Critical inclusionism aimed to solve the problem of radical inclusionists being ‘too inclusive’ on the grounds of harmless/good-faith identities, as well as answer radqueer’s challenges to queer inclusionism: 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 like race and age? And if you shouldn’t be discriminated against for your innate sexual attraction, which attractions should be protected and destigmatised?
It answered these challenges to the exclusionism of transids/paraphilias by defining ‘valid queer identities’ as all identities that are, to put it bluntly, ‘obviously okay’ by way of a critical analysis of the identity to decide if it causes issues or not. Essentially, if an identity is too ‘obviously wrong’, you can rightfully conclude that it’s invalid and so harmful and so should be excluded. It comes from a perspective of assuming immediately that proshipping and being trace (feeling aligned with a race that is not your ‘bodily’ one), for example, is inherently harmful - I would’ve gone along with this more if the coiner provided a critical analysis showing how they got to this conclusion, but they didn’t
In my honest opinion (oh no personal influence again), all it really did was provide grounds to exclude rather than to include, and it targeted identities completely unrelated to queerness like proshipping, and identities only some people relate to queerness like trace and transabled, yet uses queer liberation as the lens to look at them through. Critical inclusionists don’t actually need to critically analyse any identity radinclus people unanimously consider good-faith, as queer identities are inherently accepted. They rarely critically analyse any of these ‘anomaly identities’, at least not neutrally and without expecting to exclude them from the start. It doesn’t encourage the forming of new opinions, but justifies opinions you already have whether or not you’ve conducted a critical analysis.
I agree that sometimes you need to look at the bigger picture of an identity to truly understand it, but you don’t need to truly understand an identity to leave it alone - there’s an exaggeration here of how much harm a niche social identity can do just by existing, and not enough of a focus on the actions of individuals. Instead, it treats identities like self-responsible people, and blames identifiers for the actions other identifiers could take. It says “x is an invalid identity because some people might do y due to being x” rather than “y isn’t a good thing to do”, and makes ‘y’ a problem that can be solved just by excluding the somewhat-associated identity ‘x’.
In short, it’s just a word for being radinclus and specifically antiship and anti-radqueer, beliefs that are already the norm in the radinclus community. Unbiased critical analysis isn’t usually a part of it in practice.
Critinclus does try to tell us what to think about when we conduct a critical analysis at least, though in the final section of this, I address how you can’t actually conduct your own unless your conclusion matches the coiner’s. I still wanted to pick it apart, however.
Under critical inclusionism, an identity ‘deserves to exist’ because of its “context, history, relevance, and the factual invalidity of claims surrounding potential harm in the context of queer liberation”. It goes on to say that “labels in the realm of gender identity and sexuality are not inherently valid or invalid, they exist and therefore they deserve to exist because queer liberation has historically been about the liberation of all minorities and therefore radical love of queer identity is contextually more important than semantics”.
You don’t need to critically analyse any sexuality or gender labels because we should radically love queer identities, making critinclus immediately not about traditionally queer identities and also making it inherently radinclus anyway. But what actually is a queer identity? Not everyone agrees that they’re only identities pertaining to sexuality or gender, and radqueers would argue that paraphilias pertain to sexuality and so also deserve liberation. Some pro-contacts could take that as far as to say they deserve liberation from legal restrictions on expressing paraphilic attraction and being in consensual paraphilic relationships. Putting a safety blanket over a vague category of identity is problematic and I’m surprised I’ve never seen anyone point this out.
More annoyingly, it forgets that queer identities can be coined brand new with no history or real context to look at, like xenogenders, of which I think are much more practically argued for from a radinclus perspective - they don’t hurt anyone and they’re useful forms of self-expression for some queer people with unique relationships to gender. From a critinclus perspective, I’d probably give up halfway through an attempted link to queer liberation and history, because it doesn’t need one. Queer identities are more than just their history.
What are we excluding identities from?
Critinclus extends this queer liberation-based method of analysis to identities that don’t fall into common ideas of queerness, many of which are used by people who don’t consider them queer identities. It calls exclusionism ‘disgusting’ but excludes any identities that don’t have a known historical place in queer liberation from…what exactly? From queerness? But what if they aren’t trying to be included under the queer label?
On the surface, it seems like critinclus is only referring to what should be considered queer, but it doesn’t just say that the identities it excludes aren’t queer - it says that they’re harmful. The perspective makes it so that any non-gender and non-sexuality with no history in queer liberation cannot be properly analysed. It can’t just be ‘good-faith’ because it’s harmless, or else we’re just radinclus again. It’s either harmful or yields no result - it neither deserves to exist nor doesn’t. This makes critical inclusionism the perfect tool for labelling terms you don’t like as harmful whilst also being completely useless in proving the validity of anything that isn’t ‘valid by default’.
These identities are being excluded from acceptance on the grounds that they cause harm to the world in general, not just the queer community, despite the fact that you’re supposed to judge it in the context of queer liberation, and its uneven criteria for acceptance makes it seem like a tool for exclusion and nothing else. Critical inclusionism accepts the identity of alterhuman, for example, but we shouldn’t need to analyse this identity in the context queer liberation to be inclusive of it. We’re clearly not supposed to use this method to include things. A gender or sexuality = unquestioning acceptance, another identity = this supposed critical analysis the whole term is based on to decide if it’s okay or not, of which you have no option but to agree with the general consensus or else you have no critical thinking skills.