The queer acronyms have grown and apparently now it’s "LGBTQIA2S+"...

[cimorene]

1. This doesn’t really seem like a practical term for using in conversation

2. Is this a functional and necessary umbrella term that does what it’s trying to do?

3. Are we sure this term hasn’t come about through efforts to avoid saying “queer” now that terfs have been pushing their anti-”queer” bullshit for a good few years and created an aversion to it in the community?

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1 - I know “Ell Gee Bee Tee Queue" rolls off the tongue all right, but is this now “Ell gee bee tee queue eye eh two ess plus”? That’s the same number of syllables as the iconic "disestablishmentarianism", is approaching "use me in a Supercalifragilisticexpialodocious parody" territory, and is... probably not practical for saying casually a bunch of times in a row! An acronym that long should really have a smushed-up word pronunciation, but “ligbit-quia2splus” is not much better. (Although maybe a bit more fun to say.)

2 - Is the Q actually standing for ‘queer’, in which case it seems kinda comically redundant? Or is it ‘questioning’, as people used to say in the LGBTQ era (in which case including it in the acronym at all is still arguably silly)?

- The inclusion of “two spirit” must be a nod to the conversation that “two spirit” doesn’t belong under the “trans” umbrella bc it’s a distinct gender within its own culture, but by that same logic, it’s a culturally-specific term which doesn’t apply to members of any culture but its own, so doesn’t that still leave people of other genders who don’t consider themselves trans (including people of other genders from other cultures) still outside the acronym?

- Agender, pangender, bigender, etc people certainly count as queer, and are potentially or occasionally categorized under the trans umbrella, but do they all want to be categorized as trans?

3 - ‘Queer’ is much shorter and ‘queer’ is deliberately and consciously an umbrella that welcomes all of these categories (and more).

- But “queer and two spirit” is still much more practical, if the cultural context of the latter makes it inappropriately culturecentric to subsume it under “queer”; or “queer, trans, and two-spirit”, if members of the trans community don’t want confusion between marginalized genders and marginalized sexualities.

- It’s also a mouthful, but for that matter, “marginalized genders[, sexes,] and sexualities” ALSO seems easier to say and conceptualize since it's categories rather than lists of terms that keep suffering boundary-policing and splintering (which is why it’s what I prefer when ‘queer’ is too nonspecific). Did it get accused of being too academic? Because we can always say "oppressed" or "minority" instead of "marginalized"...?

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Comments

[alexseanchai]

I feel like I should know where to look to find two-spirit people's opinions on this and I don't.

The impression I have is MOGAI (marginalized orientations, genders, and intersex) got TERFed out, same as they're trying to do with "queer", only there was hardly any history with or emotional attachment to "MOGAI" so it was a lot easier to do away eith.

[cimorene]

I have heard 'mogai' but until you said this I didn't actually associate it with the phrase "marginalized genders and sexualities", a phrase that I've only read in that exact form before. I think I remember reading something about 'mogai' being invented by someone problematic? Which might have been the terf campaign you're talking about, although I don't remember what was supposed to be wrong with it. I never wanted to adopt it because it seemed cutesy.

[cimorene]

Oh! And also I've just remembered that I've seen that 'intersex' has been objected to on the same grounds as 'bisexual' and 'nonbinary', that it's artificially imposing a binary by implication on what is scientifically speaking a spectrum, ie sex is just as much a construct as gender etc etc. Which is a perfectly valid point. So I suppose 'marginalized sexes' or some expression like that that doesn't normalize anything would be the way to go.

[princessofgeeks]

I have been watching the abbreviation development for a few years and wondering the same things. I think because I have a background in what used to be called broadcasting that I was alert to the fact that very soon "LBGT" et al became unwieldy to say out loud.

I am still hoping for a general acceptance of the term "queer" but so far it seems limited to academia? There is now in the US a discipline of queer studies and a thing called queer theory.

I think TERF is still a very obscure acronym here although we do have them.

I had the same reaction to "trans*". I had no idea how to say that out loud.

All I know is, it's evolving. (Also I question including "two spirit" because it's not one thing around the world. So many native cultures had versions of it but they were all a bit different from each other.)

These are just my opinions though.

[cimorene]

Yeah, same. I mean, no, queer hasn't historically been ENTIRELY limited to academia, but the queer movement never got enough momentum/acceptance for the majority of people, even queer people, to be aware of it and its history and reclamation and ideology etc, let alone for people trying to write inclusivity statements from the outside to know to use it. I knew that some queer people used it on purpose as a kid and teen, during the era when the queer movement was like, really a thing, but I still didn't know it was a movement in spite of my parents dedicating a ton of time and effort to social justice advocacy. I didn't know about the whole... movement to reclaim and use queer as a welcoming umbrella until the internet, even though it's been around decades.

I did know about terfs though via the abovementioned social justice exposure.

That's kinda what I was thinking about two spirit. The whole POINT of saying that two spirit people aren't trans is that their identity exists as a part of its cultural context, so the whole POINT is that it doesn't apply to other people around the world! It's not necessarily required to list all of them, especially if you're writing from a North American perspective or otherwise one where there is potentially a sizeable two spirit population and not likely to be much of the others, but it still seems odd to go out of your way to differentiate them but not acknowledge with the rest of the phrasing that those other genders are also a thing or even that gender per se is necessarily a cultural construct? Personally I'd be inclined to say that 'marginalized genders' covers two spirit people and all the members of other genders from other cultures as long as we're talking about a western cultural context, because even if they're not marginalized in their own cultures, they definitely would be/are in ours. And 'marginalized genders' also covers agender/pangender/nonbinary/etc westerners, and potentially simply gender non-conforming individuals whose gender presentation is unsettling or anti-normative in western culture (ie tomboys, butches, etc).

[yvannairie]

I feel you. I kinda wish the Finnish tendency to tag "rainbow" in front of categories to signify that we're talking about the queer part of that population was a thing in other languages. Or that a catchy acronym like MOGAI or QUILTBAG would catch on instead.

[cimorene]

Well, that's what 'queer' is for, and it's already a handy adjective that sits usefully in front of other nouns, plus for all the umbrella-related reasons above, it works better than most of those sorts of acronyms (I tend to find them too cutesy).

[mecurtin]

This is why I just say "Queer". Fuck the TERFs & every horse they've ever ridden.

[stranger]

^ This!

I had about 300 contentious words, but it boiled down to this.

[cimorene]

This is also my impulse, but I don't want to just say "fuck your acronyms!" to people who are adopting them in good faith without awareness of the terf activities. You know, like "Fuck this acronym if it's associated with TERF appeasement but not fuck YOU, that is, if you were using it without any awareness of the TERFS, but still fuck the acronym itself". A bit of a mouthful though.

[laurenthemself]

If the term 'two-spirit' doesn't come under the trans umbrella, then all other similar terms in cultures that don't adhere to the notion of binary gender presumably don't either, in which case 'hijra', 'kathoey', 'akava'ine', and other such terms would also need their own letters.

Which is, IMHO, only going to lead to even more people calling it alphabet soup.

Which is fine by me, because as well as queer, I'm so down with being an alphabet person. Or a rainbow person.

[cimorene]

Yeah, that's exactly what I was getting at wrt two-spirit: the inclusion of it implies that the inclusion of all the others should be necessary!

Similarly, I don't mind being called alphabet soup, I don't mind terms that are necessarily involved or silly-sounding, but I do think usability (and people's ability to remember and pronounce) the terms is an important practical concern. Someone COULD probably make a filk song with the acronym and that would at least solve the memory part satisfactorily...

[laurenthemself]

I mean, more filk is always good, and something where new lines can be added as needed would rock...

...why do I feel like 'We Didn't Start the Fire' is an excellent candidate?