Queer people are often exhausted by systems that run perfectly well — for someone else.
A mother says to her adult child, who has explained more than once that they are asexual and don’t want a sexual relationship: “I don’t care if you don’t want sex. I want grandbabies. Can’t you do this for me? I never ask anything of you!”
This example happens in real life but is not the norm. Most people never say it that plainly, but that is what makes it a good one to start with, because there is often a similar subtext across many experiences. Stripped of manners, the request is: “rearrange yourself so I can be comfortable” and “absorb the cost so I don’t have to.”
Some version of that request is a daily feature of queer life.
The tax nobody itemizes
Float yourself over a living room scene where the parents have watched television most evenings for thirty years, and every show has been about heterosexual people falling in love and cisgender people going on about their daily lives. There is no intent to exclude here because nobody picked those shows to hurt anyone. They cost the people on the couch nothing. They cost the person in the room who has never once seen themselves on screen something small, every night, for thirty years.
Now float over a tenth-grade health class covering what happens to boys and what happens to girls. Not malice. Curriculum. It works for most of the room. For the students it doesn’t fit, it’s forty minutes of learning that their body and their future weren’t on the syllabus. Then the bell rings and everyone goes to lunch.
Or the grandbabies.
None of this is cruelty. In each case, somebody’s ordinary functioning depends on somebody else passively accommodating. One person is comfortable because another person is absorbing cost after cost.
The symptom almost everyone misreads
People who live this way long enough tend to arrive at the same cluster, and queer-affirming therapists see it constantly. Tired in a way sleep doesn’t touch. Confused about why ordinary things feel so heavy or why other people seem to have it all together. Angry, with nowhere useful to point it, so it gets pointed inward. Coping in ways they don’t feel good about. And underneath all of it, one explanation that seems to cover everything at once: “something must be wrong with me.”
From the inside, that conclusion makes excellent sense. When you’re doing the breathing, the walks (barefoot) in the grass, maybe even keeping a gratitude list, but still feeling terrible by nine in the morning, the obvious culprit must be you.
It isn’t. You’re paying rent.
Living inside an arrangement that requires constant accommodation literally taxes a person who is operating at a deficit.
What dysfunction actually is
A dysfunctional system is not a system that doesn’t work.
It’s a system that works for someone.
An arrangement that served nobody would have collapsed years ago. Its survival is the evidence. Something holds it in place, and that something is usually a person, or a few people, for whom the current setup is smooth, easy, and completely unremarkable.
So the first question is never “what is broken here.” It’s: “who is this working for?”
Why explaining it never works
The beneficiary typically isn’t hidden. Queer people can usually name them in about four seconds. They’re the ones we’re most exasperated by, the ones we keep hoping will finally understand, the ones we explain ourselves to over and over, desperate to get empathy, with identical results.
What seems mysterious is why they won’t see it. But look at the trade from their side. To see the arrangement clearly they’d have to accept a loss — of comfort, of certainty, of a story about their family or their school or themselves — for no gain at all. They aren’t monsters. The deal just doesn’t add up.
That’s why twenty years of patient explanation can produce nothing. It was never going to persuade someone who has to pay for it.
Which leads to the hardest sentence here. Their recognition may never be available, and it was never the prerequisite for anything.
Taking the word back
Dysfunction has been aimed at queer people for well over a century. Disordered. Deviant. Diagnosable. Whole professions were built on the premise that the malfunction sat inside the person.
There is some value in turning the word around, then, and pointing it where it belongs: at the arrangement. Not at the kid who went quiet at dinner, but at a dinner table that required it. Not at the exhausted adult, but at the setup that keeps drawing on them.
I want to be clear that this isn’t wordplay. Something shifts when a person can name the thing they’re standing inside of. It stops being their character and becomes an object, with a shape and a beneficiary and a price. Objects can be examined, argued with, and decided about. Characters cannot.
The inventory
Pick one specific, recurring situation. Not the whole of your life. One scene that happens over and over.
1. What is the arrangement? Describe the scene, not the category. Not “my family is homophobic,” but “at every holiday, I’m the only adult nobody asks about their relationship.”
2. Who does it work for? Name the person. If the answer is “everyone,” look again.
3. What does it cost me? Energy, time, money, visibility, safety, self-respect. Name the actual currency.
4. Am I in this by choice, or by conscription? The honest answer, not the generous one.
5. If I’m keeping it, what am I keeping it for? What is it actually offering me, what price am I accepting, and when will I look at this again?
Run it separately for family, for friends, for partners, for work, and for public life. The answers won’t match, and the mismatch is information.
Conscription and willing sacrifice
Now the part that surprises people.
Question five usually doesn’t change the behavior. Someone maps the entire architecture of a holiday dinner with total clarity, and then goes to the dinner.
That isn’t a failure of the exercise, a betrayal of self OR a betrayal of queer community.
The behavior can be identical. The engine driving it is not. Going because there’s no other option and no way to even think about it is conscription. Going because a sibling relationship is worth two uncomfortable hours a year, or because the housing isn’t optional this year, or because a parent is old and there isn’t much time left, is a decision. Made by a person. From a value they can name.
Same room. Same silence. Completely different energy.
Naming the value isn’t a consolation prize for people who can’t leave. It’s the difference between being spent and spending.
The question was “who is this working for?” Conscription has one answer: someone else. Choice adds a second. The moment you can say what the arrangement offers you — “this dinner buys me my sister,” “this silence keeps my housing,” “these two hours are the price of a parent I won’t have forever” — the system starts working for you too. Not because it got fairer. Because you identified something it has to offer and decided, on purpose, to collect it.
That is what makes a very dysfunctional system function for us. Not pretending it is healthy. Naming, specifically, what we are getting out of it, and taking it as payment instead of losing it as cost.
About opting out
Where opting out is available, it deserves more serious consideration than most people give it.
Where it isn’t, that’s not a failure of nerve. Plenty of queer people are inside arrangements that hold their housing, their income, their health coverage, or their last thread to a family member who won’t be alive forever. Staying to protect those things is a choice made from values, and it should be recorded that way.
Small opt-outs count too. Leaving the room. Declining to explain, again. Not correcting the pronoun for the one-hundred-and-forty-first time, and letting that be a decision instead of a defeat. Skipping one event out of five. None of these require anyone else’s permission.
What actually changes
Back to the grandbabies.
The adult child in that conversation might say yes. Might say no. Might say nothing at all. The outcome isn’t the point.
What changes is that there’s a question being answered now, rather than a request being absorbed. Someone is deciding, on purpose, for a reason they could say out loud if anyone asked.
The question has a second answer now. The arrangement is still working for whoever it was built around. It is also working for the person who chose — because they can name exactly what it offers them, and they are taking it.
A person can change nothing visible and still stop being conscripted. Once the arrangement is written down, with a name and a beneficiary and a price attached, it stops being their character. It becomes something outside them that they get to handle.
For anyone who has spent years assuming the problem lived somewhere inside them, that may be the whole result.
Looking for LGBTQ-affirming therapy in Philadelphia?
Mapping these arrangements is slow, specific work, and it goes better with someone who doesn’t need the basics explained first. Queer-affirming therapy should start from the assumption that the exhaustion isn’t a personal defect, and then get practical about where the choices actually are.
Dr. Thomas Wood, LCSW, CST-S is a relationship and sexuality therapist and certified sex therapist supervisor offering queer-affirming and LGBTQ-affirming therapy in Philadelphia and Chadds Ford, for individuals and couples across the LGBTQ+ community.
To get started, reach out here.
