We don’t gatekeep against cisgender people who consider themselves Pink Pistols.We don’t gatekeep against heterosexual people who consider themselves Pink Pistols.We won’t throw you out if you aren’t (but we will if you’re abusive to our queer members), although we warn you that making statements like “I don’t believe in your lifestyle, but…” will earn you as much popularity and acceptance as people who say “I believe in the Second Amendment, but…” The only thing we ask is that if you are not queer in some manner that you be queer-positive. This is a group for pro-Second Amendment queer people and those who support them.
So we, the mods and admins of this page, say NO to this self-destructive course of action and instead encourage people to find ways to live with each other. If we say “Only queer people are allowed in the Pink Pistols” then that inevitably results in statements like “You vote Republican, you’re a traitor and not truly queer” or “You’re Bisexual, you can live a heteronormative lifestyle, you’re not truly queer” or “You’re a heterosexual stealth Trans, you don’t belong here, you aren’t properly queer” and so on until there’s only one person left standing who is “authentically queer” and the rest are just posers and traitors. The moment we start gatekeeping is the moment this group fractures around identity issues and an ever-tightening death spiral of ideological purity. How about class? If you’re poor and you’re trans you’re going to have a much harder time transitioning (if you can transition at all) because therapy and hormones and surgery take more money than they can afford.QPOC (that’s “queer people of color”) have to deal with being a racial minority as well as being a gender and/or sexual minority, so all of us with racial privilege should let them do all the talking. Want to refine it even further? Let’s bring race into the mix.Then there are the Aces (asexuals) and Aros (aromantics) who no one really knows what to do with because “What kind of social oppression do they face?” Apparently, if they aren’t being victimized for their sexuality then they don’t “count” as authentically queer to some people.(In fact, there’s an amazingly accurate parallel between stealth vs.The stealthers regard the outers as attention whores and drama queens who are setting back trans acceptance by being outrageous. Then there are the Trans people who pass (“go stealth”) who just want to be thought of as men instead of transmen/women instead of transwomen, and they are called cowards by the “out and proud” Trans people who feel that trans acceptance will only happen if we are visible to the world.Meanwhile, practically everyone hates Bisexual people due to a combination of unfounded fear that the Bi person will be unsatisfied with only one type of genital and cheat/wander/leave their SOs and jealousy that a bi person can adopt a hetero-normative lifestyle and reap all the benefits without suffering any of the ill effects.For example, we have Bears (masculine homosexual men) who deride Twi nks (feminine homosexual men) for being “too fa ggy”, and we have Lipstick Lesbians (feminine homosexual women) who look down on Dy kes (masculine homosexual women) for being “too bu tch”. And I could point out that Gays and Lesbians don’t actually get along, but I’ll go one step further and tell you that subcultures within each don’t even get along.Yet Transgender people say that Gays and Lesbians have it easy because they don’t stand out in everyday life, and besides it’s socially acceptable to be homosexual these days, so if anything trans folks are more oppressed and deserve more representation, not less.Gay and Lesbian people think that Transgender people shouldn’t be under the LGBTQ tent because “being transgender isn’t a sexual orientation, it’s a gender issue”.
I’m going to explain why gatekeeping hurts us and why I and the other mods won’t tolerate it here, and I’m going to use queer dynamics to illustrate it. Gatekeeping: When someone takes it upon themselves to decide who does or does not have access or rights to a community or identity.