For my Monthly Meeting's Newsletter, our Testimonies & Concerns committee has suggested I write an article about FLGBTQC. Here is the rough draft. I am open to suggestions at this time; the article is not due until February 22nd. Please let me know if you have any thoughts or suggestions.
Friends for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Concerns (FLGBTQC) is an organization composed of and run by Quakers who are concerned about the Testimonies (especially the Testimony of Equality) in relation to Friends with a variety of understandings and experiences of sexuality and gender. As I've told several Friends at Third Haven about this group, the response has tended to be laughter at the length of the name and the amount of initials in the abbreviation. Friends have implied that the name could be shortened; or the Q could be dropped, asking why the Q is necessary with all the LGBT in front of it.
I do not mean to imply that Friends have not been appropriately supportive of the group; but each and every one has commented on the length of the name. We Quakers love our abbreviations and have many of them that are commonly used in normal conversations at Meeting (AFSC, PYM, T&C, FGC, FCNL, etc.). FLGBTQC is longer than most; I admit to having trouble memorizing it at first. Yet since I've come to realize what the letters stand for, the acronym FLGBTQC comes easily to me now.
I can't imagine any of us not knowing what Lesbian and Gay means, but I will speak for a moment about why listing both Lesbian and Gay is a tribute to our Testimony of Equality. Gay was first used to refer to homosexual men, to the exclusion of women. In recent years, it was extended to refer to homosexual women as well; as homosexual women began to get more recognition both inside and outside of the "non-straight" community. By using both Lesbian and Gay, FLGBTQC is acknowledging that lesbian women and gay men have different identities. This is important, because not only is it true; but their experiences can differ vastly as well. Also, listing Lesbian first reverses the common acronym of GLBT, where Gay is listed first. This is a step towards equality of men and women, by not automatically assuming that the male-oriented acronym should go before the female-oriented one.
Bisexual might be a term most of you are familiar, but uncomfortable, with. Bisexuals can be attracted to either sex. To a bisexual, lesbians and gays, and straight men and women are considered monosexual; that is, they are attracted to only one sex instead of two. Bisexuals can be accused of being "fence sitters", or "confused", or "going through phases". I had a male friend in high school first come out to me as bisexual, and then later came to accept that he was gay. This does happen; but it does not mean that all people who identify as bisexual are confused or in denial. We are perhaps the only sexuality group whose sexuality is regularly denied and ridiculed by members of the "normative" sexuality (i.e., straight) and members of the GLBT community. There is a lot of confusion about bisexuals; I would like to offer myself as a resource to any member of Third Haven who would like to know more about bisexual people (I am one).
Transgender is one category that I have to admit to having little knowledge or experience of. Transgender can refer to people with both male and female sex organs, those who are in the process of changing their sex surgically (or are thinking about doing so, or have done so in the past), those who feel they have a different gender than sex (for example, a man stuck in a woman's body), those who bend the gender identity rules of our society (such as crossdressers), and so on. Transgender is not a sexual orientation, but a gender identity. Transgender people can have any sexual orientation, including straight.
Queer is for those people who don't identify with any of the previous identities, but do not consider themselves to fit into societal norms of sexual orientation or gender identity. For example, some people consider themselves to be pansexual instead of bisexual, acknowledging that they can be attracted to anyone regardless of sex or gender identity. Pansexuals feel that bisexual, with its implication of men and women only, excludes transgender individuals. Pansexuals often feel they are attracted to the person, regardless of the person's sex or gender. There are also those who consider their sexuality and/or their gender identity to be fluid instead of set into a specific category. The Queer is listed as part of FLGBTQC concerns to allow those people the chance to have a voice in the Religious Society of Friends.
If any would like more information about FLGBTQC, they have a website at http://www.quaker.org/flgbtqc/ . Included at their website is a letter to all Friends everywhere written last February:
"Once again, we are called to testify to the love we find moving among us. It is a testimony of radical inclusion. It is a cause of great pain to our corporate body to know that there are some Friends for whom our message is deeply disturbing; indeed, apparently, in contravention of their strongly held beliefs. It would gladden our hearts if Friends could soften their hearts to hear us out."
The rest of that epistle can be found here: http://www.quaker.org/flgbtqc/2007epistle.html .
I hope that I've cleared up the necessity of each of the initials in FLGBTQC; and that by doing so have made the acronym easier to remember.
5 comments:
Oooh, there is so much more than what you've written here, Tania, about how the acronym came to be. ...And it's good to realize that as Friends who are new to FLGBTQC make their way into this community, we have been falling down on our repsonsibility of explaining a bit about our history, including how and why the long acronym came into being.
For now, though, I'll point you to two things:
First is that when the acronym was new to all of us who were then active in FLGBTQC in the late 1990s, we understood that it was important NOT to use the acronym when outside of our gatherings, but instead to say each of the words within the acronym.
This practice would become known as the 3-second witness:
Friends for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Concerns.
Naming ourselves and one another in this way was seen as a next step towards becoming radically inclusive and towards affirming one another publicly, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, etc.
The second is the paragraph that often is referred to in our newsletters and even, at times, during our Meetings for Worship with Attention to Business:
It is our hope to offer an oasis to those who have been spurned by the world at large. We are learning that radical inclusion and radical love bring further light to Quaker testimony and life. Our experience with oppression in our own lives leads us to seek ways to bring our witness to bear in the struggles of other oppressed peoples.
(A longer excerpt from the minutes that came out of our wrestling for a name can be found here.)
Look for an email from me, related to FLGBTQC.
Blessings,
Liz Opp, The Good Raised Up
Over the past 2 decades, I've been involved in various "diversity" groups and committees. It's interesting how diversity is so often about creating more boxes (i.e. letters), despite the fact that none of us fits neatly in any box. I'll never forget getting an invitation to a local church (for the glbt community) because, as they said in the invitation, "we love the glbt community". It just seemed to smack of a dehumanization of complex people in a complex society down to 4 letters. As you also pointed out, I don't fully understand the "T" of this, but it is not mine to understand. What I get is that sexuality (identity, gender and orientation) are fluid and in a multi-dimensional spectrum, not nothces on a line.
All to say, Tania, I think you have some pretty comprehensive information there. For me, the question is, can we move towards being a society, a ocmmunity, or even Meetings, where the letters in acronyms don't matter, but truly all are welcome.
Thank you for your explanation. I live in San Francisco, the city that loves love, and all kinds and my life has become much more diverse in terms of the people I hang out with's sexuality and gender orientations. I'm curious, how do you feel about the blanket "queer" category? It seems to me that this seems to be the overarching word that people embrace nowadays, sorta how people of color is used to describe the coalition among all groups of color. But then again, I live in SF, where when someone says "queer" everyone else just gets it, and there isn't a lot of education that seems to be needed as people around the country might have to educate on each individual letter of FLGBTQC.
I personally don't identify with the term queer. I certainly wouldn't be offended if someone called me queer, but I identify primarily as bisexual and feel much more connected to that label.
RE the word "queer"; even though I used the word in naming this blog (queeries - a pun on queries which Quakers use a lot), I also am not a big fan of the word. By definition, it has mostly negative connotations (odd, doesn't fit in, etc.). One defintion even names it as a negative word for homosexual.
Having said that, however, the fact that it is being embraced by the glbt community is in the best tradition of Quakerism - that is, to embrace what is meant to be hurtful, and in so doing, render it harmless. This is how Friends came to be known as Quakers - some people were observed to quake during services, and they were derogatorally called quakers; Friends then claimed the word and it no longer had negative impact. Much the same has happened with the word "queer".
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