chyron8472 said:
CatBus said:
Accurate terminology is important–for example, calling everyone under the LGBTQIA umbrella “gay” would be pretty dismissive/marginalizing to those who aren’t gay.
I disagree. Language is fluid and words mean what society wants them to mean. If a society wants to change a word’s meaning, then it changes. There can be an “umbrella” word to encompass the whole umbrella without having to explicitly enumerate each individual sect within it. Other minority groups in society don’t have to do this. I mean, what if the Native American tribes wanted to be known under the umbrella of combining the first letter of every tribe? The term “Native American” does not inherently marginalize the Cherokee or the Osage tribes.
Society at large wants “Eskimo” to mean all extreme-northern-latitude Native Americans. If we’re running with that metaphor, I’d say calling intersex people gay would be more like calling Inuits Eskimos. See how that works out for you.
I’m just saying–I get it that the acronym is unusual and a mouthful and ever-changing and even overused–but it works for the people described by the acronym, and that’s enough for me to accept it. Minority groups aren’t well-served when everyone votes on what a word means, because guess who always wins that vote? And I’m perfectly okay with the idea that I don’t get a vote on this matter.
EDIT: “Queer” was–and still is to some degree–an attempt to create a single overarching umbrella term for everyone. But it’s reclaimed, which is a problem (some people hate it because it will always be an insult to them), and even at the loosest definition, people tend to ascribe gender connotations to the word which still don’t really work for everyone. So the Q fails in its job to cap off the end of the acronym and it continues to grow.