V

VE/VER — A gender neutral neopronoun.

Like ne/nir, ve/ver is derivative of both he/him and she/her, to create a gender-balanced, gender neutral pronoun.

Like all pronouns, the use of ve/ver doesn’t necessarily indicate anything about the user’s gender; anyone can use gender neutral pronouns.

Ve is nice

I smiled at ver

Vis friends are cool

That’s vis

Ve loves verself

VER — see: VE/VER.

VERSATILE, VERS — Gay slang to describe someone who sexually enjoys both topping and bottoming.

Vers, as a category, destabilizes the false binary between top and bottom. It also disrupts the assumptions which get packaged with position and gender expression: that tops are dominant, large, and butch, while bottoms are submissive, small, and femme.

The language of top/bottom/vers is used by some as an identity label, but it doesn’t have to be. The purpose of these labels is to make it easier for queer people to find sexual partners, not to define your identity (unless you want it to).

see also: TOP; BOTTOM

VICTIM — Someone who has suffered violence.

Queer and trans people are made into victims by violence enacted upon us. We’re more likely to be physically assaulted, but also denied access to life-sustaining resources like housing and healthcare and employment. We are also victimized and denied agency in dominant narratives and microaggressions.

Some people who are victimized prefer to label themselves as survivors rather than victims; but either label can be empowering, depending on the feelings of the individual using it.

While queer people are routinely victimized, it’s important to note that the queer experience is not solely defined by victimhood. There is also queer joy, queer love, queer family, queer success, and gender euphoria.

VIOLENCE — A wide range of harms, both structural and personal.

Violence exists on a large scale. It is not especially useful to try to quantify violence and figure out who is “more oppressed” based on a checklist of their identities. Violence has many forms, including: physical, emotional, sexual, psychological (coercion), spatial (crossing boundaries between living space and work), collective social (bullying, weaponized activism, cultural violence), economic (poverty), and financial (withholding money, controlling spending).

Violence can be direct; or indirect, like silencing, erasure, disenfranchisement, structural negligence (e.g., no healthcare or housing), denial of resources, fetishization, hate speech, and respectability politics.

When it happens to entire groups of people, we experience collective violence which can result in inter-generational trauma, such as slavery, poverty, and the AIDS crisis.

Violences are both events and conditions, which are constantly reproduced. Everyone is capable of perpetuating violence, and to varying degrees we all participate in violent systems (such as capitalism); purity politics are of little use. But if we have principles of harm reduction, we can work to diminish the scale of violence.

The rhetoric of “violence on both sides” creates a false equivalence of power between self-defense (sometimes preemptive) and harmful people with structural power. “Queers bash back!” and “Kill all men” are violent (fantasies) but are not the same as structural violence because they do not pose a structural threat.

The “both sides” rhetoric also suggests that both sides are worthy of the same attention, and the same platform. But when we give violent speech (e.g., transmisogyny or white supremacy) a platform for “debate,” we’re legitimizing hate as a reasonable political opinion, and it becomes normalized. Hate speech should not be dignified with a response. When people demand that we respond “reasonably” and politely to hate speech, they are demanding exhausting emotional labor from the people most affected by that hate speech. We shouldn’t have to justify our existence; our basic human rights are not up for debate.

The “both sides” debate also assumes that both sides are equally invested in being reasonable, fact-checking, and listening to each other with empathy. It’s unfair to expect marginalized people to empathize with people who dehumanize us. That besides, it’s a total lost cause trying to debate with people who hold hateful views, because they are not interested in telling the truth, or adjusting their views to reflect facts or the experiences of other people. That energy would be better invested in living a dignified and compassionate life, highlighting the shared violences different groups face and working together to combat them; that is, instead of debating hate speech, we might lead by example.

VIRGIN — Someone who has never had sex.

Virginity is not a physical state; it’s a social concept used to describe sexual experience, and can only be defined by the individual.