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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