The LGBTQ acronym is not only careless
in falsely imputing a community to one that barely exists*, it’s even stranger
because when you break down the components, you’ll actually find there is quite
a lot of division between the Ls, Gs, Bs, Ts, and the Qs
I actually have quite a bit of experience of Ls, Gs and Bs, as a former girlfriend of mine from about 20 years ago had a gay brother, a gay lodger and a gay best friend (all different people 😊), so you can imagine how many Ls, Gs and Bs I met on the party scene in the duration of our relationship. Being the social dynamo, compassionate and caring fellow that I am, I got to know many of my girlfriend’s friends and social acquaintances pretty well. And they constituted a fairly broad cross-section of what people would now call the ‘LGBTQ community’. But not only is it remiss, in my view, to lump them all together in a carelessly formulated acronym, I think it rather deindividuates the people the acronym is trying to collectively categorise (as most group labels of this kind do).
There are, of course, exceptions – and I’m sure there are many individuals who find succour in associating themselves with such a group. But a lot of the attribution is by people outside the group who find it convenient to impute group labels to diverse individuals. And in actual fact, most people of any sex, skin colour, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so forth thrive by being engaged with primarily at the individual level, where any group to which they happen to belong is extremely tangential to their own identity as an individual.
Furthermore, there is actually more division within those groups than you may realise. Many gay individuals do not want to be defined so prominently by their sexuality - they are citizens first, with diverse experiences, professions, backgrounds, and identities. Many gay and lesbian individuals certainly don’t like the Pride spectacle which flaunts sexuality, hedonism, and sometimes promiscuity in everyone’s face. Lesbians are by and large very different from gay men, with sometimes conflicting objectives. Bisexuality is often frowned upon by both gay people and lesbians. And the so-called trans incentives often run counter to gays’ and lesbians’ perceived rights (and those of women generally) when biological males try to identify as female. The media frequently reports on a growing schism, among older Gs and Ls and younger trans-inclusive activists. And this has produced the inevitable subsidiary divergence, with those claiming that sexual orientation is based on fixed, biological sex, and those in gender identity ideology asserting that sex is fluid, socially constructed, or irrelevant. Further, some so-called trans activists argue among the ‘community’ that refusing to date or sleep with so-called trans people is transphobic.
The upshot is, once you dig deeper, you’ll find the so-called LGBTQ community is rife with discord and varying beliefs and objectives, and replete with a strong desire not to be homogenised or dehumanised through recourse to an arbitrary acronym. All that is not to deny that people you’d place in the LGBTQ group have faced overlapping challenges, like legal discrimination, social ostracism, and difficulties with identity. But pick any group – white teenagers, black primary school teachers, young fathers, Irish Catholics, manual workers, nurses, and so forth, and you’ll be able to find overlapping challenges they’ve faced, without creating a coalition of convenience, driven by ideological incentives, hasty attributions, political lobbying, and corporate branding.
*Further reading: Last year I wrote a blog post
called Bogus Communities, pointing out the human tendency to
insert the word ‘community’ after an adjective, acronym or slogan to
fraudulently impute shared views and beliefs among a group of people who are
only tenuously connected.
