Last week, musician and actress Suki Waterhouse posted a video of herself to TikTok with text that read: “aligning my chakras in the hotel room before the carpet knowing that in merely two hours every twink with an opinion will be critiquing my outfit.”

She was talking about attending the Met Gala, and the hordes of armchair critics that like to analyze what high-profile celebrities, particularly women, wear to it. And the clip undeniably struck a nerve: It’s earned over a million likes and close to seven million views since Waterhouse published it. Yet as the TikTok made its inevitable way over to X, it drew a different kind of attention. “Twink kinda turning into a slur lowkey,” read one repost with over 16 million views.

Of course, two things can be true: Waterhouse’s video was funny, addressing the casual misogyny faced by women like her on a regular basis in what seemed like good faith. (“SUKI YOU DELIVERED ATE AND SERVED” read one top comment.) But the question of who can or should be using the word “twink” lends itself to a bigger conversation.

Historically, the term has been used by members of the LGBTQ+ community to refer to thin, pretty, and young gay men. More recently, however, “twink” has been deployed online to describe really any thin, white man (see: actors like Dominic Sessa, of The Holdovers fame; Anora’s Mark Eydelshteyn; or Kodi Smit-McPhee), as well as any apparently gay person, period. And in other, much less funny moments, it’s clearly a throwaway term to get around saying something else. Troye Sivan observed as much in a TikTok posted last fall: “If you say ‘twink’ when you meant to say ‘faggot,’ that’s still a slur, I don’t think straight people should be saying that,” he argued.

Aha! Finally someone said it, I thought then. (And to clarify, dear reader, the word twink has never been used to describe me; I’ve always been too fat, too hairy, too femme for it to apply.) Even if the word is not generally considered a slur by queer people when we use it, something changes when those outside of the community adopt it as a lazy shorthand or, worse, a punchline.