Person of color (as one myself, offhandedly) is the academically accepted term – not sure what the last few anons have been on about. I am admittedly in the US but I work in diversity/inclusion/equity in education, and it’s been the standard for a long time. I can see people being offended if they don’t know better because it seems too much like “colored,” but yeah. Just wanted to try and set it straight.

gotgifsandmusings:

Yeah, and in the research I did on this yesterday, this is more or less what I found too. I’m not trying to dismiss the anons of people expressing discomfort over the term, but from what I can tell, this is the widely accepted convention in dialogue, so it’s what I’m going to be going with (where suitable). In general I usually try to specify a character’s intersection as much as possible where I can, though.

Anonymous said to gotgifsandmusings:
Are you LGBT? If you’re not you probably shouldn’t use queer as some LGBT people do see it as a slur, if youre LGBT sorry for this ask and if you aren’t could you just use LGBT instead? Thanks

I’m a queer woman, yes. I’ll use “bisexual” for political convenience (I’ve been told I’m “pansexual” before, though I’ve never really seen much significant difference between the two definitions, and “bi” is much more easily understood from what I’ve experienced). But yeah, “queer” is actually my preferred term.

However, I’m personally not really into the mindset that cishets be barred from its usage either, particularly given that there’s an entire branch of academia devoted to queer theory. I think context is everything, of course, but I also think there’s major issues with every permutation of LGBT, MOGAI, and other umbrella terms as well (“gay” has just as much history as a slur). This is why umbrella terms aren’t great, largely speaking, and why it’s very important to ask about/respect individual preference as much as possible.