I'm not gay. Get over it.

[kaberett]

I've been fortunate enough to hear from gay kids all across the country. A lot of them don't have supportive families, but some do. I cherish the good stories, but there's often a moment in those good stories that makes my heart hurt: when they tell me how happy they are that their parents "still" love them -- because all those kids knew that not loving them was an option.

Amelia at HuffPo (yes, I know).

This says something that hurts my heart, too: both because it is so achingly true - of myself, of so many other kids - but also because it erases me down to "gay".

"Gay" isn't good shorthand for either GSM or LGBT+, and I do so wish people wouldn't do it.

Comments

[liv]

This is crucial, and I think it relates to the very difficult discussion on Genderfork referenced elsewhere. My impression from the outside is that there's a nearly unfixable debate about trans inclusion, not just in language but in, well, reality as well. Because trans* folk have for so long been marginalized within activist spaces as well as mainstream society that unless people explicitly say "including trans* people" then it's the default assumption that they are hostile. At the same time, if you have to keep drawing attention to the fact that you're including trans* people, you're making a trans a very deeply marked and non-normative category, and that itself contributes to exclusion. Like there was a row in the early days of DW because they didn't explicitly include gender identity (as opposed to just gender) in their diversity statement, so some trans activists concluded that DW is a transphobic culture, even though at the time DW had more trans than cis people listed on the staff page.

I am very disinclined to go around saying "women including trans women" or even "people including trans people" all the time! But if I don't, if I just say "women" or just make a generalization about people in general, especially if I'm talking about anything vaguely feminist or related to gender, I may well come across as transphobic.

I've even seen binary trans people objecting to the term "GSM" because they feel that they're just women (or men, as the case may be), which is not a particularly minority gender identity. Trans identity rolled into sexuality absolutely, I can easily see how that's harmful. Equally, there have always been trans people in the GSM activism scene, and it's not acceptable for GSM communities and activism to be for non-straight cis people only. But saying "LGBT" or "GSM including trans*" comes right back round to the problem that it conflates gender identity with sexuality.