It definitely throws people off, especially the cisgendered queers. Saying queer instead of lgbt or gay helps people who are not in the gender binary and if I'm being completely honest a word like bisexual is trans-exclusionary, just from my personal experience bisexuals do not want to have sex with trans people, the ones that do are called pansexuals. Don't even get me started on how much of the lesbian community is terf reactionary because they don't want to associate with trans people. The gay community same deal. And why does the l at the start of the acronym? Why not TPGNBL or something else? The whole acronym order is the main reason why I'm using queer. How can we be equal if we put specific sexual groups in front of each other? Queer is all encompassing and we should use that instead. If we could change the pride flag we could phase out lgbt.
I'm a cishet and I've been saying queer for a while now just bc it's faster to say than LGBTQ. Is it insensitive for a cishet to use the word queer?
it's a bit of a gray area, honestly. queer is a reclaimed slur, but so is gay and nowadays it's definitely weirder to say "homosexual" instead of "gay". reclaiming queer is not as far along as reclaiming gay, but my impression is that it's getting there and that most of the people who still get offended by it are heavily assimilationist people and in particular TERFs and gay transphobes who get offended by it for all the wrong reasons.
Hmmm interesting. I knew queer used to be a slur but honestly I thought it was so old it had basically been replaced by the f slur and therefore had been fully reclaimed and resuscitated into a useable term. Thanks for enlightening me
To go along with what AcidSmiley is saying, I've also noticed there being a generational gap between who finds it offensive and who doesn't. Older people seem to have been more likely to have had queer thrown at them as a slur, whereas millenials and gen z tend to get other slurs and therefore queer has a lot less of a negative meaning to us. Interestingly, this debate is over a hundred years old at least. I've been reading Gay Berlin and there's a mention of this exact debate in the queer community, except over the German word schwul, in the fucking 1910's. Nothing is ever new, just cycles upon cycles.
yeah i know a couple of olds that really hated the connotation. i used to get called a queer and a sissy a lot as a kid so i kinda get it but i actually really like calling myself queer :shrug-outta-hecks: its nothing like trying to reclaim the f slur to me. i kinda dig that the word queer feels kinda whimsical
generally speaking i think using queer as an adjective rather than as a noun makes me feel better about cis people using it. saying something like 'the queer community' or 'queer topics' or 'queer books' sounds great, but saying 'those dastardly queers!' or saying 'jessica is a queer' makes it sound more sus
A lot of lgbt people would rather you didn't, just because a lot of us have had queer thrown at us as a slur whereas fucking nobody uses lgbt that way. I don't even like being called a queer by other lgbt people because it reminds me too much of school and family experiences, but with them at least i'll know that the intention is chill, even if it kind of makes me flinch still. With cishet people, you really don't know that.
i think its being redefined or something to not be considered insensitive in some parts of the community (from what i've seen, largely the younger USamerican crowd), but i wouldn't say its a safe bet.