here's an article, not so easy to read as that lovely piece of writing from JK Rowling, but it does a rather good job of defining sexuality.

https://www.sott.net/article/435904-JK-Rowling-is-right-sex-is-real-and-it-is-not-a-spectrum

I like the imagery of a coin - the fact that when you toss a coin it can land on it's edge every so often does not change it's two-sided nature.

Deleted.

Last edited by Lynne (October 3, 2020 5:36 pm)

I thought Lyonene's answer was pretty accurate.
In the "alphabet" LGBTQ it means "queer," mostly, but "questioning" has also been used.  And queer these days has a very squishy and ill-defined meaning.  Here's a definition, from an article in USA Todayeople use the term queer because it's not specific to sexual orientation or to gender identity but is more of an umbrella term that can encompass a lot of people, according to Sainz [a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign]."Queer is anything that exists outside of the dominant narrative," Cleo Anderson, a 26-year-old intern at GLAAD, a prominent gay rights group, told USA TODAY Network. Anderson identifies with the term.
See what I mean?  Pretty squishy.  

"Pretty squishy"

Very squishy.

A socialist pansexual furry teen girl = queer.
A marxist crossdressing hetero man = queer
Literally anything I dream up can fall under the queer umbrella.

Here's a nicely condensed explanation:
"Queer theory’s origin is hard to clearly define, since it came from multiple critical and cultural contexts, including feminism, post-structuralist theory, radical movements of people of color, the gay and lesbian movements, AIDS, many sexual subcultural practices such as sadomasochism, and postcolonialism.

Queer theory as an academic tool came about in part from gender and sexuality studies that in turn had their origins from lesbians and gay studies and feminist theory. It is a much newer theory, in that it was established in the 1990s, and contests many of the set ideas of the more established fields it comes from by challenging the notion of defined and finite identity categories, as well as the norms that create a binary of good versus bad sexualities. Queer theorists contention is that there is no set normal, only changing norms that people may or may not fit into, making queer theorists’ main challenge to disrupt binaries in hopes that this will destroy difference as well as inequality."

Michael Foucault, Gayle Rubin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Judith Butler are a few of the primary foundation shapers of queer theory.

Interesting to me is that one and all also either advocate for child sexuality with adults or are of the opinion that it is "up to the child".

James Lindsey:
"This seems like it's coming out of nowhere, but it's based in a conversation I had with someone earlier explaining an important aspect of Woke culture that many of us perceive but few understand. One of the targets that Woke culture wants to dismantle is the innocence of children

The most obvious way Wokeness goes after the innocence of children is in the Queer variant of trans activism, especially by having trans strippers perform for children in schools, for example. Why would they do this?

The belief is that the innocence we encourage in children is part of the systems of power (specifically generated through performativity) that enforce heteronormativity and cisnormativity and thus lead to dysphoria or oppression of gay and potentially trans kids.

The logic isn't terribly complicated: there might be gay or trans kids in the class, say, who would be more comfortable in their sexual identity (if that makes sense for a kid -- it doesn't) and gender identity if they saw disruptions to the usual "binaries" being celebrated.

The disruption is simple: exhibition of sexuality, especially Queer sexualities and trans people demonstrating sexuality. The (cultural) prohibition on this behavior is usually put as "childhood innocence," which is viewed as a dominant discourse that enforces normativities.

Sexualizing children's spaces is therefore a "logical" consequence of queering both spaces and childhood in order to "liberate the potentialities" of children's identities, and it requires the disruption of childhood innocence. That is, it's righteous Queer activism.

As a last point, the innocence of children, thus the opposite of that in adults, sets up its own power dynamic that the Critical Theory of education sees as illegitimate and in need of disruption. Children cannot be innocent if they are to be co-equal with instructors or more to point, able to use their "oppressed" status as children (in an adult's world) to be elevated to instructor status over the teachers ("I learned more from my students than they learned from me"). It's less overt here, but childhood innocence is problematic here too.

This last point becomes an additional soft spot through which Queer and trans performative activism and "racial literacy" racist activism makes its way into obliterating childhood innocence in the name of "Social Justice." This is better known as "child abuse."

In sum, you're not wrong to perceive that there's a Woke war on the innocence of childhood, which is seen as an enculturating tool of oppression by dominant and hegemonic discourses and structures. These must be disrupted. Children can't be innocent; they must be activists."

Derrick Jensen queer theory pedo jeopardy at a college lecture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQDV_iyFkHo

There's a reason most people that claim to be queer are millennials and zoomers. These ideas gained traction in college/uni in the 90's where it flourished and was encouraged as "progressive". This transferred to social media (Tumblr, Facebook, Livejournal, Twitter, etc) where it was conveyed to younger and younger children.

It's not just women's rights and protections in peril. It's children as well, imho.
https://www.dragqueenstoryhour.org/
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/03/frances-existential-crisis-over-sexual-harassment-laws/550700/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/perversity-angry-parents-protest-lgbtq-books-in-loudoun-classrooms/2019/11/10/6dbe0024-01b3-11ea-9518-1e76abc088b6_story.html

Last edited by Lyonene (July 10, 2020 10:43 am)

"I don't agree that allowing trans women to use our bathrooms will lead to sexual assaults.  I think men who want to dress up as female and get in there to commit assaults, are going to do it regardless of what the "rules" are."

I used to think that too. Unfortunately, it's not the reality in a lot of cases. What activists are demanding is that anyone that claims to be trans is trans. It cannot be questioned. There is no hormone treatment or surgery necessary, merely their self ID. While I fully believe that not all are a danger, the percentage of actual dysphoric individuals vs individuals with paraphilias is small. Removing women's rights to question, and legalizing any man to enter women's spaces, endangers women and the children who use women's spaces.

Activists claim that assaults will happen regardless, and I'll agree that's true, however, a quick google search will tell you how many times since this activism started men have flat out used it as a way to invade women's spaces for their sexual purposes.

My friend Miranda explains it best (Mir is a transsexual btw for context).
https://mirandayardley.com/en/girl-dick-the-cotton-ceiling-and-the-cultural-war-on-lesbians-girls-and-women/

His address to Parliament.
https://mirandayardley.com/en/how-transgender-became-the-new-black-presentation-in-parliament-on-31-october-2017/

For the record, Mir is welcome in the bathroom with me anytime. A sane man who knows he's a man with the problem of dysphoria and not a fetishist. There's the rub I suppose - the difference between a man that has sexualized woman and womanface, vs a man that has not.