An even briefer follow-up on being queer

Thinking about my essay from yesterday, it occurred to me that it might sound like I'm rejecting the idea of queer being an identity. That isn't the case. Of course, being queer is also a question of identity. It’s a catch-all term for anyone who isn’t straight and cis, and some would argue that even nonheteronormative cishets can claim the term. It's also a very useful term to use for anyone who doesn't feel that other, more specific terms are applicable to them, or that those terms aren't applicable all the time. The reason that I consider (my) queer a political term, however, is that I don’t need any more words to define my identity. I have enough. I’m an androgyne(/nonbinary), I’m asexual, I’m panromantic – and then I have the catch-all term “person”.

I’ve mentioned before that I have always been wary of identifying with groups, and this is even more true when it’s groups of people who ARE something and not groups of people who BELIEVE IN something. I have no control of my gender and sexuality, but I do have some degree of control of what I believe in. It’s a more active part of me, where my gender and my sexuality, much like my hair colour and the shape of my nose, are passive parts. Just like I’ve met many people with the same hair colour as myself with whom I had nothing in common, I’ve met queer (as in non-cishet) people who weren’t really in the same ‘group’ as I. A lot of them were perfectly nice and pleasant people who just happened to view the world in a different way, and some of them were jerks.

Needless to say, I don’t agree with everything anyone whose beliefs are queer, so to speak – but there’s more of an accord between our beliefs than there probably would be with any random person. So while I’m queer both in terms of identity and beliefs, the latter seems more relevant to emphasize.