Author: Maëlys McArdle

This is about why I’m distancing myself away from the activist queer community. It has to with how a clique has developed, and how social justice has been used as the pretense to create it.

I think what makes this particular problem hard to recognize is that social justice is itself about ending systems of oppression and developing empathy. It would then be unintuitive that a community built around these principles would then itself foster a system of kyriarchy.

It should not be that surprising. It’s been my experience in other communities that that kind of shit happens even if the pronounced values are about some notion of equality.

In terms of the local queer clique, people’s status elevates according to how “inclusive” they are. I put that word in bunny quotes because it’s not about genuine inclusion, so much as a narrow definition based on what’s popular on Tumblr. There’s a disconnect. Some examples from my own experience:

• I get ID’ed as a butch trans woman. I now find myself invited to speak at events on no merit other than my identity. The queer sj folk who invite me see me as a label, not as the person behind it. It’s dehumanizing because I’m a checkbox now and reduced to a metric that has nothing to do with who I am or what I’ve done. These people meanwhile pat themselves on the back for their inclusion. But it’s a broken notion of inclusion.
• The only time I see fat bodies represented in queer material is when it’s in the context of raising awareness about fat shaming. A post on Tumblr; a talk here. But you look at all the other stuff that’s published outside of that very specific context of talking about fat shaming, and those bodies are absent. It’s no deeper than the pats on the back they gave themselves for raising awareness.
• When I was attending the stuff to organize a queer event they wanted a visual language interpreter, which is awesome. In Ottawa though, 40% of people speak French – and the entire event was English-only. There was an enthusiasm around the logistics for being accessible to the hearing impaired. There was zero enthusiasm around being accessible to French speakers, and in fact was pretty much dismissed. I attributed that discrepancy in enthusiasm to the fact that the former gets pats on the back, while the latter does not. The end result that was an event that was inaccessible to many people when it didn’t have to be the case.
• Going on with that, linguistic access issues gets no air time in the local sj sphere. The list of what the sj movement cares about is actually quite narrow and led more by what’s rebloggable on Tumblr than regional needs. Social justice is not a zero sum game but what you have time to discuss in a meeting is.

So it’s like the queer sj community is more into patting themselves on the back and elevating the like-minded (other people that pat themselves on the back.) That creates a clique. It’s unsurprising then to me that the same few people in Ottawa come to speak at every queer-related event despite this city having a million inhabitants.

The clique is primarily under 30s, women and/or not-cis, absent of Francophones, poly, with extremely similar politics. It’s a very homogenous group within itself.

It’s important to recognize that this is a community and that it is not above having the same issues around inclusion as any other community – even if this is one built on principles that would seem amenable to that.

I’m done with the culture. I will continue to read sj stuff because there’s some really good material there which makes me a better person. However, I’m no longer all that interested in being considered a member of that community.