Please, please, PLEASE don't take this as some kind of bait, or think that I am anything than genuinely curious about. please. This is a genuine question, asked with love and seeking better understanding.
I am a hetero male. So I can't claim to understand the depths of what it means to be in the LGBT community. I only have a few close homosexual friends, and none of them have been able to answer this question.
Why do we put transgender people in a group with homosexual people? I'm not a huge fan of putting people into big groups anyway, but it's the way the world turns...
Being transgender seems like a completely different situation - or perhaps on a different level than a matter of which gender you're attracted to. Does that make sense?
Homosexual men are attracted to Homosexual men.
Homosexual women are attracted to Homosexual women.
Bisexual women and men are attracted to women and men.
Transgender individuals are... TRANSGENDER - this seems to have more to do with biology and psychology - not necessarily what gender an individual is attracted to. Theoretically (and please pardon my lack of knowledge of currently correct terminology):
Transgender individuals born with male genitalia but who identify as female could be attracted to men and/or women. And the reverse could be true. So... Maybe I understand from that perspective - that an individual who was born with male genitalia but identifies as a woman - if she were attracted to men, I guess might be classified by some as homosexual? because she physiologically is male (pre-op). But if she were attracted to women - she might be considered a homosexual because she identifies as a woman?
Maybe it all comes down to gender identity or something. Being a hetero male, I've had the luxury of burying my head in the sand - but that doesn't seem like a good idea in the 21st century. I want to understand.
I understand that members of the LGBT community have similar issues centered around gender. But I feel like the issues faced by the trans community, while perhaps similar (bigotry, violence, discrimination, etc), are actually fundamentally different.
Are we doing a disservice to transgender individuals by lumping them in with the LGB community?
If any of my comments or questions were offensive - I genuinely apologize. I really am trying to understand. I'm hoping conversations like this can help further understanding which could go a long way to breaking barriers and reducing hate-speak and "us and them" stuff.
I think that the things that you're discounting are the important factors here. Issues that negatively affect transgender people (bigotry, violence, discrimination. as you said) also affect LGB people and spring from similar causes. It's more of a "stronger together" sort of idea going on. You're right in saying that the specifics aren't the same, but they're similar enough so that it'd make sense to work united on them. (I don't follow the politics of it. These are just my personal thoughts.)
crap... I worried that what I wrote about commonalities might be read as me discounting them. I don't mean to write them off. All of these groups have been and are being marginalized in many ways. I just wonder if it's time to take the discussion to the next level and look more closely at issues facing all groups. maybe I've got the cart before the horse. Shoot... "There aren't gay people in Russia", right? One step at a time toward a world where people are truly free to be and love whoever they want.
I wouldn't worry about anyone losing faith in you as a person or anything. You're coming here with a very obvious tone of, "I don't know this! Is someone able to explain it to me?" More importantly, you're not arguing with people who are trying to explain it to you, which is something I see all the time on posts like this. That said, I disagree and think that the T should be kept in the acronym, and I would probably argue that it does less to marginalize transgender individuals than you think it does. If anything, I imagine it binds them to the LGB community, which gains them an important ally in the political sense. Of course, I'm also a white heterosexual male, so anyone who actually knows how it is can feel free to correct me!
So.... upon further thought - and after reading all of these awesome responses, I should have probably titled this post differently. I understand why the Ts are part of the LGBT movement. I don't mean to marginalize Trans people (or anyone for that matter) further by trying to break them apart. I guess I was trying to look further - maybe look at the next step where LGBT folks no longer have to fight for basic rights and even survival - but the next phase when they can begin to focus on some of the nuance of what it means to be Trans that differ from the LGB movement. Hmmm... it's kinda hard to put all of my thoughts and feelings into these comments while I'm at work. (who does my boss think he is anyway - expecting me to finish stuff while I'm at WORK :-P) I just envision this place, in the not-to-distant future where people can be who they want and love who they want and marry who they want with no fear of actual persecution, violence, discrimination, etc. There will always be haters... there will be people who civilly disagree with lifestyle choices... but I can hope. blergh. then we'll move on to world peace.
TBH it's because a lot of the time you put your foot in your mouth or can be insensitive. When we first met you shared some shitty opinions on gender identity, but this post is thoughtful and shows insight into the nature of identity politics, which insight normally goes over most people's heads.
i can't remember even a quarter of the things i say but i believe you that it happened i agree with you on your first two points; been attempting to dial back on comments on here for those reasons i'm sorry if whatever i said hurt you personally - i know how it feels and i don't mean to add to anybody's pain
It is a stronger together thing and there's even ground level friction between the L&G&B&T's or so I've heard. Gay guys don't necessarily love trans women are march happily under the rainbow together just because they bloc together politically. And there are other letters. LGBTQI is as far as I've seen it go. Q meaning queer and I for intersex. I'm just curious like you but I've done some reading. Did you know agender is a thing? Like you really can't bother to pick? Gender fluid is another one I can't wrap my head around. I'm open minded but gender identity for young people makes me feel old and square.
That's because white / Christian cultures have made a deliberate effort to try and erase the existence of trans people. For example how being Hijra was declared as being illegal during the British Raj in India.
For example, in the Native American culture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-Spirit
LGBTQQIAA, if I remember correctly. QQ - queer, questioning; AA - one is for androgynous, pretty sure, don't know the other. That's the umbrella of alphabet soup my college "non-binary gender" club ascribed to, but if we want to be not worried about PC-ness, "gay club." think arguewithatree just pointed out the other a, agender.
I've never seen 2 A's used w/ androgynous as an option. There's debate about the other A being for asexual but a lot of asexuals have been showing their asses by appropriating terms like "compulsory heterosexuality" and "corrective rape" and using them to shame people who aren't asexual without acknowledging the specifically queer history behind them.
Agender is not about being "not bothered" to pick but feeling an absence of gender or nonidentification with a specific gender. To use the color metaphor, some people are red, some people are blue, some people are purple, etc. Black is the absence of color in the same way that agender is the absence of gender.
I believe this is one of the reasons why "GSM" (Gender and Sexual Minorities) is being pushed as a better term. That and expanding LGBT into QUILTBAG (Queer/Questioning Undecided Intersex Lesbian Trans* Bisexual Asexual Gay) and alphabet soup variants became cumbersome.
I prefer GSM but it was coined by a pedophile to include pedophilia as a "sexual minority" so...
I think the point of his confusion is why combine gender minorities and sexual minorities. Part of what I think makes it fit (though this doesn't apply to the inclusion of intersex) is that they tend to be unrecognized minorities that are not united by a belief or central ideology, just that their defining characteristics are, as just mentioned, unrecognized by many. And that is the source of a lot of discrimination. At least, that's how I see the relation is. Intersex, I suppose, it more recently grouped in there because they face similar types of discrimination (at least, I assume so, admittedly I haven't looked much into the topic) and so they join in. There's also, as others mentioned, the fact that grouping all these demographics together gives much more strength to activism by rallying more people.
It definitely seems like a better acronym. Keeping it LGBTQI... will just lead to another, previously unaccounted for, group going "Hey! What about me!" and causing a commotion, because they'll feel out of place in the community. It would be like if the USA was "The United States of Alabama Alaska... "; each time you ratify a new state, you would have to go through the process of changing the whole name and getting people to recognize it as the "official" name. Also, to include all identities under that naming system would just be silly, because you'd end up having a 26+ character name to make sure that every person in it is accounted for. By making a blanket term, a group could say "We're GSM", just like a person from New York says "We're from the USA." It's just a better system, because it makes sure there isn't a group that is not accounted for.
It's definitely a better acronym in that it doesn't easily make people come to any kind of conclusion that some group included doesn't match the rest and I think it works better because it makes it clear gender and sexuality rights are of equal priority. I was just trying to explain why the inclusion of transgender makes sense in the traditional "LGBT" acronym that some people get confused about. I still don't think GSM makes it obvious WHY they work together for some people, but it makes people less likely to see it as a different kind of struggle.
Okay, here I am, as @thenewgreen requested! You've gotten a lot of really great answers so far - shoutouts especially to Kafke, Quatrarius and khjuu for great answers though I don't agree with everything everyone said all the time (but that's me and my opinion). Since you've gotten so many good answers, I think it might be good to flesh out some of the history, and provide some context from that perspective. While there were earlier events, The "shot heard 'round the world" of the Gay rights movement in North America is the Stone Wall Riots. Basic story - Mob-Owned Gay bars were paying off police to prevent raids (running a "gay bar" was illegal at the time, and the mob was pretty much the only game in town willing to do it). Stonewall was seen by many as "the" gay bar in the city, but it mostly only catered to Gay men (with a few Lesbian clients), and was one of the few bars which catered to effeminate men, cross dressers and trans women (though AMAB people dressing entirely in women's clothing was discouraged - and AFAB women had to be wearing "at least 3 articles of women's clothing"). The alcohol was bootlegged, raids were frequent. This raid, At 1:20 AM on Saturday, June 28, 1969, was different. Instead of the usual seizure of alcohol and taking down of some names, maybe arresting the most flamboyant, it began to look a bit like a mass arrest. A crowd grew outside, mostly of gay people, and the mood darkened. After a woman (possibly Stormé DeLarverie) was brought out in handcuffs and evidence of being beaten, it turned into a riot. At the core of this riot were the crossdressers, effeminite gay men, and trans women. women like Silvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson and others, along with many Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and queer people were at the heart of this movement. The T is in LGBT because historically, we were a big part of the history of said movement. So that's some history into the "why" of it. The question of whether we should be there or not is sort of a more complicated one. One one hand it ends up spreading a lot of bad ideas about trans people - that we are just extra gay men and women, or that we transition because we are so ashamed of liking the "same sex", or (especially in the case of trans lesbians) that we transition because we love the opposite gender so much we just want to be them. On the other hand, as rjw says, a lot of it has to do with intersectionality. We have a lot of legal needs in common - the right to marry, the right to live as ourselves without fear of persectution - so there are benefits to working together, and we have our similarities: we are all humans who are "fringe" cases, a small part of the population. I hope this helps provide more context into your questions.
well, think of it in terms of this statistic 16 transgender people have been unlawfully killed this year, according to this. That's not a complete list, and I think that the amount of trans men on the list in general is underrepresented. Still, however, it is notable that as yet, all of the trans murders this year are women save Brian / Bri Golec, whose identifiers are unclear but appears to have been identifying as an androgynous pansexual man. So an intersectionality is that All trans people have a higher likelihood of murder than the average person, but Trans women have a higher risk (in as much as it's supported by our statistics - it may be that trans men are underrepresented) of murder. Their experiences are different within the experience of being trans It's also notable that at least 12 of those women murdered are women of colour. Trans women all have a higher likelihood of murder than the average person, but Trans women of colour are more likely to be murdered. their experiences are different again from white trans women. That's intersectionality, as I understand it, in a nutshell, and it's a problem because of the broad "Gentrification" of the LGBT movement, and the Feminist movement (and really almost all movements) - lots of white gay men don't want to talk about the black trans women on the streets, lots of white feminists don't want to talk about the overrepresentation of trans women of colour in homelessness, or in sex work, or even the general overrepresentation of GSM kids on the street.
As an aside, this JUST got posted on Vice today:
To answer the top-level question: presumably it's for the same reason agender, questioning, genderqueer, and all the other groups are included as well... I've seen "LGBT" become something like "LGBTQIASOMEOTHERLETTERS". Correct. My guess is, this is probably why it's lumped in. But no. A "male at birth" individual who transitions in to female is a woman. If she were attracted to men, she'd be straight/heterosexual. Unless I'm severely mistaking what straight/hetero/homosexual are... She's a woman who likes men, which AFAIK is straight. A homosexual trans woman would be attracted to women. It's worth noting transitioning isn't just a surgery. Some trans women are non-op as well. There's HRT, which is hormone replacement therapy. And after that there's a few different surgeries that can be done. Post/pre-op generally refers to their bottom genitalia (vag/dick). A pre-op trans women (who's gone through HRT) will look like a woman. That's essentially the whole issue of transgender, hence the name ;P. It's actually the opposite. The whole point of attaching the "T" and joining up was to give awareness to transgender issues.Transgender individuals are... TRANSGENDER - this seems to have more to do with biology and psychology - not necessarily what gender an individual is attracted to. Theoretically (and please pardon my lack of knowledge of currently correct terminology):
So... Maybe I understand from that perspective - that an individual who was born with male genitalia but identifies as a woman - if she were attracted to men, I guess might be classified by some as homosexual?
because she physiologically is male (pre-op).
Maybe it all comes down to gender identity or something.
Are we doing a disservice to transgender individuals by lumping them in with the LGB community?
Not sure who to reply to, but another thing worth considering is intersectionality: the idea that forms of oppression cannot be considered independently of one another, because they interact. For example, in the USA a rich white man's experience of homophobia is going to be different from a poor black woman's experience of it, due to other factors (racism, class-ism, sexism) coming into play. This is a big topic but worth understanding because it can be applied to any form of discrimination, such as classism, racism, ageism, xenophobia, religious discimination, caste discrimination, sexism, discrimination based on mental health, etc etc. Better-informed people than me have written about it. I don't have many good links but here's wikipedia: ;)
In terms of prevailing theory, they aren't actually that different. Gender is seen increasingly as a performance, especially since Butler's Gender Trouble. Actually, 'born this way' is now largely a questionable way of getting liberal legal theory to grudgingly give rights to LGBT people, because liberal legal theory really does not do well with anything that isn't obviously a liberal issue - and the denial of rights based on an accident of birth is obviously a legal issue. There was an article recently on Hubski about 'born this way' actually: http://aeon.co/magazine/society/why-born-gay-is-a-dangerous-idea/ I'm doing a gender studies masters, most theorists - particularly in queer, poststructuralist traditions - don't see sexuality as innate. They don't see it as a choice, either, of course. Gender and sexuality are part of the process of being constituted in discourse, and discourses about gender and sex are inseperable. Even as a straight cis mail, you were constituted in gendered discourse just as much as a trans lesbian. You just don't have to agitate for your rights as a straight cis man politically. Language isn't innate, either. But learning a language is an inevitable part of growing up and growing a conscious. And we all speak SOME language, even if some languages are more associated with oppression than others. Plus, less theoretically, political alliances are important. Having similar experiences and problems is more than enough for a political alliance. By the way, if you want a really fascinating look at how discourses of gender and sexuality can be constructed radically differently from ours that doesn't involve a lot of complicated theory, read volumes 2 and 3 of Foucault's HIstory of Sexuality.
The sexuality side of things and the gender identity side of things might not be the same sort of phenomena themselves, but they're treated the same way. Both gay people and trans people come under fire for gender-related taboos. Sometimes bigoted individuals don't even distinguish between the two or even consider a trans person to basically be a more extreme gay person. When you take camp and drag into consideration you can see how things might look blurry from even a well meaning outside perspective. When you're being attacked for more or less the same reasons by more or less the same people who don't even bother to distinguish between you, you might as well band together.
As a queer person, these are people I've met in my lifetime: Females loving other females, both naturally born as female Men loving other men, both naturally born as male Females born as female loving people born as female but dressing as a male Men born as male loving people born as females who dress as men Females born as male (transgender) loving women born as female Lesbians who have sex with gay men Men born as female loving men surgically turned into women Straight woman loving a straight man who likes to dress in women's clothing A phenomenon known as "stone butch dyke", generally regarded as male-like, primarily into femme lesbians People who identify as androgynous, hanging out with drag queens, who can hang out with transgender people, who can hang out with lesbians, who can hang out with gay men Bisexual and polyamorous people of all of the above flavors loving all of the above flavors Women with bodies that don't feel right and they don't have surgery but identify as male because it makes more sense, and they can partner with straight women, straight men, lesbians, other women whose bodies feel more male Hermaphrodites who really are on the fringe, more so than transgender Androgynous asexual people into theatrical drag and bottom for gay men or women dressed as gay men, or women surgically turned into men... and so forth. So, can't tell you objectively if transgender should be included in LGB, but personally, it makes complete sense to me.
coffeesp00ns, you've been very generous with your first hand experience/educating people on Hubski regarding trans issues. Care to weigh in? Thanks in advance. For what it's worth, I thought this was a good question steve, posed in a genuinely thoughtful way. I've never considered the "why" of it before. But so far, "Q,s" answer makes sense to me.
Yah... But I want to push past the why and really look at the next step. Are we selling the transgender community short? Can the LGBT community provide the support to the Ts need in every way? Again, I think that the struggles faced by the Ts go beyond those grasped by the LGBs? Just musing.
Hey, I just got TNG's shoutout. It's in the evening, so I think I'm going to wait until tomorrow until I reply to this, but I also want to say that I think this is a good question - and that you're not the only one asking it. 'till tomorrow, Sp00ns
I agree with what Quatrarius says, and would only add that the common binding factor among LGBT is that these are all gender concerns.