I really am sensitive to the issues of not only the other-sexual population but other marginalized and misunderstood ones, but I do feel that this is another case where internal… discussion of the label is counterproductive and wastes precious time and effort. The search for a label seems caught between every faction being insistent it’s represented by name, and the proactives insisting it challenge outside assumptions, and the radicals insisting on reclaiming slurs like queer and fag as part of it.
The results so far, IMVHO, have been committe-think nonsense and black humor, achieving very little of what’s intended. Other than extreme sensitivity to being categorized as “not normal” - which, again IMVHO every such label will do, to some extent - a collective and simple “NOT [heterosexual | heteronormal | biosexually normative]” would seem to be a better long-run choice than an every involving “oh, one more letter will include them, too” labels that sound like a bad SNL skit.
But then, I’ve had my fill of completely ordinary, day-to-day civic committees that bicker for months over a name because some old bat thinks we aren’t including her tiny spectrum of citz. So maybe I’m trying to simplify something of much greater importance that seems frustratingly resistant to, well, common sense.
It’s an age-old problem in the movement - the lumping of the T and I with the LGBQQ et al. There are many valid social reasons to do so, but at the risk of missing a fundamental difference between the two groups.
Well, really, no two of these categories really have quite the same situation or needs - gay men and lesbians are often lumped together, but you don’t have to be real discriminating to see that they hardly share any real-world needs. So if the goal is a group or foundation or spokesbody for, basically, everyone who’s outside generally accepted psychosexual norms, the differences between gay men and full M-F transsexuals is not much more than that between gay men and lesbians.
Either focus the group on the specifics, or if you’re going to try to speak for all, make it “all for one.” It seems to me that all “othersexuals” are going for the same general goals (acceptance, understanding and equal opportunities)… so what’s the value of carefully differentiating and delineating the component groups for that purpose?
I wouldn’t agree with that. It seems to me that gay men and lesbians are a lot more similar in interests than either are with transgender people. They’re not identical, of course. For instance, AIDS is a much bigger problem for gay men than it is for lesbians, but both gay men and lesbians have the same general goal of “We’re sexually attracted to people of our same sex/gender, and want our relationships legally recognized and not to be discriminated against because we make that desire known.” What benefits one group is pretty much going to benefit the other…however the Supreme Court decides on the marriage cases, they’re not going to say “Gay men can get married but not lesbians.”, and an anti-discrimination law is going to say “You can’t discriminate based on sexual orientation.” It’s not going to say, “You can’t discriminate based on sexual orientation if both people are women.”
Transgender people, though, are in a totally situation. Their situation is more "I consider myself to be a gender that’s different than what other people consider me to be based on my physical form. . .i.e., “I think of myself as a woman and everyone else thinks of me as a man” or vice versa. This raises a whole new set of issues. Gay men and lesbians don’t have to worry about what bathrooms or locker rooms they should use, for instance, and transgender people do. Gay men and lesbians don’t have to worry about whether their insurance will pay for gender reassignment surgery, and transgender people do.
This isn’t to say that gay men and lesbians can’t find common cause with transgender people, or that there aren’t advantages to groups that push both sets of issues, or more generally, a group that says “we should treat everyone with respect.” But the specific issues and needs are different, whereas with gay men and lesbians, the specific issues and needs are pretty much the same.
