This small and incredibly disliked community is this interesting, I can’t do them justice without giving them a full page. They’re my favourite niche queer online community to talk about whether I agree with them or not because they’re such a unique radical left view on identity and sexuality. I don’t plan on establishing my view on any of it here, that’s boring, I just want to infodump in your face about it. That’s what you came here for after all, right?
Almost all internet-homed queer identities will have been called problematic at some point, but the community I think of when I need an example of one that proudly screams ‘we’re problematic’ in the faces of those who criticise it as being just that, is the radqueer community. A community defined exclusively by the radical/problematic identities they support and validate rather than who they are (basically a discourse stance turned community)
[many of the links I use here are archives or completely missing because radqueers are controversial folks who get mass reported off of Tumblr a lot, especially for talking about paraphilias]
You’re likely to only be aware that they exist if you spend time on MOGAI/queer microlabel and radical inclusionism (supporting identities based on good-faith usage or as long as they’re harmless) Tumblr or possibly r/fakedisordercringe, though they also have several smaller Discord servers, many of which are invite-only. This is probably because it’s a frequently harassed community born out of less-niche-but-still-niche identities unrelated to traditional ideas of what ‘queer’ is.
The term has little to do with non-heterosexuality or non-cisgenderedness yet creates one of the biggest problems you can create for the queer community’s foundation - it questions how far they’re willing to take their core ideas by redefining ‘radical queerness’.
Essentially, radqueer says that if gender is a social construct that we can define and experience in our individual ways regardless of what’s expected by society, then can this apply to other social identifiers? And if you shouldn’t be discriminated against for your innate sexual attraction, which attractions should be protected and destigmatised?
Even if you’re comfortable with those questions existing, you may not be comfortable with the radqueer community’s common answers to them. Radqueer is (as of May 2022) defined as supporting “all sorts of identities, even ‘problematic’ ones” like transidentities (transids) and paraphilias (paras). It became a catch-all term combining these two pre-existing communities and their allies into one ideology-identity hybrid, with transids being a newer concept that followed the change easily at the time (’the transid community’ was, and still often is, rarely independent), and paraphilias being an older community that still stands alone somewhat strongly. Here’s a carrd explaining some basic definitions and key beliefs
[brief definitions of the two that’ll be explored later: transidentity: any identity that is ‘trans’ or not ‘cis’, including transgender but focusing on transage, trace (previously transracial but this has another definition), transabled, and more paraphilia: recurring or intense atypical sexual attraction, different from a paraphilic disorder though those with disorders are welcomed by the community | some have made definitions removing sexual connotations to be inclusive of asexual paraphiles | carrd from within the community]
Its first definition from November 2021 is mostly defunct but many of its views can be seen throughout the community. It’s much more detailed, radical, and liberation-focused and I’m surprised it didn’t prevail as it’s everything you want in an oppositional ideology, whereas the new radqueer barely has a common ideology beyond supporting two concepts. The old definition talks about the rejection and lack of awareness of these identities from the queer community and their inherent queerness due to their non-normativity, goes against calling things ‘disorders’ ‘ill’ etc, says that radqueer and its flag can be interchangeable with queer, and calls queer ‘radically inclusive in itself’, defining it as ‘whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, and the dominant’.
I find it to be the better coining as it does a lot more than just supporting these identities but establishing a place for them in queerness, a goal, and a core belief system. Whether it was left out due to the coiner’s account termination (as is the case for lots of radqueer tumblr accounts, annoyingly for me), controversies with the coiner, the input of the second coiner, or if it was just easier to strip the term down to something more ‘swallowable’ for a wider audience, is unclear.
[Whilst the coining post does not specify contact at all, it may be relevant to add that the original coiner was pro-contact at least at the time of coining (though this may have changed and some info could be wrong). From what I’ve gathered, a few days before the previous link was posted, radqueer was posted to this account which I’m assuming is the same person as it’s the same definition but the post is shorter. On this account, you can scroll down and see that the coiner identified as “nocoha and yellow” which are defined further down the page. It’s also likely that the same person coined Xenosatanism. It’s clear that most people who saw the coining didn’t know about any of this as it gained popularity on a different account, and most only knew of it after the recoin or never got to see a non-archived coining post of it]
I found it odd how this combo come about as the paraphilia community has typically stuck to their own forums and websites due to platforms’ Terms of Service and online harassment, with exceptions for more common paraphilias seen in adult spaces online. With the context of the first definition though, I think I can see why, with paraphilias as ‘queerness extended by attraction’ and transidentities as ‘queerness extended by transness’. There are also some connections between the para, especially (No)MAP [(non-offending) minor attracted person/s], community and the transage community, one of the main transids.