You know given how often neologisms are misappropriated AAVE I can’t blame anyone for assuming that “tenderqueer” is misappropriated AAVE as well but it is in fact a term from 2012 invented by white genderqueer people in Portland, Oregon as a chosen self-identifier to refer to an aesthetic of being a genderqueer person who takes testosterone and embraces being hairy everywhere but rejects expectations to act butch or masculine or to exclusively dress in clothing from the men’s aisle.
Watching it slowly transmorph into a pejorative term for “white queers who act tender to shield themselves from criticism” has been fascinating, especially since I saw the point in the middle where that criticism of tenderqueers was understood as “the people who identify as tenderqueers are all white people who use tenderness to shield themselves from criticism” and then morphed into the term itself embodying that criticism of anyone regardless of if they identify as genderqueer by the time that 2020 essay was published which people now seem to think was the origin of a word that was coined eight years earlier by people who intended it to be positive.
Language evolution is fascinating. Anyway I just needed to write down that etymology based on what I remember observing over the past twelve years of my transition. You can use archive.org to find these earlier uses
