I had a conversation some time ago that left me adrift. A friend and I were discussing gatekeeping in LGBTQ spaces. We were lamenting the sometimes exclusionary behavior toward bisexual people in what appears to be a heterosexual relationship.
“I sometimes feel so invisible, being married to a man,” she said.
“I know what you mean,” I replied. “I’m also non-binary, so I’m often treated as an ally.”
“Right. Happens all the time, and it’s always assumed I have all this privilege and none of the oppression. I wish they knew what it’s really like.”
We talked a bit more about it, and then conversation moved on to our health issues and how it’s affected us. She uses mobility aids, but I do not.
She told me, “I don’t think people with chronic pain should really call themselves disabled. They’re more like allies. Most of them don’t even know what it’s like to have to rely on accessibility, and they’re taking away the focus from what people like me need.”
It stung. Weren’t we just discussing how gatekeeping affects us when we can be presumed straight? I didn’t answer her; I couldn’t.
***
Twice this week I was reminded of that old conversation, the one where someone saw nothing amiss with bemoaning her outsider status on the one hand while gatekeeping on the other.
The first was a very similar conversation. Like the previous time, the person speaking wanted validation of one identity while stripping others of a second. “I demand to belong/but you don’t belong.” A denial that anyone but the very most clearly-defined insiders could possibly fit. A discussion of exactly what traumas a person must have suffered in order to claim their status.
That last one is particularly hateful. Forcing people to relive their worst moments of being harmed as a ticket in the door is vile. It is triggering. It is traumatic.
***
The second reminder of the conversation was about books. It was over the course of more than one conversation, but they all happened within a few days. What makes a book queer? Do heterosexual people belong in a gay book?
The answers left me feeling less upset and more puzzled. My own life probably wouldn’t be “queer enough” for some people, and it surely would have too many heterosexual people in it for most folks’ comfort.
How do we decide? I don’t have a good answer. There are books that I would probably say are fantastically queer even though the main character isn’t in a same-gender relationship on page. There are a whole lot of same-gender romances that I would say are distinctly un-queer, despite the main characters having same-gender sex on page.
There’s purity and gatekeeping in the book world too, and those of us who can’t slot tidily into a genre or category or pairing often lose out or are outright rejected.
***
I’ve lived my whole life in those in-between spaces, the ones where you might be in or out depending on the whims of the in-group. The ones truly on the other side of the fence don’t want us. They point to the closed community where they think we belong.
The desire for neat categories where people can be slotted is understandable. We long to find those who are like us, and we gather together when we do. Someone who straddles the line feels threatening, as though they might invite inside those who have done us harm.
But where does that leave those of us who can’t be lined up and counted? We want to belong just as much. We stand at the door and knock, but the guard has told us the Wizard is too busy to speak with us.
I grew up at that intersection. From an early age, I learned I was incorrect. My father is Jewish; my mother grew up attending what I gather was a fire-and-brimstone type of church. We were told we did not belong, that we were not Jews, despite my mother no longer being a Christian at that time and despite our deeply rooted connection to the Jewish community in various ways. On the other side, I learned that I was a curiosity, a museum piece, a puzzle for Christians to solve.
“You can be a ‘completed Jew,'” they said. “We could help.”
***
For a long time, I resisted identifying as transgender or as disabled (or even as a person with a disability). I present to the world in particular way, and it’s easier to agree that I am not enough of those things to call myself an insider.
Until recently, I have spoken very little about my upbringing in an interfaith family, despite having many cultural holdovers. Last winter was the first time I dared call myself fat after I was denied treatment based on my weight. In both situations, I had felt like an imposter and that my experiences were in no way valid in comparison to others.
After last night, shrinking away from a conversation in which one of my identities was questioned in hateful ways, I don’t want to do that anymore. I do not have to meet a list of bullet-point requirements in order to belong. I don’t have to tick boxes in order to have experienced discrimination. Who I am is not dependent on someone else sizing me up and deciding if I qualify.
***
I am a lot of things, and I refuse to deny any of the parts that make me whole. If someone wants to think of me as “half a queer” or “half a Jew” or make snide references to my gender or size or disability for not being enough, then perhaps those people are not worth my time. I couldn’t care less about the people on the outside who hate me for the half they see as wrong. Why should I care about the insiders who hate me for the half that matches the outsiders?
My identity is not up for debate. If society rejects me for that in me which is different, and gatekeepers won’t allow me sanctuary, then I can and will find a community of others like me. Others who live in the spaces between.
Lara Zielinsky
Thanks for the deep thoughts. I started to comment and then realized I had a LOT to say. Please view my blog here if you want to know what I think about gatekeeping, intersectionalism, and the author: https://larazielinsky.blogspot.com/2018/12/gatekeeping-intersectionalism.html
AM Leibowitz
Ooh, great post. I’ll leave a comment there.
K.S. Trenten
Beautifully put. I’m glad you spoke out…I remember that particular topic. It really…stung. It stung so much I couldn’t even voice an eloquent response as to why it stung, something I’m trying to do more and more for the people who sting unintentionally, who don’t want to hurt anyone else, but something slips out which does. I’ve been trying to back away, to try to think and put into words why it hurts, when sometimes I can’t even explain to myself why it does.
I didn’t want to say anything. I didn’t want to increase the divisiveness I felt splitting the very air with the topic. At the same time, the air had been split, dividing us into ‘true queers’, those who pair up exclusively with members of their own gender and everyone else.
This reminded me only too much of an attitude I’ve been reading about in an excellent biography of Magnus Hirschfeld, one of the first researchers into sexology written by Charlotte Wolff, M.D. Hirschfeld was part of a flowering of intellectual life which occurred in Weimar Germany, right before the blooms were crushed and stamped on by the Nazi party.
Hirschfeld was a world traveler who saw much more than many people got to see. He traveled to China, fell in love with the country (an attitude which reminded me keenly of my own mother after her recent visit) and a young man there who became one of his most devoted companions. He met many of the other intellectuals of the world. Yet he felt uncomfortable in Jerusalem, at the attitude many of the Jews there had. They wanted their own land. They didn’t want to share it with anyone else, especially the non-Jewish people already living there.
This reminded him of how the Nazis felt in his own country about him. He, Hirschfeld was German born and very loyal to his newly born nation, yet other Germans felt he didn’t belong there, because he was a Jewish and a homosexual. Only a certain kind of person could be a ‘true’ German as far as they were concerned.
There’s something profoundly untrue about a ‘true’ anything. It appears to be a myth to elevate certain people above the rest, an excuse to look down on those who don’t qualify as ‘true’.
Sorry for the long rant. It’s just I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. (wry grin) Once again, thank you for sharing this eloquent article, for putting into words something I’m still struggling to express.
AM Leibowitz
I understand. Even after I wrote this, I encountered more instances of gatekeeping this week. Sometimes I honestly feel just plain done. It’s very hard to keep standing up for a community that still considers me an “ally.” And it’s very hard sometimes to want to keep writing when I know I’ll be questioned on whether it’s “pure” enough.
I used to think I was entering a community of inclusion, but it’s more and more looked to me like that just isn’t the case.