[philwelch]

"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.

[mgrthrow]

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.

[narag]

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.

[philwelch]

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.

[philwelch]

> 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.

[nicoburns]

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.

[narag]

So the opposite of the reclaimed slur someone mentioned.

[philwelch]

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”.)