I got into another disagreement over the Alphabet Soup, at this point an unwieldy initialism that sometimes looks like this: LGBTQQIIAA2S+.
Like, seriously. The whole point of acronyms and initialisms is that they’re snappy and memorable. Look at that smorgasbord! It’s a mess!
I get that even within the non-cis, non-het, non-allo community, whatever we call it, that some identities face even more marginalization than others. That’s why I read ace and intersex folks on the regular, it’s an experience different from mine that I cannot possibly share. That’s why it’s important to signal boost their works. But if someone’s talking intersex issues, isn’t it better to just say “intersex”? There’s a much more logical etymology there that someone can follow over “elg-bit-qwee-aahs-plus.”
Either way, any given argument is about occupying specific intersections. At this point it’s starting to become clearer to me that the non-cis non-het non-allo community is not subject to universal or transferable prejudice such that it justifies grouping all those intersections under a single umbrella. After all, the misconception that trans folk don’t have it so bad in the West because gays can marry is precisely fuelled by this idea that we’re all “one kind” of minority. Some trans folk are gay, and marriage rights affected those of us who are. But even some gay advocacy arguments fall flat when a given gay person is also something else like intersex or trans.
All in all, grouping us under an umbrella term doesn’t seem to do us much service. Or at least that’s my experience once all the marriage activists vanished in a puff of smoke despite the ever growing list of trans murders. So even if you rescramble elg-bit-qwee-aahs-plus into something pronouncable like QUILTBAG, you still have the basic issue that any given letter in the Soup is not subject to the same prejudice as anyone else in the umbrella, and vice versa. So why group us like that? Why not specify intersections when arguing about them in order to capture those unique challenges?
-Shiv