Thank you K, for pivoting back to this gem. I also appreciated the sharp note in it on Rachel Donezal and Hilaria Baldwin. There's a big category difference btwn domains where affinity is enough or almost enough for identity, and ones where affinity isn't enough, and the word "charlatan" marks that difference, sharply.
Hello :D I'm a young queer person in my twenties, and living in a country that scores towards the center of queer friendliness in Europe (https://www.rainbow-europe.org/).
There has been a significant cultural shift regarding public opinion and perception of queer people from "queerness is something you should hide" to "queerness is something you can tell other people about but don't be too proud of it" in the age group 25+, and either strong acceptance or strong disapproval of LGBTQ from younger people.
I personally attribute this mostly to the Internet and its effects on gradually homogenizing the customs of different countries into one large culture, particularily influenced by an american way of thinking - Older generations who are only lightly influenced by the internet have their opinion slowly shifted one way or another, while younger generations growing up with the LGBTQ as a fixed talking point in their lives have had more time forming an opinion of it.
As a result, I can confirm there's a significant cultural difference between people who are queer and people who are queer. Queer people older than me tend to be more reserved about their sexuality, are more reluctant to identify themselves with the label "queer", and tend to treat their queerness as something that does not define them. Queer people younger than me are more inclined to associate themselves with more labels, dress more in a manner not conforming to cultural and societal expectations, have their culture more influenced by Tumblr and other queer communities, and tend to treat their queerness as an intrinsic value of who they are.
In response to the question raised in the article, mostly summarized as "Why is new queer so different from old queer?", I can raise three possible options:
1. Due to queerness becoming more and more prevalent, people are now more willing to associate themselves with the LGBTQ then before. This particularily favours teenagers and young adults, as they are less penalized by society in announcing to the world "This is who I am!" than a person in their mid thirties in an established job/marriage. Also, switching labels doesn't make much sense for people in stable relationships - A lesbian happily married to another lesbian is probably not suddenly going to identify as bisexual and upend her whole life if she discovers she is also slightly attracted to certain men.
2. Labels like "gay" or "lesbian" have shifted from their usage as a label used to describe others to a label used to describe yourself. In ye olden days, "gay" or "lesbian" was used more to describe (or even insult) people living in a way that differs from societal conventions. Nowadays, teenagers are happily identifying themselves as "bi/trans/asexual/aromantic/poly". I can certainly see that are you much more likely to describe yourself with a label if it hasn't been used to insult you before.
3. Or maybe young people who identify as queer are constantly switching labels because they are being young and figuring themselves out. They want to experience multiple different lifestyles to find one they like. They want to test out who they are attracted to, and who they aren't. They might identify as lesbian after dating men and not being satisfied with that experience. Some of them will find happiness in a community that accepts them regardless if they choose to conform to society's dress code or not (like the punk or emo movement), and others will perhaps just spend their teenage years commenting on all issues LGBTQ on the internet and then settle down with a partner in a little chalet on the edge of the woods later - Maybe the "new queer" prevalent in youth now is just going to become the "old queer" later in life.
I gather quite a significant percentage of transsexuals are also attracted to people of their own gender (if that is the approved word - I always get sex and gender mixed up, and I know it is quite a minefield these days! :-)
For example, surprisingly, many F2M trans guys prefer sex exclusively with men. One can only assume they are attracted to what they aspire to be, or are pleased to have become, themselves. The same presumably applies to M2F trans women in a relationship with a cis woman.
If any of the above sounds offensive, either vaguely or blatantly, then rest assured that is not intentional. As indicated above, I am not very au fait with the niceties of discussions on this topic!
Trivially, we all have done this kind of thing many times in terms of location and tribe: many long term expatriates refer to their country of birth as "their country". Or, a New Yorker may have lived in LA 20 years and still call themselves a New Yorker. Your post expanded this to generalize in ways I did not think of. Also Foucault.... and possibly Marshall McLuhan on identity. Nice.
"queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality. As the very word implies, "queer" does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object; it acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular which it necessarily refers. It is an identity .without an essence." - David Halperin, Saint Foucault
What you describe in this post is the natural result of the queering of everything - every identity becomes an identity without an essence.
The first study you cited stopped me in my tracks, but then I realized at 16 *I* was a lesbian who had had recent male sexual partners! I had sex with men before I had sex with women, realized sex with women was 1000x times better, and then realized I was a lesbian. And I am still a lesbian a decade later.
I’d love to read the study to see if they accounted for things like that. In my experience, queer teenagers change their labels every week because they are exploring them in earnest. So their recent actions often won’t match up with the words they use to describe themselves.
Anyways, I found this to be an interesting read and it got me reflecting on some of the reasons why I distanced myself from a lot of social media. For example, I consumed a lot of content about sewing my own clothes, talked about it, learned about it, but rarely ever sewed anything. I just felt like I did because I was seeing other people do it all the time. So weird.
Interesting read. I can't say I disagree with contra here- to some zoomers, being "gay" seems to be a countercultural affectation rather than a reflection of physical reality. You get the impression with some of them that 10-20 years ago they would have just been goths or punks but we live in such a weird time in culture that the perceived victimhood gives them some social cache. That, and perhaps it's a safe way of exploring their sexuality in a hyper-sexualized world
Fascinating, thanks. I'm an old curmudgeon and believe in normativity, or the privileging of some things over others.
So I'm deeply suspicious of queer in the sense described by Cho- how is it not just a kind of postmodern nihilism? 4chan also had a fairly 'profound' affect through memes.
It's relevant also that queer in Cho's sense is parasitic - ie it's dependent on the category but undermines it at the same time.
Also, can we perhaps go as far to say that people are mistaken about what identity is, mistaking mere affect and affinity, or thoughts and narratives, with identity, which isn't a having thing but a being thing.
Just wanted to say thank you for your writing. I think there are two pieces you've written about how lesbianism is treated in our current times, especially online, and both of them have been interesting as well as feeling truthful and respectful. Did a lot of nodding through this one.
That characterizes your writing in general, for me. It's easy to make a sideshow of so many things that play out online, especially about sexuality, but you dig into it in a way that lets us all keep our humanity. I appreciate it.
In the object case, the big thing to note about those studies is: are they *actually true*? That is, do they describe reality, are people answering honestly on them? Because they usually aren't! "Mischievous responding", i.e. "just making shit up because you don't take the questionnaire seriously and want to troll the researchers", is a *huge* problem when studying adolescents:
A large share of all teenagers who answer in public health surveys that they're gay, or trans, or disabled, or adopted, or parents, or any other demographically unusual characteristic, are lying. The famous case of this is a massive (15k participants) study, where out of data concerns, the researchers did in-person follow-ups on every participant who said they were missing a limb. 99% were lying:
"The third group of inaccurate responders was composed of those answering questions in the SAQ and the in-home interview about whether they had an artificial limb. Of the 15,356 SAQ sample members included in the Wave I in-home interview sample, 253 respondents stated that they had used an artificial limb (hand, arm, leg, or foot) for the past year or more, indicating a permanent physical disability. However, when interviewed later in the Wave I in-home interview, only 2 of these 253 adolescents reported that they were using an artificial limb; the overwhelming majority (248) reported not using any artificial limb, and 3 did not answer this question."
People who treat one question as a joke are generally treating the whole survey as a joke, and intentionally putting weird answers. This is why gay kids are "more likely to be" teen parents, why self-reported trans teenagers are often unusually short or tall, etc. There are so few kids actually in the demographics that get mischievously responded that the joke answers seriously skew the results. It's a huge problem for health research on LGBT youth -- how do you find things like the real HIV rates for gay teenagers when the proportion who will jokingly answer "oh yeah, I'm gay and have AIDS" outnumbers the actual expected prevalence?
That's not to say there isn't a real fluidity/affinity-orientation we can see, but it's important to avoid constructing too much of a societal revolution out of these questionnaires. In particular, it's *really* easy to overstate the extent of if you take all numbers at face value.
"slut online, socially anxious virgin offline" is one of the first and most persistent examples of this I've encountered, and I wonder how much is also to do with our inability/unwillingness to differentiate between real tactile experiences and our ephemeral realities. I mean, we get to experience so much more outside of meat-world that it becomes hard/impossible to differentiate the two.
Maybe that's just my projection though 🤔
ETA: also thinking of the split attraction model that seemed to make an attempt at differentiating sexual attraction and affinity.
Very interesting read. I feel like this set of behavior, of identity as participating in an esthetic and a subculture, is more prevalent in feminine rather than masculine space.
Thank you K, for pivoting back to this gem. I also appreciated the sharp note in it on Rachel Donezal and Hilaria Baldwin. There's a big category difference btwn domains where affinity is enough or almost enough for identity, and ones where affinity isn't enough, and the word "charlatan" marks that difference, sharply.
Yes
Hello :D I'm a young queer person in my twenties, and living in a country that scores towards the center of queer friendliness in Europe (https://www.rainbow-europe.org/).
There has been a significant cultural shift regarding public opinion and perception of queer people from "queerness is something you should hide" to "queerness is something you can tell other people about but don't be too proud of it" in the age group 25+, and either strong acceptance or strong disapproval of LGBTQ from younger people.
I personally attribute this mostly to the Internet and its effects on gradually homogenizing the customs of different countries into one large culture, particularily influenced by an american way of thinking - Older generations who are only lightly influenced by the internet have their opinion slowly shifted one way or another, while younger generations growing up with the LGBTQ as a fixed talking point in their lives have had more time forming an opinion of it.
As a result, I can confirm there's a significant cultural difference between people who are queer and people who are queer. Queer people older than me tend to be more reserved about their sexuality, are more reluctant to identify themselves with the label "queer", and tend to treat their queerness as something that does not define them. Queer people younger than me are more inclined to associate themselves with more labels, dress more in a manner not conforming to cultural and societal expectations, have their culture more influenced by Tumblr and other queer communities, and tend to treat their queerness as an intrinsic value of who they are.
In response to the question raised in the article, mostly summarized as "Why is new queer so different from old queer?", I can raise three possible options:
1. Due to queerness becoming more and more prevalent, people are now more willing to associate themselves with the LGBTQ then before. This particularily favours teenagers and young adults, as they are less penalized by society in announcing to the world "This is who I am!" than a person in their mid thirties in an established job/marriage. Also, switching labels doesn't make much sense for people in stable relationships - A lesbian happily married to another lesbian is probably not suddenly going to identify as bisexual and upend her whole life if she discovers she is also slightly attracted to certain men.
2. Labels like "gay" or "lesbian" have shifted from their usage as a label used to describe others to a label used to describe yourself. In ye olden days, "gay" or "lesbian" was used more to describe (or even insult) people living in a way that differs from societal conventions. Nowadays, teenagers are happily identifying themselves as "bi/trans/asexual/aromantic/poly". I can certainly see that are you much more likely to describe yourself with a label if it hasn't been used to insult you before.
3. Or maybe young people who identify as queer are constantly switching labels because they are being young and figuring themselves out. They want to experience multiple different lifestyles to find one they like. They want to test out who they are attracted to, and who they aren't. They might identify as lesbian after dating men and not being satisfied with that experience. Some of them will find happiness in a community that accepts them regardless if they choose to conform to society's dress code or not (like the punk or emo movement), and others will perhaps just spend their teenage years commenting on all issues LGBTQ on the internet and then settle down with a partner in a little chalet on the edge of the woods later - Maybe the "new queer" prevalent in youth now is just going to become the "old queer" later in life.
I gather quite a significant percentage of transsexuals are also attracted to people of their own gender (if that is the approved word - I always get sex and gender mixed up, and I know it is quite a minefield these days! :-)
For example, surprisingly, many F2M trans guys prefer sex exclusively with men. One can only assume they are attracted to what they aspire to be, or are pleased to have become, themselves. The same presumably applies to M2F trans women in a relationship with a cis woman.
If any of the above sounds offensive, either vaguely or blatantly, then rest assured that is not intentional. As indicated above, I am not very au fait with the niceties of discussions on this topic!
Insightful. Connects to Scott Alexander's musings over "lived experience" vs. "essence" here https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-should-we-think-about-race-and.
Trivially, we all have done this kind of thing many times in terms of location and tribe: many long term expatriates refer to their country of birth as "their country". Or, a New Yorker may have lived in LA 20 years and still call themselves a New Yorker. Your post expanded this to generalize in ways I did not think of. Also Foucault.... and possibly Marshall McLuhan on identity. Nice.
"queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality. As the very word implies, "queer" does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object; it acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular which it necessarily refers. It is an identity .without an essence." - David Halperin, Saint Foucault
What you describe in this post is the natural result of the queering of everything - every identity becomes an identity without an essence.
We, GenX, were told "it's not who you have sex with, it's who you love." So, I guess we're all gay, even if we prefer heterosexual relationships 😂
The first study you cited stopped me in my tracks, but then I realized at 16 *I* was a lesbian who had had recent male sexual partners! I had sex with men before I had sex with women, realized sex with women was 1000x times better, and then realized I was a lesbian. And I am still a lesbian a decade later.
I’d love to read the study to see if they accounted for things like that. In my experience, queer teenagers change their labels every week because they are exploring them in earnest. So their recent actions often won’t match up with the words they use to describe themselves.
Anyways, I found this to be an interesting read and it got me reflecting on some of the reasons why I distanced myself from a lot of social media. For example, I consumed a lot of content about sewing my own clothes, talked about it, learned about it, but rarely ever sewed anything. I just felt like I did because I was seeing other people do it all the time. So weird.
Interesting read. I can't say I disagree with contra here- to some zoomers, being "gay" seems to be a countercultural affectation rather than a reflection of physical reality. You get the impression with some of them that 10-20 years ago they would have just been goths or punks but we live in such a weird time in culture that the perceived victimhood gives them some social cache. That, and perhaps it's a safe way of exploring their sexuality in a hyper-sexualized world
Fascinating, thanks. I'm an old curmudgeon and believe in normativity, or the privileging of some things over others.
So I'm deeply suspicious of queer in the sense described by Cho- how is it not just a kind of postmodern nihilism? 4chan also had a fairly 'profound' affect through memes.
It's relevant also that queer in Cho's sense is parasitic - ie it's dependent on the category but undermines it at the same time.
Also, can we perhaps go as far to say that people are mistaken about what identity is, mistaking mere affect and affinity, or thoughts and narratives, with identity, which isn't a having thing but a being thing.
Great writing as always.
Just wanted to say thank you for your writing. I think there are two pieces you've written about how lesbianism is treated in our current times, especially online, and both of them have been interesting as well as feeling truthful and respectful. Did a lot of nodding through this one.
That characterizes your writing in general, for me. It's easy to make a sideshow of so many things that play out online, especially about sexuality, but you dig into it in a way that lets us all keep our humanity. I appreciate it.
In the object case, the big thing to note about those studies is: are they *actually true*? That is, do they describe reality, are people answering honestly on them? Because they usually aren't! "Mischievous responding", i.e. "just making shit up because you don't take the questionnaire seriously and want to troll the researchers", is a *huge* problem when studying adolescents:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6215371/
A large share of all teenagers who answer in public health surveys that they're gay, or trans, or disabled, or adopted, or parents, or any other demographically unusual characteristic, are lying. The famous case of this is a massive (15k participants) study, where out of data concerns, the researchers did in-person follow-ups on every participant who said they were missing a limb. 99% were lying:
"The third group of inaccurate responders was composed of those answering questions in the SAQ and the in-home interview about whether they had an artificial limb. Of the 15,356 SAQ sample members included in the Wave I in-home interview sample, 253 respondents stated that they had used an artificial limb (hand, arm, leg, or foot) for the past year or more, indicating a permanent physical disability. However, when interviewed later in the Wave I in-home interview, only 2 of these 253 adolescents reported that they were using an artificial limb; the overwhelming majority (248) reported not using any artificial limb, and 3 did not answer this question."
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Brent-Miller-6/publication/235637789_An_Exploratory_Study_about_Inaccuracy_and_Invalidity_in_Adolescent_Self-Report_Surveys/links/02bfe51228ee3ebb33000000/An-Exploratory-Study-about-Inaccuracy-and-Invalidity-in-Adolescent-Self-Report-Surveys.pdf
People who treat one question as a joke are generally treating the whole survey as a joke, and intentionally putting weird answers. This is why gay kids are "more likely to be" teen parents, why self-reported trans teenagers are often unusually short or tall, etc. There are so few kids actually in the demographics that get mischievously responded that the joke answers seriously skew the results. It's a huge problem for health research on LGBT youth -- how do you find things like the real HIV rates for gay teenagers when the proportion who will jokingly answer "oh yeah, I'm gay and have AIDS" outnumbers the actual expected prevalence?
That's not to say there isn't a real fluidity/affinity-orientation we can see, but it's important to avoid constructing too much of a societal revolution out of these questionnaires. In particular, it's *really* easy to overstate the extent of if you take all numbers at face value.
"slut online, socially anxious virgin offline" is one of the first and most persistent examples of this I've encountered, and I wonder how much is also to do with our inability/unwillingness to differentiate between real tactile experiences and our ephemeral realities. I mean, we get to experience so much more outside of meat-world that it becomes hard/impossible to differentiate the two.
Maybe that's just my projection though 🤔
ETA: also thinking of the split attraction model that seemed to make an attempt at differentiating sexual attraction and affinity.
Very interesting read. I feel like this set of behavior, of identity as participating in an esthetic and a subculture, is more prevalent in feminine rather than masculine space.