The term BAME is largely no longer considered acceptable, in that it groups together diverse peoples, masks disparities and is often unrepresentative – except, strangely, when it comes to Labour role holders. [It does make one wonder, is Labour always late to the party?] Any Labour Party BAME Officers reading this, may we ask, can you really speak with one voice on behalf of all B and A and ME people? Do they all have the same and never conflicting interests?
Well, this also is true of LGBT+. In fact, have you ever asked yourself what the + stands for? How can one have an opinion on anything when one doesn’t even know what the entirety of that thing is?
It was the Canadians who started adding extra letters. A few years ago an early manifestation of the ever expanding acronym was LGBTTQQI2S – lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex … and 2S was the Inuit concept of being two-spirited (not something one comes across a great deal in the UK!) Then others wanted to join the club: non-binaries, asexuals, furries (although apparently some sensitive types have a hissy fit when you bring this up) and men who wear nappies. In fact, it appears that any kink goes – the kinkier the better (think drag queen storytelling!). So why people think it is okay to take their children to the modern manifestation of ‘kink-fest’ PRIDE, we cannot understand. There has always been a suspicion that men attracted to minors (what’s the other word for this?) would also like to join the club – but a bit like the furries and the nappies, one isn’t allowed to mention this. So rather than add more letters, a plus just became much simpler.
Often the Q is kept in the shortened acronym – but most lesbians and gay men over a certain age find Q very offensive. “You f***ing queer” was frequently snarled at us as we walked down the street (it probably still is in some places) and still makes us shudder. We are not inverts, or fags or queers – we are just as Good As You!
In 2024, PRIDE in London was led by a scantily dressed asexual woman. Can you please tell us what an asexual woman has in common with a gay man? Think about it! Not very much! Yet, when we try to protest this major evolution of our grouping to include all these other unrelated categories, most of them identities rather than realities, we are branded ‘transphobes’.
Going back to the very beginning, it is perhaps a shame that we started using letters at all. What is wrong with using our names in full? And maybe LabourLGB makes the same mistake.
Lesbians and gay men throughout the entirety of UK history lived on the fringes of society, vilified (or just silenced) for our choices of sexual and romantic partners by the heteronormative majority. The same applied to bisexuals who fell in love with those of the same sex. In the second half of the 20th century we together fought for the decriminalisation of homosexuality. We stood in solidarity with gay and bisexual men who were uniquely affected by the AIDS crisis. We called for the equalisation of the age of consent for gay men – myth has it that Queen Victoria couldn’t even imagine the possibility of lesbian sex, otherwise the higher age threshold would have applied to lesbians too. Then it was the turn of Clause 28 to go – the hateful Tory legislation that gagged all and any gay and lesbian positive speech. Next came the hard fought for legal institution of civil partnership (and later, marriage) allowing us equal rights when it came to next of kin recognition, housing, pensions and parenthood. These things affected gay men and lesbians equally, as well as bisexuals in same sex relationships. We were a political movement fighting for our rights and through which close friendships and alliances developed. However, lesbians and gay men and bisexual men and women are all very different in and amongst ourselves. We might be homosexual but we are not homogeneous!
We had thought that most of our battles were won and that we could just get on with living our lives within society. However, when our acronym was expanded to include all sorts of other disparate groupings, we found a new battle on our hands – but this time within the acronym itself.
The vast majority of children being led down the trans-affirming puberty blocker + cross sex hormones path are lesbian girls and gay boys. The rest of the LGBTQ+ movement isn’t standing up for those kids, so we lesbians and gay men must do so ourselves. This is why we created LabourLGB. We are quite clear that the transing of gay and lesbian kids is the most pernicious form of conversion therapy. How can the unquestioning supporters (many of whom are straight) of the LGBTQ+ movement not see that converting an effeminate gay boy into a heterosexual girl or converting an androgenous fledgling lesbian into a heterosexual man is anything other than homophobic?
Our movement has been hijacked by the TTQQINBAFNMAM2S+ brigade. Ours was never a club for people who just want to be seen to be cool, to be different or indeed to be sexually deviant.
We want our movement back!
We say ditch the letters! We need to be disaggregated.
