GSM

Are you part of the Gender and Sexuality Minority community? 30-Week Genderqueer Challenge part 14

This post is part of my participation in the 30-day genderqueer challenge, which I have modified to a weekly exercise.

Today’s prompt: Are you part of the Gender and Sexuality Minority community?

…I feel like I implicitly answered this question already? I don’t believe there is such a thing as the GSM community. And I definitely wouldn’t want to be part of it if there was.

To be totally, I’m not really seriously involved in any communities organized explicitly around any of the identities under the GSM or LGBTQIA+ umbrellas. I have plenty of queer and/or trans friends. I participate in and have hosted the Carnival of Aces, which I suppose means I contribute to online asexual community(/ies). And I sometimes attend events organized by Polyamory Toronto, a meetup group for people interested in Polyamory – I was even a panelist on their first-ever Poly 101 panel this year.

I do also consider you, my readers, and the bloggers I read, to be a part of my extended community, and many of y’all are non-binary and/or trans and/or on the ace spectrum, so I do participate in community around these identities online.

What I have is a complicated network of largely disorganized but often mutually-supportive connections around various shared identities and experiences. If that is what community is, than I am a part of many wonderful communities, but The GSM community? No thanks.

Catch the rest of my 30-week genderqueer challenge here!

“An unpopular or unsure opinion about the GSM community”: 30-Week Genderqueer Challenge part 8

This post is part of my participation in the 30-day genderqueer challenge, which I have modified to a weekly exercise.

Today’s prompt: An unpopular or unsure opinion about the GSM community

For those that don’t know, the GSM in ‘GSM community’ stands for ‘Gender and Sexual Minorities’. It’s an alternate name sometimes used for LGBTQ+ communities to avoid alphabet soup problems while still being broadly inclusive.

…And you may not have caught my little linguistic trick in that last paragraph, but it points to a potentially unpopular opinion I have about ‘the GSM community’: I don’t believe such a thing exists.

There are GSM communities. There are lots of them, with varying levels of inclusivity of varying kinds of people who experience marginalization because of their gender (or lack thereof) and/or sexual orientation (or lack thereof). Many of them are wonderful. But there is no GSM Community, I don’t believe there can be one, and I don’t believe there should be, really.

For one thing, talking about ‘the community’ tends to send the message that gender and sexual minorities are a monolith, and we obviously aren’t. For every trans person I see insisting that ‘transgendered’ isn’t a word, I see a another trans person actively describing themself as ‘transgendered’, for instance.

But the other problem with broadly inclusive communities is that pretty much without fail, the voices that rise to the top, the ones that get heard, are the voices of the most privileged within those communities. And so the changes that get made are the ones that benefit those who are already most privileged. And this very often actually makes things harder for those less privileged.

Even something as simple and obviously right as extending marriage rights to all couples regardless of gender make-up has the real-life side effect of helping middle and upper class white gay people consolidate their wealth more effectively, thus contributing to continued income inequality. For reals.

In order for more marginalized voices to be heard, we need something more than ‘the GSM community’. We need a multiplicity of communities with a multiplicity of voices, representing as many different perspectives as possible. I am far, far more interested in hearing from communities of black trans folk, or autistic queer people, or fat femmes, than in listening to anything that can be credited to ‘the GSM community’ at large.

Catch the rest of my 30-week genderqueer challenge here!