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I, a straight person, have a question. I'm talking about homophobia in a draft blog piece, and what’s a good choice of word for the people that homophobes dislike and abuse? Has it got to the point where “queer” is respectful and appropriate? Is “LGBTQ” better? “Gender-diverse”? (I think I’m correct to think that “homophobe” has grown to include anti-trans and gender-related bigotries generally?) Who has written a really good essay on the subject? Thanks in advance.
I'm straight, and I think Queer has not reached the point that straight people can quite use it yet.
LGBTQIA+ is safer.
@unicorndeburgh @timbray This isn’t an answer to the original question, but my own position on this, fwiw, is that queer is generally fine used as an adjective by anyone who isn’t being a jerk but I don’t want to see it as a noun in writing from a straight person pretty much ever. “Queers” spoken out loud by a straight person has me taking off my earrings.
@kissane @unicorndeburgh @timbray I had a convo with someone once about why you shouldn’t use identities as nouns. They didn’t understand it and maybe I didn’t explain it well. IMO saying “queers” is functionally similar to saying “blacks”, in that it takes away a human portion of the identity. ie Michelle Obama is not a black, she is a black person. It always gives me bad vibes when people talk about “the blacks”, same with “the queers” & similar phrases.
D'oh, obvious once pointed out. Thks.
@kissane @unicorndeburgh @timbray I'm gay and I don't usually refer to myself as queer because IMO that's the Q in LGBTQIA+ and I feel like calling myself queer is borderline cultural appropriation / invisibilization... I actually had a chat about this a while back with some LGBTQIA+ friends & we definitely have folks who identify as queer, and some who don't.
@Romain @kissane @unicorndeburgh @timbray as a straight non-native speaker of English, what does "queer" actually stand for? I never really found an explanation that made the difference clear to me?
@bleistifterin @Romain @kissane @unicorndeburgh @timbray I usually (but perhaps incorrectly) map queer to "folks who don't conform to the traditional gender binary"... which is why as a cis-man I feel it's "not me".
@bleistifterin @kissane @unicorndeburgh @timbray (I'm also a non native English speaker, if my first name didn't make that obvious 
)
@Romain @bleistifterin @unicorndeburgh @timbray For the specific time and place where I grew up (US, 1990s) “queer” was—within my age group—an umbrella term used to indicate political solidarity across all non-straight orientations.(While I was an undergrad, our LGBT+ student group changed its name from an acronym-related one to one with “queer” in it to be inclusive of more identities.)
@Romain @bleistifterin @unicorndeburgh @timbray In that moment, gender identity and nonconformance were mostly (not always, but mostly) thought of in terms of subcategories within the super-categories of orientation. There’s obviously been a sea change there, but that’s the scene I came up in.
@kissane @Romain @bleistifterin @unicorndeburgh @timbray FWIW, in my current time-and-place (2023, Amsterdam) friend have referred to me as queer because I am “one of them” in solidarity. I appreciate the inclusion! But as a US-born cishet male I worry they are stretching the term to the point of meaninglessness. 
@Romain
Queer is meant to apply to anyone not matching the general cisheteronormative archetype. For people outside of our community, "gender norms" include binary oppositional romantic and sexual relationships: men romantically dating and fucking women