LGBT=mostly T
The Telegraph on The Lesbian Project:
“I could never have imagined,” says [Kathleen] Stock, who today is launching – along with [Martina] Navratilova (who[m] she has never met in person) and writer Julie Bindel – the Lesbian Project, a group that intends to champion UK women who are same-sex attracted.
…
[I]ts existence will infuriate those who see her and Bindel, along with their ally – and heterosexual – JK Rowling, as a trio of arch-Terfs (trans exclusionary revolutionary feminists), largely because of the animosity between some trans activists who object to lesbians refusing to have sex with transgender women who have male genitalia.
The reporter must have been writing in haste. It’s a quartet, not a trio, and I’m pretty sure the three Ls don’t see JKR as “their heterosexual.” Also no, the animosity is about much more than lesbians saying no to sex with men.
The idea that lesbians still need some kind of protective body may seem almost laughably anachronistic, not least since the 2013 same-sex-couples marriage act. But the project isn’t so much battling homophobia as preventing lesbians from being overlooked in favour of newer, more “fashionable” sexualities.
There you go, that’s better.
“We’ve got a report coming out that will show millions of pounds are going into LGBT but increasingly that funding is going to trans projects, while for lesbian-only projects it’s vanishingly rare,” Stock says.
Which is one major reason the acronym is so poisonous – it simply pulls a veil over this kind of neglect or just plain hostility. Same old sewer water in a shiny new bottle: women don’t matter, it’s men who claim to be women who matter.
I’m happy to see them organize, and I understand completely why they need to. Just a few short years ago, lesbians who protested against the direction that Phoenix Pride was taking in a turn towards trans-exclusivity were treated horribly. Gays and lesbians are being shoved out of the movements that they started. Just imagine if ACT-UP were trying to march today, they would be considered a hate group for not centering the one or two trans ID AIDS victims.
This may be an unpopular suggestion, but I think we should be referring to Lesbians and Gays rather than even LGB because even bisexuals have different issues (and the ability to be more discreet by dating within their sex) than Lesbians and Gays.
I came across, in a forgettable article, a snippet about actress Sara Gilbert, who at some point “realized she was a member of the LGBT community”. The snippet mentioned she “came out”, but otherwise said nothing direct about what she “came out” as. Indirectly, it mentioned that her kissing scenes with a (male) actor (who she was seeing at the time) became increasingly uncomfortable. So, she came out as lesbian, right? Why not say so? I disagree, too, with the “member of the X community” phrasing, unless we’re talking about secretly being a member of an organization and finally admitting it.