Please help stop Queering and TQ+ing LGB people

[Pluvia]

Everywhere I look and listen, I'm noticing that LGB has been replaced by Queer. This review in the Guardian has 'gay' in the title but uses the catch-all 'Queer' and LGBTQ+ much of the time.

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/may/31/young-gay-people-being-out-and-happy-its-revolutionary-meet-the-heartstopper-generation

On Monday Front Row had a feature on Queer Poetry.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00180cy

They didn't bother to define what Queer was, just classified poets such as Rupert Brook (gay) as queer. Rupert Brook would have lived in fear of being publicly identified as being queer, I suspect.

The Q category in LGBTQ+ is mainly straight people. The takeover of LGB by Q is strategic. Like the takeover of 'woman' by transwomen, it's all disappearing the LGB.
Can I ask you, when you hear Queer used in an 'LGB people and people with blue hair who've read Judith Butler at university' way to challenge it. Ask people what they mean by Queer. Ask them whether they realise that in using it to forcibly link LGB people to a group they have nothing in common with, they are oppressing LGB people.

I was in an event yesterday where the speaker had no idea that the 'trans community' (the phrase in use) encompassed 200+ genders, including non-binary people and trans people who had not necessarily had medical or surgical interventions.

There were times when LGB was rolled into 'queer' or trans at this event. The terminology was wholly imprecise to the point where after the first couple of interventions, it was plain that none of the speakers knew what they were talking about. I don't wholly blame them.

Yup I agree. Makes my teeth itch.

Do those that don’t have a heterosexual lifestyle need a title for every variation or would just “alternative” fit, because if there are 200 genders now almost nobody understands what the differences are. As for “queer” does it mean whatever you want it to mean?.

I still don't know what queer means and even Google wasn't much help. I don't think every single wave of thought that a tiny tiny minority of people has just once in their lifetime needs a new label every time it occurs.

I'm irritated by the conflation of sexual orientation and gender.

Underpinning that, yes, I'm fascinated by language change but not the sort where words don't have shared meanings any longer and any given word (including genocide) means what is convenient to the user in the moment.

This is irrelevant but when I were a lass in the 80s, the word queer was used as a sneer, a nasty name.

This is mainly about the 'capture' of the next generation (teenagers) coming through now - teenagers are often seeking an 'identity' so all these genders, sexual orientations etc offer them convenient labels to describe themselves and make themselves a little edgy and different. It is very insidious so much like the trans lobby slowly and quietly captured institutions and minds the next step is that the Q will capture the LGB.

Absolutely this, especially in the arts and on US TV, where the word 'lesbian' in particular is almost always replaced with the vague word 'queer', a word with - and this I think is key - no defined sexual boundaries. It has long been used as a slur and carries with it the implication that to be lesbian or gay is being 'queer in the head', as in a form of mental illness.

And to rebrand historical figures with a word that to them - and still to me, as I'm middle-aged - has the impact of the n-word to black people is appalling.

Its use is money-motivated, I feel: it's vague, so it can include any white middle class youngster (or columnist) who longs to feel a bit spicy, the oppression-tourism equivalent of Portlandia's 'put a bird on it'.

Wait...straight people are describing themselves as queer now?
So it's no longer a taunt used to hurt gay people? Is it now a trendy label to show how "interesting" you are?

This lumping together annoys me too. I heard someone be described as 'coming out as LGBTQ+'. Well, which is it? You can't be all of them!

I think it has just become a lazy phrase that means anyone who is a bit edgy and trendy. It definitely excludes us old fashioned women, you know, the ones with wombs.

I caught some recent mention of similar on R4 - background so wasn’t really listening - and it struck me that queer is now used as simply radical as the catch all opposite of straight in an old fashioned sense of boring/heteronormative/oldies/conformist/conservative. I think the speaker branded herself as queer as she saw herself as radical. It made me think of Emily Dickinson’s tell it slant.
It is being bandied about so often rather like everything was a bit Po-Mo in late 80s til the end of the century. Surely v soon it will lose it’s cachet?

I don't personally like the term 'queer' (and I have published stuff about this; I have done my thinking). But I think it's quite arrogant to demand that people 'challenge' the use of it.

Some people do like the term. Including people who, for goodness' sake, have won the right to use whatever term they fancy. I have a friend who identifies as queer, and who has come through a whole working life of being discriminated against, told 'they won't employ a dyke here' etc. If she wants to say she's queer, who on earth are you, or I, to say she shouldn't?

Likewise I know much younger people who are going back to 'queer' because, in their school days, 'queer' wasn't a much-used insult (as it was for my generation), and what they remember as a slur is 'ugh, you're so gay'. They don't want to use 'gay' because it hurts, just as 'queer' used to. Again, who are we to say they must use a term that's associated with being insulted?

I hear you.

Stonewall and cronies have turned 'LGBT+' away from 'a highly diverse group of LGB people who just have the one common characteristic of being homosexual uniting them in a shared experience'.

They have turned it, quite intentionally, into meaning 'a group of people of any sexuality who are committed to a certain political belief system'.

Homosexual people have been bounced out. But you'll notice 'gay rights' etc still gets mentioned a lot because that was a useful bit to the cause when they pirated homosexuality and its public/legal support, and broke it up for parts that served them.

And they currently rely on most people still believing they are supporting gay rights instead of realising they're signed up to a highly extremist political belief system that is actively homophobic and working to destroy homosexual and women's recognition in law, while taking over the bits of the provision for them that serves the political belief system.

As we've seen; most people are too busy and distracted and easily taken in by shiny advertising to have realised.

I'm probably a little bit older than you but yes, in the 70s and 80s it seemed to refer to a particular type of camp stereotype like Mr Humphries or Bombardier Beaumont. Then it started to be reclaimed around the same time as the Pride movement got going "We're here, we're queer, etc"

Now it seems to refer to asymmetric blue-dyed hair.

I admit to being totally confused by this term. 16 yr old DD has friends who now define themselves as queer but when I asked her if that meant they were gay she said no because they have boyfriends (they are also the non-binary ones who seem to have a different pronoun every week).

I have a cousin who is gay and in a long term relationships and would never have used this term in his presence. But then I am in my 50s and feel increasingly detached from the modern identity politics of today.

"Queer" is a slur. No institution should be using it at all, ever, except in the limited instances where someone describes themselves as "queer" in a bio or something.

But I am also increasingly of the opinion that 99% of people under thirty shouldn't be using "queer" to describe themselves, either. You can't "reclaim" something that was never used against you in anger, and for most younger people, queer hasn't been thrown at them as a deadly insult, often accompanied by physical threats and/or violence. It's not their slur to reclaim. (There are exceptions to this.)

And yeah, also 99 times out of 100 someone who describes themselves as queer usually leads a perfectly ordinary heterosexual life.

Rather like 'cis' isn't it?

If you understand and intentionally want to embrace calling yourself 'cis' you crack on. It's a free country, if you want to embrace and befriend your misogyny to be co dependent with others then that's up to you. But you don't get to call anyone else that label and you particularly don't get to forcibly assign it to those rejecting it and order them to comply.

Because why should you expect to order and insist that someone uses a label they reject while at the same time throwing the mother of all tantrums if that same person uses labels you reject? Like 'biological female' and 'man'?

Other than you're busy trying to divide society into the master race with special rights and powers and entitlements and the servant class who have to shut up and obey you, and frankly no, I'm not enabling anyone in that game. That's plain insane.

My issue with asking what people mean by queer is that they tell you. A two hour me-me-me monologue later and I need a lie down.

But I get the point youa re making.

Thanks for raising this topic. I am baffled by the terminology. When the new White House press secretary (US) was introduced recently, she was — by her predecessor — described as the “first out LGBTQ+ person” to hold the job and I thought “which of those initials is she?” She is lesbian, in a long-term relationship with a woman, so presumably she is neither G nor B nor T, but perhaps also Q? I just don’t know. Why not simply describe her as Lesbian or, better, why is her sexuality relevant at all?
I had assumed that lesbians and gays had united with all the other “letters” to create one bloc of people so large and inclusive it had more power. But it seems to have backfired now with the explosion of transgender and non-binary and other categories that deny the concept of natal sex.
(and, before anyone criticises, I do accept some people are truly trans and truly non-binary, but think the current waves, particularly amongst teens and young adults, defies what should logically be expected of humans — or of other mammals….)

And rather like 'woman' we now have a very large chunk of the population wandering around going - we had a class definition which was the means by which we organised and had legal rights - they've taken this and made it mean something else to serve their rather selfish personal interests....

wtf are we called now?

This is to me rather like a white modern population deciding to appropriate a racial slur word and embrace it as look at us overcoming oppression.

And it baffles me that I can't name any of those words, because all hell would break loose in how offensive it would be and how unacceptable - rather like now saying 'adult human female' is - but you can call female and homosexual people whatever names and take what you want from them, that's fine.

See how successfully homophobia and misogyny has been normalised and made fun to do?

These people are so stupid . Once you dismantle the protections for any group like this, you have nothing left at all but the hope that you and your mates and loved ones stay in the currently fashionable group. And fashions change. They change constantly. If you can do it to someone else then sooner or later they will do it to you, and it will be too late then to wail about the protections and social beliefs that used to protect you - you were the one that queered and dismantled them.

But I'm not ordering and insisting anything? I don't know where you get this from.

Like I say, I personally don't use queer; I'm a lesbian, it's fine. But I understand why some people do use it, and to me their reasons seem perfectly sensible.

That was a general 'you' Sarah, not you personally.

I was agreeing with you that words are a choice, and cannot be enforced. I think the enforced use of 'cis' often evident on this board is very similar to to pushing of 'queer'.

Same hear. It makes me wince every time I hear someone use the word.

Whew! I was a bit blindsided there.