2015. július 1., szerda

It's time to dissolve LGBT

Marriage equality! We did it! And now that this issue which has defined the gay rights movement for a decade is resolved (in the US), it's time to re-orient the movement. Everyone keeps saying the fight isn't over, this is just the first step, etc. So what's next?Personally, I think every gay person should be screaming the phrase "ENDA" into every microphone they can find starting last Monday. For the last year I figured they would be. But now I'm reading the news and it feels like the issue de jour is trans rights. Which is great, but also a problem.The trans* community isn't really a subset of the gay community. The reason, as far as I can tell, that they've been lumped together so long, is that the gay community had a lot more power and visibility and support (and size, I believe, though good numbers are hard to come by), so the trans* community jumped on our coattails. They've profited significantly from association with the gay rights movement, and I'm happy for them. But they've picked up momentum now, and if they don't step off our coattails we're gonna trip.Anybody who's anybody is talking about trans rights. And to the laymen it looks like gay people already got their rights. I think it would be better for both communities at this point to start making it clear that these are separate groups worthy of separate consideration. It's not like there isn't room for two concurrent civil rights movements. But we have to make it clear that these are two distinct groups or we'll get subsumed under trans rights the way trans* people were subsumed under gay rights for so long.My proposed solution is to blacklist the phrase LGBT. I'm going to start telling people that it originated when the public couldn't tell the difference between a man who wanted to have sex with men, and a man who wanted to be a woman, and that in 2015 it's offensive to conflate the two. LGB and T are two types of GSM (gender-sexual minority), the same way that Black and Latino are two types of ethnic minority.The gay rights movement is at a crossroads right now, and marriage equality could be the death of us if we aren't careful. We've got momentum, now is the time to think strategically.

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