Probably the thing the individual groups have most in common with each other is the opposition. It’s not just similar issues they’re up against, it’s often the same people driving them. It makes even more sense to join forces in this case.
It’s just a bit unfortunate that this opposition is often only too pleased to lump LGBT all together into one group; ‘perverts’, that also includes child-molesters and rapists - so the alliance of LGBT might reinforce the prejudices of the opposition to a certain extent.
From what I’ve seen, the L’s and G’s don’t have much in common with the T’s. Among other things, gay men and lesbians generally want a society that accepts them as openly gay. The transgendered usually want to be known only as regular people and blend in after their transition. In most cases, an MTF woman wants (and needs) all kinds of legal protections that aren’t in current laws. But she wants to be known only as a woman. There are, of course, exceptions. IIRC Australia had a member of parliament who was a post op MTF. She was very open about her past and crusaded for better rights for transsexuals and prostitutes.
Quiet, you! I understand that lesbians aren’t there for my amusement, see them as people and support their rights. Therefor, I should get to watch hot lipstick lesbians do it.
I’m a 56-year-old gay male as has never understood why I’m in the same category with bisexuals & TVs/TSs. I feel “closer” to lesbians than these other “categories.” As much as I’ve tried to identify with & understand the former, I’ve always come up short. All I know is I’m a normal, contented, balanced man who looks and behaves like a man. The only difference is that I love and sleep with a man instead of a woman. Frankly, it seems to me the public is confused (with good reason) as to what “gay” is because of the inclusion of bisexual, TV, & TS along with it. I’ve seen so many horrible examples of “gay” folk dragging us all through the dirt with their “flaming” “EVERYBODY LOOK AT ME! PAY ATTENTION TO ME! RESPECT ME!” escapades that it makes me want to hang my head and cry. When will folk like that ever learn that you can’t demand respect for being different - respect is earned. Do you ever see straight folk running around flaunting their heterosexuality? Well, maybe just a little - but nothing can possibly match the “flamers” I’ve seen. We’ll all get along a lot better if we accept ourselves, behave quietly, with dignity, & yes (shudder!), somewhere closer to the boundaries of social norms - that doesn’t mean rolling over & playing dead concerning discrimination. Seems to me “we’ve” brought a lot of the discrimination upon ourselves & until we make more wholehearted attempts to join mainstream society, we’ll never get anywhere.
<borg voice> YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE. </bv>
As a gay man, if I have to live in a world without pride parades, Brother Boy or Ru Paul’s Drag Race, what reason is there to keep on living?
Shorter lucky57: “Knuckle under and emulate your heterosexual betters! Everybody must be as heteronormative as possible! If you’re ‘weird’ and different, we’re going to abandon you because only absolutely straight-acting men who sleep with men deserve their rights and freedoms!”
On the contrary, it is the transsexual who holds an inflexible view of gender identity, for it is they who assign undue meaning to what it means to be a male or a female. If a man does not conform to the stereotypes of the male gender identity, that does not make him less of a man.
You apparently dot not know much about transsexuality, then. At best, you are talking about a certain subset. But, even then, you don’t understand the issues involved well enough to comment.
And you sure as hell will be regarded as less of a man if you wear a dress, wear feminine makeup or do anything else typically limited to women. You shouldn’t be, of course, but you will be.
As for the question in the OP: it’s a lumping for convenience because the issues are similar. It’s not a lumping as in “they’re all the same” or “they must get along.” It’s more like an alliance.
It’s the freaks who always lead the charge. The quiet, middle-class, clean-cut professionals can’t be counted on to do shit, because they don’t want to lose their job or their home or the esteem of their communities. But freaks don’t have any of these encumberances. They’re always gonna fight because they have nothing to lose except their self-respect.
What happens is that as soon as the freaks make some headway, that’s when the “normals” feel brave enough to come out and take control. Which is fine. Not everyone is endowed with the same quantity of guts. And every movement needs an accessible, mainstream image.
But never forget that it was the freaks who got the ball rolling in the first place.
This. You’d think someone who’s been around as long as lucky57 would remember that it was the drag queens and transgender folks who really rioted at the Stonewall, kicking this all off. If it weren’t for them, “gay liberation” as a movement would still be wearing suits and following the Mattachine model, which did act like lucky57 wants us all to…and did pretty much NOTHING effective in the way of gay rights (or even decriminalization of homosexual acts) for 20-odd years prior to Stonewall.
Interesting to see this zombie thread revived in time for the Gay Pride Festivals.
I already made my comments above, but am reminded of the comedian I saw at a Gay Pride event in LA.
He pointed towards the Rainbow Flag and said, “That is a perfect example of the LGBT community coming together in agreement to decide which color the flag should be.”
As a crossdressing male, I’d say we’re incredibly simplifying things. In the male transgendered community, there’s a lot of diversity. It includes for example:
Frequent crossdressers who would never consider being a woman
Men who get sex changes and live full time as women, but still identify with transgenders
People who adopt an intermediate gender between male and female
and lots of other variants. Some crossdressers refuse to be called transgender (in fact many like their gender roles as traditional as possible), while many post-op women simply consider themselves “women”. Their attitudes towards gays and lesbians vary wildly on their concepts of transgender, to say nothing of their political and social bents. Why should be discriminated against unite these groups. There have been plenty of examples of ethnic/religious/racial minorities who mistrust each other, why should the LGBT group be any different?
As far as acronyms go the most complete I am hearing is LGBTQQIAAP for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, Intersex, ally, asexual, pansexual. I also hear LMNOP and WXYZ thrown onto the end as a humorous acknowledgement of the complexity of it all.
Another angle on the whole thing is called “queer theory” and the gist of this is that hanging labels on various supposedly independent elements such as orientation or gender expression is inaccurate and unhelpful. We are all different in uncountable ways. Creating artificial and false binaries just excludes and disenfranchises people. For example, if you are attracted to males, does it matter if you are attracted to straight versus gay ones? Or if you are attracted to people whose birth assigned gender is male, versus their current gender expression through clothing and manners and name and pronoun use? Or if some of those things are female and others male? I tend to agree with this, and think you are whatever you tell me you are, which could certainly include “you haven’t specified yet and I don’t need you to”.
Some wag in this town during a recent debate started asking when do we deal with rights for the LTE4G community. And you definitely beat the letter we got asking for it to be LGBTTQQI (the two t’s for transsexual and transgender and people in the office were wondering about the difference) (and what would be the asexuals’ problem?).
Exhausting every possible variant in order that nobody gets excluded (except of course for non-“ally” heteronormatives) or to maximize the base of support, can end up calling attention to how kludgy the coalition may become. But the idea is to focus on the common interest and leave the divergences for a later date – and maybe having worked together on the common cause will lead at that later date to being more tolerant when dealing with those divergences. (But still, I might be an ally in pushing for equal rights but as a middle class male heterosexual I can’t help but feel I am not really a member of the group that needs to achieve those rights; feels kind of unfair to those really being persecuted).
Oh, yeah - I think I remember hearing two T’s for a while, too, but not recently. Dunno if something’s up or I just haven’t noticed!
The asexual’s problem? Hmm, don’t think I know. Though we could say that this coalition isn’t necessarily of people with problems. I know somebody who is very up on this sort of thing I can ask. Speaking of "a"s without problems, though, the other “a”, allies, don’t have a problem of being direct victims of oppression or lacking privilege, and aren’t defined that way. To the extent allies don’t think the world should be oppressive for anybody, but it is, well, then allies have a problem. That doesn’t sound like it’s directly applicable to asexuals, though - asexuals don’t have a distinctive reason to care about oppression that is obvious to me.
I’m a middle class male heterosexual, too, and cisgender (as opposed to transgender) too. Plus I’m college educated, English as a first language, natural US citizen, all white Anglo Saxon Protestant ancestors - you name it, I won the privilege lottery. And I think having privileged and unprivileged classes is rotten. I hate it. People like me are allowed to hate it and want to change it, fortunately.
Besides, it seems like the nicest and most interesting and perceptive and insightful people are outside my lottery-winning demographic group. Come to think of it, I bet ninety something percent of the world is outside my demographic group.