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By Jes Malitoris
There is a community on UNC’s campus that
celebrates and is largely comprised of people who have
a non-normadve gender identity and/or sexuality. This
community includes those who identify as gay, lesbian,
bisexual, pansexual, trans*, intersex, queer, genderqueer,
asexual, bigendered, allies, and a bunch of other identities
I’ve probably never thought of Our campus resources
for this community are the student group, GLBTSA,
and the LGBTQ center on South Campus. Both of
these abbreviations have been accepted as easy ways to
refer to the community because the sheer number of
identities often results in a truly impossible combination
of acronyms, sometimes affectionately referred to as
“alphabet soup.”
However, this acronym is important to the presentation
of the LGBTQ community. Certainly to me, as someone
who fits within the fairly small genderqueer and pansexual
populations, a recognition that homosexuality is not the
only sexuality, and that sexual orientation and gender
identity are different, is integral.
Consider this: what if we at UNC used “basketball” as
an all-encompassing term for “sports”? I think the swim
team would get pretty annoyed, since basketball does not
reflect the way their sport works at all. The fencing team
might protest that not only is basketball not the same as
their sport at all, it also makes them, as a much smaller
and less popular sport, invisible.
Such is also the case with the LGBTQ community.
Using names like “Gay-Straight Alliance” (GSA) not only
makes everyone who isn’t gay invisible, it reinforces the
binary: j^ou are either gay or straight, ignoring gender
identities altogether, and not recognizing the spectrums
of sexuality' and gender identity'. Visibility is a key concept
from two sides: on the one hand, using an acronym that
recognizes several identities expresses to those outside
the community that it is comprised of a collection of
non-homogeneous people; on the other, it creates a sense
of inclusiveness both for those who are a part of it and
who are considering joining.
I am not advocating daily usage of a huge collection of
letters to reference our community because, let’s face it,
sajing LGBTQI...WXYZ every single time is annoying but
is accurate, and definitely leaves room for humor. GSA,
on the other hand, is much more accessible, but highly
inaccurate. So how do we reconcile these two extremes?
Personally, I’m all for the creation of a new term that is
easy to say and doesn’t leave anybody out—perhaps we
could try using the term Gender and Sexuality Minority
or “GSM.” But for now, I think it is most important that
we be conscious of the identities we recognize and those
which we exclude, whether consciously or unconsciously.