Still Here, Still Queer: Neuroqueerness, Utopia, and the End of Empire
Queerness isn’t just survival—it’s the blueprint for a world beyond capitalism and empire. Rejecting assimilation, this manifesto embraces neuroqueerness, fluidity, and the utopian future we’re already living.
Introduction
I have been thinking a lot about exhaustion. About the kind of exhaustion that seeps into the bones—not the kind that sleep can fix, but the kind that comes from a world that was never built for you. Burnout, yes, but also something deeper. A weariness from the sheer weight of existence in a system that demands too much and offers too little. From the constant negotiation of space in a world that sees you as inconvenient. From the never-ending fight to be understood on your own terms.
The Tangerine Tyrant and his ilk are not an aberration—they are the logical conclusion of capitalism in its death throes, doubling down on control as it loses legitimacy. The cruelty, the rollback of rights, the narrowing of what is considered acceptable existence—all of it is designed to crush deviation, to force everyone back into the moulds that sustain the system. But queerness has always been the thing that slips through the cracks. It is not just an identity but a methodology—a way of being that does not fit, that does not comply, that does not accept the limits imposed upon it.
In Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz argues that queerness is not just resistance but a utopian force—something that exists beyond the present, always pulling us forward, always refusing to be confined to what already is. Queerness, then, is not just about survival in this moment—it is the answer to the failures of capitalism, the rise of authoritarianism, and the rigid structures that dictate whose lives are legible, whose futures are possible.
I feel this acutely. My neuroqueerness—my non-binary identity, my autistic temporality, my refusal to be pinned down into neat categories—has always placed me at odds with the world’s expectations. The neuro-majority demands coherence, legibility, a story that makes sense on their terms. But I have never been particularly interested in making myself legible to them. My burnout—both from capitalism’s relentless demands and from the firehosing of the regime’s never-ending atrocities—has only made me retreat deeper into my queerness. Not as an escape, but as a refusal.
I have been thinking, too, about foreignness. Not just in the literal sense—though my accent still marks me as an outsider even after all these years—but in the deeper, more existential way. The sense that I do not belong here, that this world was not built with people like me in mind. I have spent my life navigating spaces that were never designed for me, translating myself into forms that others could understand, often to my own detriment. But queerness reminds me that I do not have to contort myself into something I am not. That I do not owe anyone an explanation for existing. That I do not need to make sense to them.
One can be queer and trans, obviously, but neither dictates whom one chooses as a romantic partner—if one chooses one at all, or many. The rigid assumptions that tether gender to attraction, that seek to categorise and contain, are relics of a world obsessed with ownership. Queerness disrupts this, just as it disrupts everything else. It says you do not have to be one thing. You do not have to fit into the categories they have given you. You do not have to follow their script.
Queerness, then, is not just about what we are not—not straight, not binary, not normative—but about what we are becoming. It is not a rejection for rejection’s sake, but a refusal to be constrained by the limits of the present. It is an opening, a horizon, a way forward when everything else is collapsing.
The empire is in decline. The regime is tightening its grip. But queerness is still here. I am still here. And I refuse to be anything other than everything that they fear.
The False Promises of Assimilation – How the Mainstream LGBTQ+ Movement Abandoned Liberation
There is a myth that progress is linear. That once rights are won, they are never lost. That history moves in one direction, always forward. But history does not work that way, and neither does power. Power does not relinquish control—it shifts, adapts, rebrands. The mainstream LGBTQ+ movement has spent decades selling the illusion that the fight is nearly over, that queerness can be tidied up, packaged, made respectable. That if we just prove we are just like them, they will let us in. But queerness was never meant to be about getting a seat at their table—it was about building something else entirely.
The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) has long embodied this failure. It has always prioritised assimilation over transformation, securing victories for those who could fit within the existing order whilst leaving behind everyone who could not. When HRC lobbied for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) in 2007, it actively chose to abandon trans people, backing a version that protected only sexual orientation and cutting gender identity protections loose. The justification? That it was pragmatic—that trans rights could be dealt with later, after securing protections for cis gay and lesbian people. Later never came.
Instead, the movement poured everything into so-called “marriage equality,” as though state recognition of love would somehow dismantle a system built on exclusion. As though access to military service—the right to kill and be killed in imperialist wars—was the pinnacle of liberation. Where were these institutions when trans people were being murdered? When we were being denied healthcare? When we were homeless, jobless, fighting for survival? The answer is simple: they were never built for us.
In Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz critiques what he calls “gay pragmatism”—the idea that LGBTQ+ movements should pursue incremental, respectable victories rather than radical upheaval. He argues that this approach neuters queerness, closing off its potential to imagine something beyond what already exists. This is exactly what has happened. The mainstream movement has spent decades making queerness palatable to the very systems that harm us. And for what? For corporate sponsorships? For token representation in the halls of power? For rainbow capitalism and police at Pride?
I have lived through these betrayals. I have watched as queerness became a branding tool, useful only when it could be marketed, sanitised, stripped of its radical potential. I have seen how these organisations speak in empty platitudes while trans people are left crowdfunding for healthcare, for rent, for safety. I have felt the weight of their abandonment, the way they step back the moment queerness becomes inconvenient, the moment we refuse to play by their rules.
The Tangerine Tyrant and his war on trans existence did not come from nowhere. The far-right has gained ground not just because of their cruelty, but because the institutions that claimed to fight for us were never prepared for an actual fight. They were built for negotiation, not resistance. They were built for appeasement, not revolution. And now, as trans people are facing a level of state violence not seen in decades, HRC and its allies are laying off staff, restructuring, retreating. We should not be surprised. This is what they have always done.
There is no assimilation that will save us. No amount of politeness, respectability, or legal recognition will dismantle a system that was designed to keep us out. The only path forward is to stop asking to be let in and start tearing the doors off their hinges.
Neuroqueerness & The Failure of Capitalist Time
Capitalism demands order. Not just in the sense of productivity quotas and efficiency metrics, but in something deeper—a demand for legibility, for predictability, for the categorisation of everything and everyone into neat, discrete units. Capitalism cannot function without rigid binary roles: worker and boss, man and woman, disabled and abled, productive and unproductive. It treats people the way it treats time—as something to be measured, divided, optimised. To exist outside of that order is to be unaccounted for, unrecognisable, a glitch in the system.
Queerness, by its very nature, disrupts this order. Neuroqueerness even more so.
I have never experienced time the way capitalism demands I do. Autistic temporality is nonlinear, recursive—a constant rewriting of past and future based on new information. For me, memories are not filed away in a chronological sequence but stored as gestalts—patterns of meaning, moments that reconfigure themselves the instant new context emerges. When I came out, my history did not remain static; it rearranged itself to accommodate my truth. The past, in an instant, made more sense than it ever had before.
Capitalist time does not allow for this. It insists that who you were yesterday dictates who you are today, dictates who you will be tomorrow. It insists that the past is fixed, the future is linear, and the only movement that matters is progress in the direction that serves power. But neuroqueerness resists this entirely. If time itself is fluid—if the self is in constant flux—then so is everything built upon the assumption that time is rigid.
This is why capitalism is inherently hostile to queerness. Not just because queerness refuses to conform to its roles, but because queerness reveals the lie that those roles were ever real in the first place.
In Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz argues that queerness is always about the future—always about refusing the limitations of the present, always about imagining something beyond what currently exists. It is not just an identity but a horizon, something that is never fully realised because it is always unfolding. Autistic time functions the same way—it is not a straight line, but a field of possibilities, constantly shifting, never fully settled.
I feel this in my own experience of identity. As a gestalt processor, as alexithymic, as non-binary, my understanding of self does not fit into the clear-cut categories that the neuro-majority expects. The world wants coherence, a single, stable answer to the question "Who are you?" But I do not have one. Or rather, I have many. And they are all true, all at once.
Neuroqueerness is not just a disruption of gender norms; it is a disruption of the very way identity, productivity, and knowledge are structured. It resists the demand for static answers. It resists the notion that anything must be final. It insists that identity—like time, like queerness itself—is always in motion, always becoming.
Capitalism cannot function in a world that operates this way. The Tangerine Tyrant and his followers understand this instinctively. Their war on trans existence, on disabled people, on queerness, is not just a culture war—it is an existential defence of capitalist order. They cannot allow a world where gender is fluid, where bodies do not conform, where minds are not disciplined into compliance. They cannot allow a world where people refuse to be counted, categorised, made legible.
But that world is already here.
Every time we refuse to make ourselves small enough to fit inside their systems, every time we live in ways they cannot comprehend, we are already breaking their hold. Queerness, neuroqueerness, autistic temporality—these are not just identities, they are tools of escape. They are the cracks in the foundation. The parts of the system that will never fully be brought to heel.
And if capitalism cannot contain us?
Then capitalism will not survive us.
Queerness as the Antidote to Empire
Empire is built on discipline, hierarchy, and scarcity—all enforced through violence, whether that violence is visible or carefully concealed beneath bureaucracy. It is a system that demands control: control over land, over bodies, over knowledge, over time itself. It functions by convincing people that its structures are natural, that hierarchy is inevitable, that some must always suffer for others to thrive. Queerness dissolves all of this. Not just by opposing it, but by rendering its entire logic irrelevant.
Empire cannot tolerate fluidity. It requires borders, not just on maps but between people, between identities, between what is permitted and what must be erased. The colonial project was always about more than conquest; it was about the imposition of rigid categories—civilised and savage, male and female, rational and irrational. The same logic that justified the enslavement of fellow human beings, land theft, and genocide is the one that pathologised queerness and neurodivergence.
Consider drapetomania—the so-called “mental illness” that described an enslaved person’s desire to escape. Psychiatry did not “discover” drapetomania. It invented it, because empire could not comprehend that someone might refuse to be owned. The field of psychiatry has always served power in this way—defining as “illness” anything that refuses the order imposed from above. The same mechanisms that once diagnosed Black rebellion as madness now classify trans existence as a “disorder” and autistic communication as “impairment.” Empire medicalises deviation, then demands compliance in exchange for “care.”
I think often of Dr. Nick Walker, whose work in Neuroqueer Heresies reshaped my understanding of these forces. She describes neuroqueering as the practice of deliberately disrupting both neuro-normativity and hetero-normativity at once—breaking down not just individual norms, but the entire framework that upholds them. To neuroqueer is to refuse ownership, to reject the idea that identity must be fixed, that bodies must be disciplined, that knowledge must be hoarded rather than shared.
Western thought—steeped in colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchal control—cannot conceive of being without ownership. It assumes that knowledge must be possessed, that gender must be defined, that the self must be stable and coherent. It cannot fathom identity as something fluid, relational, ever-evolving. And yet, that is exactly what queerness is. That is exactly what neuroqueerness is.
I do not see my body as me. It is a tool, a conveyance, a means of navigating a world that was never designed for me. It is a problem to solve, a site of negotiation, an uneasy truce between what I am and what I must endure. My experience of self does not reside in it, nor in any singular moment, nor in any single definition. I am not one thing, and I never have been. But empire requires that I be one thing—a gender, a role, a category, a number in its endless calculations. Queerness refuses this.
To be neuroqueer is to break down ownership itself—of identity, of time, of knowledge. It is to reject the idea that there is a singular, correct way to be, or that we must explain ourselves in ways that make sense to those in power. Empire demands compliance, but queerness does not negotiate with empire.
Queerness is not subversion for subversion’s sake—it is survival in a world that was built to erase us. It is not resistance as reaction, but existence as defiance. It is the realisation that we do not owe them our legibility, our coherence, or our submission.
And when empire crumbles, as it inevitably must, it will not be because queerness fought it on its terms. It will be because queerness built something beyond its comprehension.
The Manifesto – Still Here, Still Queer
Queer as in—more trans than Spider-People slinging through the Marvel multiverse, because at least they get to exist in a world where transformation is just another Tuesday and not a political battleground.
Queer as in—knowing that the desire to escape enslavement was once classified as a mental illness—drapetomania—because freedom itself was seen as pathological. Knowing that psychiatry has always been a tool of control, a scalpel in the hands of power, carving out who is ‘normal’ and who must be ‘corrected.’
Queer as in—psychiatry is not neutral, never has been, never will be.
Queer as in—the difference between prompts and cues, between compliance and connection, between training and teaching.
Queer as in—understanding that ‘normal’ is not an objective state but a weapon, sharpened against those who refuse to conform.
Queer as in—European ecological imperialism paved over entire worlds, renamed destruction as ‘progress,’ called conquest ‘civilisation’—and I refuse to be part of that cycle.
Queer as in—not just rejecting their future, but imagining one they can’t comprehend.
Queer as in—capitalism requires poverty to function. A living wage for all is structurally impossible because the system demands a surplus of suffering to keep the machine running.
Queer as in—if we want liberation, we don’t ask, we don’t beg, we don’t negotiate. We build.
Queer as in—the Socialist Commandments, because what is queerer than the belief that no one should go hungry, no one should be unhoused, no one should be sacrificed for the profit margins of the ruling class?
Queer as in—if you think we’ll settle for rainbow capitalism and legal scraps, you’ve misread the entire situation.
Queer as in—not just identity, not just survival, but a position from which to attack the reproduction of ‘normal,’ the systems that make queerness a liability rather than a birthright.
Queer as in—not here to be tolerated. Not here to assimilate. Not here to make anyone comfortable.
Queer as in—the storm they didn’t prepare for, the fire they can’t put out, the revolution they pretend not to see coming.
Still here. Still queer. And never going back.
Final thoughts …
There is nothing left to salvage. This world was never built for us. It has spent centuries trying to erase, discipline, and assimilate us—telling us that we must fight for our place within it, that our best hope is to be tolerated, permitted, contained. But we do not need to reform this world. We need to exit it.
The neuroqueer, the gender-expansive, the ones who live outside capitalist time—we are not anomalies. We are the future. Our ways of thinking, of being, of existing in relation rather than domination—these are not disruptions to be corrected. They are blueprints. They are escape routes.
Cruising Utopia was never about waiting. Muñoz’s queer utopia was not some distant horizon—it was something to be lived now, in defiance of a world that refuses to recognise it. A refusal to accept that the present is all there is. A rejection of the demand to be patient, to be pragmatic, to compromise for the comfort of those who benefit from our silence.
We are done negotiating.
We are done begging for inclusion in a system that was designed to erase us. We are done making ourselves legible to those who will never see us. We are done waiting for permission to exist. They cannot imagine the world we are building, because they have spent too long ensuring that it could never exist. But we are living in it already. We have been, all along.
The empire is collapsing. The old world is crumbling under the weight of its own contradictions. And when it falls, it will not be because queerness destroyed it.
It will be because queerness had already moved on.
The future is here. The future is queer.
Whether they like it or not.