For reference, I am a trans girl and pretty sure I’m Endosex. I do not know any openly intersex people IRL.
Is the term GRSM inclusive of intersex people, and if not and it should be, what alternatives besides LGBTQIA+ are? (I’ve heard Quiltbag and Mogai as well but apparently they are both problematic? Idk but apparently Quiltbag feeds into gay stereotypes and Mogai divides the overrall community but I have no idea).
I would appreciate responses from Intersex comrades if possible, but I’d love any form of help on this issue. Thanks <3
GRSM is not inclusive of intersex people as Intersex is not a gender or a sexual orientation. That was one of the major issues brought up with the acronym.
From what I remember, MOGAI was coined specifically to address the issues with GRSM because GRSM was including coercive paraphilias but excluding intersex people. MOGAI means Marginalized Orientations, Gender Alignments and Intersex, and was coined by a nonbinary person on tumblr after input from a lot of other folks who wanted to be as inclusive as possible without including coercive paraphilias as being inherently ‘queer’. (The term ‘Gender Alignments’ instead of ‘Gender identities’ used here was referring to whether someone was cis / aligned with their assigned gender or not, as ‘marginalised gender identities’ would include cis women and exclude trans men.)
QUILTBAG is just a mnemonic for the lengthening LGBTQIA+ acronym and stands for Queer/Questioning, Unsure, Intersex, Lesbian, Trans, Bisexual, Agender/Asexual/Aromantic, and Gay. There’s nothing about gay stereotypes as far as I know.
Thank you so much for the education on these labels and their inclusivity, I’m really appreciative you (and everyone here) have gone out of their way to educate me on Inter people and their inclusion in our community labels. Thanks, comrade –Silv
As a gay guy I fully support putting gay as the end of the initialism.
The history for lesbians going first in LGBT+ is because of the lesbian nurses being some of the only people willing to work with AIDS patients in the 80s and 90s.
Sexual minorities can be interpreted as either an intersex person, or as a person with a sexual orientation other than heterosexuality, so I always interpreted it as being inclusive of intersex. I don’t know what the general consensus is, but I don’t see any reason why anyone would exclude intersex people from it other than bigotry.
it would be very strange to have the motivations that get you to preferring GSRM over LGBTetc and immediately turn around not including intersex people
i haven’t heard anyone ask OP’s question and i wouldn’t think to ask it because I assume it would be so inclusive because the point of it is including all of us without needing a letter for every pokemon. Good on OP looking out.
I’m part of an inter inclusive trans and nonbinary community in Germany and have noticed that “intersex” has become as outdated as “transsexual” among activist queers, we just use “inter” specifically because we do not want to conflate it with sexual orientations like homo/bi/pan/a/demisexual etc.
idk if the same is happening in the US, but it would make sense if it did, and my inter friends all use it in this way. Also i see TIN* (trans, inter and nonbinary) as an acronym increasingly often in German discourse. Note that none of these categories are mutually exclusive, when i say “trans and nonbinary”, the “and” is used as “and / or”. It does very definitely not mean that nonbinary isn’t a valid trans identity, just that it’s up to the individual if them being nonbinary also means that they identify as trans. I absolutely do identify as both, but i’ve met a lot of nonbinary folks who find that their lived experience is different from that of trans people and that they do not want to claim the trans label, and when i’m placing self ID front and center in the liberation of queer people, i can hardly argue with that.
As far as wider umbrella terms go, i’m very happy with just using queer for anybody who is subjected to othering based on gender, orientation or assumptions about their “biological sex”, but i understand that the history as a reclaimed slur makes this more complicated among older LGBTQIA+ people in anglophone countries, especially in the UK where it seems to have been in widespread use as a slur for much longer than elsewhere. Over here, rejection of the “queer” label is overwhelmingly the domain of assimilationist cis gay and cis lesbian reactionaries who usually have a strong agenda to exclude anybody who isn’t a cis endo allosexual binary white “judeochristian” potatogerman gay man or lesbian woman, and i don’t feel particularly bad about alienating these people.
Regarding MOGAI, idk if it’s actually problematic, it just has gotten a ton of flak from reactionaries who extensively used tumblr kids making pride flags for hypthetical genders and orientations as rage bait. A lot of the MOGAI labels literally exist just as a play of thought and aren’t something anybody has ever actually identified as, or they are representations of how some questioning teenager happened to feel on a given day. I’m not saying this to trash talk MOGAI, these are perfectly reasonable things to do when you’re a kid figuring out who you are. I’m just saying that a lot of people use that as an attack vector to get mad about “the left making up 189 new genders every day” and that this should be kept in mind when somebody criticizes MOGAI. These often aren’t good faith discussions.
Thank you so much for the education on Inter people, LGBTQIA+ language and MOGAI. I was semi-aware the hate towards MOGAI was generally coming from transphobes, but I’ve seen queer people who are leftists distance themself from the label and I assumed it was for another reason. Cheers, Silv.
Well, there’s bad faith arguments around MOGAI from all directions - if you ever see the “bisexuality is enbiephobic because bi means you’re attracted to exactly 2 genders” discussion in the wild, run. But the nomenclature as a whole definitely has drawn a ton of attention from chuddy ragebait accounts.
Some bisexuals are attracted to enbies lmao, plus if bisexuality = two genders does biracialness = two races? Some people just choose to be ignorant, me personally when I see them I’ll correct them and only interact if they have positive or constructive negative feedback, otherwise I just ignore them (mute them if possible lol)
Honestly, i don’t know any bisexual that isn’t attracted to enbies. I mean, not being attracted to enbies at all isn’t a thing that’s possible in the first place when you feel any kind of attraction because enbie includes every gender presentation imaginable, including all binary presentations because enbie is as much of a blanket / catchall term as it gets, but even if we’re talking about “stereotypical androgynous look you’d expect to see constantly in a selfie thread in a nonbinary community”, i don’t know any out of the tons of bisexual people i know who wouldn’t be into that.
