The Meaningless Incoherence Of "LGBTQ+"Time to drop the ubiquitous term. It obscures and misleads more than it clarifies.
A decade ago, the term “LGBTQ+” — even just “LGBT” — was a bit of a novelty. Now, as you are no doubt aware, it’s ubiquitous, routinely used by the MSM and even Donald Trump. Some go further. The official White House term is now “LGBTQI+” (the “I” is for “intersex.”), an acronym President Biden usually struggles to get right. I don’t blame him. Justin Trudeau’s mangling of it is a comedy classic. It sounds at times like a new TV streaming service for gays. But it’s here now — and everywhere. Whether I like it or not, I am now deemed not a gay man but an “LGBTQ+ person”. Google Trends captures the linguistic shift. The words “gay” and “lesbian” peaked in 2015 and 2014, respectively, and in 2016, “LGBTQ” took off. It’s now more common than either of the previous terms. “Transgender”, “LGBTQ+”, and “queer” also took off at around the same time. Language usually changes gradually, when it is organic, and it’s no biggie. But a change in language this swift is rare. Perhaps it was the combination of marriage equality — legalized nationally in 2015 — and the simultaneous launch of a woke cultural revolution that did it. Gay groups, media outlets, academia, tech, and even corporate America have now almost entirely replaced “gay and lesbian” with this new acronym. There are even reddits out there on “who is your favorite ‘LGBTQ person’”?” — a definitional impossibility — and MSM headlines like “This Group Might Save Your LGBTQ Kid’s Life,” and “Meet Kate Brown, the first openly LGBT person to be elected governor of a state.” (Spoiler alert: she’s not gay or lesbian or trans. She’s bi and married to a man.) The term “LGBTQ” has an obvious advantage: it’s concise. All those long, complicated words get reduced to an acronym. Who, after all, wants to say a phrase like North Atlantic Treaty Organization, when you can just say NATO and everyone knows what you mean? The trouble is that words have meanings, and the term “LGBTQ+” — like the term “Hispanic” or “Latino” — is not like NATO. It doesn’t refer to a single, identifiable group, experience, or community. It refers to multiple ones. And each is distinct, discrete and often very different. When you examine its component parts, you realize that the Ls and Gs and Bs and Ts, let alone the Is and the +s, differ dramatically in basic things like psychology, lifestyle, income, geography, education, and politics. They don’t necessarily live in the same neighborhoods anymore — as the old gay ghetto has dispersed across a more tolerant landscape. They don’t routinely socialize as a single unit. Some bisexuals have never had a same-sex relationship, or know any gays at all. Gay men contain multitudes — from conservative Southerners in the Marines to “queer” club kids drinking the critical theory Kool-Aid. The lesbian dating scene is light-years away from gay men’s, and closer to the hetero experience in many ways. Transgender people are utterly different, often as comfortable with straight people as with gays, with a wholly separate life experience. Gay men are, after all, in a profound way defined by their sex; trans people are defined by their rejection of it. Lumping them all together and treating them as a single unit is like treating Jews and Arabs as the “Middle East community,” or Cubans and Salvadorans as indistinguishable “Latinos.” “LGBTQ+” is a term that obscures and misleads more than it enlightens and clarifies. And it has made any study or understanding of homosexuals as a discreet group close to impossible. One reason for this is that, by far, the biggest group in the “LGBTQ+ community” — almost half — are bisexuals, 78 percent of whom are women. So the biggest difference between gays and lesbians and the “LGBTQ+” community is that in the “LGBTQ+ community”, 57 percent are women; in the actual gay and lesbian world, 67 percent are men. Those are two very different populations. Among the youngest “LGBTQ+” cohort in the 2023 Pew survey, bisexuals outnumber gays and lesbians by a whopping 3 - 1. In the future, then, if trends continue, the “LGBTQ+” community is going to be overwhelmingly female. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But again, it is a vastly different population than the gays and lesbians of a decade ago. More pertinently, the Pew survey found that 82 percent of bisexual men and women “who are married or living with a partner are in a relationship with someone of the opposite gender.” Nothing wrong with this either, of course. But do the math: 82 percent of the bisexual 46 percent of the LGBTQ+ community that is in a relationship is in a straight one. So it’s almost certain that the biggest group within the LGBTQ+ umbrella will be functioning as straight (gay men are merely 32 percent and lesbians 16 percent of the “LGBTQ+” folks — and those figures are from 2018, with “bi” growing apace since). That’s how you can arrive at this statement from Gallup: “LGBT Americans overall are about as likely to be married to a different-sex spouse as to be married to a same-sex spouse.” That’s insane! MSM outlets also now use the word “queer” to describe all gays and lesbians. Pamela Paul, peace be upon her, observed in 2022:
From the NYT recently, some examples: “the Oscar nominations announced yesterday were a high-water mark for queer representation,” … “Queer History Was Made in ’90s Clubs” … “At This Staten Island Garden, the Plants Are All Queer.” This is endemic in the MSM — as woke writers in woke newspapers vie with each other to prove their woke credentials. There’s even a radical chic frisson among straight lefties who delight in calling gay people “queer”. In what can only be called identity-slumming, many straights are now calling themselves queer as well. We’re constantly told, of course, that all gays and lesbians have collectively co-opted and destigmatized the q-word. But polling shows that only 3 - 4 percent of the entire LGBTQ+ world call themselves “queer”. So the MSM routinely uses a word for the entire “LGBTQ+” world that 96 percent of this community rejects. It’s up there with “Latinx” as an accurate descriptor. The T section of the LGBTQ+ world — the section that now absorbs almost all of the attention — is comparatively tiny, at around 6 percent. But the term “LGBTQ+” can be deployed to imply they are much more numerous. So the Human Rights Campaign, the former gay rights group, can put out a tweet, as it did this week, saying that “the first anti-LGBTQ+ bathroom ban of 2024 was passed in Utah,” and was “a coordinated attack on our existence.” But if 94 percent of the “LGBTQ+ community” isn’t transgender, how on earth can our existence be at stake? In fact, even in the worst years of gay persecution, public bathrooms were the central socializing space for gay men! They were refuges, not threats to “our existence.” Now drill down into lifestyle, income, habits, education, etc. Everything suggests that these are several very distinct populations. To cite one measurement, just 1 percent of gay men say they have sex with both biological men and women. This compares with 39 percent for the Bs and 33 percent for the Qs. Seven percent of gay men rate their current mental health as “poor or very poor,” while a whopping 29 percent of the Ts and 30 percent of the Qs say the same. Racially, only a quarter of gay men and lesbians are “non-white”; but 47 percent of Ts are “non-white”. Many of these things — how best to put it? — are simply not like the others. Educationally, gay men are outliers across the entire society, let alone the “LGBTQ+ community.” Half of us have bachelors degrees (compared with 35 percent for straight men). This is true for gay men across all races, including Asian-Americans, the smartest sub-population in America. Six percent have an advanced degree — twice the percentage of straight men. Lesbians, alas, don’t outclass straight women in the same way. The reason is probably what happens when a gay boy finds himself isolated among his peers, and studies furiously in his childhood to get ahead of them: the “Best Little Boy in the World” syndrome. That’s my story. I’m far from alone. But that leads to big class differences as well. Gay male couples are among society’s most successful: “On average, the family income for married men in same-gender relationships is 31 percent higher than married women in same-gender relationships, and 27 percent higher than opposite gender married couples.” Gay men now earn more than straight men on average. Marriage equality has helped: “The median adjusted annual household income for men in same-sex marriages was roughly $132,300 in 2019, significantly higher than the median income for men in opposite-sex marriages ($90,700).” Or take poverty rates: gay men have a lower poverty rate (12.1 percent) than straight men (13.4 percent). But the “LGBT community” has a poverty rate of 21.6 percent. And the Ts have a 29.4 percent poverty rate — three times the gay male rate. Doesn’t it make much more sense to treat these experiences as fundamentally different? How can activists tackle poverty effectively if their lens is so clouded? And are we really united by the same politics? The MSM routinely conflates “LGBTQ+” activists with actual gay and lesbian people. But gays and lesbians are more heterodox than other minorities. In terms of partisanship, the “LGBTs” are 50 percent Dem, 22 percent Independent, 15 percent GOP and 13 percent other or unknown. That’s less reliably Democrat than Asians, blacks or Latinos. In 2016, exit polls suggested only 14 percent of “LGBTQ+s” went for Trump; but in 2020, 27 percent did. Almost one in three “LGBTQ+s” was “MAGA” last time around! The most coherent argument I’ve heard for treating bi women married to men, transgender individuals, gay men and lesbians, and edgy straight people as one single “LGBTQ+” category is that we are all “oppressed” in the same way. When same-sex love was a criminal act, when marriage and open military service was barred from us, when discrimination was rampant, this all-encompassing oppression contained a kernel of truth. It made sense to join forces, when the common accusation was same-sex love. But those formal strictures have long since been abolished; and discrimination is far less prevalent than it once was. DADT ended in 2011, Obergefell enshrined marriage in 2015, Bostock secured civil rights for trans people in 2020 — and yet the “queering” of major institutions and their language is only escalating. Those landmark Court rulings, moreover, have growing support among the masses. A 2023 survey found that the American public overwhelmingly oppose laws that discriminate against trans people — in housing, the workplace, colleges, healthcare insurance, doctors, K-12 schools, and even in the military. Over the last decade, only 4 percent of “LGBTQ” people said they had been fired or not hired for their identity, and only 5 percent said they’d been denied a promotion for that reason. For marriage equality, support is holding steady at 71 percent. And that “epidemic” of bigoted, anti-trans violence pushed by groups like HRC and the White House is simply a meretricious lie. But perhaps the greatest problem with the “LGBTQ+” formula is that it implies there could never be any conflicting interests between gays, lesbians, trans people and “queer” straights. If we’re indistinguishable, how could there be? The left champions diversity as a totem but increasingly treats non-straights as a crude monolith. And in reality, the most controversial question in the “LGBTQ+” space — the affirmation-only transing of children with gender dysphoria — directly pits the interests of gay and lesbian kids against those of trans kids. This is because the vast majority of children with gender dysphoria are gay or lesbian; and this is the target population for child sex changes. How can you tell which kids are going to end up as transgender and which will become gay or lesbian? The official answer is that it is clear in every single case. The actual answer is that we can’t know for sure. But if the policy is that any child who merely says they are the opposite sex cannot be questioned, and must be fast-tracked toward an irreversible sex change, we have a huge danger: that gay children will have their bodies wrecked, their fertility ended, and their sex lives stunted because we have erased the trans and gay distinction, and, in fact, merged the two. In many ways, the threat to gay and lesbian children is as grave a threat as any that the gay world has encountered. And because of the “LGBTQ+” formulation, the threat this time is coming from inside the house. This is often the problem when language is corrupted, when ideologically-motivated acronyms replace clear English words, when very distinct experiences are blurred over, and when activists have seized the discourse of both the MSM and the medical establishment. It’s time to return to reality, to say things plainly and to consign this increasingly meaningless acronym to the dustbin of history. (Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: a long chat with Justin Brierley on the “meaning crisis” of modern life; dissents over my latest piece on Trump and the tyrant threat, and other topics; two notable quotes from the week in news; an Yglesias Award on the Biden economy; 16 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a lively Mexican cover of “This Charming Man”; a stirring view outside a Missouri window; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!) From a new subscriber:
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New On The Dishcast: Justin Brierley
Justin is a writer and broadcaster who gets Christians and non-Christians to talk to each other. He co-hosts the “Re-Enchanting” podcast for Seen & Unseen, and is a guest presenter for the “Maybe God” podcast. He also contributes to Premier Christianity magazine, where he used to be editor. His new book is The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, and he has a documentary podcast series of the same name. Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on what killed the New Atheist movement, and the infinitesimal odds that life ever emerged in the universe. That link also takes you to commentary on our recent episodes with Jonathan Freedland, Jeff Greenfield, and Joe Klein. Plus, more reader debate over Trump, Biden, race and IQ, Israel, and political violence. You know: all the easy topics. Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Isikoff and Klaidman on Trump’s trials; Christian Wiman on resisting despair as a Christian, Nate Silver on the 2024 race, Jeffrey Rosen on the pursuit of happiness, George Will on Trump and conservatism, and Abigail Shrier on why the cult of therapy harms children. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other pod comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com. Dissents Of The WeekA reader writes:
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