this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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It's tricky. There are asexual, intersex, and two-spirt people who don't identify as queer so shortening it to LGBTQ can be seen as erasing identities (who are frequently already marginalized in queer communities). I don't tend to use the full acronym in conversation, and you're right that it reads like a product ID, but the asexual, intersex, and two-spirt people I know generally appreciate it.
I guess I don't quite see why they would then be joining the queer community if they feel being under the queer umbrella isn't accurate. Wouldn't they be allies, and not members?
I know that membership and support are delicate topics and I don't want give the impression of pushing against acceptance, but if you want your identity to be represented as a headline letter in the queer community, but also don't consider yourself queer, what exactly is the intent?
It just seems like at that point switching over to GSM makes a lot more sense than attempting to represent every identity directly, especially when it begs the question of why non-binary, pansexual, and others are excluded in preference to IA2+ folks. Idk, just seems like a fraught topic.
It is very much a fraught topic, so thanks for the very good discussion! Many intersex and asexual people don't think of themselves as joining the queer community; neither do some trans people, and for that matter some gay, lesbian, and bi people actively dislike the term "queer". It's complex! Sometimes it makes sense to highlight specific identities -- which is what I did in the post I did on [A (partial) queer, trans, and non-binary history of Mastodon and the fediverse](A (partial) queer, trans, and non-binary history of Mastodon and the fediverse) -- but sometimes an umbrella term is more useful, and there really aren't any great options. It's a fair point that non-binary, pansexual, and others aren't included in the acronym ... like I said in the post, I with with LGBTQIA2S+ for this one because there's a Mastodon instance called lgbtqia.space, and Indigenous people are often overlooked in the fediverse so I thought it was important to call out the two-spirit aspect. That said if I had known that 75% of the comments on this post would be about the acronym I might have taken a different path!
Yeah, bit of a shame that the acronym wound up being a lightning rod for engagement instead of, you know, the actual article lol. But despite it being around for at least a year (from when I was poking around), I think this was the first time many people saw that particular acronym. Especially after LGBTQ+ became the definitive inclusive option, albeit not as permanently as I'd imagined.
At any rate, I feel like GSM is at least easy to use as an umbrella and lacks the charged history of queer being a reclaimed word. It might not spread awareness of smaller groups directly, but at least it keeps the focus on topic.
Yeah, I've been telling people "good news: 25 comments on the article! bad news: almost all of them were about the acronym". Oh well, we learn by doing. And as you say, a lot of people saw the acronym for the first time, and at least one person learned that two-spirt doesn't refer to furries, so there was some useful education ... it wasn't my primary goal here but that's never a bad thing.
Different terminology makes sense in different contexts -- and from different people. For a lot of what I write, I want the resonance of queer's charged history; other times, it might not make as much sense.