Mara Keisling
Founding Executive Director, National Center for Transgender Equality

Should the LGBT Community Use Words Like '->-bleeped-<-got' and '->-bleeped-<-'? No, They Hurt People
Posted: 03/ 6/2012 9:17 am

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mara-keisling/->-bleeped-<--it-hurts-people_b_1292055.html

I was taught early on to be a critical thinker. In my family, without that (and a strong wit) you couldn't keep up with your parents and six siblings. You had to think through all sides of what you were discussing and never be caught using pedestrian slogans you had heard at school or from friends. With so many other sharp people always in the conversation, if you took sides, you had to know why and how to defend your position.

Another thing that I learned from my family is that you should never be intentionally cruel to anyone. Primarily as a young kid, the rule applied mostly to making fun of people's personal appearance and race, which, though tied to personal appearance, was societally a much bigger issue. You did not disrespect people's appearance or race. It was cruel and wrong.

Labels are always a difficult issue.

Most people in America now know how it hurts for a white person to use the n-word. But now we have lots of words that some group or another has told us we shouldn't use: "lame," "illegal" "immigrant," "retarded," "->-bleeped-<-got," "dyke," "->-bleeped-<-." Some people complain that we have too many such words and that it's "political correctness run amok." Some people use these proscribed words as merit badges, emblematic of independence or rebellion.

This has come up on the show a couple of times. We've talked about the notion of reclaiming words to take the power out of them, but I've never been a fan of the notion. "->-bleeped-<-" doesn't have the same inherently hateful origins as "->-bleeped-<-". A ->-bleeped-<- is something that's meant to be burned and that's how it comes to be used to describe anyone that is broadly hated by society. It hasn't always been gay men. That's relatively recent.

However, "->-bleeped-<-" is commonly used in a derogatory or condescending fashion. In theory, it's totally okay to use it to describe someone who has made it clear they're okay with it. In practice, it seems like it would lead to people being casual about its use when a lot of people are offended by it. So I tend not to use it and I make a point to remind listeners that it's generally a derogatory term and they should assume that it's an offensive word.

I don't want to reclaim "->-bleeped-<-" as it seems impossible to separate the word from it's hateful origins, though a couple of my co-hosts are okay with using it affectionately to describe themselves and other gay guys. As a compromise, we came up with "->-bleeped-<-e". I'm not good with typing phonetics, but it's a long "a" like in "papa" and the g is soft like in protege. It sounds kind of French. The plural is ->-bleeped-<-es but is pronounced with an "ay" on the end (the "s" is silent).