Queer acceptance is consequential

Also published on Wordpress.

Anti-queer bigots argue giving queer minorities equal rights will drastically change the world we live in. From my personal experiences, when you ask them to elaborate, they usually give one of these four responses:

1. Queer equality will greenlight sexualisation and even sexual abuse of children, even though not only such things have existed prior, there are no evidences that queer people dominate the “child grooming industry”; if you can believe not all Catholic clergymen are child sexual predators, then why can’t you believe the same about queer people?
2. Queer equality will take the rights of cishet and/or religious people. Obviously, this is projection. They want queer people to have less or no rights and they assume queer people will return the favour.
3. Queer equality will allow people to marry animals and their own family members. Obviously, this is slippery slope fallacy; they believe those things will happen not because of evidences or proper reasoning, but because they feel they are entitled to force a correlation between two random things.
4. Queer equality will make cishet people queer. It doesn’t, it only allows queer people to comfortably come out of the closet. But, even if people can turn queer simply because queerness is accepted, that means cishet identity is fragile and not as strong as people think it is.
5. They refuse to elaborate. They make the claim and expect others to trust their words, confidently declaring their dogmatic asses as trustworthy.

But, they are not entirely wrong. Because no humans live in a vacuum, queer equality will bring changes to our world… but, not the changes bigots love to claim will happen.

Queer acceptance does not simply improve queer people’s quality of life, it also means we have to question everything about ourselves.

We are fearful that some or all aspects of our worldview are outdated and holding us back and therefore, have to be discarded for the betterment of everyone. Because our worldview is inseparable from who we really are, discarding it feels like we are “losing our true selves”.

Emphasise on the word “feels”. It does feel scary to let go of something we grew up with. But, I guarantee, doing so still allows us to be ourselves; the difference is our selves have become better and more open-minded.

The changes may not just be about changing our selves, they may also involve acknowledging their truest forms.

We are opposed to equality because we fear we may be queer ourselves. Queer acceptance means we are more free to explore such possibility. It means we have to confront it, sooner or later.

If we turn out to be queer, some of us fear we will suffer from intense self-hatred, unable to accept ourselves. Even if we are not queer, we still feel insecure about our sexuality and gender identity, because we don’t fully conform to the cishet stereotypes.

Many of us have to yet to realise that it is okay to defy society’s unnecessarily restrictive expectations, that there is nothing morally wrong about offending other people’s arbitrary and shallow sensibilities which serve no purposes other than coddling their own fragile feelings.

Easier said than done. But, it is possible.

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Obviously, not all changes are good. Sometimes, changes can be for the worse. But, if you believe a tradition is worth preserving simply because it is old and no one are able to provide data-driven evidences of its benefits and refute data-driven evidences of its harms, then it deserves to be discarded.

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