Yes, there is a mess here. I think this is where the biggest divide between theory & activism occurs. I can explain why I think this happens. https://twitter.com/jenniferkrhn/status/1309830168215654403

Queer theory is the one of all the theories that emerged around 1990 that remained most purely postmodern -more accurately poststructuralist - while the others functioned by incorporating some postmodern ideas into a framework that accepted objective truth to exist. I'll explain.

Around 1989, a lot of theorists looking at race, gender & sexuality began to say that postmodern concepts of social constuctionism in the service of power was valuable but it was too deconstructive & thus you could not construct a better world with it.

Therefore, there was a need to use postmodern ideas of power, knowledge & language to deconstruct oppressive systems but also to accept that these systems objectively existed & that people with a certain identity had a certain consistent experience of oppression.

Thus we saw political activism enabled in postcolonial theory, critical race theory, intersectional feminism etc. The queer theorists did not take this route. They went the opposite way continuing to deny that there was a common experience of being, say, a woman.

For them, progress towards to a less oppressive society for people who do not fit the mould of 'feminine woman attracted to men' and 'masculine man attracted to women' could be made by continuing to resist all categories of sex, gender & sexuality. This is what 'queer' means.

However, the problem identified by the other branches that political activism cannot be very productive by just continually dismantling things existed and meant that queer theory was not found by many people focused on LGBT rights to be fit for purpose.

Many people on the sexuality end of this alleged advocacy on their behalf just rejected the whole notion of 'queer' saying that categories like 'gay' & lesbian' had a stable meaning that applied to them & that they had concrete goals like being able to get married.

On the gender identity end of this (many people believe that lumping sexuality & gender identity together for purposes of advocacy was incoherent & unhelpful in the first place) things were less clear-cut.

It is less easy for trans people to take the straightforward liberal stance 'Some people are trans. Get over it" because trans issues require much more external input in the form of irreversible medical intervention & the ethics of accessing spaces & sports etc.

So trans activists of various kinds have not been able to just go with queer theory if they wanted to actually achieve anything & this means that even those who do base their concepts of sex & gender on queer theory also need to address objective realities.

Therefore, the kind of trans activism that can be called "Critical Social Justice" tends to be a messy mixture of queer theory concepts with intersectional feminist activism & a simplification & bastardisation of both.

This enables the activists to swing from assertions of objective truth, rooted in "experiential knowledge" connected to marginalised identity in the intersectional style to denials of any stable categories & objective truth in the queer theory style as the situation demands.