I have to admit that I got a laugh when I had to Google this word today.
Not to be insensitive, but yes, the abbreviation above is indeed, an acronym.
I was reading an article and came across this acronym. I was OK on the first half of it, as I recognized it stood for Gay, Lesbian, Bi, and Transgendered.
But evidently, those terms lack enough specificity. There are, evidently, people for whom GLBT is a hurtful, stereotypical term, lacking in nuance and subtlely to define the wondrousness of their being.
So someone added Q, for Queer.
Now mind you, Queer is a word I remember from my youth as being an unmitigated perjorative. Call someone a queer on my fifth-grade playground, and well, you were spoiling for a fight. And by high school, call someone a queer, particularly a gay person, and you'd get sent to the principal for being insensitive.
But evidently the terms of political correctness are like New England weather -- wait long enough, and the unthinkable terms become not only come 'round again, but now they are acceptable, or even mandated. Queers are people for whom the terms LGBT or GLBT either a) do not apply, or b) are not specifically strident enough, but who are not, apparently, c) straight, either.
OK, so GLBTQ.
But then someone added "I".
Evidently another term of nuance, because I had never heard it. "I" stands for Intersex. Intersex is someone who is not Gay, nor Lesbian, nor Bisexual, nor Transgendered, nor Queer, but somehow different or somewhere in-between. Somewhere lost-in-acronym. Everybody else, in other words, except, of course, the straight. I'm not sure I even want to know what intersex is; I suppose it might pertain to the dinosaurs in the novel Jurassic Park whose added amphibian DNA made them change from male dinosaurs into female.
OK, so GLBTQI.
Then I ran across a story with the "P" added at the end. I admit, I started laughing as I tried to figure out what it stood for. Polyamorous? Pedophilic? Perverts?
P stands for Pansexual -- which is when you are, apparently, not only GLBTQI, but also perhaps, from time to time, straight. You like sex anywhere, anytime, with anything.
Or maybe it involves sex with pans. I don't know. I didn't go any further down that alley.
I guess it is an acronym only an academic could love.
Me, I'm just glad that I have the Catechism, and can rely on the magisterium if confronted with some poor soul who feels compelled to define themselves this way.