Queerness is Not a Self-Love Exercise
On a queerness that looks inward to transform the way we love others, and a critique of identity politics and how it often leaves the most marginalized behind
I decided in a period of loneliness a while back to drop all attempts at using specialized pronouns. After seeing dozens of people misgender me on purpose and messaging me with gendered threats of harm, I started to see a lack of a point in adding to a pile of self-loathing grief by wishing to be referred to in the third-person with “they” and “them.”
It wasn’t overnight. I’d thought about having myself move past the idea for months at that point, before any malicious misgendering. I found myself losing any motivation over the course of years to keep correcting people on my pronouns, from close friends to strangers. I absolutely despised the hokeyness that became all the jokes on non-binary identity in meme culture, between the “they/them pussy hits different” tweets and “enbys be like” grams, despite my half-tongue-in-cheek usage of “They/them DJ” as an artist name. (I can’t blame myself for tiring of the humor—after two years of using the name, so many fellow artists still referred to me as “he” despite consistent corrections, and plenty of ravers seemed to think I was a man using the name completely as a joke.) Still, I’ve gotta say, enbys do be shoppin.
Most of all, though, I began to reflect on the principles of my own queerness—I’ve always been disillusioned by a popular queer culture that has emphasized the visible externalizing of queerness, from drag to androgyny to speech patterns. It’s right for many, especially in history and in the context of history. I just was long comfortable with how I already presented, in large part due to the constraints of living with a conservative, highly Christian set of parents. I didn’t need to participate in the joyful parade of visible queerness, nor was I safe to. It bled into my work, as I frequently began taping up posters at Directory parties proclaiming a utopian “queerness beyond visibility.”
Under this guidance, I couldn’t help but question why I continued to require an affirmation from others on my gender identity and sexual identity. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had truly felt comfort in having myself be referred to with they/them pronouns; these weren’t even used so often when I was directly interacting with people, and would only be used to refer to me in the third-person. If I was mostly being referred to correctly, I wasn’t present to hear much of it.
I remembered all the times my pansexuality was questioned, too, and the ways queer activists looked at me with dismissive disdain. What was the point of even trying, when I firmly believed the point of queerness is to inwardly find a transformative way of loving others, and to share that with the world; when I believed the point of queer community was to be in higher understanding of the queer struggle, to provide solidarity for those out and not-out alike, to provide comfort for those who practiced queerness in their own unique ways? Would really hearing myself referred to as “they” or “them” really help me find love and comfort for myself, let alone help me love others better?
I decided no. Today, I go by any set of pronouns—he, she, they—and have found massive relief in focusing on the core of queerness behind that curtain: whether the other person truly acknowledges my complete humanity as a person, even if they may not completely understand what my queerness entails or relate to it.
With all this interpersonal conflict regarding my identity, it’s no wonder why I often want to set aside identity in my politics and in my share of discourse. The feeling reminds me of teenaged years, where discussion on being Asian at school only went so far as how much of a FOB one was or how “white-washed” they were. To an extent, that level of vapid cultural competition still continues to this day—if I don’t eat a certain food, I’m not Korean enough, and if I don’t share in certain collective, cultural memories, I’m not Korean-American enough. I happen to actually appreciate the volatility of being Korean and American and having a mish-mash of worlds within me, gaps in cultural knowledge and experience and all. I think the point is to fill those gaps in with my own unique experience. Can we leave it at that while we sit at this Korean restaurant together?
Similarly, I remain content with my outward appearance not reflecting the subconscious consensus that non-binary people should apparently look some kind of androgynous (or at least, different from the gender they were assigned at birth). I’ve been comfortable with these things for a long time, and it’s reduced the need for me to consistently externalize my identity. This often seems to give people the imperative and urgency to assume what my identity is for me, and adopt it as their reality.
The most blatant example is queer and straight people alike having pushed the idea for too long that I am “not queer enough,” “fake queer,” and “queer-baiting” for not being comfortable with spending much of my time in spaces that would call me these things. I am lumped in with cis, straight men painting their fingernails and calling it a queer day, with cis, straight women proclaiming they totally want to kiss their female friends all the time and exclusively dating men. The problem is: what happened to queer discovery after the Tumblr era? Did the expansion of queer acceptance in the zeitgeist just remove the space and time for people to discover what queerness is for them? Did not being out just disappear as an experience? What is the artificial, subjective line between co-opting queerness and actually being queer? Why not just leave others alone?
It’s all slathered in thick layers of queer pretension, but the argument about me always seems to come down to the fact that I look, act, and speak like a man, that I don’t hang out with enough queer people, that I don’t date enough queer people; that I don’t share enough of my queer trauma out in the open as is expected of the marginalized, that I don’t correct people on my pronouns enough and have allowed others to think of me as a man. The excuse is often, “Oh, all these people call you ‘he,’ so I figured you were cis. I’ve never seen you personally with a guy or queer person, so I just figured you were straight.” Is it not just trans-exclusionary rhetoric at the end of the day?
Never mind that I have been openly queer and gender-nonconforming since my teenaged years, that I stopped caring enough to constantly correct people on my pronouns for the sheer anxiety it’s brought into my life, that I’ve come to find my comfort with my appearance largely due to the excruciating fear of being out to my family; that it’s been queer people that have left me with much of my own sexual trauma, that it’s been many of my queer friends that have abandoned me the most through some of my sustained life struggles, that it’s been these queer spaces that have stripped me of much of my agency to live my life without doubt. The protective culture inherent and vital to queer communities often can seclude those who need protection and guidance the most. It is a paradoxical solidarity that eats itself alive.
I had wondered in recent years, being embedded in queer communities for so long, why long-time friends had just stopped caring to use they/them pronouns, why long-time friends stopped bothering to correct others for me on my pronouns. Recently, when hundreds of people had the opportunity to speak about me online without my presence and involvement, I found out many friends and many strangers all chose to ignore that I threw a decidedly queer party, that I literally went by “They/them DJ” so people would call me by my proper pronouns, and just projected and decided that I was a straight, cis man co-opting the queer experience, never having said a critical word about it publicly beforehand. And nobody I knew personally seemed to bother correcting anybody on any of this, despite their own adamance in performing perfect queer acceptance anytime else.
Relying on others to validate my queerness in these ways can only be futile. I know this for myself now.
I’ve been ruminating endlessly on why those with othered identities are always expected to wear their whole selves out on the surface. Marginalization often requires proof, like a fucked-up, social means-testing to make sure you’re marginalized enough to reap the benefits of community and solidarity. I remembered SOPHIE’s pre-out years, where a subset of flimsy feminist discussion simply assumed that some artists like SOPHIE were co-opting feminine identity as an aesthetic. Obviously, it turned out to be just ill-informed, proto-trans-exclusionary drivel. Today, though, if the most self-identified “radical” queer communities cannot bother to move past dealing in the most basic TERF ideology and reactionary dialogue, what is my own motivation in considering my external identity to be the most important part of myself? Or anyone’s? Because I keep much of my internal identity—my personal life and history—guarded too, but outwardly espouse the ideologies I keep, this sort of forced identity has shadowed me for so much of my life in different forms, and I expect it to haunt me for the rest of it.
It’s worth thinking about for a moment that SOPHIE passed away in search of such a small, personal, internal bliss: a clear view of the moon.