Have you ever thought about the meaning of the acronym LGBTQ? I have and Chico State has too. It stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning.  Here on campus, there is an organization called the Cross Cultural Leadership Center (CCLC) where I attended a Conversation on Diversity about LGBTQ issues.  This was a semi-facilitated discussion where we were asked to write questions on a piece of paper and then put them into a bowl.  The discussion leader then chose a question and asked it to the group. I was surprised at how much I didn’t know when listening to the group answer the questions being asked.

One of the first questions asked was, “What do the I and A stand for in LGBTQIA?”  I had never heard of there being an I and an A, so this was interesting to me.  The I stands for intersex, which is when a person is born with both female and male genitals.  Someone can also be born with XXY chromosomes or XYY chromosomes and consider themselves intersex.  The A stands for asexual, but we didn’t really go over that in the discussion.  The next question was, “What is the difference between gay and queer?”  This was kind of a tough one to answer and I definitely did not know the answer.  The only answer to this I could think of was that queer was aderogatory term and gay was just the term describing someone’s sexuality and not necessarily putting them down for it.  The answer that the group came up with was that queer was the more political term, but also often heard and used as a negative term.  I agree with this because whenever I hear the word queer, it is always used in a negative way.

We also talked about some of the reasons as to why some communities are more accepting of LGBTQ than others.  Some of the answers we came up with were different religions, old western ways of living, values, and societal norms.  For example, if a community is very religious and lives by the bible, they will probably not be as accepting as others.  Along with this, if other members of a community think it is wrong to be LGBTQ, then that could play a huge role in whether members of that community will feel comfortable coming out with their sexuality. I think personally, if I were gay and lived in a community that condoned it, I would not come out.  I don’t think this is right at all because your sexuality is part of who you are and no one should feel like they can’t expressthemselves. 

 I know this was supposed to be anonymous, but I’m not afraid to share the question I asked.  I asked what it meant to be transgender because I didn’t completely understand. I thought it was someone who had a sex change, but that’s not always true. Being transgender can be a person who identifies themselves as the opposite sex and who is not planning on having a sex change.  This can be done by adopting pronouns of the sex they desire to be as well as wearing the clothes of the sex they are.  We also learned about the opposite of transgender, which is sisgender (SP?).  This means that you identify with the sex you were born with.

I’m so glad I went to this forum because it opened my eyes to a lot of things I just hadn’t thought about before.  If the CCLC has another conversation like this, I encourage anyone and everyone to go.

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