression works? Is a model. It’s an oversimplification that people use because the actual reality of how oppression works is way too complicated to talk about. It is not the Ultimate Truth Of How Oppression Works Forever and Ever. 

Therefore, there are dynamics of how oppression works that the privilege/oppression model doesn’t talk about at all.

Let’s talk about prison. Men of color are overwhelmingly more likely to go to prison than any other group, far disproportionate to their numbers. The white men who go to prison are usually poor. While women of color are also more likely to go to prison than white women, and poor women than rich women, the problem so vastly disproportionately affects men that it’s not even funny.

Or anti-queer hate crimes. Of the sexual-orientation-related hate crimes recorded by the FBI in 2011, nearly 60% were a result of the perpetrator’s hatred of specifically gay men. (I checked a couple previous years to make sure this wasn’t a fluke and, yeah, it hovers pretty consistently around ‘slightly more than half.’) You can argue that the FBI’s data-collection strategy is fucked (I’d be happy to edit this to include a correction if it is), but assuming that it isn’t, gay men are disproportionately likely to be victims of a hate crime.

This just doesn’t work in the privilege/intersectionality model, which predicts that women of color will face more racism, poor women more sexism, and LGB women more homophobia, than their male counterparts. But– at least in certain aspects of these oppressions– men clearly and objectively have it worse. 

Some people have decided to patch this by creating an alternative “female privilege,” where women have not-going-to-prison privilege and not-being-beaten-up-for-being-gay privilege. The problem here is that if you are a white middle-class-or-above man… you generally don’t have to worry about going to prison! You may smoke your weed in peace! If you are not gay (and not the kind of feminine that assholes think means ‘gay’), your chance of being beaten up for being gay is nigh infinitesimal. The prison-industrial complex and anti-gay hate crimes do not affect straight white middle-class-and-above men any more than average.

The solution here is just to throw out the privilege/intersectionality model in this particular case. It just doesn’t work here. And when you throw out the model that’s making everything more confusing, the only statement left is “gay men, men of color, and poor men face forms of homophobia, racism, and classism that are affected by the fact that they’re men.” Which is perfectly logical, sensible, empirically validated, and supported by both statistics and lived experience. 

(And that’s the NSWATM post I never got around to writing while I was there.) 

On The Word Queer

No argument I have encountered is quite as pointless and virulent as the argument about who gets to count as queer. The most virulent subform of this argument is, of course, whether asexuals count as queer. Seriously, fun game: go on a relatively popular feminist/queer forum, ask whether asexuals are queer, watch everyone scream at each other, eat popcorn.

I really do not have a stake in this argument at all, since as far as I can tell the question of whether asexuals are queer makes absolutely no difference to anything in the actual world. Besides, a lot of people seem to have this idea that there is an Objective Real Definition of Queer and if we argue about it enough we will, through rational argument, discover the Platonic Form of Queer. That’s not how words work though. Words just mean what everyone agrees they mean.

Therefore, I have decided to list out every definition of queer that I have heard, with rationale, in the hopes that everyone will agree that they are all equally valid definitions that mark categories which actually exist and we can just pick the one that’s most suitable for whatever conversation we’re in.

Reclaimed Slur: This definition suggests that, since “queer” is a reclaimed slur, it should only be used in a badass “your insults cannot hurt me, I accept who I am” way. The problem with this is that people who use this argument very rarely carry it to its logical conclusion. “Queer,” as a slur, is primarily used against men who have sex with men and trans people who were male assigned at birth. Male crossdressers have more right to reclaim “queer” than I do.

LGBT: This definition says that “queer” refers to lesbians, gay people, bi people, and trans people. Like, maybe you want another word because you’ve been using the word LGBT too much? That can be a thing. “Queer”, in this definition, reflects the shared history of LGBT people and the fact that the oppressions they face (homophobia, transphobia, biphobia) are intimately linked. (Ace hate, on the other hand, is to the best of my knowledge more more closely related to rape culture and compulsory sexuality than to homophobia or transphobia.) This is the definition that most of the people who are on the “no, asexuals cannot say they’re queer” side use.

LGBT and also asexuals and aromantics: This definition says that since asexuals are also a minority sexual orientation, it makes sense to classify them in the same group as LGB people (the other three minority sexual orientations). Therefore, queer means people with a minority gender history or sexual orientation. (Some people include aromantics, who don’t experience romantic attraction to people, under the queer umbrella as well.) 

A broader version of LGBT (plus possibly asexuals): This is the definition I like! There are lots of fuzzy edges around LGBT. Straight men who sometimes sleep with guys when they’re drunk. Women who fall in romantic love with people of all genders but only want to have sex with men. People who thought they were trans but ended up detransitioning. The fuzzy edges are in a very different position from those of us who are actually LGBT; however, it’s also important to acknowledge the ways in which we have similar lived experiences. Of course, this definition comes in asexual/aromantic and asexual/aromantic-free versions. (The fuzzy edges of asexuality are demisexuals and gray-asexuals.)

Gender and sexual minority: Everyone who has a minority gender or sexuality! This is really broad, because it includes not just asexuals, aromantics, and the fuzzy edges around LGBT, but kinky people, poly people, butch women, femme men, and basically anyone who takes at least a sentence to explain their gender or sexual orientation. This category can be justified because of the massive overlap between those groups, and because all these groups face people who think that their sexuality or gender is, for some reason, something other people are allowed to have opinions about.

People who are gender-revolutionary and question the gender binary: The queer writer Kate Bornstein has been known to define sex-positive trans-supportive straight people as “queer heterosexuals” and talk about how everyone who admits that their gender is in some way transgressive or ambiguous (as is everyone’s) is queer. I suppose it is indeed nice to have a word for that.

The subgroup of any of the above definitions that views their sexuality as political. Basically, the Kate Bornstein definition of queer, except limited to LGBT people, or LGBT people plus asexuals and aromantics, or gender and sexual minorities, or whatever. Queers are people who view their genders and sexualities as weapons against the cisheteropatriarchy and who probably write a lot of really terrible poetry about the matter. (By this definition, I’m not queer!)

Pro-Equal Marriage Is Not A Fucking Privileged Position

I am so fucking tired of shit like this:


[Cartoon of gay and straight couple doing normal things like cuddling and shit, with caption "Gay Marriage: Why The FUCK Is It Illegal?" Commentary on side: "Let's queer this shit up. If equality = assimilation count me OUT. I am NOT normal. And I am fucking proud. Rad queer pride. Gay marriage: Why the FUCK is it the priority?"]


[Protest sign that says "Sleeping on the streets or walking down the aisle? It's time to start prioritizing LGBT youth."]

Obviously, I’m not saying that LGBT youth homelessness isn’t a serious issue; it is. So are employment discrimination against LGBT people, violence against LGBT people, access to trans health care, and HIV/AIDS. But there is this bizarre tendency among some people to believe that marriage only matters to rich cis gay men who want to have a giant floofy wedding and be just like everybody else. That being pro-equal-marriage is a “privileged” position and people who are really aware of social justice issues don’t care about it.

Noooooope. Let us review some of the advantages (for Americans; non-Americans will have different advantages) of marriage!

  • If your same-gender spouse dies, you can’t get Social Security survivor benefits; if you are not the biological or adoptive parent of your child and the biological parent dies, you don’t get Social Security survivor benefits to take care of the kids. This disproportionately affects poor people, since rich people are less likely to need Social Security benefits to make ends meet. 
  • The government gives tax breaks to couples who are raising children. If your child isn’t your biological kid or adopted by you (and adoption by an LGBT person can be hell in a lot of states), you don’t get those tax breaks, which means you have less money to take care of your kid. Again, affects the working poor a lot more than it affects the rich.
  • Employers are not required to offer family leave to people so they can take care of a sick, injured, or disabled domestic partner or family member of a domestic partner. This disproportionately affects disabled people, since– hey– turns out we need more caretaking than abled people do!
  • Spouses of people in the US can immigrate to the US. Your same-gender lover? Doesn’t count as a spouse! Like a lot of immigration issues, this disproportionately affects the poor (who can’t afford lawyers to work through the immigration bureaucracy) and people of color.
  • Employers who offer health care for domestic partners get taxed more than those who just offer it for spouses, which makes them less likely to offer health care to domestic partners. They’re also not required to offer former employees continued coverage for domestic partners the way they are for spouses. While you’re pretty privileged if you have employer health care, this still hurts the middle class more than rich people. Not to mention how necessary health care access is for disabled people!
  • Turns out you can get a lot of the same rights as a married couple if you hire a lawyer to draw up the contracts. Guess who can’t afford a lawyer? Poor people!

I realize that social justicey people don’t like talking about disability and poverty, because poverty and disability aren’t cool and sexy issues that you get all kinds of cool points for talking about. But they matter. It matters when you run the risk of never seeing your life partner again because neither of you can immigrate and you can’t afford a plane ticket. It matters when you can’t get leave to take care of your partner who’s dying of cancer or just out of the mental hospital. It matters when your partner dies and while mourning them you have to find some way to make ends meet without the Social Security checks you’d been relying on.

It also helps that a lot of the people criticizing “assimilationism” are young. A lot of the benefits of marriage are things like Social Security and parenting and family leave, things that young people usually have no lived experience with. It’s easy to think that marriage is just about “being the same as the breeders” when you’ve never experienced any of the ways it isn’t.

Furthermore, if you talk about the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell as a concern of super-privileged queers, and don’t talk about how the military is one of the few options for poor, rural people to make a middle-class income, I will fart the word “intersectionality” in your face.

P. S. First dude! As a polyamorous nonbinary queer sex worker who has a lot of Words to say about the way our culture constructs relationships, very few of them kind, I am probably as “anti-assimilationist” as you. But you know what? I want to get married, I want to help raise children, and even if I didn’t I stand in solidarity with those who do because there is no fucking wrong way to be queer. I refuse to limit other people’s choices so you can feel super-special and revolutionary because of whom you want to bang.