Hear hear!

This is a small thing but not a small thing. I run into it a lot editing articles for Prism & Pen, a queer publication on Medium.

The use of individual as a synonym for person or individuals as a synonym for people is something I've been resisting as a writer for a long time, anyway. It's dehumanizing. It's impersonal. It often feels deliberately distancing.

In conjunction with describing queer people, I like it even less. Because we already face problems with dehumanizing and distancing language used to talk about us.

I feel a similar way about expressions like "the queer community" or " the LGBTQ community."

Why can't we just say person and people? I read a news article this morning about a lesbian who was given a bad military discharge in the 1980s — after being handcuffed and grilled under hot lights by army investigators.

The reporter then wrote, "She was discharged under less than honorable conditions because she was a member of the LGBT community."

No, she was discharged because she was a lesbian in a romantic relationship with another lesbian. She was discharged because she's a woman who loves other women.

She's a person, not a "community member."

Like you wrote, this is subtle but it's important.

We are people, yet it seems to me that other people often go out of their way to avoid calling us people.

Even when it takes a rather convoluted expression to do that.

I understand that some writers are simply trying to elevate their prose, to use language that makes them seem more professional or sophisticated — and that's a more general problem with writing, really, isn't it? It seems like it takes writers time to learn that crispness and clarity improve with more direct vocabulary and less convoluted vocabulary.

I'm saying that as a cisgender gay man and a queer person. Not an individual, and not a community member, although I certainly can be a proud member of some communities.

By the way, we would have loved to have published this essay in Prism & Pen. If you write on queer and/or trans subjects in the future, we would be happy to try to help connect you with more readers.

Here's a link to our latest weekly digest if you'd like to learn more about us:

https://medium.com/prismnpen/a-gay-arab-speaks-conversion-therapists-swarm-poland-uk-kills-trans-kids-ed958df82eec