As far as I knew it’s always been the LGBT community. Now I sse LGBTQ on several sites, such as this one (a story on the dispute between Whole Foods and one of their customers over an alleged gay slur):
I gather the Q stands for Queer, and that’s fair enough. But isn’t Queer also represented by Gay? What’s the point? Surely it can’t be simply that some Gays prefer to be known as Queers. Under that reasoning the acronym could stretch out to the crack of doom. Or is there some subtle difference between Queer and Gay that I’m missing?
Definitely a Native American thing. “Winkte” in the Lakota language, although it doesn’t literally mean “2 spirit”, as “win” is the root word for “woman”, so it means something like “acts as a woman”, referring to men only.
Gay generally refers to men who are exclusively involved with men, and in some cases includes women who are exclusively involved with women, though usually ‘lesbian’ is the preferred term. It doesn’t really have any space for non-binary gender or people who’s attraction doesn’t follow the simple model (a masculine male who’s interest is receptive sex with butch women doesn’t really fit any of the standard categories, for example), while ‘queer’ has evolved to mean basically ‘anything that isn’t entirely straight’, so is a better general term. Also, ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ have rather specific subcultures directly attached to the name, and good number of queer people aren’t welcome and/or don’t want to be in those specific subcultures.
I think that the super-long acronym variants turn into a self-parody and sticking with the historical LGBT is the way to go for understandability, much like the NAACP sticks to the now-archaic ‘colored people’ terminology. I think that terms for ‘attracted to categories’ are evolving and are really inadequate now (there’s no word for ‘man who’s attracted to women, but not necessarily exclusively women’ for example), and that it’s going to evolve a lot over the next few decades, and messing with the acronym distracts from the real issues.
Always? No. For a while we were the “Gay and Lesbian community.” Before that, we were the “Gay community.” Before that, there was no community, just a bunch of homos and dykes who got beaten up and left for dead.
People who are affirmatively tolerant on gay, lesbian and transgender issues still ask “Why do we need to add another letter to the acronym? Isn’t anyone who isn’t mainstream already covered by ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ or ‘bisexual’ or ‘trans’? I understand not liking rigid categories but seriously, do we need this term?”
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Q is for Genderqueer, at least as much as it is for any other term. (Can’t use G, it’s already in use).
Genderqueer, in turn, basically means “it’s something else”. Well, more specifically it means “your gender isn’t the one that folks would normally expect of you”. I would readily agree that it doesn’t readily encompass intersex. Intersex people have a different and nonconventional SEX identity, which is a somewhat different critter than a gender identity.
I’m glad the “Q” is in the acronym. It makes me feel included. I never identified as trangender. I know it is theoretically supposed to include folks like me, but in practice if you go around saying you’re transgender, everyone expects it to mean that you either have transitioned, plan to transition, or at least would ideally choose to transition if that were a financial and medical possibility for you. I prefer “genderqueer”. Folks may have less of an idea what it means but that’s better than giving folks a pretty strong idea that’s fundamentally incorrect.
I never heard Q standing for genderqueer until quite recently, and, in fact, was under the impression that any variation on the word queer when referring to LGBT was offensive. I had always heard it as questioning, especially applying to teenagers.
That’s exactly why we use it, to take ownership of the word and dilute its offensiveness. The same way that we took ownership of the Nazi’s pink triangle. Of course, depending on who’s using the word, and how they’re using it, it can still be damn offensive.