They decided to withdraw
Oh no oh horrors queer Australians are staying home.
Queer Australians are axing travel plans to Washington DC’s World Pride festival, as Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting LGBTQ+ rights leads to fears of discrimination at the US border and potential attacks.
He isn’t actually targeting lesbian and/or gay rights though. I hate him as much as you do but that lede is just a lie. It’s the usual lie, the one that pretends lesbian and gay rights are the same as purported trans rights, when they’re not even close. Purported trans rights are about being believed and endorsed and pampered and worshipped as women if you’re men and men if you’re women. There are no such rights. There is no human right to force other people to participate in one’s games of Let’s Pretend.
The Guardian was contacted by LGBTQ+ Australians, including trans and same-sex couples, who had scheduled trips to the US to incorporate World Pride but in recent weeks ditched their plans.
Mik Bartels is among them. The University of Canberra student, who is examining LGBTIQ+ discrimination in healthcare for their PhD, was offered a scholarship that covered travel expenses to attend World Pride’s human rights conference.
Bartels had attended the conference at the 2023 World Pride in Sydney and found it valuable for their research. “It brings together people from all disciplines – community leaders, scholars, academics from around the world,” they said.
You’re impressed by the scrupulous attention to the “they”s and “their”s yes?
However, after an Equality Australia travel warning and recent reports of discrimination in the US, they decided to withdraw their acceptance of the funded trip.
“Given my appearance as identifiably queer, my academic profile being centred on LGBTIQ+ discrimination, and my online presence where I am openly queer, I was not confident that I would be able to get into the US without being detained,” they said.
What’s an appearance as identifiably queer? Wearing a T shirt with “QUEER” on the front? Wearing a baseball cap with same? Bits of metal through the lips and nostrils and eyebrows?
“I’m conscious of the US government’s list of banned words in academic research – my own research includes about 20 of those words.
“I’m also hyper aware of how I present myself online. I’m quite visibly queer in how I look and dress. I realised there was a very real possibility of being detained. I didn’t withdraw the acceptance lightly, but felt [that] for my own safety, I needed to.”
Oh gosh, they’s hyper aware of how they presents theirself online – you don’t say. Of course they’s hyper aware of how they presents theyself: they is hyper aware of everything to do with theyself because they is embedded in a wildly narcissistic ideology that teaches people to think and talk and do “scholarship” about nothing but their precious SELVES.
Missing out on the conference and World Pride was a “double whammy”, Bartels said.
“When you spend a lot of your life building the confidence to carve out a space for yourself, that becomes a lifelong journey. Opportunities to celebrate that journey and to demonstrate my relationship proudly are rare, so for this to be taken away, it can feel like a bit of a kick in the guts,” Bartels said.
Well, never mind, you’ll still have precious beloved Self, so you’ll never really miss out on anything important.
I saw a snippet of an interview, a probably conservative reporter talking to a young woman at some Pride-adjacent event. The young woman described herself as queer. The reporter asked her what that meant; was she gay, was she trans? No, neither, she’s queer, it’s an identity. The reporter tried again, giving an example of “conservative”, and explaining what the term might mean. The young woman was unable to come up with anything, other than “it’s an identity”. The clip may have been somewhat edited to make a point, but I have little doubt that the term means little or nothing concrete, it’s just a way of declaring oneself to be different from those boring “normies” without having to specify anything.
So being queer is a lifelong journey. Who would have thought. Here I thought the lifelong journey was…life. I use it to expand my knowledge of the world in science, philosophy, and history. I don’t think I know as much about myself as I do about Johnson grass. You know what? That’s okay. I can live without my ‘journey’ being validated.
These people don’t realize how ridiculous they sound to normies, do they? Or maybe they just don’t care.
Didn’t see any facial hardware in my brief search for images, but they is a woman with shortish hair that isn’t even blue, purple, or green. She’s wearing a denim long sleeve shirt over a black T in her Guardian shot.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/may/07/world-pride-festival-washington-lgbtq-australians-cancel-travel
Maybe her queerness is an aura, the wavelength of which I’m not quantumly attuned to perceive. So, unless there are more extreme images I didn’t stumble on, she is not “…quite visibly queer in how I look and dress.” Scared because of her “visible queerness”? She’s wearing common casual clothing. She doesn’t even come close to Punk or Goth. She just wants to be special, and comforted, and pitied. Okay, I’ll “pity” her, but not for the reasons she’s whining about.
They are normies who can’t stand the idea that they are normies, who don an “identity” in order to be outstandingly special and revered. They want accolades and celebration without the hard work of accomplishment, or the cultivation of a skill or talent. They can’t even bother to dye their goddamn hair, yet they expect us to see they are “obviously”, “visibly” queer. Tell us what “queer” is, and maybe we’ll be able to see it in you if we squint really hard. ASs it is, you’re selling us a five star Michelin banquet, but all we see on the plate is a frozen TV dinner that is but indifferently microwaved.
In the past, Christian ascetics modestly kept their hair shirts tucked out of sight, as a matter of private penance and devotion, a constant, personal reminder of their continued distance from Divine perfection. Not so with this lot; they wear their “queerness” on the outside, and demand our awed appreciation of their stunning bravery. We’re the ones who are falling short of their awesomeness; we’re the ones who are expected to do penance for their sake. These narcissists want us to believe that their precious “identities” are some kind of imposed hardship or burden, for which we should admire, respect, and honour them.
YNnB:
It strikes me as possible, that unless they carry on all the time with all that narcissistic and attention-seeking behaviour they will reveal a constant inner grief.that it serves as cover for. Or, as that jazz pianist Richard M. Jones. put it in his classic blues song ‘Trouble in Mind’: “When you see me laughin’ / I’m laughin’ just to keep from cryin’.”
Or, as Henry Lawson put it (from my memory) “Two men walked along the road / And I walked in between: / The man I was, / The man I am, / And the man I might have been.” NB: Lawson died a hopeless alcoholic, condemned by many for his ‘self-pity.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pMmq08pxDU
Or they don’t even wear their “queerness” on the outside, they just assert it. Constantly.
YNnB, I agree on the whole. You’d walk past her on the street without thinking twice. If you really wanted to label her the shaved sides and clothes could maybe lean toward butch, but I’ve known straight women who looked more butch than that. I also wonder at the ultimate value and impartially of research into discrimination against alphabets when they are just so hyper aware of, well, nothing much. Trump is awful. I disagree with almost everything about him, including that he continues to breathe. I think all travellers are at some risk of detention and harassment at the border, including straight boring types. Overwhelming the people who have been pinged to date have had minor visa irregularities, which in the past resulted in less awful consequences.