hi this is a rant about what I consider to be poor online behavior of queer people aimed at other queer people, specifically of the kind I call "tumblr brain," feel free to keep scrolling
for some gods forsaken reason I did open tumblr, which is a ghost town for me now, almost all the posts are reboggles from the same person who seems to reboggle thirty to fifty things a day when they're bored and I don't remember why I followed them to begin with and I should just unfollow because I find some of these reboggles so aggravating that I'm seetheposting on cohost. Anyway,
There was a callout post, we'll call the author Poster, about "everyone" proving they were a fake ally to nonbinary people by... using the pronouns that a nonbinary celebrity publicly announced one may use. Specifically, a well-known nonbinary icon officially switched from they/them to they/she and (Poster did not include this part) said they'd been feeling more feminine lately. Good for them! Adjusting your visible identity every few years to keep up with how you feel about life is fine, and good! And it's good to give people healthy examples that you don't have to stick with any one label forever!
But Poster wanted to call out how they seeee, they seeeeee that "everyone, even supposed allies" started calling her a her. And how problemaaaatic this is, because you're denying her nonbiiiiiinarynesssss. By using the pronouns she specifically said you could use because she identified with them!!!
This isn't what Poster said, but it's certainly what they mean: "Oh, this poor, poor nonbinary person is so confused, and thinks they might be binary again, which could only happen because of the pernicious pressure of the binaries. I need to protect them from this poor decision by enforcing that no-one is allowed to call them by the pronouns that I decided are wrong." This is both denying the agency of the celebrity because you feel entitled to them performing perfect nonbinariness for you, and asserting that every person who picks pronoun B from "please call me either A or B" is individually committing some sort of collective sin that you just made up. "Ah-ha! You were told it was two equally valid choices, and you chose wrong, proving you are a bad person!"
This is "tumblr brain" to me: going out of your way to find fake reasons to be mad at other queer people, so you can win the most Perfect Queer Points at the expense of other people who are in the same boat as you while that boat is under enemy fire. Please may this mode of thinking, this queer inquisition, disappear into the event horizon when tumblr finally implodes for good.
