Insisting that "queerness is not a mental illness" has been one of the biggest mistakes that has been done in the fight for queer liberation and it set liberation back massively.
It justified mental illness as a concept, and thus justified the colonization of the mind and left the door open for the colonization of the body through that, a massive blocker for anybody trying to access care (but especially trans people).
It accepted a view of the mind and body that is not grounded in autonomy, but colonial practice.
Mental illness as such doesn't exist, there are self-desired and self-undesired mental states and it is on us to choose which once we want and which once we don't, altering them with whatever practice and tool we see fit.
But what racial-class paternalism instead creates in the world right now is a colonial hierarchy of not-self desired mental states, connected to the concept of whiteness and measured by how productive one can be. This is what the statement "queerness is not a mental illness" supports.
This of course also ends up driving a fundamental rhetorical wedge between queer liberation and mad liberation, since it puts queer liberation solely in the the realm of assimilation and rejects any notion of an anti-colonial view of the world.
It puts limiters of how far the abolition of ableness (and through that whiteness) can go.
In the end "queerness is not a mental illness" is a saneist, assimilationist, pro-whiteness and pro-colonial statement.
Queerness is a mental illness in that it goes against what neurocolonizers see an acceptable mental state to be, it is a disablility since it goes against the expectations set by colonialist structures. And if we don't accept that, we will never be able to get queer liberation.
#queer #anticolonial #liberation #mad