Hello!
I am new here, and new to the LGBT community in general. Around 6-7 weeks ago I realized I was trans(htf do you make it to 30 and not realize?)
In talking to my therapist, they said they(belonging to the community themselves) like to use queer as shorthand since it includes everyone and isn’t an unending acronym that is constantly getting new letters. I also like that and would use it, but being new, I’m not sure how others who’ve been here longer feel.
Are they equivalent?
I don’t like how the acronym keeps changing and accidentally leaving out a letter could be taken as an intentional slight.
Yes, “queer” originated as a slur and mostly got adapted as a self describing term for the community. I use it to describe myself and the community, partly because it rolls off the tongue more easily and partly because it’s a nice and easy term to describe everyone not cis heteronormative.
The term “punk” has a similar story, btw. It came into being as a slur for people that didn’t quite behave as expected by society and punks then took it as a name for themselves, saying “Yeah, I’m a punk, there’s nothing wrong with it and you can’t do shit against it,” which is also why I like to use the term “queer”. Because there’s nothing wrong with being queer and people can’t do shit against that.
Being queer is pretty punk
🤘
Yes it is. Fun side fact: transgender is a common theme especially in cyberpunk, definitely worth looking into if you didn’t yet ;)
I did not know that!
I definitely love the anesthetic, maybe that gave me an excuse to allow myself to like some pink & purple? I do love scifi and the retrofuturistic music!
Got any recommendations?
It depends on the media you prefer. The classics would be The Matrix, 1995’s animated Ghost in the Shell (though the transgender theme is more accidentally AFAIK) or William Gibson’s 1988 book Monalisa Overdrive.
Monalisa Overdrive also inspired Janaína Overdrive, a brazilian short movie by Mozart Freire (which is still on my watchlist though).
There is then Martine Rothblatt’s From Transgender to Transhuman: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Form (again, still on my list), and the general theme of transhumanism, which is often a stand-in or expansion of transgender.
However, something you should be aware of, cyberpunk is generally dystopian and can be pretty depressing. The shiny neon aesthetic is just the sugar-coated topping. There is another world beneath it. The real world.
I am very aware of the dystopia. Maybe that’s part of the appeal for me, the contrast.i have not heard of the matrix having any trans relationship, other than the directors.
I will check those out, I have wanted to watch Ghost in the Shell for a while but never got there or it wasn’t available. The anime+trans reminded me of this video I found super interesting! It starts about “why are there so many more trans people in Japanese games?” and then goes deep into the culture differences between east and west and how they look at conformity in different ways so that homosexuality was easier to accept here and more difficult there but the reverse for trans
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRrVkZoN93c
Great, I just wanted to have that set. At the latest since Cyberpunk 2077 became big, the subculture and the artistic genres are all to often reduced to the aesthetic, basically ignoring all the punk elements.
There’s more all over the movies, but central in the first movie is Neo’s transition of Thomas Anderson, someone who builds an online persona, searching for something he cannot quite get a grasp of, taking the red pill (sad but ironic how that term is used nowadays) which symbolizes the first steps on learning the truth, waking up from the Matrix and climaxing in the death of his old persona, then being reborn his true self, Neo.
Of course, this can be interpreted in many ways, but then you see the context of who made this.
That video sounds interesting, I’ll try to watch it tomorrow.
Oooooo yeah, I’ll have to give that a re-watch considering the after context! And yeah, fucking red-pillers…