I was doing some fact-checking for my Zoom vote post, when I noticed this page on David Cobb’s campaign website, about how he supports “LGBTIQ rights.”
He is good enough to spell out the acronym, which stands for “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, and Queer.” But he makes no attempt to explain what ‘Intersex’ means, or how ‘Queer’ is distinguished from, say, ‘Gay,’ which was already on the list about five words before it. (Four, if you don’t count ‘and.’) He must have assumed, reasonably enough, that if you don’t know the difference, you probably aren’t part of that constituency. Or perhaps he doesn’t know the difference either.
I remember — when was it, the early Eighties? — when it was simply “gay rights.” Then, to include folks who felt left out, it became “gay and lesbian,” then “gay, lesbian, and bisexual.” At some point, ‘lesbian’ got promoted to first in line, ‘transgender’ was added to the end, and all the words got promoted to proper nouns, resulting in “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender,” or LGBT.
But now, with the addition of ‘I’ and ‘Q,’ are we still adding unincluded groups, or are we just adding synonyms? Who are the people who bristle at being labeled Gay, insisting that they are Queer? What rights are the Intersexes demanding, and are they different from the rights for which the Transgenders are clamoring? And how long can this acronym get? We’ll have to stop at 26 to avoid repeating letters, unless we start dipping into foreign alphabets, or On Beyond Zebra.
Anyone familiar with this arcana may leave a comment; I would appreciate a polite clarification.
While America was holding her real election, the public television kids’ show ZOOM was holding an online mock election for their youngish viewers. Guess who won. No,