This is not a piece of writing about hating the queer community. If anything, it is the opposite, because I am really also articulating the voices of my LGBTQ friends and mutuals who have echoed these exact sentiments. The community fought actual battles, whether legal, social or physical for the right to exist openly.

Yet, what we are watching now, across pop music, social media and the dating landscape is a slow colonization of that hard-won space by people who want the aesthetic without the adversity.

Sabrina Carptenter… Being Queer-Adjacent

The “House Tour” music video dropped earlier this week, and very honestly, I found it fun. Sabrina Carpenter robs a mansion with Madelyn Cline and Margaret Qualley, all three of them dressed immaculately. There’s a stolen Grammy. There is a tarantula. They are clearly having a blast.

There is also, unmistakably, a flirtatious charge between the three. None of the three women have claimed to be queer. Sabrina Carpenter, in fact, has pretty explicitly identified as straight. And yet, the video is clearly lit and directed to fell, if not sexual, then at least adjacent to sexual between the women. It makes you wonder. It makes a certain audience feel seen, and then to stop just short of actually seeing them.

This is the new queerbaiting.

The original meaning of the term referred to a media industry tactic. Showrunners who would write two male characters with unmistakable romantic tension, deny it in interviews, and cash in on the resulting fan speculation without ever committing to the representation. The practice was intended to attract queer or straight ally audiences with the suggestion of queer relationships, while not alienating homophobic members of the audience or censors by explicitly portraying those relationships. It was a calculated hedge: get the queer audience's money and attention, give them nothing real in return.

What Sabrina Carpenter does is a more personal and arguably more insidious version. She is not a showrunner. She is a person, which means accusations of queerbaiting get complicated quickly, because we can’t know anyone’s sexuality, the closet is real, nobody owes anybody a coming-out announcement. These are all fair points. But there is a distinction worth making, and it runs through the centre of all of this: there is a difference between an artist who is queer and chooses not to label herself, and an artist who isn’t queer and keeps gesturing at queerness anyway because it’s profitable and aesthetically interesting right now.

The “Taste” video from last year made this even more explicit: Carpenter appeared kissing Jenna Ortega in a video that mixed horror film references with a plot that ultimately centred on two women’s rivalry over the same man, before they set aside their differences and kissed at the end. The kiss, in that context, functions as a punchline, a twist, a spectacle, not as a genuine depiction of female desire. It’s queer-flavoured content made for a straight gaze, including, importantly, the straight male gaze that has always found two women kissing titillating precisely because it poses no threat to the existing order.

So… if Sabrina isn’t queer, what is it? Heteropessimism, coined in 2019 by writer Asa Seresin describes the attitude of disappointment, embarrassment, or despair at the state of heterosexual relations. It is the “boyfriends are embarrassing… but I have one” energy. Very ironically, it depicts a love hate relationship, centering men.

Sabrina Carpenter’s persona is essentially that. Her whole brand is built around men being somewhat disappointing — “I think I’ve got a cuter word for it! Manchild!”. She is always the too-smart-for-him girl, the one who knows she's too good for this, the one who sings about men with a kind of fond, very fond, exasperation.

Being queer-friendly is not the same as being queer representation. Showing up to perform a set flanked by drag queens… lovely! Genuinely staging your music videos to imply you might be bisexual when you are not… less lovely, actually.

The #WLW pipeline

The hashtag #wlw, has, on Tiktok, somewhere in the region of 32.9 million posts. It was designed as a community tag, a way for queer women to find eachother, to carve out a corner of a very large, very chaotic platform.

And then the algorithm got involved, and some people noticed that posts tagged #wlw do well… they get views. They get a specific kind of engaged, loyal audience. They create parasocial intimacy quick. And so the tag began to fill up with content from girls who are, frankly straight, or at minimum, girls who spend 95% of their emotional and romantic energy on men, but who have developed what I can only describe as strategic girl-curls on someone famous and have decided this counts. There's a version of this that is genuinely exploratory. Young women figuring out their sexuality, using online community to process attraction they don't yet have language for, because that is exactly what these spaces were built for, and it would be cruel to police that. But there is also a version that is purely parasocial and purely algorithmic. A girl who calls Alyssa Liu her “wife” in comment sections, post thirst content about female celebs, tags it “wlw” and proceed to go to sleep thinking about her situationship with a guy. Thats performativity at best, queerbaiting if we are being honest.

The reason this matters is not about hurt feelings. It's about dilution, even though sure it is reaching a larger audience, its great for representation. When the tag that queer women use to find each other gets flooded with content from people who are not actually queer women, the community's tool stops working. The safe space stops being safe. The algorithm starts serving queer content to an audience that doesn't need it, while the people who do need it struggle to filter through the noise. It is a small harm, perhaps, but it compounds.

There is also something very offensive about the underlying assumption here, which is that female same-sex attraction is like an upgrade from heterosexuality. Because, it’s cooler, more aesthetically pleasing, moodier. It really suggests that straight women can try it on temporarily when men are being annoying. This is, again, heteropessimism in action. Straight women have increasingly used this kind of performance as a way to nominally distance themselves from the problem arising in heterosexual relations without doing anything to resolve these problems, meanwhile ignoring straight privilege and oversimplifying the queer experience as being “cooler” and “easier’”. This non-struggle, this fantastical experience is an insult.

The Performative Male and The Performative… oops can’t say it

Now we arrive at the most socially treacherous section.

You now the guy. He carries a tote bag, probably one with a bookshop logo on it, or something from like a NewYork art exhibit. He drinks matcha, specifically. He listens to Claire and Laufey and has super strong opinions about maybe Sally Rooney. He might, casually drop a hint or two about being “kind of bi”, or “against labels” then immediately refrain from further discussions, because he will get exposed if the discussion carries on further.

The “performative male” archetype, as defined by online critics, is a man with “traditionally feminine hobbies with the intent of cultivating an inauthentic aesthetic that might appeal to progressive women”. Because if they have a matcha in hand, cry at therapy sessions and read extensively, they must be non-threatening and… emotionally intelligent.

This phenomenon became so visible that literal competitions began springing up, maybe as a joke, or to subconsciously tuck at the ingenuine nature of these men.

But the female counterpart?

Much harder to name. Much harder to call out. And much, much harder to criticise without any social consequences. Because, it very evidently, “breaches girl code” and can easily be seen as “anti-feminist”.

The performative bisexual women. The girl who has curated playlist titled something vaguely sapphic, with tiktoks that gesture towards queerness, and photo poses that visibly suggest something more. Unlike the performative male, whose behaviour can be mocked without much moral fallout, the performative female has the comfort of sitting behind an ideological shield. One built from very real histories of women not being believed, not being allowed rights let alone sexual fluidity, not being taken seriously.

So any critique risks collateral damage.

The more the merrier right? So everyone laughs along, everyone plays into it. They let ambiguity sit unchallenged because questioning breaks the huge huge collective.

Why this probably should matter more

The consistent theme across all these cases is the same! queerness is being used as an aesthetic, a tool, or a marketing strategy by people who do not bear its costs.

What makes this hard to talk about is that the queer community has, correctly and importantly, pushed back against the idea that anyone gets to decide who is and isn’t queer, and I am sorry if I too harshly policed this. Sexuality is fluid. Coming out is a process. Nobody should have to prove their queerness to anyone. All of this is true. But it has created a situation in which the tools for identifying genuine members of a community have been effectively disabled, and in which any attempt to question whether someone’s queer identity is sincere can be painted as bigotry. This is convenient for the people doing the appropriating, and inconvenient for everyone else.

The Sabrina Carpenters of the world benefit from queer cultural capital, from the aesthetics, the community loyalty, the sense of being interesting and boundary-pushing… without bearing any of the actual weight of being a queer woman in the world. The girls flooding #wlw with content generated to capture a loyal female audience benefit from the warmth and intimacy of that community without contributing to it. The performative bisexual man benefits from appearing progressive, emotionally evolved, and safe, without any of that having to be true.

And meanwhile, actual queer people watch their spaces fill up with people who are there for the vibe, and are asked to either say nothing or be accused of gatekeeping. (Most are actually extremely welcoming, and rather unbothered. But it does keep those who are genuinely offended from speaking up)

^ As seen, opinion are extremely varied, and rightfully so.

Sexuality is genuinely complicated. Online identity is genuinely fluid. Some of the people I’ve described are probably more genuinely queer than they’re given credit for. But a lot of them aren’t, and the ones who aren’t are costing the community something real. They’re costing it the ability to mean something.

I personally think queer identity is not a personality trait you can adopt because men have been disappointing lately. It is not a hashtag you append to your content because lesbian audiences are engaged and loyal. It is not a detail you add to your artist persona because it makes you more interesting to your demographic. It is, for the people it actually belongs to, the story of how they came to understand who they are, often at significant personal cost.

I’ve started reading at the Botanic Gardens & amongst nature

waking up early sometimes (oops) enough to catch the sunrise,

collecting flower petals along the way and pressing them into small, imperfect bouquets.

There’s no grand reason for any of it. It just feels right. And I think what it signals, more than anything, is this: I’ve lost my toughness. And I am so glad. I’ve gone back to the softness I’ve always had.

A few things brought me here.

The first is reading. There is something about genuinely inhabiting a character’s world, apprehensively, tenderly, that cracks you back open. I’ve been weeping and laughing alongside plots again, letting stories matter to me. And through the courage of fictional people, I found myself quietly reclaiming my own. I think this is the most organic form of healing available to us. It very simply restores our inquisitiveness, our sensitivity, our willingness to feel things fully. Books gave me that back.

The second is letting my guard down. I’ll be honest with myself here: regardless of what I may have said in the past, I’ve always carried preconceived notions about people. Some of it was projection. Some of it was a kind of preemptive defensiveness, proving, to myself, that I could see people clearly before they got the chance to disappoint me. Whatever the reason, I was never really able to welcome people with open arms. But I’ve learnt something this year. Genuine connection is rare. It doesn’t come by easily or often. So why approach every new person already braced for the worst, when an open mind at least increases the chances of something real? That small shift in perspective has brought me more than I ever anticipated! I feel as though I am surrounded by laughter, warmth and peace every SINGLE day!

The third is learning to say no. It was the very first new thing I tried, and arguably the hardest. Turning down things I knew I couldn’t carry… even when everyone around me seemed to think otherwise. It gave me genuine anxiety for a while. It felt like going against the grain of who I was supposed to be. But it worked out. It always does. More grace, more space, more room to actually grow.

Well, at the end of this, what I notice now is that words come easier. My writing no longer feels clogged… by uncertainty, by unresolved things, by grudges I hold against myself and god knows what. Something has cleared.

I can very happily say: I am softer, and I am better for it.

A few songs that have soundtracked these months:

White Keys — Dominic Fike
New Perspective — Noah Kahan
Fresh Out the Slammer — Taylor Swift
I Like Me Better — Lauv
Someone to You — BANNERS

The moment that lodged itself most deeply came during my sixth session with my immigrant student in February. He is twelve, sitting his PSLE this year. His Chinese is strong. His mathematics is clean. But his English is not pushing through, and in PSLE, that will cost him.

We were working through a math problem when he started tearing up, which later erupted into a tantrum, and then helpless wails. He told me he couldn’t understand the question. He said he knew he was going to fail. And then he said the thing that stung the most: his friends all spoke fluent English, and he simply could not. His parents, both working long hours, had told him it was fine to be good at Chinese. But he was the one who felt out of place. He was that got ostracized, and that will fail his PSLE. I sat there, helpless. The most I could do was raise a few AL points for his final examination. And even that, I know, won’t help.

It would be unfair to say the government has done nothing. Early education assistance schemes exist. After-school tutoring is available. The infrastructure of support is genuinely there. But there is a particular kind of distance that no scheme has yet managed to close. He did not feel unsupported. He felt unseen, and that feeling will stick with him for a long time, I for a fact know it all too well.

For a long time, I measured belonging through surface-level indicators. Do you understand the local lingo? Do you feel proud of your country? Can you navigate the MRT without thinking? Do you see your future here?

I now think that was dangerously shallow.

Belonging, is different for everyone. But is is produced actively through the accumulation of small interactions, recognition and dignities. While I continued doing research on this topic, I came across this idea of: belonging work. Drawing from Marx’s theory of social production, it refers to the active engagement required to shape the social and material relations through which a person comes to feel that they have a place. Belonging, in other words, is not simply granted. It must be built, and the labour of building it is not evenly distributed.

Age, race, gender, and class all shape the experience of belonging. But in recent years, a growing number of Singaporeans, researchers, social workers, and ordinary people I’ve spoken with, have converged on the view that social class has become the most determinant factor of all. A 2023 survey by Access Singapore found that one in two Singaporeans felt the country had become more unequal over the past decade, with income inequality and living standards cited as the central concerns. Seven in ten respondents also believed that different neighbourhoods offered meaningfully different levels of opportunity for upward mobility — a finding that is striking because it cuts straight through the meritocratic myth. It is not just that some people start with less. It is that where you are born, what street you grow up on, already begins to determine who you become. The "Bukit Timah belt of schools"for example, a cluster of elite institutions along a short stretch of road, has contributed to premium property prices in the surrounding area, as families pay to live within the one-kilometre priority admissions zone. In practice, the complex primary school enrolment process creates confusion and anxiety for many parents while allowing those with resources, time, connections, knowledge of the system, to gain an admissions advantage in perceived elite schools. This sort of divergence continues… on and on… into higher education, into adulthood and even retirement. But you get my point.

There is also a structural reason why class has taken on this disproportionate weight, one rooted in the very origins of the Singaporean national project. Singapore did not fight for its independence. It was expelled from Malaysia in 1965 and forced into nationhood. There was no revolution to mythologise, no colonial enemy to unite against. What the founding generation shared was condition: they were hungry, poor, and uncertain together. That shared precarity was the national identity.And later on, the government manufactured a few narratives from scratch, for survival: Pragmatism, meritocracy, and multiracialism.

For decades, this worked. When the struggle was collective and visible, the sense of solidarity was also real. But globalisation, rapid development, and shifting demographics have eroded the unifying logic of shared hardship. Singapore is now one of the wealthiest nations in the world. And wealth, it turns out, does not distribute belonging equally. If anything, it stratifies it. Recent research suggests that when individuals feel their circumstances have not improved to their expected level or that of their peers, they may feel denied of their fair share.

The students who study hard but inherit their family’s poverty find that meritocracy’s promise does not extend to them. Migrant workers who build the city’s skyline are treated as others even as their labour is structurally indispensable. Singaporeans who need financial assistance sit across from social workers and submit themselves to intrusive means-testing, justifying their need for an extra two hundred dollars for their child’s school fees. They leave those offices, if they receive the help at all, with something subtly taken from them. Not money. Dignity.

Here is what I have come to believe, through my students and through everyone I have spoken to while turning this question over: what people need, at the deepest level, is not physical access to resources. It is not alignment with national narratives. It is not even personal connection to a place, though that matters too.

It is the protection of their dignity.

Sociologist Teo You Yenn, whose 2018 ethnography This Is What Inequality Looks Like became a national bestseller and was cited in Parliament, spent three years among low-income families in Singapore and found that what the system repeatedly damaged was not just their material welfare, it was their dignity, in a system where for many, every day was a struggle with indignity. Her central argument was that bettering the situation for the poor must go beyond financial transfers to changing the prevailing narratives. Because when people cannot meet the standards of "normal" living, their circumstances are misattributed to personal failings rather than structural conditions, and that misattribution strips them of dignity.

This is especially true in an Asian social context, where dignity is not merely personal but relational and communal. To be seen as lesser… by a system, by a process, by the assumptions embedded in how help is administered, is an injury to one’s standing in the social world. And once that injury is sustained, the question do you belong here? becomes charged with something much more condescending.

The government’s means-tested relief schemes, the tiered assistance categories, the “additional help” designations. These were designed with good intentions, and they do reach people who need them. But the architecture of these systems often communicates, however unintentionally, that the recipient is an exception to the norm. A problem to be managed. Not a citizen whose dignity is owed as a baseline, but someone who must first prove the extent of their misfortune before being admitted to care.

That boy was not crying just because he couldn’t do that question. He was crying because he already knew how the system would read him, and he had internalised that reading as truth.

If belonging work is unevenly distributed, if some Singaporeans must labour far harder than others simply to feel that they have a place, then the question we need to ask is not just what more can we do? but what did we build this on, and does it still hold?

The values of pragmatism and meritocracy were forged in a context of collective scarcity. They made sense when everyone was starting from roughly the same desperate place. But as the conditions that gave birth to those values have disappeared, the values themselves have calcified into ideology, a rigid one, a set of assumptions that the system now enforces on its own citizens, regardless of whether those citizens were ever positioned to benefit from them equally. In 2018, Singapore's then-Minister for Education Ong Ye Kung acknowledged in Parliament that meritocracy risked becoming a "dirty word". Singapore's social framework, built on self-reliance and meritocracy, implicitly sorts citizens into those who have earned their place and those who have not. Under the national narrative of miraculous progress, those who have climbed can speak of past hardship with dignity and even pride, their suffering becomes evidence of triumph. But this same narrative leaves those who have not moved up with no dignified framework for their experience… only the implication that they have somehow failed to participate correctly in the national story.

What might it mean to replace that framework, or at least to supplement it, with one that centres dignity as a non-negotiable? It would require a different story about what Singapore is, one that can hold the complexity of its current reality rather than the mythology of its founding days. A nation defined by shared precarity eventually has to ask itself: when the precarity lifts unevenly, what do we share now? The answer, I think, has to begin with that baseline the recognition that every person in this country is owed not just opportunity, but the dignity of being seen as fully belonging here, regardless of whether they have yet won.

I don’t know if my immigrant student will pass his PSLE. I hope he does.

His, and many others’, problem deserves a better answer than the one we’re currently giving. This is a research project that I will be embarking on in the next year or so. I hope by the end of it, I can provide a solution, make some changes, and give people the currency of belonging they really need. But before that! I’ve penned down all my thoughts and observations :)

Some interesting readings:

https://teoyouyenn.sg/this-is-what-inequality-looks-like/

https://www.routledge.com/Social-Capital-in-Singapore-The-Power-of-Network-Diversity/Chua-Koh-Tan-Shih/p/book/9780367635060

https://mothership.sg/2019/02/teo-you-yenn-education-inequality-meritocracy/

Maybe it was learning about life and bereavement that made me question all this. Maybe this quiet fear of the divine, of the unknowable afterlife has lodged itself in me. The more I thought about the end of living, the more I began to understand what it means for life to abandon you, and what it means to hold onto it. Well since everyone was so cynical about losing the self to begin with, it is only right for us to look it through the lens of loss, when we feel time’s breath against our neck.

I have always admired those whose ambition burns so recklessly it seems to scorch the air around them. Some end their physical self when they lose the spiritual one, when they believe they have fallen out of step with their essence. And though that is tragic, I cannot help but see in that act a kind of dreadful certainty. To know who you are so completely that you would sacrifice everything for it. That is both terrifying and magnificent. And that is a nobility we all strive for, but most of us never reach.

Lately, I’ve turned towards self-help books (I say it is for enlightenment but maybe it’s just desperation creeping in), to the gentle murmur of the pages promising healing and calm. But tbh I just find them oddly unsettling. They keep telling me to embrace life as it is, to accept that change is inevitable, to believe that there is always something better waiting beyond the horizon. Yet, they never provide a follow-up. Sure, I’ve adopted this thinking. But so what?? This optimism feels so artificial, it’s like nihilism dipped in sugar, basically like a philosophy of surrender dressed in so-called peace. Because to me, nothing should be left without a fight, especially while we are young enough and brave enough to fight for it. Only through raw, unfiltered, imperfect efforts can we earn what we want, can we deserve the lives that we live.

And so, as the Dead Poets Society advised, we turn to Whitman. O Me! O Life! and that haunting question: What good amid these, O me, O life? The answer: There you are here — that life exists, and identity — that the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute to a verse.

It really hits me now, that life is never something that happens; it’s something that comes from us. To say we should make the most of what we have is true, but it is unforgivably incomplete. Because what of those who have barely lived? Those we have never known physical torment or true deprivation, who have yet tasted grief so thick it clings to the ribs, or love so vast it drowns the lungs? What of those who have not yet belonged so wholly to a place or a people that the very last thought of losing them feels like tearing skin from bone?

For those of us brimming with life, privileged, breathing and unbroken, sitting passively in gratitude and making what we have right now is not enough. We need to create more opportunities that others wait for, for ourselves and for others. We must fight for what we want, even if it is unrealistic, even if it might never happen. Because the presence of odds means there is something precious behind that door, something so sacred that only the daring deserve to find it. And when the years fade, and when our bones turn cold, and when the pulse of life ebbs from our hands, I do not wish to have given up on anything. I want to have lived an ambitious, roaring, unrelenting wreckage of a life. I want to have fought until the very end. Because when life begins to slip away, the only thing worth doing is to fight back.

Help it genuinely feels great penning down such abstractly empowering notes down. I guarantee this writing that though I’ve not yet verbalized my actual goals, they are very well brewing and will be achieved.

And I guess that is my sense of self.

Life comes from us. Because I fight and I bleed and I’ll do it all again. It is built from the marrow of our striving, shaped by our own hands that can never sit still. To live is to write my own verse, in the full voice of confidence that my words can echo, even after the curtain falls.