Alphabet Soup

No serious question here or anything. I just want to know what the full expansion of “ LGBTQ” is. Thanks!
–Just Curious

Excellent question, my good sir, madam, or whatever. There’s a lot of debate in the LGBTQ community over precisely the use of which term should be used to identify itself, and this is a good opportunity to lay out a little bit of the history of queer identity politics within India and at large. LGBTQ stands for “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer”. It’s an umbrella term for all the people out there with gender identities and sexual orientations there that are not straight, but many individuals who are part of the community have issues with the use of just about all of the words in that acronym (particularly “queer”), since they are all English words and thus the domain of privileged, English-speaking Indians who have access to that kind of politicized self-identity and the luxury of defining themselves through the lens of Western labels. A same-sex desiring man or woman in a rural village (or, not to put too fine a point on it, in Washermanpet) wouldn’t call themselves gay or lesbian because they simply don’t know this exclusionary Western terminology—or so the argument goes. I’ve heard of the acronym being expanded to include kothis (the commonly accepted word for femme-presenting gay men in India), aravanis (the Tamil word for transgender women), hijras (the Hindustani word for transgender women), intersex individuals (people with indeterminate sexual organs), and people who are “questioning” their orientation or gender—LGBTQQHIA. (Quite the mouthful, isn’t it?)

Personally, I think the argument about questions of exclusionary terminology on the basis of language, while valid, doesn’t really go anywhere since most of the Indian terminology is unequally gendered anyway. There are words for men who desire men and for biologically-born men who experience their gender as women, but there are no available Indian-language words for same-sex desiring women or biologically-born women who experience their gender as men. The ability to name, identify, and ultimately define oneself isn’t simply the purview of educated, English-speaking urbanites, but arises out of a practice of unequal power relations that implicates all of us, not just people who are not in the know. The argument about the inequality of identity labels is flawed for precisely that reason—the inequality runs deeper than just the use of language and isn’t predicated solely on sexual orientation, but contains an element of gender inequality as well. My answer to all of this? Call yourself what you want but continue to express solidarity with others who answer to different names. A queer woman shouldn’t hate on a lesbian woman, and vice versa. We’re all in the struggle together.