It seems a long time ago when homosexuality was still an unspeakable taboo. Today, the pride march – a name preferred to that of gay pride because it is more inclusive – is a real popular gathering, and many are the personalities living their homosexuality in broad daylight. However, homophobic attacks are still a scourge, and there are few members of this community for whom coming out is not a terribly feared ordeal – too often rightly so.
However, to the now familiar categories of gays, lesbians and bisexuals, the voices of other people have long since been joined, but now increasingly loudly, very often thrown into the same basket out of convenience:these are the terms trans, queer, intersex… which give rise to the acronym LGBTQI+. It is also not silly to integrate them under a generic term since these struggles overlap and share the characteristic of diverging from the heterosexual and cisgender norm (see below). While young people easily juggle with all these terms, the nuances and importance of which they generally understand well, here are some clarifications so as not to be completely lost and to avoid missteps, which can be extremely violent for people whose identity is already regularly flouted. If, on the other hand, you want to do well — to be an "ally" as we say in this terminology — this article is for you.
Let's go back a little in the past to begin with. If the French revolutionaries abolished the crime of sodomy in 1791, homosexuality did not become a trivial matter. Homosexuals, transvestites, thus remain confined to the margins of society, where they mingle with an underworld fauna in the slums of the suburbs as in the novels of Jean Genet for example, himself writing from his prison cell. The Vichy regime even legally reaffirmed this separate status in a law that was only abolished in 1982, under the presidency of François Mitterrand.
It is on the other side of the Atlantic that we must turn to see the true birth of the LGBT movement. In 1968, in New York, a police raid on a notorious homosexual bar, the Stonewall Inn, triggered riots in the city:for the first time, homosexuals asserted themselves in the public space and claimed their rights, by s opposing the police harassment of which they are the target. These are the beginnings of the gay movement, which developed and radicalized in pain during the 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic and its catastrophic management only underlined the rank of second-class citizens to which homosexuals were relegated.
As homosexuality becomes normalized and accepted, the struggle for gay rights gives way to that for LGBT rights, an acronym intended to group people whose sexual orientations deviate from the heterosexual norm (i. ie lesbian , gay and bi-sexual ), but also those whose gender identity does not correspond to their biological sex:the famous T for trans . And today, this acronym is sometimes joined by other letters. LGBT therefore, but also Q for queer , I for intersex , etc. (hence the addition of a "+" sign).
For several decades, sociology has been working to detach gender from sex, in order to understand the issue of transgender people, which is nothing new. From the hijras in India to the two-spirits in Native American societies, many cultures have incorporated these deviations from the norm into their social hierarchies. Indeed, our biology itself is not so binary, and a number of people (difficult to estimate, as the spectrum of intersex is so broad) are born with or develop more or less hermaphrodite sexual characteristics:these are the intersex people.
However, the mere existence of intersexuality testifies to the glitch caused by the binarity of the male/female dichotomy:what to do then with individuals who present characteristics that are both masculine and feminine? It is about understanding that gender is to be distinguished from biological sex. Gender is a social construction, certainly raised on the basis of this sex, but ultimately independent of it. If this is deeply rooted in our society and our unconscious, it is for example perfectly incongruous to attribute an affinity for certain colors (blue/pink) or activities (football/sewing, etc.) according to birth sex .
Nevertheless, the fact that it is socially constructed does not make it less effective—and potentially violent. We will therefore speak of transgender people to designate those people whose gender identity does not correspond to their birth sex — as opposed to cisgender people:those whose gender identity corresponds to their biological sex, i.e. men born with a penis, and women born with a vagina (to put it simply, this description still excluding intersex people). And from this incongruence can arise a malaise experienced as an intimate and permanent violation, which is called gender dysphoria. Even cisgender people suffer from these tight shackles:the conditioning of men to repress their emotions leads, for example, to a higher suicide rate (we speak of "toxic masculinity").
And to clear up any confusion, a transsexual is a transgender person who has undergone sex reassignment surgery. But one does not necessarily imply the other. Precisely, one of the great battle-horses of this fight is to make accept the independence of sex and gender, and even the fluidity of the latter. One can be a woman born with a penis and choose to keep it, or vice versa; you can play with masculine and feminine codes without linking them definitively.
LGBTQI+ culture is not a uniform culture. This is all the advantage and the disadvantage of this term fan, which brings together people united above all by a stigma that ostracizes them from traditional society. However, few points in common a priori between those who fought for homosexual marriage, aspiration to assimilation within the national community via the seal of the State, and the sulphurous Guillaume Dustan for example, who made the apology of his bareback sexuality (coitus without a condom, therefore likely to be a vector of sexually transmitted diseases) on the cathode-ray screen in the early 2000s. Where some seek to integrate smoothly into the masses, others embrace and celebrate their stigma, upturned and displayed proudly like a crest—sometimes literally:the Act Up logo, the one with the pink triangle, is neither more nor less than the upturned triangle marking homosexuals in Nazi concentration camps. The word queer, originally an insult addressed to homosexuals and transvestites, has itself been reappropriated as a mark of self-determination, in order to celebrate this difference between heterosexuals and others.
If this revenge tends to irritate the most conservative, it is precisely because it exposes our society's nose to the musty smell of its narrow-mindedness and reminds us of the very poor fate reserved for all those who have the misfortune not to conform to its standards.
"Let them do what they want with their sexuality, but why should they have to show it off in front of everyone?"
The explanation of this "why" is however very simple:what the queer community demands is not the right to be like everyone else, but precisely the right to be herself, and to be proud. The term "tolerance" is revealing in this regard:something that we tolerate is already something that should not be, something whose presence is endured. The queer community does not ask to be tolerated, but to exist, without being accountable.
It is a celebration of this difference, a revenge of the excluded, the subordinates, the reprobates who, instead of demanding their assimilation into traditional structures, thumb their noses at them by building their own communities, where norms and values reign. divergent. Hence the importance of the notion of family, not nuclear, but adoptive – the one we have chosen by affinity – within queer culture. Notions from the academic world, such as that of intersectionality, which theorizes the confluence of discriminations (sex, orientation, skin color, class, etc.), are prevalent there. To put it simply, queers do not care about the "natural" order invoked by conservatives of all kinds and challenge the heterosexual, male, white norm... by building a more colorful world like the rainbow flag. , where we play well with masculine and feminine codes.
In short, get used to these already common formulas for the younger generations. Some define themselves, for example, as pansexual, an orientation which, unlike bisexuality, does not reduce the gender of its object of attraction to what it has between its legs. This is just one example from a rich lexicon that cannot be exhausted here. But you are now equipped with some notions. If ignorance can often lead to rejection, no more excuses to be stupid and mean.
