The term "Breeder"

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I have never understood how people who are the victims of discrimination can be so quick to discriminate against others.

I'm guessing it's like, "Ha! Now you see how I feel! How do you like that?"

Well, my own problem here is that I am absolutely ignorant about the lesbian community. I don't know anything really at all about them outside of the caricature that you see on television. I honestly don't know a whole lot about the issues faced by lesbians that gay men don't have to deal with. It's not a matter of not thinking their issues are important. I'm just not conversant in them.

Personally, I don't think that gay men tend to be especially transphobic. With gay guys, transphobia usually manifests as an attitude of, "I think it's stupid and/or don't understand it, but I'm okay, you're okay." I think gay guys often like to try to psychoanalyze transsexuals in a way that might reflect a poor understanding of transsexualism and gender, but the positive aspect of this is that it reflects that they are trying to empathize. If there are a lot of gay male transphobes out there, I haven't met them unless they hang out with the so-called "bears." Bears are annoying.

No, I mean bears are really SERIOUSLY annoying. They're not like some people think "gay guys who are trying to act straight." In fact, there are a lot of them who are about as prissy and effeminate in their mannerisms as the worst flamer in Christiandom. It has nothing to do with them trying to be "less gay." In fact, I have nothing against what they are superficially. But they can be freaking SNOBS!! !

There are some ultra-feminists out there, though, who hold the third-wave feminist view that "gender is a social construct," so they see a trans-woman as being complicit in "maintaining the male hegemony" by "reaffirming social constructs." It is first-class rubbish, but I guess it helps them feel better about being reactionary bigots. People who try to make bigotry sound intellectual and progressive usually come off sounding like outright morons.

With respect to the keynote speaker, consider the alternative--how appropriate it is for a speaker to presume to speak about experience that is not his own? There might be insight that I can bring that would be useful to lesbians or trans people, but I cannot ever pretend that my experience is applicable to them, unless they see the applicability of it.

When I to an LGBT group or I am invited to represent the "LGBT perspective" (as if such a singular thing exists...), I never do so as anything other than a G, and I will usually preface myself by saying that I leave it to the Ls, the Bs and the Ts to speak from their own perspectives.

Then frankly, I feel they should have had a group of keynote speakers representing their own experience. Or someone could have made their speech that ties in their own experience and make it relevant to the other groups. Discrimination is a very easy topic to do this with. I dunno, I also felt the speaker was putting on airs during his speech so it made it seem like everyone else's struggles weren't as important, which irked me a bit. >.<

I hate it when people, discriminate, each other for any reason its just not a relevant thing to do.

Panels can work extremely well, but they can also fail miserably. This is a huge challenge for people trying to put together a conference, even leaving aside the logistical challenges of paying fees, coordinating individual panelists' availabilities and coordinating participation on a singular keynote topic.

I certainly can't speak about this particular speaker, nor to his attitude and approach to the subject. The deficiencies you point out are certainly legitimate causes for complaint.

But I can stay that discrimination does not easily cross lines of sex, race and sexuality. My experience of discrimination is very different from that of lesbians' experience and that experience by racial minorities, if for no other reason than I am a white male. While we might all face discrimination, writ large, racism, sexism, and homophobia all manifest themselves in different ways, and different means of response to them are called for.

And she assumed you had and/or wanted children just because you were straight? *facepalm*

Seems to me she is just an extremist and most of them miss details. I would not think of it too much. Or, if you are a lady, she probably just thought you were really cute and were upset you weren't available?

Part of me feels it might have been the latter as my friends say that she was checking me out before talking to me. I never notice these things so oh well. A few of my bisexual and lesbian friends say that they started talking to me because they thought I was cute but then they discovered I was straight but decided to still chat with me because I'm cool or something.

My guess is, it wasn't personal.

Straight allies are great, and usually appreciated if they do a good job. However, straight people don't always do a very good job of trying to dismantle their privilege and really work for what is best for GLB folk. They often don't understand, for instance, how much we are discriminated against, simply because they're not being us and being discriminated against. This viewpoint makes it hard for them to understand what LBG people really need, and they don't necessarily let that lack of understanding get in the way of their enthusiasm to start helping, which can lead to them really messing things up and becoming enormous grievances to the BGL people who are trying to win their own rights.

By the way, calling you a "breeder" is not offensive against a straight person in the same way that slurs against gay, lesbian, and bisexual folk are offensive. (Neither is "heterophobia" anywhere near the problem that anti-BLG sentiments are.) Reason being that you could leave that space any time and go to a space full of straight people and know that your sexual orientation is considered healthy, normal, and acceptable (barring other forms of oppression). Compared to LGB people, straight people have a lot more power and support, and if they choose to have a baby that choice is often celebrated (again, barring other forms of oppression). However, the term is very offensive for other reasons, including:

When used against people of color, particularly black people, who have historically been (and still are) portrayed by whiteness as irresponsible baby factories.

When used against someone who is disabled and/or neurally-atypical, because again, there's a huge tendency to paint them as though they are irresponsibly popping out babies that they cannot raise, or disabled babies (horrors!)

When used against poor people, who - you guessed it - are portrayed as irresponsible breeders who have more kids than they can afford or else have more kids just so they can get tax deductions for them.

It sounds like your lesbian acquaintance needs to take a long, hard look at the ways (completely unrelated to being a lesbian) that she has privilege over you. Heck, with someone like her on board, I don't even need straight allies to screw things up; she's doing a fine job of creating a hostile environment for LGBTQ folks on the spectrum.

I hate the term "breeder". That's all I have to say.

Tonight I heard a straight friend saying proudly he was a breader. We are close friends, so I asked him what he meant, and he said that just thinking about "breeding' makes him all horny and alive; and he said it was not just about the sex act, thinking about getting a girl pregnant makes him horny... Perhaps a lot of guys and girls feel great about the idea of being breaders, the problem related in this thread saying breeder is a pejorative term is about conotation, and not about denotation. I believe that the more gay people say out loud they are proud to be gay, the more straight people are going to realize they infact are proud to be breeders.

"Breeder", in the only sense I've really heard, is an offensive term, yeah. The LGBT community, like any other community, has a small group of people floating around in it who for some insane reason have decided to be bigoted against straight people. Or each other, as the case may be -- lesbian/gay relations or LGB/trans relations can get awkward (or violent, at worst), which is just... ugh. Ew. That's not typical, by far, and I don't even know where to begin on how stupid it is. But it happens, like it does anywhere else. D=

In short: Ignore her. She's being nonsensical. She's probably had bad experiences with the straight community, and she needs to figure out that fighting hate with hate doesn't really work. But that's her problem, not yours.

Every group of oppressed minorities is going to have its Professor Xs and its Magnetos. (Excuse the geek reference.) The Magnetos, consciously or subconsciously, feel some kind of desire for revenge, so you occasionally get gay people who have a knee-jerk reaction against straight people because of all the horses**t they've had to put up with throughout life. I find it understandable but not acceptable. We're better than that, and we don't need a few rotten apples giving us all a bad name.

ugh the word just sounds so sick. it's EXACTLY like calling gay guys cock-suckers and lesbians muff munchers (sorry i had to use those words as examples) i love babies and would be a really great mom, no matter what my sexuality is. it reminds me of the racism i experienced in a mostly black elementary school. it's hard to understand why, but some people who experience prejudice end up stooping down to the level of the people discriminating against them. (sorry if some of the words don't sound right, it took me much longer to type this than it should have been i'm not very good with English it took time for me to figure out how to phrase things right)

No, I understand completely and I guess I should be grateful to not know what racism feels like. If someone did make a racist remark about me being white, I probably didn't notice or take it seriously as I probably should have. Your English isn't that bad by the way.