Less Is More: We Need To Stop Expanding the Alphabet Soup and Changing the Pride Flag
[June 2026]
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Before you get up in arms, this rant comes from inside the house, not from some MAGA boomer yelling at clouds. I am the G and the T in LGBTQ. I have lived this.
This essay needs to be written because too many of us who have been in the trenches for years are watching our community fracture under the weight of its own endless reinvention. What started as a hard-won fight for basic dignity and visibility has morphed into a relentless cycle of purity tests, linguistic gymnastics, and symbolic overhauls that leave a lot of us exhausted and alienated. I am not here to attack queer existence. I am here to defend it from the very forces that claim to champion it but end up making it harder for ordinary people like me to simply exist without apology or footnotes. When the language and symbols meant to unite us instead create new barriers, it is time to speak plainly. Silence lets the loudest voices dictate terms that do not serve the broader reality of our lives.
We owe it to ourselves and to the next generation to examine whether constant expansion truly equals progress or if it has become a distraction from the real battles we still face. Civil rights are slipping in too many places while we argue over letters and color placements. This piece is my attempt to cut through the noise with the perspective of someone who has known his truth since childhood, built a life in this community, and now sees the need for course correction before we lose more ground, and more people, to performative excess.
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When I came out in 2013 the acronym was GLBT. I watched it morph into LGBT, then LGBTQ, then LGBTQIA, then arguments over LGBTQIA2S or 2SLGBTQIA, and on into LGBTQQIAA and whatever fresh hell came next. This is fucking ridiculous.
You might think that ever-expanding the acronym makes it more inclusive for everyone. In practice it does the opposite.
In 2022 I got dragged on Dreamwidth because I said LGBTQ+ instead of LGBTQIA2S. I am in my forties, chronically ill with permanently low spoons, I also have ADHD, and I am not Extremely Online the way younger generations are. I can barely remember my phone number and zip code, let alone track how many letters now follow the T. I got yelled at for being an exclusionist over that.
As of 2026 I have said publicly what I once kept quiet: some gatekeeping is necessary and we do not need to keep expanding past Q. Back in 2022-2023 I would have shrugged and accepted LGBTQIA. Today, I believe we should stop the acronym at LGBTQ, with the Q for Queer. One of the biggest reasons is people exactly like me — disabled, neurodivergent, not glued to every new discourse cycle. If you think adding more letters creates inclusion, you are actually excluding those of us who cannot keep up with the euphemism treadmill and will occasionally use language now deemed outdated. Brain fog is real. Forgetting the latest mandated string of letters should not get you branded a traitor.
Practical reasons pile up beyond that. To me the Q for Queer functions as a useful modifier. It folds in gays, lesbians, bi, and trans people who are aromantic or asexual. It covers those of us who are polyamorous, kinky, or furry. It includes people who are gender non-conforming but not trans.
The A creates endless fights over whether it means Aroace or Ally. When it means Aroace we end up with cishet women calling themselves queer because they are demisexual. Being ace is valid (I myself am ace-spec), but a straight person claiming queer stretches the word until it means nothing. The same goes for P for Poly. I am not here to police consenting adults. My objection is simpler: some idiots will immediately assume it stands for p*do shit, and worse, it lets cishet people in het-looking poly setups — a woman with two cishet men, a man with two cishet women — slap the queer label on themselves. Words have to mean things or they stop meaning anything at all. So I strongly disagree with adding letters based on how many people you do or do not fuck.
The 2S part grates especially hard. My stepfather is tribe-recognized Oneida Nation and looks it. Just like not all indigenous North American tribes "worship the Great Spirit", the term "two-spirit" is only used by some tribes. Treating two-spirit as the universal catch-all for all Native people erases dozens of other tribes plus Polynesians, Aboriginal Australians, Maori, Thai ladyboys, Indian hijras, and every other non-white culture with its own specific terms for gender variance. The 2S push was largely woke white people deciding on behalf of Native Americans, centering one narrow experience as representative of all indigenous people worldwide. Then they act shocked when some of us call bullshit on that kind of performative inclusion. It does not honor diversity.
Not all intersex people want to be lumped in with us, either.
The whole ever-expanding acronym looks ridiculous. Plenty of people inside the community already hate it. Imagine how it lands with allies and outsiders. You can roll your eyes and say we should not care about respectability politics or what Republicans think. I agree we should not shape our lives around conservative approval. But I disagree that optics do not matter at all. The constant churn and the demand that everyone stay Extremely Online to avoid offense is not winning the culture war. It hands ammunition to critics who already call us frivolous and out of touch.
Then there is the flag. The Progress Pride flag is a fucking mess.
The original Pride flag was for everyone. Gilbert Baker created it in 1978 with eight bold stripes (including pink) that later settled into the classic six-color rainbow. It carried clear meanings — red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, blue for serenity, violet for spirit. It was simple, powerful, and instantly recognizable. It flew for all of us without footnotes or updates.
In the 2010s I started seeing subgroup flags, and that felt fine. There is a flag for gay men with its white, blue, teal, and green stripes. Lesbians have their own. Bisexual and pansexual folks have theirs. Trans people have the light blue, pink, and white one. The bi versus pan debate strikes me as stupid, but that is beside the point. These separate banners let specific groups celebrate their own flavor of identity while the rainbow holds space for the whole community.
So here is the thing that breaks my brain: if the rainbow already stands for all of us, and we have given each subgroup its own flag, then why the fuck are we slapping the Trans Pride flag right on top of the rainbow in the Progress version? It feels like an unnecessary claim of primacy, as if trans issues now define the entire movement instead of sitting comfortably within it.
The added black and brown stripes create their own problems. Some say they represent people of color in general. Others insist brown is for people of color while black stands for those who died of AIDS. Either way it centers Black people and Latinos, which is okay on its own terms, but what about everyone else? What about Asians? What about Native Americans? What about Australian Aboriginals? What about MENA people? The list goes on. Trying to squeeze every shade of marginalization into two stripes inevitably erases more than it includes. It pretends at universal representation while actually narrowing the focus.
On top of all that, the Progress Pride flag is fucking ugly. It is a straight-up eyesore. The clean horizontal rainbow gets interrupted by chevrons and triangles that fight for attention. The design looks like a committee argument rendered in fabric. It looks like Lisa Frank dropped acid and then vomited. Back to the disability point: it legit hurts my fucking eyes to look at it. For those of us who are autistic and deal with sensory overload, or those who get migraine triggers from high-contrast visual chaos, this thing is not welcoming. Do you think you are being inclusive by forcing us to fly that mess or risk being called exclusionary? Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
And just think: now there are versions that include the Intersex Pride flag and the Ace Pride flag and the Bi Pride flag, to make it look even worse.
Look at this shit. No, really.
The plain old rainbow flag, whether the classic six-color rainbow or Gilbert Baker’s original, is good enough for all of us. It does not demand you decode layered meanings or stay current with every redesign. It simply says we are here, we exist, and we refuse to hide. That message united generations before the endless tinkering began.
The Pride flag turning into a continually evolving eyesore feels symbolic of the broader mess inside the community. While we argue over letter counts and stripe placement, our actual civil rights keep sliding backwards in too many places. The infighting and wokescolding eat up energy that could go toward real solidarity. We exhaust ourselves and alienate people like me — older, disabled, neurodivergent — who just want to live openly without memorizing new liturgies every six months. The newer symbols, with their cluttered designs and ever-growing acronyms shouted from every banner, feel like performance. They prioritize signaling over substance. They cater to the most online voices while leaving the rest of us behind.
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We do not need to keep expanding. Stop at LGBTQ. Let Q do the heavy lifting as the catch-all modifier it already is. Retire/refuse to fly the Progress flag or at least stop pretending its visual chaos improves anything. Simplicity is not exclusion. Clarity is not bigotry. A movement that cannot remember its own name or symbol without constant updates has lost the plot. We fought for visibility and dignity, not an infinite scroll of letters and colors that alienates the very people it claims to lift up.
I love my people enough to say the quiet part out loud: enough. Stop rewriting the rules faster than some of us can read them. Inclusion that demands perfect fluency in the latest discourse is not inclusion. It is a gate with an ever-changing combination lock. We deserve better. The original rainbow and a handful of clear letters were already enough. They still are.
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