Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Altrusexual, Finally, a Pithy Word for LGBTQIP2SAA, etc.

Altrusexual

Finally, a Pithy Word for LGBTQIP2SAA, etc.

by

Eric Paul Nolte


I have an answer to the problem of finding a pithy term to describe the community of people who do not identify themselves as heterosexual:

Altrusexual.  

Okay, the word does not easily leap off the tongue. But how much better is it than this daily-changing and impossibly awkward flood of abbreviations: LGBTQIP2SAA!

Altersexual would be a more euphonious choice than my altrusexual, but, as with so many other ideas, the term has either been preempted by earlier users or shunted into vortexes of confusion by the problem of equivocation, namely, the troubling fact that the same word has come to mean more than one thing, and sometimes many more things than the one thing you want to pin down with a good name.

Do you doubt me?  

Think of “liberal,” deriving from the Latin liber, meaning liberty, freedom, but now perversely meaning not one who advocates individual rights and capitalism but instead government control of every blooming little thing.  Think of competing and contradictory definitions of the Good, of true, false, faith, knowledge, profit, morality, induction, art, fact, opinion, equality, objectivity, and freedom.  Need I go on?  It’s a dogfight out there! 

I’ll explain below why the word “altersexual” will not work for what I mean. 

Why should I care about an issue like this which, in the opinion of much of the world, affects but a relatively small community of “sexual minorities,” as the academics might describe them?

For one thing, I have close family, deeply loved, there among this community.

For another thing, the absolute size of this community does not begin to capture the gravity of this issue, starting with humanity’s widely varying experience of sexuality, and of the explosive feelings that this matter arouses across the spectra of politics, religion, morality, and psychology.   

So, as for my choice of “altrusexual” as a pithy term for the non-heterosexual, let me discuss how different cases may be made for and against this word:

Against the word, for starters, is the troubling fact that it’s my word, a neologism, which is a category of language that has long been attacked by our most thoughtful users of language because these unprecedented words can muddy the waters and are so often pretentious, self-aggrandizing, or worse.  Nevertheless, I believe this instance may be one of those rare cases where a new word is justified.

Not long ago, I would have thought that “homosexual,” “asexual,” “queer,” and maybe “anti-sexual” would have been perfectly good terms to describe those who are not heterosexual.  But the community of non-heterosexuals seems to have risen up and rejected all of these words.  So their opinion on what they want or do not want to be called should be acknowledged.

For another thing, again, their community has not embraced a description of themselves as homosexual, queer, and so forth.  Surely their opinion ought to be respected for how they themselves might like to be called.

Now, because I am surely not alone in my confusion over this constantly changing string of characters, let us unpack what we are talking about when we say, “LGBTQIP2SAA.”

I, for one, have failed to keep straight (sorry...) this ever-shifting alphabet soup, like a stream of letters poured into a pot from a kettle of random letters plucked from the Roman, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabets.  Today, the heat is turned up to the boiling point, and because this community rightly feels itself to be persecuted, when we fail to address them respectfully, it can provoke the howls of wounded and angry voices from a thorny briar patch. 

So what are we talking about here?

As I say, let’s unpack this stream of letters.

Before I start, let’s be clear that I am not making fun of this altrusexual community.  The matters involved here make a riveting contemporary conundrum.  Moreover, and emotionally most to the point, as I said, I have family and friends I love with all my soul who live there, and they absolutely know me to hold the deep belief that love is love is love—and that the more love there is in the world, the better.

Alright, back to the matter at hand:

So far, everybody knows the letters LGBTQ—Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer

Now, “I” means “inter-sex,” for people with two sets of genitals, or who have certain chromosomal anomalies.

“P” is for pansexual, meaning sexual activity with people of any sexual orientation or gender.

“2SA,” means “two spirit,” to describe those who recognize the male and female spirits inside everyone, but more specifically to name a tradition among some “First Nations” that believe that some minority of people have both male and female spirits inside them.  I am guessing that this may be congruent with more modern conceptions, like those of Jung and others, which is to say that all men and women, by their nature as human beings, have both male and female elements of their psychology.

“A” for asexual.

“A,” again, for Allies, meaning those who, although not a part of this community, feel a deep support for them.

If you feel any confusion or hostility to this ever-shifting landscape of language to describe this community, let me remind you of how other groups have undergone changes that are similarly difficult to keep track of:

Think of how Negro became Colored, Black, and African-American.

Think of how Indian became Native American, Amerindian, and, lately, First Nations.

Think of how Handicapped became Disabled.

Hmm.  This brings to mind how “Disabled” never made it all the way to “Differently Abled,” which drowned in the waters somewhere between the River Euphrates and the River Euphonious. 

I am also reminded of how I remember seeing on my boyhood street a “Home for Incurables.”  What must the patients in such a home for the incurables have thought of their prospects in life?  I can't know.  Did this moniker encourage them to feel hopeless?  And is not a feeling of hopelessness a self-fulfilling prophecy?  I do know that how you think is damn near everything in life.  If you think you are incurable, then you surely are.     

You may already have heard the term “altersexual,” so what’s wrong with this idea?  

I did think that this would be a better term for this community of the non-heterosexual, but my google search revealed that the word has been preempted, like so many good words that have been rendered unusable by prior convention.  I found a use of “altersexual” by some mean-spirited wag who derides as hapless the poor soul who says, “I don’t know if I want to be with a guy, a girl, both, or neither.”  Not to mention the matter of, “I don’t know if I want to be a guy, a girl, or both, or neither.” 

I also saw the usage of “altersexual” in a way that might suggest that the idea is wrapped up with a leftist conception of social justice, and it is not my intention to confine my idea of “altrusexuality” to the left side of the political spectrum.  As a libertarian-minded person, I find it ironic that such a big proportion of the non-heterosexual seem to be advocates of leftist politics and therefore proponents of statist control of everything.  Government regulation of everything seems fine only to those whose gang now has the levers of power.  Just wait until the next gang that hates you grabs those levers!

Now, I just said above that the opinion of this community should trump anybody else’s opinion on what to call themselves, but here I must say that I must respect my own measured opinion, which agrees with the altrusexual community that “altersexual” is not a good term, but disagrees with it that their best interests are served by the party of plunder and thought control. 

My term, altrusexual, is derived, of course, from alter, and altru, Latin terms for “other,” plus the Vulgar Latin alterui, the oblique case that modifies “other” with part of -cui, -ui, which means “to whom,” and adds an adjectival “L.”

We could speak of “altrusexuality,” using the same grammatical form as for “homosexuality.”  Perhaps we could also use the term “altrusexism,” which unfortunately echoes “sexism,” a bad belief, but it is not bad to bring this formulation into the realm of belief itself, onto the turf of philosophy, in other words—because it is therefore a term which, being a belief, is subject to examination and therefore to acceptance or rejection as a matter of logic.  By logic, I mean a controversial idea, but, in my opinion, an idea that is true nonetheless, namely that we acknowledge the law of non-contradiction (which says that nothing can be entirely black and entirely white at the same time and the same respect) and apply this concept with thoughtful examination to the evidence of experience.  This formulation may be another name for the idea of objectivity, which is also controversial.  The idea of objectivity is controversial because it is rejected by cultural relativists, and yet is upheld by many who falsely conflate it with their various flavors of religious absolutism and revealed wisdom.  How bizarre!  How common!  How invisible to most!  How senseless!  To my knowledge, only Ayn Rand’s full theory of concepts can bring sanity to these conundrums. 

Now, consider the coincidence that my terms altrusexuality or altrusexism might make one guess that they are derived from “altruism,” which takes the Latin for “other” and mates it with “-ism.”  This term was coined by Auguste Comte, who strove to create a secular morality that would pull the fangs out of the cruel and mass-murderous head of religion and to address all the other predatory behavior in the world as well.  

Objectivists will plotz at the suggestion that any good can come from anything that Comte wrote, but surely it is a good motive to want to create an ethics that could drain the world of murderous, screwball, supernatural ideas and predation.  

So, what to call the LGBTQIP2SAA community?

Altrusexual.

In the end, let us celebrate the fact that love is love is love is love, and the more of it, the better!


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2017.1128
revised 2017.1130
and again, 2017.1229

1,700 words