Any Other LGBT Gamers Here?
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I'm quite aware of LGBT, quiltbag [http://quiltbag.keenspot.com/], etc. I'm also aware of the "truly" full acronym, which is silly amounts of long. Finally, I'm also a reader of Khaos [http://www.khaoskomix.com/], a LGBT comic who at one point made a LGBTWTFBBQ joke.snowfi6916 said:
Seeing as even quiltbag can be somewhat ridiculous, I've meshed part of the full acronym with Tab's joke.
You see, I'm very supportive of the LGBT community what with me being one of them. I definitely understand WHY some people want to be so specific and inclusive, but it can sometimes get very silly. Because it gets silly, I sometimes poke fun at it. Laughter is what brings us all together, after all.
I'm one of the boring heterosexuals who honestly doesn't give a shit what someone's sexual preferences or gender identities are.
To be fair, I like to also identify as pansexual. I love men, women and everywhere in-between on the spectrum equally.Myndnix said:
What's so "silly" about people wanting to be called what they see themselves as? I don't know who you are LGBT wise (you said you were "one of them"), but I wouldn't call whatever you are silly at all. Do you consider your gender or sexuality silly?Zen Toombs said:
If not, then don't call what other people want to be called "silly".
I've heard it be known as GSM before - Gender and Sexual Minorities. Bam, everyone's included, and there's only three letters.
I believe most people (from what I've heard anyway) call it "bisexual, male preference"(bi male pref) or "bisexual, female preference" (bi female pref) if you're female. Which is technically what I am, but I identify as gay because the male pref is very strong with this one, so I could never really have a real relationship with a woman.Darken12 said:
OT: Anyway, yeah, I'm gay. I try to avoid pointing it out too much, because I find it obnoxious to do so if it isn't relevant, but there it is. And there seem to be quite a few other LGBT people around the forum (especially Ts, more than I usually see on other forums) and most other people are very tolerant, so I think you'll fit in fine. Welcome to the forum.
While I agree with you that that works better, I don't think it would be practical, since LGBT is a popular term now and people aren't just going to start calling it something else because it makes more sense. It's like "CE and BCE as opposed to AD and BC". It makes a lot of sense to not have such things be more secular/non-religious, but people still say AD/BC almost always.West_Filly said:
I recently came out as MtF (leaning towards Pan) as well and in a small town to complicate things. I used to think that I was alone as well only having one guy friend to game with (very supportive). Nice to have friends to support you. I don't do the forum thing much and this reply will likely get lost in the rhetoric but I just wanted to say congratulations. We are definitely not alone and don't ever be afraid to be yourself. I wish you the best of luck!
Considering how I wouldn't want to be referred to as a 'heterosexual' or even a particular sub-sect of heterosexuality... "male born, male identifying, attracted to non-trans females between the ages of 20-50 exclusively never weighing greater than X kilograms and--" because that's almost the level of specifics these "QUILTBAG" terms are approaching.snowfi6916 said:
The desperate need to have a letter quantifier included in the term which essentially just means "not-straight" is silly.
And I wish you the best of luck as well! Trust me, I was in your shoes... then I moved to the big city. My life took a bit of one eighty at that point!kavikova said:
The length of the acronym is kind of silly. There could be a shorter more broad term to include everyone. I believe that being too long defeats the purpose of abbreviating it.snowfi6916 said:
OT: I identify myself as bisexual, but the term pansexual may be more appropriate. I also consider myself transgender but can't currently afford HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy). For the time being I still tolerate being referred to by masculine pronouns.
There is a difference between what gender you are, and what your sexuality is.Abomination said:
And what you just said was highly insulting and rude to all transgender people. They are NOT just "not-straight". Sexuality has NOTHING to do with it. Someone who is transgender can be straight, gay, lesbian, bi, asexual, pansexual, etc. But they are still transgender.
Yes, I know, I made it readily apparent in earlier posts.snowfi6916 said:
Highly insulting? Get off that absurdly high-horse. I never said being transsexual just means "not-straight" but the term LGBT/QUILTBAG essentially does. A transsexual can be heterosexual but it doesn't make them "straight". "Straight" is the term that is associated with being non-trans heterosexual - or have we since adopted another word that I didn't know about to describe what is essentially a non-QUILTBAG/non-LGBT?
See this? THIS is how it is silly. All this fuss for not having a particular letter allocated to a specific sexuality & gender-identity combination in the broad term that just means "heterosexual and non-transsexual". "Vanilla". "Largest demographic". "Non-queer" (apparently that one insults people somehow).
OT: I'm bi. Not trans but I dunno if I'd call myself cis... maybe fluid? Androgynous? Confused more than anything, haha. I generally prefer to label myself queer and leave it at that.
Welcome!
Putting aside the question of "honesty" entirely... there are very real pragmatic reasons to be open about it. The most important one is personal safety. While outing oneself as trans can be dangerous in our society, concealing it and being outed can be even more dangerous. If a potential partner would refuse to date someone who's trans, there's no telling how they might react if they discovered their partner was trans later down the line. Aside from more personal concerns, like not wanting to date a bigot or someone who'd react negatively to your identity/history, there is the sadly very real risk that a transperson (particularly a transwoman dating a straight, cis man) may be beaten, raped, or killed by their partner for their "deception." (There was at least one fucking scumbag in a recent "Would you date a transgender person" thread that said they would murder their partner if they found out they were trans. Whether they were being hyperbolic or not, that is a mindset that some people actually do have and have acted on.)
But beyond that, there are political reasons that some transpeople make their status public knowledge. Visibility is very important, as is education, to progressing toward greater public awareness and acceptance and legal equality. The progress that the gay community has made over the past few decades and the changes that still need to be made in the decades to come were/are possible in large part because of gay people, both prominent celebrities and ordinary folks, being more open and more visible. There is an incredible amount of prejudice against transgender individuals both in our legal system and in many people's minds, and changing that will require visibility. That's not to say that there's anything wrong with someone who wants to transition and just live as their real gender. That choice is theirs and theirs alone. But there are many transpeople who do want to be out with their status for political and/or personal reasons.
As for the more personal reasons... like any other marker (race, class, gender, orientation, national origin, etc,) being trans has an impact on how a transperson grows up, how they see the world, how they are treated by others, and all this comes together to be a facet of their identity as a human being. (Likewise, being cis has the same impact, but it isn't as apparent to someone who's cis because it's society's default, much like how being white, or straight, or male, or able-boded, or neurotypical, etc has an impact. It's there, but it's... mostly transparent, not really visible until/unless you look for it.) Even if all they want is to transition their body to and live as their real gender, being trans is part of their identity and has had a hand in shaping who they are.
Lastly, I just wanted to point out a couple problematic things in your post. I don't mean this in any way as an attack on you--your heart seems to be in the right place. But terminology is very important, and a few things jump out at me as coming from an under-informed place.
Lines like "previous sex/gender" and "but I was a guy" may be offensive to some. The way many transpeople see their transition is that they're bringing their body in line with their real gender. Eg, a MtF person might say that they were born female but assigned male at birth. (Terminology is very personal though, and many people describe their own experience/identity in many different ways.)
"Full post op transgender folk" is a poor way to look at things as well--many object to the pre-op/post-op dichotomy because it places undue emphasis on one's genitals, because it presents the latter as "complete" and the former as "incomplete," and because it implies SRS is a necessary and sufficient condition to be/live as one's real gender. (This has all kinds of ramifications, from the fact that SRS is prohibitively expensive for many, to that some localities require it to change one's legal gender, to that some transpeople simply do not wish to have the operation.) Furthermore, it promotes the ideas of gender essentialism (there are Platonic ideals of "Man" and "Woman" that people can either live up to or fall short of, with the former being hilariously impossible) and the gender binary.
And "but you just hurt the other person, who is now forced to deal with the truth" is especially bad because (and, again, I'm not saying I think you actually hold this view) "the truth" is not something that someone should have to "deal with" or be "hurt" by. This line of thinking implies that transpeople are somehow lesser or inferior than cis people, if their having been assigned a different gender at birth is some sort of secret they must keep to avoid being looked down upon. The sad truth is that many people do look down on trans folk, but the goal is to make them change their way of thinking, not to make transpeople change the way they present themselves.
Edit:
Welcome!
(Disclaimer: I'm not trans myself.)omega 616 said:
Putting aside the question of "honesty" entirely... there are very real pragmatic reasons to be open about it. The most important one is personal safety. While outing oneself as trans can be dangerous in our society, concealing it and being outed can be even more dangerous. If a potential partner would refuse to date someone who's trans, there's no telling how they might react if they discovered their partner was trans later down the line. Aside from more personal concerns, like not wanting to date a bigot or someone who'd react negatively to your identity/history, there is the sadly very real risk that a transperson (particularly a transwoman dating a straight, cis man) may be beaten, raped, or killed by their partner for their "deception." (There was at least one fucking scumbag in a recent "Would you date a transgender person" thread that said they would murder their partner if they found out they were trans. Whether they were being hyperbolic or not, that is a mindset that some people actually do have and have acted on.)
But beyond that, there are political reasons that some transpeople make their status public knowledge. Visibility is very important, as is education, to progressing toward greater public awareness and acceptance and legal equality. The progress that the gay community has made over the past few decades and the changes that still need to be made in the decades to come were/are possible in large part because of gay people, both prominent celebrities and ordinary folks, being more open and more visible. There is an incredible amount of prejudice against transgender individuals both in our legal system and in many people's minds, and changing that will require visibility. That's not to say that there's anything wrong with someone who wants to transition and just live as their real gender. That choice is theirs and theirs alone. But there are many transpeople who do want to be out with their status for political and/or personal reasons.
As for the more personal reasons... like any other marker (race, class, gender, orientation, national origin, etc,) being trans has an impact on how a transperson grows up, how they see the world, how they are treated by others, and all this comes together to be a facet of their identity as a human being. (Likewise, being cis has the same impact, but it isn't as apparent to someone who's cis because it's society's default, much like how being white, or straight, or male, or able-boded, or neurotypical, etc has an impact. It's there, but it's... mostly transparent, not really visible until/unless you look for it.) Even if all they want is to transition their body to and live as their real gender, being trans is part of their identity and has had a hand in shaping who they are.
Lastly, I just wanted to point out a couple problematic things in your post. I don't mean this in any way as an attack on you--your heart seems to be in the right place. But terminology is very important, and a few things jump out at me as coming from an under-informed place.
Lines like "previous sex/gender" and "but I was a guy" may be offensive to some. The way many transpeople see their transition is that they're bringing their body in line with their real gender. Eg, a MtF person might say that they were born female but assigned male at birth. (Terminology is very personal though, and many people describe their own experience/identity in many different ways.)
"Full post op transgender folk" is a poor way to look at things as well--many object to the pre-op/post-op dichotomy because it places undue emphasis on one's genitals, because it presents the latter as "complete" and the former as "incomplete," and because it implies SRS is a necessary and sufficient condition to be/live as one's real gender. (This has all kinds of ramifications, from the fact that SRS is prohibitively expensive for many, to that some localities require it to change one's legal gender, to that some transpeople simply do not wish to have the operation.) Furthermore, it promotes the ideas of gender essentialism (there are Platonic ideals of "Man" and "Woman" that people can either live up to or fall short of, with the former being hilariously impossible) and the gender binary.
And "but you just hurt the other person, who is now forced to deal with the truth" is especially bad because (and, again, I'm not saying I think you actually hold this view) "the truth" is not something that someone should have to "deal with" or be "hurt" by. This line of thinking implies that transpeople are somehow lesser or inferior than cis people, if their having been assigned a different gender at birth is some sort of secret they must keep to avoid being looked down upon. The sad truth is that many people do look down on trans folk, but the goal is to make them change their way of thinking, not to make transpeople change the way they present themselves.
Edit:
Cis.Abomination said:
I *think* I identify as pansexual, but I'm not particularly sure as I have never been in a relationship or any such thing. As for now, though, I just like everyone, pending their personality and if I am physically attracted to them. But like I said, no relation ship, so I guess it's still a road of discovery to travel and see what happens! Also hi OP! And you too Kakikova, welcome.
Gender queer and trans alley here. Welcome to the Escapist.
I dont think he claimed to be trans. And while people who wear womens/mens clothing are not trans, they still fall under the LGBTQ banner. As do all people who fail to fall under the heteronormative gender spectrum.snowfi6916 said:
I hate to burst your bubble, but "straight" is a slang term for heterosexual only. It has nothing to do with whether someone is trans or not.Abomination said:
From Wikipedia:
The term "straight" originated as a mid-20th century gay slang term for heterosexuals, ultimately coming from the phrase "to go straight" (as in "straight and narrow"), or stop engaging in homosexual sex. One of the first uses of the word in this way was in 1941 by author G. W. Henry.[25] Henry's book concerned conversations with homosexual males and used this term in connection with the reference to ex-gays. It currently simply is a colloquial term for "heterosexual" having, like many words, changed in primary meaning over time.
You are wrong.
But the problem is, if someone is transgender, are they really cross dressing?A Distant Star said:
To quote my MtF friend: "If I see myself as a woman in every way, then if I put on women's clothing, am I really "cross dressing", or am I just "dressing"?
I was just saying that saying that being transgender and being a cross dresser are one in the same thing is incorrect.
No, some one who is transgendered not a cross dressed. But no one is saying that.snowfi6916 said: