“Most people in the gay community cannot recite LGBTTQQIAAP, much less explain it. The average gay guy or gal is just a person trying to make it through life like everybody else.”
I want to take a look at one of the most glaring examples of a new-left group cannibalizing itself today. It’s a group that has gotten so mired down in identity politics, it can no longer decide what to even call itself. I’m talking about the gay-lesbian alliance group, LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender)—or should I say LGBTQ? Is it LGBTIQ? LGBTQIA? Which is it, for god’s sake? Well, don’t expect the lunacy to end there, because we’ve jumped the shark. The latest version of the movement being lobbied and taught in universities, LGBTTQQIAAP, is a real thing. Check out this handy Fox Valley Technical College LGBTTQQIAAP diagram if you still don’t believe me. This acronym—no, we can’t call it that anymore—this impossible-to-remember jumble of letters stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, Ally, Pansexual. I know I’m not supposed to straight-splain this nonsensical word salad, but I’m going to anyway.
Let’s just go down the list and start with the traditional lesbian, gay, and bisexual categories. There was a time when lesbians would use the term “gay” to describe themselves, but I understand the need to have a different term for gay males and females, and then a third—bisexual—for the most prolific of us who are into a bit of everything. As a straight male, I proclaim here today that I’m down with LGB. It’s easy to remember and straightforward. But then it starts to get, well, queer.
Where there used to be one T for transgender, there are now two. The LGBT community decided they didn’t like the medical term transsexual, so they replaced it with transgender. That’s what I remember being taught in human sexuality during my senior year of college at least. Now transsexual is back, and we have both terms to deal with.
According to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, the definition of transgender is “an umbrella term for people whose gender identity and/or gender expression differs from what is typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth.” GLAAD goes on to say that there are really no rules or commitments that come with being transgender. One doesn’t have to go through with a surgery, hormone therapy, or any other process that might demonstrate his or her convictions, for that matter. You can wake up one day and decide you’re transgender only to change your mind and go back to being the run of the mill male or female that you were the next.
Look, I’m respectful of people, and I know when to fight what battles. I have no problem calling a man Miss or a woman Mister if they wish. If they want to be called a bird, I’ll ask, “Finch, toucan, or pelican?” but once you become a blue jay, you’re a blue jay. Own it. In other words, I don’t have a problem calling Bruce Jenner by Kaitlyn, but if she comes out and says she wants to be Bruce again, all credibility is gone immediately. At that point, everyone’s time would have been completely wasted, because the person who created the global conversation didn’t even believe in it himself.
Transsexual is described as an “older” or “outdated” term in the medical field for people who have permanently changed their gender identity through surgeries and hormones. It bothers me that non-scientists are calling a scientific term “outdated,” but I digress. The scientific fact remains that you can never change your sex entirely. Hormones and 20 surgeries will never change a skeletal frame, alter bone mass density, or allow a male to birth a child. Still, if a person believes so deeply that they were born the wrong sex to the degree in which they are willing to go through with permanent operations to change themselves, who am I to refuse to call them what they want to be called? Hell, I may not even know that they are transsexual by the time they’re done. In my opinion, transsexual deserves more credibility than transgender.
The US military policy change enacted last year under the Obama administration to allow transgender people to “openly serve” is troubling. How can any straight person be expected to maintain a grooming standard of uniformity when obvious-looking men are allowed to wear dress skirts and women are wearing pants? A possible compromise would be that post-op transsexuals can openly serve so long as they can do so in a way that they fit in with uniformity standards.
All of this comes with a giant caveat, however. No one should ever be encouraged to rush a decision on whether to disfigure themselves permanently. Even the ultra-left leaning The Guardian reports on medical studies that say sex change operations are not successful for many subjects who undergo them. Multiple studies say that post-op subjects remain unhappy and have much higher than average suicide attempt rates. It is for this reason, among others, that the American Psychiatric Association diagnoses both transgender and transsexual people with gender dysphoria—a mental disorder—in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).
It’s time to move on to Q. Whatever happened to simply LGBT, and what is queer anyway? Queer is just another word for weird, quirky, strange, unexpected, peculiar, or unusual. Queer is not a sexuality, but if we’re going to make it one, then don’t forget that straight people can be into some pretty “queer” things in the bedroom. I don’t even want to go there. The point is that everyone is queer, from their sexuality to the way they sing in the shower when no one is listening. Queer needs to go.
The addition of Q#2—“questioning”—destroys the “born this way” narrative in the nature vs. nurture debate and supports the idea that one’s sexuality can be influenced by external factors. Were Shawn King and Rachel Dolezal already members of a minority group when they began to question their race, or did they have to lie about the race of their biological parents to get their black cards first? If you said, “Neither, they’re white,” you win. To the guy out there introducing himself to others as “questioning,” no one cares. Maybe you’re just bisexual or too impressionable in the face of people who develop acronyms such as LGBTTQQIAAP. “Questioning” as an identity group is as absurd as Shawn King’s phony urban accent.
Intersex is a tough one, as it has a place in real scientific research and the medical field. There are many competing definitions, but one of the most agreed upon is that Intersex is used for a person having “ambiguous genitalia.” Another argued-upon term for this definition of intersex is “hermaphrodite,” and it is treated as a birth defect. A gender assignment is usually given to intersex individuals at birth depending on which sex they more closely attribute to. Some parents opt for a surgery to be performed as well. According to the Intersex Society of North America, the commonality for those born intersex is about 1 in 1,750. My common sense tells me that intersex individuals stake a much greater claim to special rights in the transgender/transsexual debate. It brings up interesting points such as this—if a doctor performs a surgery for an intersex individual at birth to assign them a sexuality, that doctor basically just decided what sex that person will be allowed to marry depending on the state they live in. What if they chose wrong?
“Allies” are considered any “non-queer” supporters of the movement. There’s not much to say here. Just because you’re a fan of the Atlanta Falcons, it doesn’t make you a member of the organization. Scrap it.
Then there’s asexual. I can’t be the only person questioning why the twelve asexual people out there even want to be around all these other hyper-sexualized people who have made it their number one mission in life to solely identify themselves by the kind of sex they like. If I don’t like soccer, I’m not going to be running around with crazed Liverpool fans. I’ll probably just be watching football instead. Asexual people are not part of the LGBT movement. The nuttiest of LGBT leaders want asexual people to join them because they will take any group they can use to attack traditional views on sexuality, period.
Finally, we’re at pansexual. You know how there’s bisexual? Well, Pansexual is that on steroids. It’s described as “a person who experiences sexual, romantic, physical, or spiritual attraction to members of all gender identities.” I don’t know any other way to say it’s just a person who is extremely horny all the time and is attracted to everything they see. It’s redundant and can be nixed.
It seems like there is a lunatic fringe among the LGBT community that pushes all this stuff. Most people in the gay community cannot recite LGBTTQQIAAP, much less explain it. The average gay guy or gal is just a person trying to make it through life like everybody else. Shouldn’t fair and equal treatment without stigmatization be the goal of the organization anyway? When you break the list of “gender identities” down to this degree, you inevitably piss off the one madcap in the world who identifies as an earthworm by leaving them off the list. Would it be fair for this writer to ask that we boring straight people be allowed to commit LGBTI (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, Intersex) to memory and move on with our lives?
