Here’s the list. I presume there are others. A while back someone remonstrated with a post of mine because I didn’t divine the meaning of a jumble of letters abbreviating some group gender community or something. I’m still scarred.
“Few people” definition is left open, for the moment. Facebook has entered this terra ingognita. From the AP cite, something like “most people won’t have a clue, but it’s really really important to a few.”
I see these terms from time to time used by young people. I believe they are being taught this stuff in college classes.
Outside of a subset of college students or those in gender studies programs, never. And some I’ve never heard before. Guydyke?
I am a straight white male, getting on in years, and (AFAIK) no one in my current (rather small) circle of close family and friends is other than straight (although that has not always been the case), and I have long been been familiar with this terminology. (OK, not everything on that lengthy list, but the general idea of LGBTQ identities.) There are certainly several people who identify as genderqueer, etc. on this board. Get with the program, man! It’s the 21st century.
I admit that the time I came across someone on another site who insisted that he was a male lesbian - anatomically male, not transsexual or transvestite, and entirely sexually oriented towards women, but not straight - I concluded he was trolling.
It was within our adult lifetimes - I think you’re close to my age, Leo - that the terms gay and lesbian were rare in general discourse. Transsexual and transvestite are even newer as common terms. Yet they are all used by all but a few troglodytes.
Why would you think that additional terms wouldn’t join them, or more importantly, shouldn’t join them? They will grow into use in exactly the same way, in fact; through their use by people who identify with them and happen to be sons and daughters, colleagues and associates, and social media friends and acquaintances of the rest of the population. Exactly as njtt said about the Dope.
Will every one of them last in general speech? Probably not. Language almost never works that way. Every group has lumpers and splitters: those who want to combine categories for ease of identification and those who want to make finer distinctions to emphasize important differences. It will happen in the Genderqueer community as well, and that assumes that the term genderqueer will survive the process. You should note that the terms on that page are a subset of the much longer list of words on Transqueerwellness.org.
Or the short answer to the thread title: Yes.
I’ve heard terms such as genderqueer, genderfuck, etc. I had a housemate in college who identified as queer (she was a lesbian who preferred to date pre-op transmen) and participated in a group that did “genderfuck” performances. For example she would do a striptease in lingerie while wearing a fake mustache. My other housemate also identified as queer although he ended up in a heterosexual relationship with a girl while he was living with us.
Sexual identity and gender identity is not at all binary for many people, so I think it makes sense for these terms to exist and I think they will become used by more and more people as it becomes socially acceptable to openly be what is different from “normal.”
The singer Morrissey came with the term “humasexual” to describe himself as he says he is attracted to humans, but not based on gender (I’m glad he won’t be down at the aquarium with Troy McClure).
Or perhaps he’s just really into Anthony Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin.
What seems a little confusing to me is that many of these terms seem to be saying the same things; or at least very very similar things. It seems like just using different words to convey the same basic concepts.
While I respect that people may identify the way they want, and I know language changes, but at some point the terms stop being useful. “My particular sexuality” is not a group identifier. If there are a large number of ever-changing gender related terms the term “gender” becomes meaningless.
“Male lesbian”, c’mon; even as a joke.
That’s the goal; yes. Balkanization (for lack of a better term) is a step on the path toward “doesn’t matter.”
At some point I gave up trying to deal with everyone’s exact match between gender, sex, and sexuality. So I rarely use “gay” or “lesbian” anymore, instead I’ve moved to “attracted to men” and “attracted to women”. A bit clunky, but it avoids misunderstanding just fine.
Naturally, once you start introducing fluid/non-binary sexuality and pseudo-fetishes like only being attracted to transpeople and other stuff like otherkin it gets into a whole other ballpark. I don’t interact with enough people who prefer pronouns like zir and hir or unique sexual tastes for it to really matter, so I haven’t really determined how to deal with that minefield yet. I generally prefer a reduction in terms to a surge of slightly distinct labels. (Of course, language doesn’t care what I prefer).
I’m probably a bit genderqueer*, and I know that personally I don’t go with the litany of terms and I never will. When it comes down to it, there’s always going to be something you are that lacks a label, and while it sucks to not have a group or an easy word to tell your family what you are, inventing a new exciting term for some incredibly specific personal identity doesn’t really help. If anything, it just makes people eyeroll and brings in the special snowflake accusations. (And, to be perfectly fair, there definitely are some people that overblow perfectly innocuous feelings into conditions they made up in their head to get cookies, so it’s not always even wrong).
None of that means I’ll rail on anyone. If you want to be a guydyke, sure. But there is an upper threshold of tolerance I have for these terms and I definitely don’t edge on the side of these terms being Important™ for much more than social justice sociology straw polls. If anything, for formal data collection (e.g. for government forms) I’d argue to just move to more of a scale. “From 0.0 to 1.0 mark how female/male you are with totally female being 0.0 and totally male being 1.0” and stuff like that, rather than introducing a bunch of slightly distinct highly personalized terms. It’s a bit clunky for everyday conversation, but I’d want to move towards using more modifiers like “I’m a bit male” over introducing a bunch of new words. But again, it’s not up to me.
Except than a couple terms from that first link (trigender, pomosexual, demiguy/girl, epicene, guydyke, girlfag), I’ve seen all others use really frequently in the circles I hang out on the internet or in real life.
I’m on tumblr, so I have a well-worn familiarity.
Which is why most of them will fade with time and only a few useful ones will enter the permanent language.
If that’s the goal, then that’s the way to do it.
My only request is that if I called a girlfag “gay”, that person won’t feel offended and I’m not labelled “an intolerant asshole”.
Hilarious.
Actually, the opposite.
I’m used to hearing about half those terms used by friends and people I associate with. Maybe there is evolution of terminology driving some of the proliferation, but if we want terms with which we can categorize everybody, it’s going to be a lot of terms.
It’s like professions, or interests, or even what tastes good to each of us. Categories are incomplete. We could talk about what we like and dislike instead. Or we could probably worry about it way less. Not many people are going to complain when you show an interest in what they want to tell you about themselves, and never bother them.
The Facebook 56. Why they didn’t make up one more variety is beyond me.
Facebook has how many billion people on it?
My opinion: it is no less than a new facility for on-line sexual (dating) hookups and stabs at abbreviated self-identity ala 40-char or less mentality.
Ie, column heads of “SM Seeking SF.”
Yes, it is other things, but it is good for business for FB.
From the Slate cite above, for the sheer deliciousness of it, and ::feeble excuse coming:: in case the page ever 404s, for those w/o FB. Plus it’s value-added because I used the thingie to number them for easier reference.
[ol]
[li]Agender[/li][li]Androgyne[/li][li]Androgynous[/li][li]Bigender[/li][li]Cis[/li][li]Cisgender[/li][li]Cis Female[/li][li]Cis Male[/li][li]Cis Man[/li][li]Cis Woman[/li][li]Cisgender Female[/li][li]Cisgender Male[/li][li]Cisgender Man[/li][li]Cisgender Woman[/li][li]Female to Male[/li][li]FTM[/li][li]Gender Fluid[/li][li]Gender Nonconforming[/li][li]Gender Questioning[/li][li]Gender Variant[/li][li]Genderqueer[/li][li]Intersex[/li][li]Male to Female[/li][li]MTF[/li][li]Neither[/li][li]Neutrois[/li][li]Non-binary[/li][li]Other[/li][li]Pangender[/li][li]Trans[/li][li]Trans*[/li][li]Trans Female[/li][li]Trans* Female[/li][li]Trans Male[/li][li]Trans* Male[/li][li]Trans Man[/li][li]Trans* Man[/li][li]Trans Person[/li][li]Trans* Person[/li][li]Trans Woman[/li][li]Trans* Woman[/li][li]Transfeminine[/li][li]Transgender[/li][li]Transgender Female[/li][li]Transgender Male[/li][li]Transgender Man[/li][li]Transgender Person[/li][li]Transgender Woman[/li][li]Transmasculine[/li][li]Transsexual[/li][li]Transsexual Female[/li][li]Transsexual Male[/li][li]Transsexual Man[/li][li]Transsexual Person[/li][li]Transsexual Woman[/li][li]Two-Spirit[/li][/ol]