Debunked? Its a counterpoint to the fact that it’s pronounced that way because it’s spelled with a g. If that poor argument wasn’t used, the giraffe one wouldn’t have to come up. It’s not evidence of anything other than that letters can be pronounced in more than one way.
For the graphical thing, imagine pronouncing NASA wrong because of the way aeronautical is pronounce. Or underwater in scuba. World in WHO? The I in AIDS isn’t pronounced anything like immunodeficiency.
The creator of the format is documented as having confirmed the pronunciation is “jif”, but I don’t care. Once he created it and put it into the world, he relinquished his control.
I was hanging with a group consisting of mostly older millennial gay men who don’t like that trans people are being included alongside them in conversations about human rights, sexuality, and gender. They think it takes away from the fight their community has gone through over the past few generations.
I chewed them out. Like, a lot. I am usually not at all confrontational but I pretty much stunned them into silence. Now I’m waiting to let them process, expecting a couple to reach out to me to step back from some of the shit they were saying. If that doesn’t happen, I guess I’m not really welcome in that group anymore and I’m ok with that.
There are no trans people in this group. I’m not a gay man nor am I trans. But when I hear shit like that, I hear echos of gay men activists not being willing to work with lesbian women activists, white feminists not includig black women, male laborers trying to keep women out of labor rights movements. It’s stupid. It’s tribal and hateful. It undercuts the strength the movement could have if we weren’t asshats about it.
Rights campaigning 101, strength in unity. This is basic ass shit.
While I do agree that unity is the way to go in the fight for rights, I can understand why one would want to separate the T from the LGB. It’s an issue of consistency - L, G, and B all describe sexuality, while T describes gender. The two are related, but ultimately separate concepts - one does not inform the other, and grouping them can hypothetically lead ignorant people to think that they are directly related, which could hypothetically lead to non-straight cisfolk experiencing more oppression than they would have otherwise experienced due to the perceived association with transfolk, as non-conforming sexuality is more generally accepted today than non-conforming gender.
That being said, it’s all hypothetical, and what matters is the reality that people from all spectra of nonconformity are regularly oppressed, and in many places, the oppressors treat anyone LGBT+ with the same disdain. So grouping them is vital for the sake of the most oppressed.
I mean, you could similarly reason that bisexuals aren’t welcome (both gays and lesbians are solely attracted to the same sex, after all), or that asexuals aren’t welcome (you can be asexual and heteroromantic, after all), and so on. I think, ultimately, that unity between us is important, and allowing the umbrella to protect all members of gender, romantic, and sexual minorities strengthens the overall cause rather than weakening it.
Telling 8th grade content teachers that they must modify their assignments to accommodate migrant students and English learners, and that just directly translating those documents forever wasn’t going to cut it. Gosh there was a lot of grumbling in the room.
I get it, we’re short staffed and overwhelmed, but it doesn’t make it go away.
Seriously, though, I said (irl) the home affordability crisis in my country can’t be truly solved in any way that simultaneously still allows people to invest in homes (rent them out, sell them at higher prices, do business with tourism, etc) to any meaningful degree. Everyone around had very strong, diverse opinions on that.