Aisling

I don't wanna detract from the good points in these two posts by going off on my own personal tangent, and I highly encourage everyone to read both of them. Cause the things that they say, about the expectation that everything political in your fantasy world have a mappable real world analogue, well, it's relevant to the reasons why I've been hesitant to use creative writing to explore my own experiences of queerness and transness. Namely, I hate the question "what does this represent in reality" when it's coming from people whose idea of reality is deeply limited. And so many people I've met have a limited idea of how queerness and transness function in "reality". I'm not talking about straight people either. I'm talking about other queer and trans people on social media platforms and in my city. I've been reading articles and listening to podcasts about the history of queerness and queer activism and it's just driving home for me how many ways there are to talk about love and sex and gender and identity, and how god damn arrogant it is to pretend that the labels and concepts you and your circles use are the One Correct Way. Even the changes I've seen in language and vocabulary in language and vocabulary in my short three decades on Earth are hard to describe to someone who hasn't experienced them firsthand. Changes not just in what it means to be gay or trans, but in what it means to be a man, a woman, a couple, a family. And I would have hoped that art and fiction would be a safe place to explore these feelings, but sometimes the way people talk about stuff on the internet makes me feel like it's not worth it.