Columnist complains that LGBTIQ ‘sounds like a Countdown Conundrum’
A newspaper columnist has complained at the growing acronym LGBTIQ – “because it sounds like a Countdown Conundrum”
Nigel Nelson, the political editor of the Sunday People, made the claim after discovering that the Green Party launched an LGBTIQ manifesto – standing for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer.
He wrote: “Green leader Natalie Bennett has extended the LGBT section of their website to LGBTIQ. Sounds like a Countdown Conundrum to me.
“LGBT stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender. IQ adds Intersex and Queer. Any more letters and Nat will have the entire alphabet.”
Mr Nelson was baffled at the new additions to the conventional LGBT – though the LGBTIQ Greens have had their current name for some time – claiming: “Queers may hope to rebrand this word as an inoffensive umbrella term… [but] as a middle-aged, middle class, heterosexual white man, I could no more bring myself to say what sounds offensive than call black people the N word”.
He also claimed it “mangles the English language and turns it into nonsense” that some prefer to be referred to as ‘they’ because they are not biologically male or female – citing the phrase “They is in the pub”.
A number of other languages around the world have a third-person singular pronoun that is not gendered.
Mr Nelson would probably not like to hear about other even longer variants of the acronym in use such as LGBTIQQAA – which includes questioning, asexual and allies.
