"Not exactly 'straight'"

Is 'queer' when a woman is a person?

A tremendous amount of culture-wars angst has occurred over the question of whether it’s ‘non-binary’ when a woman feels herself to be more person than woman. Somewhere along the line, it got decided that woman was limited, restricting, exclusionary, so there was this explosion of rhetoric about women*, women+, women-and-femmes, and so on. Of rhetoric. In the world of actual people, women were still going around calling themselves women 99.9999999999999% of the time or thereabouts. Most of the people identifying as non-binary were in fact androgynous-presenting, though it would indeed be funny whenever some mega-feminine-presenting married-to-a-man sort of lady would be like, ‘I’m Mrs. Chad and my pronouns are she/they because I enjoy sports and hamburgers.’

Where a more meaningful shift has occurred is in women identifying as, or being classified as, some or another form of ‘queer’ for unspecified reasons, or for specified ones that do not amount to being gay, bi, or trans.

As I mentioned, my new Instagram foists upon me various genres of content, throwing things at the wall to see what sticks style. First was the wholesome Jewish memes, then the lesbian comedians. It’s that phase of algorithmic scrolling that introduced me to the following video and, more to the point, its comments.

The video itself, part of a series, is clearly a bit, a character who is on the cusp of realizing something about herself. She’s not a butch straight woman but a closeted mega-lesbian. I’m not going to claim to find this the height of comedy, but it is comedic, it is in that realm. I’m not the target audience. Not because I’m not a lesbian but because I’m the target audience for comedy about weird curmudgeonly men. (Victor Meldrew, c’est moi.) Which kind of brings us to the point here.