Seeking suggestions for the name of this group
There has been occasional concern about the name of this group: ~lgbt. Some people believe it's not inclusive enough, some people think it's a bit clinical, some people think it's not expressive enough, and so on. Nothing major, just minor concerns here and there.
However, Deimos has said he'll rename this group if we want to.
So I'm here to find out what we might want to change the name to.
This will be a two-step process. This thread is for gathering suggestions, and discussing the pros and cons of the various suggestions. After I've collected a list of everyone's suggestions, I'll then post a second thread with a survey in it, for us all to vote on those suggestions.
But, for now... what do you think this group should be called? (And it's okay if you think it should be called ~lgbt!)
The current list of suggestions:
I would personally prefer it remain ~lgbt, or if changed, changed to one of the lgbt variants to be more inclusive. "Queer" has way too much personal baggage for me and many others which will likely make it contentious, and rainbow is far too ambiguous and reminds me of the messy/confusing name conventions used on reddit. But TBH I don't really care that much, and if the majority of people prefer queer or rainbow, I wouldn't be that bothered by the group name being changed to either.
Adding my vote in for no change (Since vote scores were hidden).
We're not voting on options now. We're collecting suggestions.
I do like to see that people now (have to) voice their opinions on Tildes, instead of expressing them via votes.
Voting is voicing your opinion, but anonymously so.
counterpoint: so far it seems to mostly just serve to add noise or clutter to threads, though. some people might be certainly be inclined to weigh in more heartily because votes are almost useless now, but the comment you're responding to is really only not superfluous right now because we don't know how many people agree with what opinion (beyond the abstract fact that the top level we're replying to is apparently the most popular opinion in the thread) and so in order to express agreement visible to other people you need to reply to what you're agreeing with.
As humans tend to do – something I'm entirely comfortable with, even if it means multiple persons now have to speak their mind.
i'm kinda not, because it's often needlessly noisy and gradually makes threads a gigantic clusterfuck to parse out when they really just don't need to be. reading the big thread on the change for example borders on nearly impossible at this point in part because of its size and in part because i can't really parse what's going on in either the top level comments or in the extensive comment chains going on there. it's just one big wall of text to me without contextual indicators of how people feel about things, and moreover if people could see votes right now i imagine there'd be quite a few less comments in that thread than there are since people wouldn't feel a need to basically repeat the same points that other people are.
I think it's weird how you seem to keep flipping back and forth between "the vote numbers don't matter and shouldn't affect how anyone thinks anyway" and "I can no longer follow discussions at all without votes" depending on what point you're trying to argue at the time. Both of those can't be true. If you're having trouble without votes, you were clearly being influenced.
please do enlighten me when i've ever anything even remotely similar to whatever the fuck you're talking about here, dude, because i'm pretty sure i've never argued that, not least because my whole point in the big thread is that votes do serve purposes and do have impacts on the community, and those purposes and impacts in my view are beneficial to the community.
I have no interest in trying to discuss anything with you when you've jumped immediately to hostile defensiveness, as usual.
if you don't want me to jump to "hostile defensiveness," you probably shouldn't assert things that i'm pretty sure i haven't ever said without any kind of evidence which backs up your assertion. people have used that exact sort of bullshit in the past to abuse me or manipulate me, so i have absolutely no patience for that anymore regardless of who you are.
Alright, against my better judgment, I'm going to bite:
What happened here wasn't an assertion or an attempt to put words in your mouth. To be quite honest, I also interpreted your comments the way Deimos did at first. It took a fair bit of effort to figure out what you intended to communicate. What actually happened here is that there was miscommunication caused by the English language being a clusterfuck. Nobody was trying to manipulate or abuse you, there was just a misunderstanding.
Should Deimos have taken more time to carefully go over what you said to make sure he was understanding you correctly, by applying the Principle of Charity? Absolutely. Should you have perhaps been more calm in the way you responded, applied the Principle of Charity yourself to his intentions, and politely corrected Deimos' misunderstanding by telling him what you actually intended to communicate? This is also a resounding yes.
From the other side of this:
Are you right to be upset that he interpreted your comments in a less-than-charitable way? Yes, absolutely. Is he right to be upset that you jumped to "hostile defensiveness" when you interpreted his misunderstanding in a less-than-charitable way? Also yes.
You're both right here, and you're also both wrong. These disagreements are going to happen every now and then. I just hope that this helps both you and @Deimos walk away from this with a better understanding of what happened, with or without reconciliation.
You mean, like when people discuss the voting change in a thread about a group name? :P
yes, although this thread hasn't really hit critical mass of starting to become unreadable yet. that usually starts to happen once threads hit about 80 comments, give or take a few.
...which do not include written reactions, I presume.
How do votes help you navigate the commentscape better?
i mean, basically because of the same reasons i outlined in the big thread?
all of these are useful in navigating threads because there is a message in how every exchange of votes in every thread goes. if someone shares an opinion with me for an example but their argument with someone else on that opinion doesn't sway people in the audience, i know then to either avoid that argument or to refine it or restate it in some way that is more likely to be persuasive. if someone in a thread gets no votes for some reason, it likely indicates that what they are doing is behavior to avoid or a line of argumentation to avoid. shit like that. i essentially think of it as one gigantic feedback mechanism.
Similarly adding my vote to this one; LGBT is the standard, I see no reason to change it.
~lgbt seems like the only workable one, in my view. it's the single most recognizable, universal term for the community, we all seem to understand that the group is not just what's in the vanilla acronym, and none of the alternatives here really stand up to me.
maybe if it becomes a point of serious ambiguity in the future, i'd see a name change of the sort as preferable, but honestly given the alternatives and our collective understanding of what the group is i don't really see a better name than what we have already or a particularly good reason to change it.
Why is instant recognition more important than inclusion?
I also hope we don't avoid a possible good option just because we're scared of looking like redditors lol
because the whole point of a group on this website is to be recognizable and readily understandable as a unit of categorization, not necessarily to be a statement of inclusion or a political statement of some sort. ~lgbt does both of those things fine without turning into a massive discourse machine or obfuscating the point of its existence to users, and we all seem to know that in its current form the group title is really not exclusionary to begin with unless you take the line that we have to explicitly spell out everybody who falls into what's implied by the acronym.
I don't know what to tell you if you think there's an apolitical choice or that we should ride on "you know what I mean."
i didn't say that there was an apolitical choice at any point in that, just that a group name's purpose isn't necessarily to be inclusive like some of the choices up there are intended to be or some sort of political statement like ~queer would probably be interpreted as, but alright.
i mean, we would literally be riding on the same thing with all of these choices except for ~queer, which is again a sorta-reclaimed slur that some people explicitly distance themselves from and refuse to identify with, and ~gsm, which even a lot of people in the lgbt+ community don't know the meaning of. our current "everybody knows" strategy has worked fine before, and it doesn't show really any indication of being base-breaking now.
Every option is making a political statement, ~lgbt is one that prioritizes the groups it labels. Ask anyone what the term means, and they will likely spit back at you the words it stands for.
Would you be saying this if it was ~lgb? If it was ~gay? Are we so bound to being understood at a glance that we can't throw a bone to anyone not already recognized? That lack of recognition is even more reason to be upfront and loud about further inclusion. Even ~lgbtiq, while suboptimal, accomplishes that.
if those were the accepted terms in some other timeline perhaps, but they don't factor into the equation here and really never have so they really don't matter as far as this conversation is concerned. also, you're talking to someone who is literally not represented in the acronym as it currently is on here and upfront admitted that, so i have no idea why you're trying to pull this "lack of recognition" thing on me of all people. no, i really do not care about purely "recognition" because again stuff like recognition to me does not inherently determine to me what the group title should be. given all the circumstances that play into group titles, i simply don't think that trying to expand out the acronym or use ~queer or ~gsm or any other variant term works as well as ~lgbt does.
ironically, in scorning liberal identity politics, you seem to have accidentally appropriated their line of argumentation here by saying we need to start including more specific identities and what comes with those identities in the group name, without considering the broader interests of the groups the people you're trying to represent might fall into or whether or not they all actually agree with your idea of things or care at all about inclusion in this circumstance.
Because I'm making an argument, not trying to say anything that has anything to do with who you are. I never said you're arguing what you are because you're a filthy evil exclusionist. Quit looking for a gotcha, I'm not trying to fuck with you.
No, all I've said is that if we're going to take that approach since that appears to be the norm, we might as well actually extend it to its logical conclusion rather than half-assing it because it's already understood. And btw "listen to x voices and what they actually believe!!" is liberal idpol at its finest, the most worthless expression of it possible. Avoiding that is at the center of my opposition to it. I don't want to go down that line since this isn't supposed to be my platform to preach, but pointing that out also doesn't 'get me'.
you're making an argument that is very clearly directed at me in at least one way, because otherwise you would not have felt the need to include the
Would you be saying this if it was ~lgb?bit. also my point is more that your case (and other cases in this thread for other terms) don't really win me over, because i think a lot more goes into this than whether or not we should "represent" people and representation and identity is not and should not be the be-all-end-all because at the end of the day, passive users of the site will have to know what the section is and non-LGBT+ people will be using this section too because it's not like some super secret club. yet again, i reiterate, given all the circumstances that play into group titles, i don't think that the proposals put forward here work better than what the group title already is (and honestly i think a lot of them open the door to useless meta discourse in the future that just won't happen with the current title).why, though? why is just using "LGBT" so half-assed when it is pretty much ubiquitous, and how people use this group is well understood and not that hard to understand? are we so untrustworthy of users that we need to spell everything out to them like they're children and assume they don't know that LGBT includes all those other groups that usually get lumped in with the community?
...that's literally not what i said though (which is that you're basically treating people as identities here, not as people who might have opinions or values or ideas separate of the opinions you'd associate with those identities), and what i said is literally not identity politics, though? that's valuing people's opinions as individuals and not as identities and recognizing that maybe some of them don't want what you think they want in spite of what their identity suggests they would believe. i as a person, for example, think the push for using "queer" over "LGBT" is stupid even though my identity "should" be a beneficiary of people using queer, because queer is needlessly controversial terminology that some people categorically cannot identify with because it is still a slur to them while LGBT entirely lacks that baggage and has just as long and storied of a history as queer does as a term of self-identification and liberation.
I apologize for this style of reply, but I just wanted to address some things before getting outTake it as "Would a person who makes the argument that you are also apply this to these others terms?" It has nothing to do with you other than that you're the one making the argument.
And sure, I think other factors exist. I don't buy that any of the other options (short of ~gsm) are so unusable that they're worth overwriting representation. Representation isn't the most important thing in the world and you'll find me not caring about it all over the place. But it's more important than the minor difference in recognition between these options.
👀 we're in a thread that's doing exactly this and it will happen in the future.
As if exclusion is rare and something you can safely assume is not the case? Are you serious? Inclusion is not the default. I assume spaces that call themselves queer or lgbtq or whatever are more likely to be inclusive than ones that use "lgbt" or older terms, but even then it's far from 100%. This is a problem everywhere.
I'm not arguing anything about what people of certain identities would say, nor am I concerned with what individuals trying to argue for those whole communities are doing. In my eyes those are the same and equally wrong. I'm about arguing which option is the best with reasons for doing so, not what option has support with whatever groups or individuals we're supposed to listen to. If I did want to do that, I would bring up the people who aren't included who do argue against usage of "lgbt" or get more into how it personally makes me feel (not good!!), but I think that's a shitty avenue to go down. Or at least not the one I want to.
I might just take a play from your book here and bail. No point in continuing if you're going to misrepresent my argument like this. Gonna end here.
As it is now, all the groups on tildes have names that make their topic obvious. ~Rainbow would in my view change that.
As an example of a community-driven site that spends a lot of time on terminology, Wikipedia operates with LGBT as their umbrella term. I think that's the most mainstream and most recognizable initialism for these topics.
I'd argue LGBT represents everything non-heterosexual and non-cisgender. If ~LGBT isn't inclusive enough, I'd go with ~LGBT+ or ~LGBTplus to avoid the whole lettering debate that invariably seems to happen otherwise.
I've added these suggestions to the list of options. Thanks.
Unfortunately we can't use ~lgbt+ since + is a "reserved character" in the URI spec.... so it would have to be percent encoded to ~lgbt%2B, which is pretty ugly with unclear meaning. ~lgbtplus works though.
Yukky technical stuff. But thanks.
NP. and kind of offtopic a tiny bit, but have you thought about how you will actually do the vote? e.g. ranked-choice, binary-choice, simple polling via comments, etc.
What about what to do with the results? Should it just be plurality, require a clear majority, something else, or just play it by ear?
And also worth considering: should we try to find a way to ensure that only ~lgbt regulars have a vote, or should even non-lgbt users and lurkers be included?
This situation might actually be the first I have seen on Tildes where it could have been handy if trust/rep was already in place... and also actually points out one of the major problems with vote count being disabled on comments as well, @deimos. :P
Yes, I have thought about voting. Absolutely. I've done this sort of thing before, in other contexts.
As an Aussie who's used to preferential voting, I'm going to use a method where people can identify their preferred options, ranked from 1 to X. This is better than making people pick just one option. That all-or-nothing approach isn't the best way to decide something like this.
I'll use Survey Monkey's ranking question option for this. I wouldn't use Tildes' native voting, even if it was available.
I didn't consider blocking people from voting. I'm not sure we could, anyway. However:
Sounds good to me. I definitely prefer some form of preferential voting, for sure. And:
That is something I didn't consider, but it's an excellent point.
Oh yeah, I hadn't thought about this, I am a bit concerned about the polling. I don't think we want non-[term pending] people swinging this for us. That seems a bit...wrong.
Yeah it does seem prone to causing issues by letting absolutely everyone outside this community have a vote... but honestly, how would we realistically prevent otherwise right now? We could look back through every user history to make sure they have posted at least once to ~lgbt or have something in their bio mentioning being lgbt. But that would still likely exclude a lot of lgbt users and include a lot of non-lbgt users as well... and it also gets weirdly close to sounding like a purity test of sorts. :/
And also any time you put up barriers like that you wind up reducing the amount of people who will actually take the time to go through the process and vote, further skewing the results.
Shit ain't easy. :(
p.s. I'm not saying this particular issue is so serious it warrants that kind of effort and consideration, per se... I am just thinking more long-term and wide-scope here by asking these questions since they are bound to come up eventually in similar circumstances.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of trying to put up strict barriers either. Even if we did want to, I don't think we're equipped enough as a community (meaning ~lgbt on Tildes / Tildes as a whole) to sort out the edge cases and tough questions that come with that.
If anything, I think the best option might be...asking nicely for people entirely uninvolved to avoid coming in and overwhelming the voting.
Heh... yeah, again something that I didn't consider but is a good idea and might ultimately be sufficient.
I do wish we had group sticky topics though now too, since a vote like this that affects the entire group should ideally be clearly visible in that group for at least a few days or even longer, IMO.
Remember that we can bump threads by posting new comments, because the default sorting method is by activity. I plan to bump this suggestions thread a few times over the next few days or so. And I'll do the same with the voting thread.
True, but that's kind of abusing the system a bit and could be annoying for people since activity also works outside of group pages. So we should probably ask @deimos if he would be fine with us occasionally bumping it to keep it visible before actually doing that, especially since he may even be able to quickly hack together a temporary sticky-like option for that one topic instead.
What you call abusing the system, I call using the system. ;)
Bumping it a couple of times is fine if needed. I'd probably suggest bumping it once sometime around Monday morning USA-time, since the site's usually less active over the weekend and a lot of people probably won't see it until then anyway.
(@Algernon_Asimov)
Thanks. (I wasn't going to bump it every hour!)
~lgbt
It is the umbrella term, everyone knows it's the umbrella term, changing it to include another letter just creates the problem of it alienating all the others that weren't included. Even ~LGBTTQQIAAP doesn't have everyone, ~gsm is a cellular protocol, and ~rainbow isn't descriptive enough at first glance.
~rainbow, or ~lgbt
I definitely don't like expanding LGBT, only because it's THE acronym and has been for some time. Its not without problems, for the reasons laid out in the OP. Once you buck the standard and begin expanding it to be more inclusive you are also making the active decision on who to exclude, or you're left with something absurdly long. That's not very elegant.
If this was posted the other day, I would have suggested ~queer. But reading through the linked thread and the opinions within, that's not without problems either.
I like ~rainbow best of the given. I'm not creative enough at this time of day to offer an additional name for the pool, and I can't think of any active problems associated with it. The rainbow flag has solid history of association with LGBT/Queer folk, and the proper color spectrum has no clear divisions; room for everyone built right into the concept.
It's already doing that, it used to be "lgb" and even that was an exclusionary list of who counts. If we use any version of the acronym, it has that same problem.
You're not wrong. But it has been LGBT for about 30 years now. It's well entrenched in the social consciousness by this time. That doesn't make it good, or non-exclusionary. Just, standard. I freely admit it's not an ideal. I myself would need several letters tacked on to feel properly included. Your own suggestion of ~gsm is a worthy candidate that avoids the inclusion problem, I like it.
Saw this briefly cover in other threads, but thought it might be worth it's own comment...
As someone who is in a straight relationship, but still lurks and occasionally contributes to this community, should I not vote when that thread comes up?
If asked not to, I won't, and I'm not at all offended. However, I would like too. If possible, and if anyone cares, I would be okay with voting and then somehow marking my vote, so the community can decide what to do with my vote after too.
Vote if you're interested enough to think your vote is relevant. If you participate in this group, then that makes your vote relevant. If someone's just passing by and has no previous involvement in this group, their vote may not be as relevant and they should consider why they're voting in something that doesn't affect them.
I like ~rainbow because it also works nicely for any subcategories, ~rainbow.lesbian, .gay etc. Much more elegant then ~lgbt.gay where gay is kind of repeated twice here. That said I'm not sure if a subcategory is even all that useful.
I like ~rainbow. I've heard and seen the phrase "rainbow community", and I like it. It reflects the rainbow flag, which shows a variety of colours. The "rainbow" name retains the idea that we're all different types of people, but that we've gathered together in solidarity.
On the other hand I see quite a few people referring to the rainbow flag as specifically the "gay pride flag."
that's not really a new thing, and it basically was originally and still often is used as a gay pride flag specifically. it's kind of a complicated thing, though, and wikipedia has a decent rundown of just how weirdly complicated it is.
My preference is ~queer for reasons outlined in the previous thread, but I understand that that's contentious and unless people piled in agreeing with me, it's a bit of a hard sell.
So my second choice would be ~rainbow, as it is the only other common option (other than ~gsm I suppose, but that introduces much worse clarity issues than anything else, I think) which isn't about listing out the members of the club. It's a bit cutesy and doesn't have the "bite" I'd like it to, but it's more than good enough for me.
I've added this suggestion to the list. Thanks.
If I were making the decision for me personally, I would say ~queer, but knowing the baggage of that word and how it still gets used as a slur for some, I am deeply uncomfortable with the idea that someone could come into our community and be presented with something that has been used as an instrument of hate in their life.
As such, I like ~rainbow. I like its inclusiveness, and it doesn't privilege one group over another. I also really like that it feels like it covers a topic more than an identity. For example, I think a common question for cis and straight people is "Am I welcome in an explicitly queer space?" Answers vary depending upon the space and the people who make it up, but I would like ours to be open and welcoming to all. ~rainbow feels like it is fundamentally non-exclusionary, as I've never heard someone identify as "rainbow," yet it's clear what it's referencing. It represents a broad spectrum, and doesn't implicitly draw a line in the sand defining "non-rainbow" individuals. As such, I think it's a nice, subtle way to help everyone, including allies, feel comfortable.
Contrary to most others, I personally would advocate for ~lgtbiq. It's much more inclusive (especially because the "q" of queer is in some sense also an umbrella term on its own). While ~lgbt might be more recognized, I don't think anyone only knowing this more common term, will have much of a problem recognizing that ~lgbtiq is related. So, it has the added benefit of being more inclusive without any real downsides. ~gsm isn't too bad either: it's not too common but I don't think that should deter us from using a more descriptive term
Just in here to say I don't really care but I'm supportive of whatever the community thinks is best. Thanks for looking into this and making this topic.
Last call. Any more suggestions to put in the mix?
Yes.
It's "a while" in this context. "For a while" is a noun phrase which refers to a period of time; "awhile" is an adverb which describes how long you've been doing something.
If you need to say "for", then it's "for a while". If you can say "for a day" or "for a year" instead, then it's "for a while". If you're saying you've been doing something a long time, it's "awhile".