Gays did n't ' win . '¶

Gays didn't "win." Pay attention. Fascism is ascendant, trans people are just the most effective crack in the (very recent and very fragile) rise in queer "acceptance." You are a fool if you can't see the existing and growing expansion of that crack to encompass all queerness. https://t.co/DS8D4lUHIw Liberal "acceptance" movements are facile, vulnerable to fascist organizing, and do not meaningfully alter the cultural, economic, or political relations that maintain the bourgeois hegemony that keeps us oppressed. We don't need "acceptance," we need liberation. Political liberation. Our goal is not to find some way to assimilate into bourgeois culture, which is vehemently opposed to anything that challenges its hegemony, reproduced as it is through the patriarchal family. We can't win this fight through good PR and behaving "appropriately," because at the core of queerness is the notion that the bourgeois family is not the be-all and end-all of familial relations. Our mere existence is a direct threat to the reproductive cell of bourgeois culture. "Appropriate" means imitating, as best as possible, the bourgeois cultural notion of family. Gender roles, as much as they evolve, are still a critical ingredient in that. Subverting the notion that there is an immutable "essence" to gender is anathema to this culture. The only "good PR" gay liberals were able to accomplish is convincing certain elements of the hegemony that gay people can still have monogamous, nuclear families, with all the same social relations involved. The kids, the houses, the consumption, the reproduction of the culture. Hence the belief that marriage equality was the finish line. That is weak. It's not enough assimilation for certain tendencies, and it is only "liberation" for those with the economic and social cache to pull it off. It can and will be ripped away in an instant. It's the exact same pattern we've seen throughout history. Jews in Europe thought they were doing a good job of assimilating. Many attained the rank of successful capitalists. They were deep, lovingly accepted parts of their communities. By "lovingly accepted," obviously I don't mean to imply that antisemitism disappeared. Merely that certain elements of "civilized society" saw Jews as just another aspect of the pluralistic liberal society they hoped would maintain hegemony perpetually. Many of them viewed their more culturally distinct counterparts as being "less appropriate," and unwilling to act in a way that the broader society could accommodate. But as it turned out, fascism cannot accommodate anyone outside their view of a hegemonic culture. They felt (correctly) that repression and persecution were powerful avenues for growing revolutionary sentiment. Tolerance, to the extent possible within a society built on a very particular set of hierarchical norms, was a useful tool -- until "to the extent possible" faded. The more "inoffensive" Jews saw their wealth stripped away. They were persecuted in exactly the same way (except those with the wealth and connections to actively collaborate with the fascists in the early stages, including Zionists). Antisemitism bubbled under the surface, particularly among the sectors of society that had been trained for centuries to view themselves as culturally distinct from the essential other -- Jews, foreigners, queer people, etc. Meanwhile, economic conditions deteriorated. None of us are made safe by ceding liberation in favor of acceptance, because liberal acceptance is conditional. Grow the fuck up. Protect yourself and your community. Build revolutionary organizations that can withstand the onslaught of fascism that we are experiencing RIGHT NOW As the material standing of the working class declined, revolutionary sentiment grew, and the ruling class had to fall back on the same old tricks. The "unifying" ideology of ultranationalism. Papering over the contradictions of class through a mythical construct of the nation. So deeply engrained were these notions of the nation as essential, of natural gender and family roles, of racial superiority, that they found purchase in the rise of fascism. Those "tolerant," "civilized" people found themselves asking "Who really belongs in our civilization?" We see this being reproduced right now. This is not a game. This is not a PR problem. This is not an "exchange of ideas," and there is no compromise the fascists are willing to make. They want us to not exist.