Every time someone says "you shouldn't say queer, it's a slur" I become a bigger fag
I wasn't prepared to spend my adult years rebelling against youths trying to tell me to be more respectable
My "no, it's the kids who are wrong" moment was when they started saying they were minors, openly and proudly. Wild horses couldn't have dragged that out of me back then.
so the thing here is that queer kids need help from us older folk. most queer people our own age (40s) grew up without knowing that queerness was a thing, let alone any mentors who could help with it - because the generation preceding us mostly died.
the consequence of that is that we haven't got existing social structures that can help kids to navigate the political landscape, in the way that many other marginalized communities do. (the Jewish community is particularly good at this, from what we've been able to figure out. they have all sorts of explicit patterns for building youth-led organizations. well worth studying.)
furthermore, it's worse than that: there are people in the world whose mission in life is to spread hatred, and they've done a better job than the forces of love have in reaching queer youth. children can't be expected to know the political consequences of the stuff they're repeating, the vast majority surely believe, in full sincerity, that these intracommunity attacks are a good and necessary thing.
nobody else is going to fix this, so we all need to - whoever reads and understands this. it's our job.
the children are allowed to be wrong. it is our job to care for them anyway.
