Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:It’s odd that one can think oneself as enlightened and educated but then find that one still carries prejudice. I’m in my mid sixties so I grew up in a very different world. A world where not only could same sex couples not marry, but homosexual activity was actually illegal in most states in America. We were always taught that homosexuality was bad. I’m glad things have changed but I’m having a hard time keeping up with it. I keep coming across new words I don’t know referring to different sexual preferences I’d never heard of. Just yesterday I first read the term “scoliosexual” which I’m not sure I understand. New letters keep getting added. I had finally memorized “LGBT” when they added “Q.” I must admit I don’t understand what the Q adds. But now they’ve added “IA.” I don’t even know what those letters stand for. But I’ve recently realized that I still carry prejudice. My son is 14 and has no interest in girls. This seems odd to me because we were all girl crazy at that age. To me this seems weird. But my son thinks it’s weird that I was so interested. To him that seems incomprehensible. I’ve asked him if he’s interested in boys and he says no. DW doesn’t think he’s gay. But what concerns me is that this concerned me. I guess when for so many years one is taught that something is bad, you can’t just wish the prejudice away. But maybe that’s the problem. Telling people that they should be ashamed of being prejudiced doesn’t make anyone less prejudiced; it just makes them deny that they’re prejudiced, even to themselves. And that only makes it worse because any problems like addiction or racism can’t be corrected if we refuse to admit that we have the problem. We shouldn’t be telling people prejudice is something to be ashamed of. We should be treating prejudice like a disease which should be cured.
The Q is for both queer and questioning FYI — Queer being a vague umbrella term for “not into cis heterosexual relationships” (cis means identifying as the same gender you were assigned at birth if you hadn’t heard that one yet) and questioning being an equally vague term for “I’m trying to decide if I’m not straight but I’m not sure.” I think the Q is very important especially for people still figuring out their gender identities and is also good for incorporating trans and nonbinary identities because some people who identify as eg Lesbian are only interested in other cis women and don’t feel comfortable having trans women use lesbian so she can claim queer with less friction. I is for intersex, which incorporates a lot of nonbinary physical gender states (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex). The A usually stands for asexual although depending on context can also be used for allies. Asexual (in this context) refers to people who are simply uninterested in sexual or romantic relationships.
A lot of these terms have been used longer than you might think but only reached the mainstream recently as we have decriminalized and unpathologized them. Lots of people aren’t going to start talking loudly about being asexual if all it gets you is involuntary commitment to a mental institution and corrective rape. Queer has fluctuated through being a self-identifier and pejorative since it started being used as a sexuality identifier in the late 1800s, as have most of the words in the LGBTQIA+ alphabet soup which is probably one of the reasons we have so many of them. 😝
But I understand your point — that it’s hard to overcome the prejudices we learn when we’re young and the world can change a LOT in a single lifetime. I think it’s great you’re realizing your prejudices when you look at your son’s developing identity. What really matters isn’t that you’re concerned (let’s be real, we’re all worried about our children all the time aren’t we’re) but that you love and respect him and are letting him figure it out even though his teens aren’t going quite the way you expected.
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