It's okay if certain people don't like it
Overall, it’s easier to use and remember, especially if this all new to you. You might be gay, I might be trans, but we’re both queer and that brings us together.Ī lot of people like it because it’s easy to say with decidedly less syllables than LGBTQIA+. Some people find queer’s ambiguity appealing since it gives a sense of community without the need for a more specific label. It encompasses a wide range of identities, and doesn’t risk excluding groups that the acronym may leave out. There are loads of reasons why people identify with queer, either individually or as an umbrella term. But like all words, its use evolved over time and quickly came to mean something different. Think for a moment: the word gay used to mean 'happy' and queer used to mean 'strange' or 'different'. The ‘gay community’ became the ‘gay and lesbian community’, then the ‘LGBT community’, or the ‘LGBTIQ community’, and so on. Over the last 50 years, we’ve cycled through a great deal of them.
From its dictionary definition, to being used as a slur, to being reclaimed by some LGBTQIA+ people and to being rejected by others, queer means many different things to many different people.įinding umbrella terms for a community as diverse as ours isn’t easy (trust us – we know!). The meaning of ‘queer’ has changed a lot over the past few decades.
