Hacker News Reader

Comment by narag | Hacker News Reader

I take he's talking about ideas. Being queer, as I understand it, is not an idea but a fact, like being six feet tall or having blue eyes.

View on HN

"Queer" is a vague identity with political connotations, by which I mean, the gay people who call themselves "queer" tend to be a lot more woke-leftist than the gay people who don't call themselves "queer". It's absolutely an idea and a constructed identity. The facts of the matter are things like sexual preferences and behaviors, but you don't inherently need to construct an identity around them. On the other hand, sometimes you need to be aware that even if you don't identify yourself, you will be identified by others, which you're going to have to deal with.

I think you've both got the right answer and explained it with a very negative framing.

Gender and Sexual Minority, LGBTQ+, and queer all describe a largely similar set of folks.

Queer arose not from "woke-leftist" spaces, but grew out of 70s and 80s radical gay and trans spaces - groups like the Gay Liberation Front - who were willing to fight back (violently if necessary) against violence and discrimination.

Queer is absolutely a political identity, a framing of ones gender or sexual identity. They intersect with one another. It's not unlike "I eat only plants" vs "I'm vegan", they mean roughly the same thing until you hit contexts where they don't.

I'm not a native speaker, not in the know of the nuances of those terms, just accepted the one you chose.

There's a point that I still don't understand. The article advices to keep identity as a minimum. Not having none, just not including every circumstance or opinion in your identity. The reason is that a fat identity makes you more vulnerable to bias.

Is being queer a fundamental part of your identity? Or is it something subject to change like "being a JavaScript programmer" or something like that?

The place where I was born... that is a fact, I neither can nor want to change that. I consider it a part of my identity but, at the same time, I try to take some distance from it so I can examine my own opinions and decisions.

Even at some moments I wonder what would I think if I had been born elsewhere or if I change nationality. But that doesn't mean I'm going to do that. That runs deep, but being an X programmer, a X-ist, a morning person, if I prefer cats or dogs, a member of NNN generation... that's circumstancial for me.

Whether you're sexually attracted to men or women isn't something that can change, but that doesn't necessarily mean you have to enshrine it as a significant part of your identity. This is actually where the semantic nuances come fully into play. People who identify as queer are consciously choosing to identify as queer. There are gay men and lesbian women who don't identify as queer. Sometimes that's because they don't agree with the radical orientation of the people who do identify as queer, sometimes that's because they don't like the word itself, and sometimes it's because they don't feel a sense of group identity with everyone under the "queer" umbrella.

> Queer arose not from "woke-leftist" spaces, but grew out of 70s and 80s radical gay and trans spaces

I guess "radical" would have been a better choice of terminology than "woke-leftist", but really you're looking at very similar communities that share an ideological heritage and who tend to complain about any terminology people use for them. The term "woke" is new but the basic ideology goes back to 70's radicals as well.

I would add, "woke" is not necessarily a negative label, and indeed was originally used most commonly in a positive sense intended to describe people who were awake to the reality of the world. It's only more recently come to be used a pejorative mocking the original usage.

So the opposite of the reclaimed slur someone mentioned.

I wouldn’t even say it’s all pejorative mockery. Setting aside the negative connotation, I think we all know what ideas and movements the term “woke” refers to, and the people on that side of the discussion haven’t, to my knowledge, agreed to any other nomenclature they would prefer, which means the only people using the term are the ones criticizing the underlying group of ideas and movements, which is where the negative connotation comes from. (And then some of those critics unfairly overgeneralize, similarly with the term “socialist”.)

> not... but

If you act according to your Real Preference RP, then RP is a fact; if you Role-Play, it is also a constraint.

Edit: there is also a notable third position: when you act from a what you judge a Right Position RP - you do what is right. It must be noted because it may look like an "identification", but it is different in important ways.

I'm not sure it is a fact, I mean, these days there are heterosexual people who call themselves queer.

> who call themselves

In which sense? Because 'queer' means "eccentric" - many would describe as that. For that matter, people call themselves "gay" for "joyous".

Incidentally: the queer use of 'queer' predates that of 'gay' (just a piece of trivia).

> For that matter, people call themselves "gay" for "joyous".

Uh... I don't think people do that anymore.

They do, and some will absolutely do (to some it is important to "assess" language) - it really depends on what you mean with "people" (of course I meant a subset).

What happened there is, in the succession of editings I left that 'people' there in a way that happened to be ambiguous. I made a composition error out of inattention.

The subset you're talking about is the union of extremely non-native English speakers and native English speakers over 120 years old.

No. It is not a matter of being «native». It may be your mothertongue of not: it is an approach transversal to all (this class of) languages.

It is the set of those people who intend to speak English, though surely not the language in use among the English. "Currently typical" English does not mean "good" English.

Edit:

On the contrary, «native English speakers» are the one who will follow that: they are the ones supposed to have absorbed more English (and relevant) literature.

I have just checked and I see the terms employed correctly in Joyce, in Wilde, in Chandler, in Hammett, in Paul Johnson, in Niall Ferguson, in Woody Allen, in Spike Milligan.

As absolutely expected: there is the gathering of the Assessors.

Of course queer as "unusual" predates "queer" as gay. :D It's a reclaimed slur. It was a negative label applied to people who ultimately decided to make that negative label a part of their identity.

[Removed chunk because of misunderstanding]

[...] To my info, the first use of 'queer' for "homosexual" is from 1922, and the term was used for "eccentric" for the last five centuries.

('gay' for homosexual was reported as widespread "communitarian" use in medical texts in the 1940's - the use for "promiscuous" is at least four centuries old. In some territories, 'gay girl' still means "prostitute".)

Edit:

I misread your post. Of course, "of course" ""queer" for homosexual" can easily be a "reclaimed slur". There should be no surprise about it.

And your use of 'gay' in «"queer" as gay» is "queer". That is not ""queer" as gay", it is "queer" as "unaligned in sexual orientation", and not necessarily "gay". Just nitpicking on language though.

> In which sense?

Generally in a political sense (related to the gay sense). Someone who does not accept heterosexuality as a norm or default way of being, even though it may something that they personally prefer.

Well, queer encompasses more than just gay and lesbian people.

Non-binary people can be queer, heterosexual trans people can be queer, asexual people can be queer. Same with polyamorous people.

Literally anyone can be queer. Its a meaningless tag.

Literally anyone can be Christian, but that doesn't make it a useless tag. It's a linguistic and mental shortcut that has utility despite the relative ease of application.

Doesn't that make it not a fact then, if people can just opt in and out to being queer?

I would argue that no identity is a fact. All identities are beliefs on the part of the person doing the identifying. To identify something as X is to express the belief that it is X.

This reminds me a class very long ago, when the teacher wrote two contradictory definitions of style in the blackboard, one saying that style is what the authors have in common with their school, the other saying that style is what the authors have that others don't.

Of course, those were defining two different concepts: the style of a school and the personal style.

To be precise, identity is very easy to define: it's to be you, instead of anyone else. Until someone invents some kind of brain trasplant, it's impossible to transfer consciousness, so your identity is your body, more specifically, your brain. That would include your memories that, although can be erased by trauma or illness, are mostly very strongly rooted.

Outwards, it would expand to your habits, your chemistry, your beliefs. All that can change, but it's difficult. So it's more your personality than your identity.

Then there is "identity" that isn't. More like being part of a group, so it's parallel situation to that of style. You identify yourself with a group, you define yourself as the sum of the groups you include yourself in. Identity is very much about individuality. "Identity" seems to be the opposite: the inabilty to be someone on your own.

Unless we're getting to some deep metaphysical stuff, I don't think I buy that. Yes, some identities are solely based on belief. But others are indeed based on facts: someone might identify as "basketball player" because they play basketball. Or they might identify as "tall" because they are in the top 10% of people for height. The height example might sound silly, but there are people who are somehow "proud" of these sorts of traits that they have no control over.

Certainly the situations can sometimes change: the basketball player might stop playing basketball and no longer identify as such. And I suppose someone who has never played basketball in their life could adopt the identity of "basketball player" if they wanted to, but... that's fine, that would be a case where that particular person's identity is based on a belief (or delusion).

I'm not talking about what the identity is based on. I'm talking about what the identity itself is. I think this is useful to help clarify the difference between "X has the identity Y" and "X is Y" which otherwise seem very similar. The former means that "someone believes (or many people believe) that X is Y".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com