High school girl looks at LGBTQ in an incorrect manner

A friend’s daughter attends a suburban Boston high school in which political thinking is strictly orthodox. She threw a wrench into the works the other day, however, by wondering out loud to teachers who were using the term “LGBTQ” for the 500th time this semester: “If you call someone bisexual, doesn’t that imply that there are only two genders?”

12 thoughts on “High school girl looks at LGBTQ in an incorrect manner

  1. No wrench, just conventional terminology. Lesbians aren’t from the Greek island, either.

    • But it’s always bisexual. According to your logic, why is it always TWO out of n. If there are n genders, couldn’t you be 3 out of n, or more? Quadrisexual?

  2. It just means attracted to two sexes. It doesn’t preclude the existence of other sexes. You might call most of the population monosexual.

    • Bilingual doesn’t -imply- two. It -says- two explicitly.

      People unsing bilingual for multilingual are being imprecise (which is something people have to just deal with).

  3. Phil is right. The term “bisexual” is inherently exclusionary. What about trisexuals, quadsexuals, googlesexuals and so forth?

    Thus, the only acceptable term should be polysexual, and hence LGPTQ should be used.

  4. @Steve
    Please don’t discriminate against the edge cases.

    Personally I prefer niladic, monadic, dyadic and polyadic to refer to how many partners someone prefers when engaged in such activity and then using ‘convergent’, or ‘divergent’ to describe the sequence of partners for each act.

    Of course, whether the ensemble of sequences are ergodic or not should be an active topic of intersectionality research, and the non-ergotic divergents shouldn’t be discriminated against by the quasi-stable convergent monads.

    Hopefully, L. Rafael Reif can weigh in on all this in a Christmas email emphasizing how his values are superior to ours.

  5. @anonymale

    What happens if a cishetfem tries to pass herself to a niladic cismale?
    IsMonadic(cishetfem) = YES;
    call Niladic_cismale(cishetfem);

    Does this result in the pass being ignored, does the call get compiled to university administration, or does it produce an involuntary stack overflow at runtime?

  6. @steve
    As a lazy programmer of no real accomplishment, I think I would implement the niladic_cismale function as a NOOP [your first suggestion] though, conversely, all unsuccessful calls to _female should result in flagging the caller’s scholarship as problematic and shoot an op-ed to The Tech demanding more female representation among the tenured staff [close to your second suggestion].

    On a personal note, If you’re looking for work, I need programmers for my Blockchain of Consent Application, a pick-and-shovel play for the Internet of Things[to Hump With on Campus]

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