As the title states really. I need to refer to this diverse group of people, who somehow have gotten put in the same box labeled “sexual minorites”.
I’m a boring CISHET vanilla white male, so I don’t really know. I want to include as many as I can when I refer to “lgbtq+ people”. I’ve been studying various flags, trying to find the one flag I need. But I can’t really figure it out.
Is lgbtq+ the preferred term, or what should I use? Is a flag better? I don’t want to hurt someone by not including them.
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.
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.
I’m a bi guy and I’ve never used LGBTQ2IA+ in my life. But I like it when the government does. I like to see them falling over themselves trying to be inclusive. Struggle, bitch, it’s about time something was even a tiny bit difficult for those fucks.
I don’t think OP needs to do the same, though. Queer community, gay community, LGBT, that all seems fine to me.
Mm, problem is op is a cishet. We can use words like queer and alphabet mafia, but they are…different from the mouth of an outsider (for want of a better word)
What about saying quee without the hard ‘r’?
Lmao i fucking love you
Queeyah, dahling. We’re all terribly queeyah
It seems that people disagree with you, based on your votes. I don’t get it, I am an outsider, I’m going to stay an outsider. No matter how many black friends I had, I would never consider using the N-word either, because I’m not black, I’m not a member of the community, and I don’t know how it is to live your life under those circumstances.
So as OP I can honestly say that I’m not really considering “queer”. One thing, as I’ve already ranted above, is that an English context its history is in a derogatory usage, and shaking that past is difficult, and impossible for me to comfortably pull off. But in a Danish context the word makes no sense. “Trans” and the various permutations of the letters are used in Danish, but “queer” never has been. I believe the closest word would be “bøsse”, but that is strictly used to describe homosexual men.
I’ve never seen/heard the 2 before, what is the 2?
The 2 or sometimes characterized 2S refers to the Two-Spirit community.
I’m realizing now this may only be a thing in my part of the world, which may go to show that an overly inclusive acronym is actually divisive.
I would not consider that divisive, I would say I need to do better. But also, we all have life to learn and some knowledge travels faster than others. Please don’t change.
Seconded! Don’t change, just because a term used by the North American first nations people is unknown to me, as a Scandinavian, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use it in an everyday context. Just that I probably won’t, because … because what actually? I mean I’m Danish, we colonized Greenland, Iceland, and the Faeroe Islands. As a culture we really wrecked the native Greenlandic culture. I should probably look into how to include the Inuits in the future then.
Writing that sentence I wanted to make sure, that Inuit is the preferred term. And in 5 minutes I learned that there’s not just one Greenlandic language, there’s actually three. I’m in my 40s, I’ve lived in Denmark my entire life, and received an average Danish education - WTF? why haven’t I learned something as basic as this about my fellow countrymen? Danish is taught in Greenlandic schools, but we can’t bother to know that there’s three Greenlandic languages?!?
Now I really need to figure out, how to include Greenlanders, like the Two-Spirit community, but in a localized version.