Comment on How do you refer to the lgbtq+ "community" least excludingly?
Bougie_Birdie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
Hello, I’m one of those queer people.
For my two cents, I find in conversations it’s easiest to refer to it as the “queer community” or “gay community.” If I’m feeling an acronym, the first one I reach for is LGBT. And that’s me speaking as one of those q+ folks.
Now for me, I prefer to use Queer because it’s sort of an umbrella term. For instance, all lesbians are queer, but not all queer people are lesbians. It’s also great for people who don’t like labels, because it doesn’t pigeonhole someone into a specific box.
The term “queer” has a little history behind it too. When I was in middle school, being called queer was like, the ultimate insult. It was used pejoratively, and it felt bad to hear it. Nowadays we’re reclaiming the word, and it loses its evilness. That all said, you can call people “queer,” but don’t call a person “a queer” or else you’re being insulting. It’s to be used like an adjective, not a noun.
For my money, this is the most inclusive flag without singling out a particular community. Image
Generally speaking, I don’t like an overly verbose acronym. It’s part of why I stop at LGBT or LGBTQ instead of going all the way to LGBTQ+, or as my government seems to want to say, LGBTQ2IA+. In my opinion, the effort to make the community more inclusive by adding more sub-communities to the acronym has the opposite effect.
DABDA@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The other question/issue I have with the long abbreviation is does the order of the letters matter? It’s currently settled on L->G->B […] but is that just by tradition or does it signify some other importance [order added? relative size of community? etc]. If you remembered all the characters but couldn’t remember the sequence is it disrespectful to list them alphabetically or try to use the typical order and possibly transpose a couple? I would assume there’s a process for deciding when to add a designation to the abbreviation, how do things get decided against and what does that mean if you feel there’s something that should be included but isn’t? You wouldn’t want to gatekeep someone’s genuinely held identity, but you can’t list everything, and if you add a “everything else” then what’s the point of a list in the first place other than increased prominence in relation to “everything else”?
It definitely feels like a more conversation-friendly catch-all (such as “queer”) is more tenable instead of constantly adding or changing designations to refer to a nebulous collective group. At its core, basically that group is anyone that considers themself not CISHET, and any extra specificity is certainly important for identity and community building but probably not needed in typical conversations/references.
Another thought just occurred to me, how does screen reading assistive tech. deal with seeing
LGBTQ2IA+– does it just read out every character or will it try to pronounce it like a word? Either would be varying levels of jarring to the user I’d think.Sorry for dropping this kinda stream of consciousness rant on your comment, and I don’t consider myself part of the community so it’s really not for me to say anyway, but I was glad to see a similar sentiment against the abbreviation reflected throughout this post and particularly from your comment.
Bougie_Birdie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
I have a couple different opinions on the order of the letters. Normally, I’d say that order doesn’t matter because it’s a collective, and the order comes from the point that communities merged together. For instance, there were originally alliances of Lesbians and Gays in the 70’s, but Trans often wasn’t considered its own thing until sometime in the 90’s. And since Queer was originally used as a slur, it didn’t make sense to add it until even later when sentiment had changed.
So usually what you see happening is more letters getting added on to the end at the point of adoption. However, and I just learned this today, the government of Canada today is now using 2SLGBTQI+ as their official acronym. This breaks convention for a couple of reasons, in that Two-Spirit is represented with ‘2S’, which means that it now has precedence and more symbols than the other communities in the group.
They say this is to represent that the Two Spirit community would be the historically oldest group in the collective. I’m not sure if I really believe that though, since these labels are about human sexuality, and that’s been around as long as there have been humans. There was no ‘first’ sexual or gender minority in my opinion. This feels more like a do-nothing feelgood thing where a government that’s failed to do right by its indigenous people pats itself on its back for being inclusive. Which doesn’t mean I’m not happy to see it, it just also feels jarring and weird, and I doubt that the acronym will actually see much practical use when people are talking to each other.