LGBTI?

[the doom cannon]

So um I have a question. Why do members of the lgbt whatever community seek validation from everyone. Be happy with who you are yes? Oh so you're not straight? That's nice move along. I don't understand why they need to be so overtly acknowledged as a group when the current generation of young adults already doesn't really care one way or another. It seems rather pointless and it's kinda annoying when gay people (which includes everything but hetero for me) actively seek attention or validation. There were two gay guys in my high school class of 100, and one of them was chill about it while the other went out of his way to make it clear that he was gay. Guess which one was annoying? I have a gay uncle and he and his partner are two of the chilliest people I know. They don't flaunt their sexuality, heck I didn't even realize they were gay for several years and I just assumed they enjoyed being with each other. So yea, its my opinion that gay people should just be people, and not "gay" people. Maybe I grew up in a very open minded environment, but I would be willing to bet that when the current generation of 20ish people get to their 40s and in political power, the entire gay rights movement will be completely unimportant. Until then, I seriously doubt that you will change the minds of the people who are already in power.

Side note, what's the point of lgbt anyway? Serious question, I really don't know. I don't mean it to be insulting in any way at all, I'm just having trouble figuring out what they do.

 

[Twilight_guy]

You know so long as people are arguing over the proper acronym for the group, they aren't arguing for the goals of the group. Just saying, priorities people.

 

[Lono Shrugged]

This reminds me so much of The Life Of Brian it's not even funny. The whole 'Judian peoples front/peoples front of Judia' People sitting in rooms arguing semantics because they don't know how to solve a problem at it's root. Any label is exclusionary just accept it. You can't encompass everyone without compromising your original label. It's idiotic to have these huge acronyms just so you can be seen to include whatever small group of disenfranchised people are complaining next without helping them feel inclusive in society. Almost be easier to lose the acronyms and have a group dedicated to protect and try to look after anyone feeling lost sexually regardless of orientation or gender. Kinda prove that you are more open minded than greater society and accept that we are all essentially the same......Nah, labels it is.

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

So what do you think? Should "I" be added into the "LGBT" acronym, to shine more light on the intersexual minority?

Well -

**reads page 1 of thread**

Yikes. I am tempted to comment on conversation of terms (ie, terms that are very, very similar, but certain people insist on splitting hairs on, which disenfranchises two similar groups from one another), but... not worth it. I've been down that road before and it won't end well.

OT: I've grown rather fond of QUILTBAG. It makes me imagine a large bag full of cloth scraps of all different types. Which is a wonderful image as well as a fairly inclusive acronym.

 

[mechman123]

I believe that they should take the "L" out of LGTBA as it seems to only serve the function of separating gay women from gay men. No distinction is made between bi-sexual men and women NOR between Transexual men and women, so what makes Lesbians so deserving of the distinction? Gay is just short hand for Homosexual, and homosexuality refers to anyone that is attracted to the same sex as themselves. SO i ask you, why bother with the "L"?

 

[Darken12]

Although I don't agree with it all the time, Pride Parades, coming out stories, Gaymer Cons and other campaigns have a concrete purpose; to declare that we exist, we're just like you, and we're not going away. If you have some issue with that and you're not part of a minority group, that's saying something. As much as I love being a gamer (there are those pesky labels again) this community can get very antagonistic over things that have little to nothing to do with the gaming culture at large.

Right on, bro.

Look, the group is the sexual minority. Let's keep it simple like that: sexual minorities. Be like the Christians and use that as the term to describe the billion denominations as one.

Sexual and GENDER minorities. If you're going to sweep everything under a single umbrella, do it properly.

Holy shit on a shit sandwich, do they really need that many letters? While I personally think the whole "MUH IDENTITIES" thing is dumb in the first place it may be because it's this absurd. Maybe if they had a better way of explaining it people like me wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it as dumb.

Even after reading some of these posts explaining it it still seems stupid...

You already have a gender and a sexual identity. In fact, if you're a straight male, the entertainment industry caters to you almost exclusively. The second demographic (that is still a minority in the entertainment industry) is straight women. If you're one of those two demographics, society is built to cater to you, accept you, represent you and provide your every want and need. If you aren't either, you're shit out of luck.

It's easy for you to dismiss the value of having an identity, and having it acknowledged by society, because it's already the default for you.

Side note, what's the point of lgbt anyway? Serious question, I really don't know. I don't mean it to be insulting in any way at all, I'm just having trouble figuring out what they do.

We don't live in a paradise of equality and acceptance, not even in first-world nations. In the US alone, not all states allow for equal rights [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2012/may/08/gay-rights-united-states]. And this is without even mentioning countries in Europe or Central/South America.

I was just reading a blog reporting that in Brasil, which is the leading economy in South America, religious fundamentalism has reached such a point that "curing gays" has become a thing with actual support (and several LGBT people have been murdered in the streets for walking hand in hand with a person of the same gender. I saw a picture of a man lying on the pavement with his brains splattered all over the place from having been beaten to death with a fucking rock), Russia has passed a "gay gag" law (that prevents parades and the discussion of homosexuality in public media), Islamic countries make it an actual crime for people to be gay, and even in the Western world, the entertainment media still pretends we don't exist or are exclusively stereotypes/titillation for straight audiences.

Things are not good for us. While hate crimes against every other minority are in descent, LGBT hate crimes are on the rise [http://www.businessinsider.com/anti-gay-hate-crime-stats-dont-budge-2012-12]. The transgender thread in this very forum showed that some people consider it entirely justifiable to inflict violence upon a transgendered woman who doesn't announce her status to everyone she meets (in a world where transgendered people probably suffer the brunt of most LGBT hate crimes) because she's "tricking" the poor straight men (and while gay men and transgendered women get the brunt of the actual violence, lesbians and transgendered men are still subjected to rape and sexual assault as a way to "correct" them).

I am quite glad that you haven't encountered these things yourself, but I assure you they do exist, even in the most civilised parts of the Western world.

EDIT:

You can't encompass everyone without compromising your original label. It's idiotic to have these huge acronyms just so you can be seen to include whatever small group of disenfranchised people are complaining next without helping them feel inclusive in society. Almost be easier to lose the acronyms and have a group dedicated to protect and try to look after anyone feeling lost sexually regardless of orientation or gender. Kinda prove that you are more open minded than greater society and accept that we are all essentially the same......Nah, labels it is.

You do know that there are already groups of people that call themselves one thing regardless of their personal differences, right? They're called countries. And they do very, very shitty jobs at providing equal rights to sexual and gender minorities or protecting them from discrimination and hate crimes.

A broader, vaguer label (such as "Human" or "American") is just a convenient way of erasing things you don't want to deal with and sweeping issues under the table. You can literally do anything and say you're doing for "Americans" or "humans" and spew empty words on how you support everyone and treat everyone equally, while ignoring the problems of marginalised groups.

Identification is the first step towards addressing oppression.

 

[trooper6]

Well, I have often seen LGBTQQIAA used and heard it spoken outloud, so I don't think it is universally not included.
Side note: there are some Intersex and Transsexuals who don't want to be included in the LGBQP+ grouping because despite the root word, neither intersexuality. Nor transsexualism are sexualities, and the sexual minority communities has historically and presently treated gender variant people quite poorly, and the lumping together of those groups tends to reinforce inaccurate stereotypes amo g society in general.

However (and here I'm going to address those people who ask what is the point of LGBT, why don't people call themselves people, why must they label the selves, etc)...these labels aren't just about self-identification, they are also about social discrimination. And bigots often see Trans women as just another form of gay man and Trans men as another form of lesbian. Homophobes panic that loving an Intersex person makes them gay. So a lot of the discrimination that people of the MSGI community face are rooted in similar sex/gender anxieties.

So, to those people who say, why can't you just identify as a person? I do identify as a person. But, my identification as a regular person doesn't mean that I will stop being racially profiled, doesn't mean that I all of a sudden get the same legal rights as my cis sexual heterosexual fellow people.

Is a system where there is discrimination, getting rid of the labels that describe the people being discriminated against doesn't get rid of the discrimination, it just makes it impossible to name the discrimination for what it is and then combat it.

 

[bananafishtoday]

People go on and on about how they hate labels, then they have to have some commitee acknowledge each label for every % of confusion there is in your sexuality.

Are you a female, would never sleep with a women, but you can admire some female bodies? You're interqueercurios.
Are you a shemale, but feel like a girl, but kind of a lesbian, but totally gay? You're transmogrifiomnipanalphasexual.
Why must there be more names for sexuality than metal music genres?

Because sexuality actually matters.

*rimshot*

 

[UltimateNoodle]

I find it amusing that in a topic about being more inclusive, pansexuals are being shot down so much. The distinction for me between bisexuals and pansexuals is the rejection of a gender binary. While a bisexual is someone who can have a romantic or sexual attraction to either a male or female (and in my experience, an attraction to one more than the other is quite common anyway), pansexualism encompasses attraction to everything in between as well. In my mind at least, bisexual says "I can love you if you are male or female" while pansexual says "Gender isn't important, I can love you regardless of gender identification".

Anyway, on the topic of the thread, I think that the term LGBT has become a popular one to the point where attempting to add any more individual letters to it probably isn't going to have any wide-spread effect on its use. The best suggestion I've seen in the thread so far is the use of LGBT+, retaining the popular terminology while having inclusiveness of more obscure minorities in the title. Really though, in my experience, the LGBT community is a wonderfully inclusive community to begin with and any changes to the name don't really seem necessary to identify with that group.

 

[Loonyyy]

Can we just call it "non-Hetero" and be done with this? I know that some people like to be different, but for some reason you're grouping all of them together.

Because ?non-hetero? doesn?t consider those with gender identity issues, as not all transgendered people are non-straight and not all non-straight people are transgendered.

People use labels because of society having a penchant for putting people in and making them conform into their own confined little boxes. But also, presumably because it?s easier to say ?gay? than ?a man who?s into other men, but not women? in a conversation, whether it be in dating, politics, or something else.

Actually, I don't agree with how he phrased it, but I think Glasgow's on the right track here: Eventually if you add everything to the label, it stops having meaning. Sooner or later it's easier to define it by the out-groups than the in, and after that, the word's not a shorthand anymore. There's got to be a better way of defining the socially maligned "non-standard" gender or sexual orientation people than listing their preference or condition in an acronym.

Especially since the label is generally used as a part of activism and social awareness, so it's not describing so much a group as a movement.

 

[You Can't Take the Sky From Me]

I think 6th and Silver makes a good point. Adding more and more letters to the initialism just makes it unwieldy. Nobody in the LG community, or the LGBT commmunity, or the GLBTIQSDFBDDR community, is likely to be excluding others. That would be terrible hypocrisy.

Maybe if people want something to rally around, there needs to be a word that just means something to the effect of "not cis-gender cis-sexuality". Maybe the community should reclaim the word "queer"?

I dunno. But this increasingly long initialism just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I don't really have anything to add, I just wanted to thank you for knowing the difference between acronyms and initialisms. It made me happy.
(If I did have an opinion it would be that overly long initialisms start sounding like jokes.)

 

[the doom cannon]

snip

If you hadn't skipped the part saying I'm totally cool with gays you would understand that I'm totally cool with gays. Maybe you're right that I'm in the camp of "you can be gay just don't shove it in my face". But I view flaunting it in your face to be an attention grabbing technique used by those who need either attention, validation, or both. Maybe I'm not a nice person, but to me that sort of behavior is childish and annoying. If everyone around you (in his case) already doesn't care, then why would you go out of your way to make sure people know. That's annoying to me. I dont mind people being stereotypically "gay" or do overtly gay things. I do care, however, when these things are done to garner attention. I severely dislike people of any sexual orientation who actively try to be the center of attention.
As for heteros flaunting their sexuality, I would be curious to know where you get that statistic from. I know that the people I know don't go around telling every person and their dog what person of the opposite sex they banged last night. Heck I don't even hear gay people saying that. So yea I'm curious. And you know, I don't mind gay people describing their interest in specific people of the same sex either. Also, my sex life is generally a private matter, and unless asked directly I don't go out of my way to tell people. Everyone I know is like that too.
As for the last bit, I meant that it will be unnecessary except for in countries in the Middle East and in areas of religious fundamentalism.

 

[Mike Kayatta]

I know many people have already touched on this, but frankly, the more letters go into this acronym, the wider a net it casts--sort of the opposite idea of a singling out a minority. I guess the real question is, where do you draw the line? Should we include foot fetishists or furries? What about people who have sex with dolphins? On what grounds would you bar those or include them, and what makes intersex worthy of inclusion, or for that matter, even gay? At some point you have to start defining why these people are different and deserve segregation (or recognition, depending on which lens you're deciding to look through). Personally, I'd say that all sexual tendencies involve one person loving someone else, so why bother trying to say anything other than "not considered the social ideal of perfectly 'straight'" if anything at all?

With that in mind, here is my new proposal for an acronym that's most fair:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

Or--and this is radical, I'll warn you--how about people are just people and we stop our endless and pointless categorization to make it easier for us to inaccurately judge or refer to large swaths of the populace?

 

[Whispering Cynic]

I never had any reason to keep up with all these fancy initialisms and seeing how new ones apparently get invented almost daily, I'll be sticking with my favorite "IDGAF" while politely refusing any involvement in debates concerning these "identities" or whatever those are. Other people's sex lives are none of my business, after all...

 

[Mike Kayatta]

I know many people have already touched on this, but frankly, the more letters go into this acronym, the wider a net it casts--sort of the opposite idea of a singling out a minority. I guess the real question is, where do you draw the line? Should we include foot fetishists or furries? What about people who have sex with dolphins? On what grounds would you bar those or include them, and what makes intersex worthy of inclusion, or for that matter, even gay? At some point you have to start defining why these people are different and deserve segregation (or recognition, depending on which lens you're deciding to look through). Personally, I'd say that all sexual tendencies involve one person loving someone else, so why bother trying to say anything other than "not considered the social ideal of perfectly 'straight'" if anything at all?

With that in mind, here is my new proposal for an acronym that's most fair:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

Or--and this is radical, I'll warn you--how about people are just people and we stop our endless and pointless categorization to make it easier for us to inaccurately judge or refer to large swaths of the populace?

Jesus. Fucking. Christ.

That's just great. Now we've even got The Escapist writers comparing homosexuality to bestiality.

I can see how this post might have been well-intentioned, but it's just another one to add to the "why should LGBT people be allowed their own identity?" pile.

Ha, I am far from comparing homosexuality to bestiality in the way you're implying. Trust me, there are many comments you can track down to be legitimately concerned with, so please take Jesus elsewhere. My point is that EVERYONE is allowed their own identity, but the more you amalgamate them, the more that identity ceases to be. Once you start regrouping everyone, then what identity are you really "allowing"? Who here is qualified to say who is and isn't allowed to be a part of that shared description. And as long as the answer is ~shrug~ then maybe we should move on from trying to be so technical about how we're segregating groups.