Topics created by CrusaderRab

The acronym has become unwieldy. I believe some of the identities after "T" share struggles with the preceding letters, but many others are simply there for recognition. Intersexed people can go through some real shit in life because of how they are perceived and treated by society, though I am at a loss to see how an advocacy group addresses the struggles of asexuals or demisexuals. I am unaware of how people who have no sexual attraction to limited sexual attraction towards others experience discrimination and violence in society.

The original three and then four identities existed to unify a community for political reasons, so they can act together to enact change on local, state and national levels. From those letters, advocacy groups arose to address the needs of the "community" as a whole, and specific identities. And these needs were along the lines of housing, jobs, access to social and public commons - and most importantly all things pertaining to rights unrecognized by the state.

I think people forget that.

This may come as a shock to some people because of the blanket-smothered perspective that the media generates, but just like in the Western world, there's an extremely wide berth of variety in terms of microcultures. Even in the Middle East, metro areas are just factually more liberal, and thereby less homophobic. The further away from major cities you go, the more conservative it gets, and thereby the more influenced by extremist religious ideas (i.e. homophobia).

Now of course, the key difference is that there are things like religious police in a lot of Middle Eastern countries, which does make it inherently more dangerous to be visibly "out", but you will probably be fine as long as you don't draw attention to yourself as a gay person.

The side effect of this extreme oppression is that it's naturally funneling LGBT people toward major cities, which is also true in the West, but it's much more pronounced of a phenomenon in the Middle East. This does mean that, because there's a higher saturation of gays in these areas, it's much easier to hook up, but it's not something I would personally recommend doing because of the inherent dangers.