Photo courtesy of Tumblr

Catie Byrne
Features Editor

I am a millennial lesbian, but I am not, by modern standards, a “21st century Marginalized Orientations, Gender Alignments and Intersex (MOGAI) queer.” In fact, don’t ever associate me with MOGAI or coercively label me with terms that I don’t self-identify with, such as queer, monosexual or allosexual.

For those lucky enough to not understand the terms I listed, I envy your ignorance.

In order to explain why even looking at these words gives me a migraine, I must explain, for non-LGBT readers, that my bitterness stems from a strain of bad discourse related to intra-community LGBT issues popularized by tumblr.com.

When you log on to tumblr.com and type the tag “the discourse” in the search bar, the following tags appear as related: “Q slur,” “homophobia,” “lesbophobia,” “MOGAI tumblr” and “the acecourse.”

The aforementioned terms I wish not to be labelled all fall within the tag, “MOGAI tumblr.”

For those unfamiliar, MOGAI stands for “marginalized orientations, gender alignments and intersex” and was invented with the intent to be a more inclusive acronym than LGBT.

However, in practice, MOGAI has done more to divide members of the LGBT community through the means of invented privilege politics, egregious historical revisionism and, I feel, most unforgivably, the spread of misinformation that confuse and harm questioning LGBT youth.

Of the invented MOGAI privilege politics, the most prevalent are allosexual and monosexual privilege, which argue that people who experience sexual attraction, and are only attracted to one gender, have privilege over people who do not experience sexual attraction, as well as people who experience attraction to more than one gender.

Allosexual was initially coined as a word to differentiate asexual people from people who experience sexual attraction, and monosexual to differentiate multisexual people from straight and gay people. The problem with these terms is that it lumps gay and straight people into categories with intersecting privilege.

Simply put, that isn’t possible.

As a lesbian, I am systematically oppressed for my sole attraction to women, regardless of whether or not that attraction is sexual.

Of course, all people who experience same-gender-attraction are oppressed by the hegemonic institutions which reinforce heteronormativity; however, MOGAI’s have been known to specifically defame lesbians as “monosexual and allosexual oppressors.”

Monosexual privilege is often defended by the claim that multisexuals do not have as much representation in the media as lesbians. However, what is perceived as representation is actually hypervisibility.

This means that the representation we do have is inaccurate, insulting, lesbophobic and ultimately produced by the same people who deny multisexuals the representation they crave: straight people.

As for allosexual privilege, it is, without exception, lesbophobic to suggest that lesbians are somehow oppressive for their attraction to women; secondly, to presume a politic of privilege regarding whether or not someone experiences sexual attraction is extremely invasive — especially considering that this idea has trickled down to minors, who may or may not be closeted, and hypersexualizes the lesbian identity to nothing more than women as sexual objects.

Not only is the rendering of my identity to nothing more than sex misogynistic, it is also homophobic, insulting and dehumanizing. Lesbians’ identities are infinitely more complex than the MOGAI paradigm of sexual versus romantic attraction.

The separation of sexual and romantic attraction also does not make any sense outside of the asexual community because gay and lesbian asexuals exist, and, have repeatedly expressed annoyance that straight asexual and aromantic people use this paradigm to separate themselves from their straight privilege.

The idea that cisgender, straight, asexual or aromantic people belong in LGBT spaces by virtue of their identity as asexual or aromantic is a dangerous and invasive tactic of self-insertion, which potentially endangers safe spaces specifically designated for LGBT peoples.

This brings to light the overarching issue of who can reclaim the q-slur, otherwise known as “queer.”

Generally related to MOGAI nonsense, “the acecourse,” is bad asexual community rhetoric which argues that cisgender, straight aromatic or asexual people can reclaim the slur queer.

This is a troubling debate because the word “queer” has never been used to systematically oppress or brutalize straight, cisgender people, regardless of whether or not that straight person experiences sexual or romantic attraction.

To suggest otherwise is homophobic, transphobic, transmisogynistic and historical revisionism.

As much as I’d like to, I can’t completely blame tumblr.com for the popularization of these terms, because it is just another cog in the pink-washing, neoliberal and homonationalist social media machine of faux radical queer politics.

Categories: Columns, featured, Opinions

Tags: angst, catie byrne, Columns, opinions