Some abbreviations have good vibes. For many the RSPB does. Some make one’s blood boil. VAT does mine. Others need only be voiced to start a quarrel. EU is a ghastly example. But though their effects are various, these at least quicken the pulse.
There’s one abbreviation, though, that to me brings neither excitement nor pleasure, nor anger nor dislike, but only a vague sinking of the heart. LGBT — or “the LGBT community”.
This community does not exist. The bolting together of dissimilar groups distorts understanding. LGBT isn’t a club I’m in.
Now this is odd. I’m unquestionably a G in that smorgasbord. I like my orientation and it makes me happy. I know very well there are gay men for whom life is not so easy, and some whose sexuality is a source of torment; they need solidarity and understanding, and from people like me I hope they’ve always had it. But still, and through it all, the G in LGBT stands in my mind for something positive, a thumbs-up, a smiley-face.
So why, when the G for gay is thrown together with L for lesbian, B for bisexual and T for transgender, does the face stop smiling? Why this abbreviation, more joyless than any of its constituent capitals, lowering the spirits further with the addition of every latest capital letter, born in a crazy Oxford undergraduate debate, and growing up to live on in a dreary local government circular?
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LGBT sounds not so much a merry cocktail of desires but defensive and prickly; not a cross but a slightly peeved face, already squabbling about whether a Q should be added (for “queer/questioning”) plus an I for intersex, an A for asexual and a + for “whatever”.
This is no parody. LGBTQIA+ is now the maximalist abbreviation being recommended among campaigners for the rights of sexual minorities. Some bristle. Some take umbrage. And some, with a strong and earnest sense of injustice, prepare for battle in a cause that for them is brave and right. Each to their own response: what I deny is that this is the single battle to be fought beneath a single banner — LGBT — to which a miscellany of sexual minorities owe allegiance just because our capital letter is in the title.
“I doubt that being gay gives us any special insight into the mind of a transgender person or vice versa
People routinely employ the expression “LGBT community”, but neither out there on the streets nor as a classification in social sciences does this community exist. The Ls and the Gs have lots of friends who aren’t either. Bisexual men don’t self-identify much as a group or feel drawn particularly to each other for friendship and fun.
I doubt that being gay gives us any special insight into the mind of a transgender person or vice versa; and I’m if anything less able than a straight man to guess at the attraction a woman might feel for a woman.
Nor do the categories fulfil their surface impression of symmetry. We’ve no reason to assume that man-to-man attraction and woman-to-woman attraction are fundamentally the same: mirror images of each other with only the polarities switched. Nor is bisexuality in women necessarily a match with bisexuality in men.
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Gay men are most emphatically not boys who want to be girls. Talk to non-campaigning, non-“scene”, and politically inactive gays (which is most of them) and you’ll find the range of opinion among us on the subject of transgender rights is no different from the range of opinion among heterosexuals — variously sympathetic, baffled or horrified. I’ve decided to have no opinion at all beyond a wish that people should not be humiliated, mocked or forced in one direction or another.
Is this last, then — tolerance and perhaps fellow-feeling — a candidate for the glue that could bind those capital letters together? Are we at least agreed in opposing oppression, a rainbow flag to rally the Gs, Ls, Bs and Ts into a unifying crusade? That’s the central case for an LGBT coalition and it owes much to the post-Marxist Ken Livingstone-style left-wing “rainbow” view: that all oppressed minorities are basically on the same side, marching together with the striking miners.
I’m unconvinced. Different minorities who self-identify as persecuted do not necessarily approve of each other or share any common bond. But the Livingstone virus lodged deep inside local government, and on issues of sexuality now seems endemic in the public sector. Certain kinds of dogmatism thrive in an undergrowth where rules, circulars, lists and quotas reign, and common sense can be ignored without penalty. I worry less about the universities, where the undergraduate pantomime on gender and orientation issues must finally caricature itself into obloquy. Student ridiculousness is in the end self-regulating. Public sector madness, on the other hand, self-propagates.
LGBT, now perhaps with added QIA+, has its origins in a core 20th-century alliance between gay men and lesbian women, around which has latterly clustered a wildly different bunch of causes, often angry, often shrill, and persistently disputatious. Some of their campaigns strike me as needful (bigotry as a sad cause of homelessness and vagrancy does link gays, lesbians and transsexuals) and some less needful. But what would I know? Meanwhile the populist right prize the LGBT ultras as a demonstration of politically correct folly, the two sides living in symbiosis, bigging each other up.
I suggest we gays stand a little back. When we formed the Stonewall group in the 1980s we had clear, strong aims, mostly for reforming the law. These have been achieved. There remains work to do: the changing of social attitudes, particularly (but not only) outside London, and this campaign is all about pride and normalisation. It’s desperately important, especially in work among the young, to keep repeating the message that growing up as gay will not mean having to face misery and persecution; that everything’s getting better fast; that we’re winners now, and really lucky to live in the 21st century; and that homophobia is not a vast, crushing force but a silly prejudice persisting in the minds of mostly ignorant people with outdated attitudes.
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We’re lightening up. Ghettos are dark and we’re leaving the ghetto. Am I saying that, having got what we want for ourselves, we gays should leave other struggling minority sexual orientations to flounder? No: I’m warning that theirs are often very different and complicated struggles. Perhaps we should help, but from the outside, not as fellow-victims. We are not victims. The V for victim that lurks, unetched, beneath that LGBTQIA+ abbreviation must not be allowed to depress our cause.
Being gay is good news. We are no longer prime victims of oppression and we should hold on to that.