If you mean what I wrote, then I want to apologize to @timex for that. I believe it’s discrimination to say that some things are real and others are not real when it comes to self-identification and experiences, and denying the reality of the experiences of individuals can cause them psychological harm. I don’t want to accuse @timex of doing that on purpose though! I’m just explaining my reaction to seeing that kind of argument.
I don’t think it’s discrimination to not care about some issues, or to not use some word or other. It’s fine if you just want to refer to people as people without qualifiers. I just don’t like it when people claim that some experiences are real and some are not.
Being an old man, I fall pretty squarely into the “old man” camp. But also being someone that has talked with a lot of people in my life who’ve suffered from things that were never even on my radar, I’m pretty reluctant to wave away the marks of someone else’s experience.
I’m especially disinclined to say something like, “You just made that up yourself” today. Back when I was a self-centered asshole, I wouldn’t have hesitated. But being that kind of person really didn’t work out for me.
Mikey Neumann - a former writer at Gearbox and current (excellent) film producer at FilmJoy - is asexual. He wrote recently about why its acceptance does matter to him and people like him:
Before I read that I thought like you - why does it matter? But after reading it I realized it’s similar to all of the other ways people identify. Having a clear way to identify yourself - and be recognized by others - enables shorthand to describe who you are and have others understand it.
To Mikey and people like him, being able to identify and be recognized as asexual is just as important as it was for gay people or trans people to be accepted for who they are.
Even if it doesn’t mean enacting laws or avoiding overt discrimination, social acceptance and the ability to feel like you’re not “broken” is incredibly important.
I have literally never been dragged unwillingly into a discussion about LGBTQIA issues. Just like I’ve never been dragged unwillingly into a discussion of a FTP MMORPG.
When either term comes up, you are free to walk away while others have a conversation.
I use LGBTQIA in conversations around those issues or in LGBTQIA spaces.
And I don’t have to use it anywhere else. That I suppose, is the key point.
I have recently been very much advocating that using the language/terminology/etiquette of the group you are engaging with is the best way to communicate and it’s achieved good results.
Incidentally the LGBTQIA community is gripped in conflict at the moment at least amongst the Gen X/Boomer LGBs I know so perhaps the acronym will split too.
But it’s different, because its by its nature it doesn’t involve other people.
Being gay or trans requires acceptance to exist, because unless you are in the closet, you are going to be demonstrating that aspect of your personality to some extent.
But that’s not really the case with a person who is simply not having sex.
I would have said so as well, until I read @ArmandoPenblade’s accounting of his friend. She enjoyed all the aspects of a relationship, except the sex part, so for her it absolutely is something she has to ‘display’ to some extent.
It’s a bit dismissive, but it’s probably well to remember that something like 80% of people who consider themselves bi- or something other than the L-G parts tend to be women. Many letters of the alphabet soup are from female teenagers and young women figuring out the subtle distinctions that are so important to them and kinda irrelevent to you.
Do you care that Camilla Cabello left 5th Harmony? Do you even know know what a Camilla Cabello is? Just like that might be so important to a teenager yet completely uninteresting to you, a lot of those letters are young people trying to figure themselves out. That’s why i said before to take this stuff lightly, since the preponderance of people worry about this are young.
Past like, letter number 7, the distinctions become gradations of internal monologues that do not concern you.
Do you mean who they can have sex with and still keep their status as a gay man or a lesbian? Like if they take certain groups to bed they shouldn’t be allowed to keep their, for lack of a better word, label?
Sort of. The issue boils down to lesbians not wanting to have sex with women who have penises. (and to a lesser extent gay men not wanting to have sex with men with vaginas)
Its especially ugly because its also inextricably tangled within a community that contains genuine transphobia and/or phallophobia and/or genuine victims and survivors of male sexual violence and sorting A from B is not easy
