Life
Beyond the Gender Binary
As college students explore different sexual identities, campus LGBT organizations are changing their acronym to keep up.
bap248@nyu.edu
The letters LGBT are well-known on college campuses. Ask practically any student, and you’ll quickly hear that they stand for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender, and usually refer to a campus organization devoted to issues of sexual identity.
Now, you may also hear the buzz about how some students are pushing to expand the acronym or to change it altogether.
Today’s alphabet soup of gender-identity labels include LGBTQ, LGBTA, and even LGBTQAITS, which stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (or Questioning), Ally, Intersex, and Two-Spirit and represents a spectrum of sexual orientations. (Intersex, for example, refers to someone born with both male and female physical characteristics, and Two-Spirit implies having masculine and feminine spirits.)
According to Daryl Presgraves, spokesperson for the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, a national alliance of student groups based in New York City, discussions about name changes are “widespread,” and new labels are being adopted to reflect a variety of sensibilities. “Every generation comes up with it’s own terminology,” he said.
At American University, in Washington DC, for example, students have added the letter “A” to their organization’s name to include “allies,” straight people who are supportive of gender-identity issues. “As a resource center we are not a simply for GLBT people,” said Nick Sakurai, program coordinator for the school’s GLBTA office. “Our mission is to be inclusive regardless of gender or sexual orientation.”
An “A” was also added to the acronym at Central Washington University, in Ellensburg, WA. “We came to that decision because we believe that [allies] are part of the community,” said Jen Han, program coordinator. She explained that, regardless of sexual orientation, all people should be working toward “freedom in identity without oppression.”
Discussions at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, revolve around the order of the letters: Some there want to call the campus group TBGL. “Often, transgender issues are pushed to the side, so making the acronym backwards would [bring them] to the forefront,” explained Kevin Correa, administrative and programming assistant at the school’s LGBT office.
Another option is using broader terms that avoid specific labels. At Pomona University in Claremont, CA, the organization is called Queer Resource Center, changed from The Closet in 2002. The new name “includes more people and we don’t have to worry about adding all the letters,” said Josh Nelson, coordinator of the group.
The use of “queer” is one of several options being debated at New York University, in New York City, which first opened its gender-identity resource center in 1996. “The negative connotation [of the term queer] is going away as people start to reclaim it,” said Todd Smith, director of NYU’s LGBT office. Personally, he would prefer “something along the lines of ‘gender and sexuality resources’,” he said. At this point, however, there are no official plans to change the organization’s name.
The discussion about the acronym is the latest twist in a sexual identify movement has been evolving on college campuses since the early 1970s. Other issues on the forefront include gender-neutral bathrooms and dormitories to provide a more welcoming environment for transgender and intersex students.
The reason gender issues tend to be high-profile on college campuses is because, “for the first time in their lives ….students feel free to explore [gender] issues and experiment with them in trying to figure out who they are,” says Ian Macgillivray, Ph.D., an education professor at James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA and author of two books on gender identity.
For his part, Macgillivray favors the idea of expanding the acronym rather than coming up with an umbrella term. For now at least, “I think it’s important to be as inclusive as possible,” he said. “We are still at the point where we need to spell things out. Even if that acronym gets longer, if someone wants to be included, it’s important to do that.”
NYU's office is still called LGBT...but for how long?
Photo by Bianca Posterli