GBLTQ? (Gay Bi Lesbian Trans ?)

There is an advertisement on campus for a GBLTQ event. I know that GBLT stand for Gay, Bisexual, Lesbian and Transexual but I am stumped about the Q. My best guess would be that it stood for Queer but I don’t know how that differs from the first four. Any thoughts?

“Q” usually stands for “questioning”, that is, people who aren’t sure if they’re gay or not. I think “Q” can stand for other things, though.

Robin

GBLTQ = Grilled Bacon Lettuce Tomato Quesadilla
Why does everone have to turn everything into a gay issue?

:: giggle ::

It sometimes is used to mean “queer”, as the OP suggested. “Queer” can subsume a lot of other identities - don’t get me started on the eight or ten letter-long abbreviations I’ve seen in our campus queer magazine. Queer may be sort of a stand-in for all the various little cultural identities that GLBT leaves out, and then there are folks who for whatever reason self-identify specifically as queer. Since queer people have a long history of having our identities denied to us, there’s a certain attitude against devaluing someone’s chosen identity by pointing out that just maybe two-spirits don’t need to be explicitly recognized in our acronym (or, for that matter, that it’s silly and obnoxious for some white kid to decide that their own identity is based on a reductionist interpretation of a Native American custom). It’s gotten extremely silly in recent years, but there you go.

The “Q” could mean either “questioning” or “queer”, or both. I’ve certainly heard “GLBTQ” defined both ways plenty of times.

Can you expand on what other options are there besides Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual or Transexual? The only other group I can think of is Cross-Dressers who if I understand correctly aren’t transexuals.

In glbtq.com it stands for queer.

Here it stands for questioning.

Amongst others, I think that androgynous folk and asexuals would both fall under the “other” heading.

I’ve never heard of cross-dressing being included under any sort of queer political banner. Cross-dressing, or transvestitism, is a sexual fetish enjoyed almost exclusively by straight men (men in both biological and gender indentification senses). It occurs in various contexts, but despite the apparent gender-bending of the activity, it’s not really within the purview of queer activism (nor am I particularly aware of any sort of transvestite activism).

There’s the entire concept of “genderqueer”, including transgendered/transsexual folks, intergendered people (those who feel their true identity is somewhere between male and female), intersexed people (those born with physically ambiguous genitalia, more or less), non-gendered people, and so on. Plus, you forgot asexual people.

But there’s more to it than that. See, there’s all sorts of matters of identity beyond simply what gender you think you are and what gender(s) you like to have sex with. And some organizations with an eye towards ensuring that every possible identity is recognized and validated have started including a trillion other letters in their abbreviations.

I tried to suggest with my last post that there’s a whole lot more queer identities floating around out there than is clear simply from combining a physical sex, a gender identity, and a gender that you’re attracted to (pick one item from column A, one item from column B . . . ). There’s all sorts of other ways of identifying - for instance, some people who would objectively be described as “bisexual” identify as (and forgive me if I screw up the term a little) “per-sexual” because they’re attracted the “person, not the body parts” (or something like that. I have a personal distaste for the suggestion that us monosexuals don’t care about the people we’re with. I don’t mean to paint bisexuals with a broad brush, but their activism tends to be a bit arrogant and dismissive of other sexual orientations.) There’s “two-spirits”, like I mentioned, which is some sort of custom practiced by certain Native American tribes that apparently some tiny portion of Queerdom has decided to embrace as their “true” identity. There’s a ton of others, and I can’t remember them all.

I don’t mean to sound too dismissive of some of these sexual/gender identities. But frankly I think that some of these “identities” are just an odd sort of oneupsmanship, or an effort to divide ourselves into a trillion groups of one person each. There’s a limit to how much tolerance I have for this sort of hippie-flower-power validation - at a certain point, I’m willing to say to someone, “You have a penis? You feel you are male? And you’re attracted to men with penises? Congrats. You’re gay. No novelty identities - you’re a gay male.”

The “T” stands for transgendered (transexuals are a subset of this group). The “Q” usually refers to “Queer” or “Questioning.” Queer is a kind of catch-all term for all the other letters in the acronym, although some people identify themselves primarily as queer. In my experience, “queer” usually signifies a political/activist type of identity. In addition to the usual acronym LGBT, you might also see: A = ally (someone who supports gay/lesbian people), S = straight, and I = intersexed (people born with unique genital or chromosomal differences that make it difficult to classify them as male/female).

A lot of people, as has been mentioned, identify primarily as queer when the other existing labels don’t cover them particularly well, or convey something about their lives that isn’t accurate.

For example, my fag hag R. identifies mainly as a queer woman; she is primarily sexually attracted to women and exclusively has romantic relationships with women, but she also enjoys sex with guys on occasion. She has trouble IDing as lesbian because she sleeps with guys, and she doesn’t ID as bisexual because she has a distinct preference for one, and “bisexual”, to many, suggests you could go with either with equanimity (as is the case for many, but not for her). So she IDs as queer; besides the emotional and sexual facts, that also indicates she feels part of the Queer community and identifies with it.

Although my situation is different from hers in that I can accurately ID as gay, I also ID as queer to indicate that I identify with all the groups in the broad Queer community.

It’s more the word “transvestism” that’s not used much anymore. “Transvestic fetishism” is the term that’s used for the fetish you mention, and it isn’t really thought of as falling under the ambit of the Queer movement (though of course its practitioners could be queer in other ways).

A lot of people identify as cross-dressers. They’re not necessarily trans, in that they continue to identify as the gender to which they were assigned; but their gender presentation - clothes and such - is gender queer. They may well identify as part of the queer or trans community.

[qquote]There’s the entire concept of “genderqueer”, including transgendered/transsexual folks, intergendered people (those who feel their true identity is somewhere between male and female), intersexed people (those born with physically ambiguous genitalia, more or less), non-gendered people, and so on. Plus, you forgot asexual people.
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I should point out that a lot of these folks may not identify themselves as genderqueer. A transsexual person, for example, may regard themself as not at all genderqueer: they fit comfortably into one of the two gender norms, it’s just that it’s not the same one that was assigned at birth.

On one hand, you’re right. On the other hand, I know from experience that a lot of people coming to these identities are in earnest, they’re trying to find something that fits, something our society has not had the vocabulary for in the past, because these identities and these sexualies and genders were simply not considered to exist.

This is what I went through when I discovered the word “genderqueer.” And I can tell you, it gives me the warm fuzzies when it pops up in someone’s acronym or list. I don’t get huffy when it doesn’t, because I understand it’s new and small (and besides, I also fit under the big old G that’s always hanging out there) and besides I can definitely sympathize with the brevity concern, having typed up one or two brochures in my day. But it’s always nice to feel that you’ve been remembered.

To me, the big problem with the acronym thing is when someone tacks a T or an I or a 2S or whatever onto their acronym, without doing any of their homework at all to ensure that they can provide services to that community, or that they even know what it is, or even that everyone will be supportive of people of that community when they show up. It was an endemic problem (and still is) a few years back when it was all the rage to tack a T onto your acronym. Half these groups had never met a trans person, had no idea how to deal with them, and weren’t even prepared to deal with transphobic comments. I find that tiresome and dishonest.

The G is for Gouda

Two good books, each proposing a different term for the same basic concept:

Genderqueer

Pomosexuals

And of course there’s the great:

My Gender Workbook

These books attack the binaries of gay/straight and male/female, and argue that the distinctions cause us to miss differences and similarities that are more important than the basic dichotomies.

Genderqueer doesn’t exclusively mean intergendered or intersexual. Just like ‘queer’ can basically mean anything but heterosexual, ‘genderqueer’ applies to anyone who’s not cisgendered. If some transfolks don’t like being called ‘genderqueer’ - well, again, there I go not indulging people’s desire to make up a wacky identity and a million little rules for how to use it. How the hell am I supposed to keep track of every individual person’s preferences regarding which umbrella terms are okay and which aren’t? “Sheila’s transgendered but not genderqueer. Tanya has a penis, and identifies as a woman, but she’s genderqueer, not transgendered. If you get it wrong, they’ll get all pissy.” I hate that crap, especially since I’m already liable to forget that some of my friends weren’t born with the parts they have now. I simply can’t keep track of an encyclopedia worth of information on someone that I have to leaf through to figure out which pronoun to use and which identity they’re into this week (granted, my personal friends tend not to play identity politics, but there’s all sorts of casual acquantainces.) Genderqueer is a useful term, and it quite naturally includes good ol’ fashioned transgenderism/transsexuality, since that’s nonstandard and tends to be ignored or misunderstood in a largely cisgendered, heteronormative society.

Anyway, this sort of thing is exactly why I like the words ‘queer’ and ‘genderqueer’. None of this “you forgot my sexual identity, which is practiced by a tribe of aborigines on the north coast of Australia and can’t be pronounced without doing a set of special tongue exercises first” nonsense.

It depends who you ask; the word’s so new we haven’t settled down with it yet, let alone universally. Hell, there’s still disagreement over the precise boundaries of transsexual and transgendered.

Here’s where we part ways. If you can remember a person’s name and other relevant details about their lives, you can remember how they identify, once they’ve told you, if they’re important to you. I think it’s better to allow people to inform you as to what they are, not to inform them of what they are.