sciatrix: A thumbnail from an Escher print, black and white, of a dragon with its tail in its mouth, wing outstretched behind. (Default)
sciatrix ([personal profile] sciatrix) wrote in [community profile] queerly_beloved 2020-04-10 08:38 pm (UTC)

At this stage in my life, I think of allyship as an action, not a status, and I find it easier to bar people from acting in non-allied ways than for identities and experience. This does not mean that I'm like, "yay straight cis people come talk about your feels here!" in my settings--it means that I ask the people in my groups to be mindful of many kinds of marginalized experiences within broader queer coalitions, and to familiarize themselves with general sore spots. So for example, since I largely organize ace groups, I often nudge people who are so excited to feel free of pressure to engage in sex themselves to remember that that needs to not spill over into sex-negativity that might hurt people who have been historically marginalized for the expressions of sexuality that they do want to have.

I also think about groups in terms of specific focuses on who is/should be centered at any given time, and I try not to advertise more inclusivity than I actually have in mind. So if I'm saying that I'm organizing a general queer space, I try not to actually center it on my own subcommunity and experiences and make it a general space. On the other hand, I also think that all queer identities and experiences deserve to have places and times to be centered, too, and that you can't simply expect cis gay men (for example) to only use the generalist spaces.

Bluntly, the kinds of clueless straight and cis people who insist that they are allies and distort everything around themselves cannot meet these requirements on their own behavior. They wind up weeded out by the emphasis on being aware of other people's experience and listening, and they stumble and then dig in and sulk when corrected; they're not accustomed to that kind of listening and trying to be respectful, and they are not accustomed to not being centered.

It's not about what you call yourself. It's about how you act to other people.

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