my take on the latest & really any inter-queer argument about labels and their "real" meaning:

1) no such thing as a "real" meaning
2) let chaos reign, eventually in the very-long run some sort of stable meanings will emerge as the pace of change slows

longer version, a thread

meanings of words around queerness have been very unstable because not only do they pingpong between the unqueer (derogatory and/or pathologizing) and queer (reclaiming/reinventing), they also bounce around A LOT within queerness where different ppl use them for different reasons

a queer label might be "felt" self ID, might be a political label/umbrella term, might be reclamation of a slur, might be a term within theory (e.g. intersectionality). and each use is going to have a different meaning for even the exactly same word, at the same time

& on top of that there's been very fast developments in queer theory and queer lived realities since... let's say the 60's, i.e. post-repressive-50's and post-destruction-of-everything-hirschfeld, so the understanding of assorted queernesses has been dramatically changing

not so much in the "these are new kinds of queernesses" way and more in the more voices being heard way, and people trying to process all this new-to-them and newly knowable stuff.

AND THEN, because it's the internet, we get global input from people from all sorts of cultural/social/linguistic backgrounds.

so. we got extremely diverse and fast changing understanding of every aspect of queerness. of course the language is going to get chaotic as fuck

and yeah, it's going to mean some words may feel like they lose all meaning because they'll be used for literally every possible thing in queerness. it kinda sucks when having a word is/was the way to access visibility and a spot in the public discussion.

but attempting to control and impose the One True Meaning is much worse than semantic chaos. let's just learn to live with localized, topic-specific, explicit definitions when discussing things, and also to just letting people be creative as fuck with self-labels.

it doesn't have to make sense (to you; or to the public). it doesn't have to be useful. everyone doesn't need to understand the exact same thing when hearing a word (especially since no word works like that really)

just use the words as you need them, when you need them

and like i said, eventually the pace of change is gonna slow. it's gonna stop being the chaos of birthing understanding and shit will settle into the slow boring pace of change all words undergo. literally.

tl;dr: i'm too old and tired for any further fights over sapphic vs lesbian, pan vs bi, queer vs gay vs lgbt, and every other argument over "wrong" or "correct" ways to use queer words. especially since 3 weeks from now everything will change again anyway