eftychia: Me in kilt and poofy shirt, facing away, playing acoustic guitar behind head (Default)
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posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 05:26am on 2008-04-04

"If you notice there are a lot of commercials pointed towards gay men and some gay women. They have become a market and this is why they are becoming 'tolerated.' In a capitalistic society such as America you will not be 'tolerated' (which I argue is not enough, it should be accepted, not tolerated) until you become part of the mainstream market place. Once trans people become a target market to exploit and profit off of, then they will 'join' the mainstream." -- [info] istopi, March 2008 (in a comment to a community-locked entry discussing the tendency of T*folk to get tossed aside and told "maybe next year" whenever political compromises are made in the quest for LTGB rights)

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posted by [identity profile] skreidle.livejournal.com at 11:30am on 2008-04-04
As an interesting bit of commentary in its own right, that's the first time I've ever seen the 'T' given such prominence in that abbreviation--it's usually LGBT (or LGBTQ if Queer or Questioning is included.)
 
What I see most often is GLBT (and LGBT), but I try to randomize the order when I write it myself (when I remember, anyhow) to try to challenge (conscious or unconscious) orderings of prominence of the subgroups, and (conscious or unconscious) perception of the order of the letters as conveying any sort of relative importance of the subgroups in the first place.

(I know not everybody perceives a hierarchy there, and yay for the people who don't; but I'm also aware that a bunch of people speak and act as though they do see such a hierarchy, whether they intend that or not.)

Since I just scramble the letters myself instead of firing up a program with a random number generator in it, I'm probably not actually all that random in practice, but that's the idea behind the practice anyhow.

With the conventional ordering, it becomes (I suspect) a little too easy for non-T* readers to think of the 'T' as an afterthought (though it is, of course, a bit tricky to definitively distinguish cause from effect when one suspects a feedback loop is involved). Writing it differently each time is my attempt to rectify that without relegating some other letter to always being last either. I just hope that the result remains intelligible to folks accustomed to one particular ordering -- and that people who do notice as you did, reconsider (if only for a moment) assumptions about where T* issues fit into the BGTL rights movement and overall community.

As a side effect I figure maybe it'll have an effect on "bi invisibility" as well (something I still hear bi friends complain about from time to time). My one fear is that a reader will fail to recognize it as a mere reordering and think it's a mysterious, unrelated abbreviation they don't know.
 
posted by [identity profile] sodyera.livejournal.com at 02:43pm on 2008-04-04
My problem is that lately, almost every male character in the media has been displaying a visible layer of stubble on their faces. Television now looks like a big Gillette commercial, as if suddenly nobody knows how to shave properly any more and somebody's gonna ride in on a big electric shaver and give everyone a makeover in the next commercial break. And it's not just the allegedly macho lead-men; even the math geek on "NUMB3RS" went through last season like he was deciding, "Should I grow this beard or what?" I just wish it would stop.

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