acertainknot:

“I don’t want to blame shrill SJW college queers for anything, because they’re doing the same thing Truscum are doing (and the same thing I’m doing in the museum) however distastefully, which is just trying to navigate a culture that tells us personal identity matters a lot, consumer identity matters a lot. A huge part of my experience of affluent white American culture, since my childhood, was being expected to define myself as an individual, through my dress and taste and academic performance and literally any other choice I made. Like making a character at the beginning of an RPG. Public symbols as everything, starter pack meme as everything. And I think this context of constructed self-hood in alienated consumerism is conducive to anxiety, and I think young people who are negotiating with queerness and transness sometimes want those variances—especially since they’re punishable with the painful consequences of homophobia or transphobia—to do a bunch of work for them. A lot of young people—and I struggled with this too—want queerness or transness to answer the existential question, “who am I,” when in fact the construction of that question in alienated consumer capitalism is basically unanswerable in a meaningful personal way.”

— Baer, H., 2022. Trans Girl Suicide Museum. Los Angeles: Hesse Press. p. 129.