Little people/midget/dwarf - editorial I posted in response to an article on Salon

With bonus UPDATE - at the end of my rant.

I am not a little person but I am gay. If you ask me to, I will call you whatever you would like. However, when I first heard, several years ago, that the term "midget" was now to be added to the ever increasing list of verboten words it did strike me as odd. Not having lived with the condition I cannot speak for little people and why they might seek to change our collective minds about the use of the word, but as a member of a group that has had similar issues with deciding how to describe themselves to others I would like to second the insights made by a few of the other posters regarding what can become a revolving door type syndrome in which one term is replaced by another and then the replacement term becomes widespread and then becomes considered inappropriate as well, and so on and so forth.

First we weren't called anything in particular at all (think ancient Greece etc), then with the advent of the middle ages we became Sodomites. To the list were added Faggot, Nelly and Gay. The first gay rights movement was found in pre-war Germany and the first replacement term was offered up; Uranians. Thank God that didn't stick because the ur-anus puns would have been truly endless! When the concept of a gay rights movement re-emerged in the United States in the late 1950s early 1960s the preferred term was Homophile and the first public protests seeking gay rights made a great effort to appear as "normal" as possible, one of the earliest marches held in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia stipulated in the rules for the marchers that men wear suits and women wear long dresses.

A few years of this approach and we landed at Stonewall in 1969 and the "official" term became Gay - which seemed nice and all, being that it just meant happy. Eventually the term gay became widespread enough that it is now used by many younger people to simply refer to something they find stupid, regardless of any connection to sexuality, for instance "the new Transformers movie is really gay." Ok, need a new word again.

There is the clinical term "homosexual" which I find too dry and also too fixated on identity as bound up completely with genital activities etc. Post Stonewall, and especially during the angry gay (talk about an oxymoron!) years of the AIDs crisis in the 80s and 90s there were many who defiantly re-embraced the old, once derogatory terms fag and queer.

Now we find ourselves on the verge of basic integration with marriage and military rights the last ones on the list to be tackled. The revolving door has put us back where we were in the 50s and 60s seeking to be seen to be as "normal" as possible and we have ended up with the unwieldy new LGBT; Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and transgendered. There is a movement to add the letter I to the end; Intersexed. the problem here is not only that acronyms are inherently dehumanized and lack any real meaning of their own but also the list of letters could, potentially be expanded infinitely to include any and every sexual orientation including in the future perhaps, the asexual, the chaste, friends of gays, and finally, oh, why the heck not, straights. LGBTIACFS would be the penultimately PC term because it would be perfectly meaningless and therefore could not be used to insult anyone. But who really wants to be referred to as a string of meaningless letters? I cringed when I saw that little people have begun to call themselves LPs.

I suppose it is all a natural cycle. As mentioned in previous posts we have seen this pattern repeat with other minority groups; negroe (derived from the Spanish for Black), colored, black, afro-american and then african american finally to land back at plain old black. Mexicans, chicanos, latinos etc.

I have friends who I know respect me as a person and accept me with real love, and among ourselves we are able to use the words fag, queer, homo, LGBT (which sometimes is transformed into BLT for a laugh) and none of these words carries a sting because I know the person using it, myself included, accepts me and sees me as a valid and fully equal human being. Sure, I will call you a pterodactyl if that is what you would like, but I am afraid that in the end these PC word battles amount to "much ado about nothing" when the real issue is to simply make sure that each generation of Americans learns to become more and respectful of each and every other person no matter their stature, skin color, sexual or affectional orientations etc etc etc.


UPDATE: I found this article via salon as well from the perspective of a very short man who also wonders about the anti-midget movement:

The idea that a man should be taller than the woman he's with is deeply ingrained, perhaps not just in our culture but in the human psyche. (Which is why I went to live with the Pygmies for a year. Man, I made out like a bandit.) (And Pygmy chicks? Are hawt.)

I know: boo fucking hoo. Got a job? Got a house? Then get in line for sympathy. The line starts behind the 40 million people who are out of work. Hey, I’m not saying it’s a tragedy or that I think about being short 24/7/366 (it’s always a leap year in my calendar), or even that it’s been a driving force in my life. It definitely doesn’t suck more than cancer or lupus--in the great scale of things, it’s more like eczema. Kind of annoying, and a little itchy... Yeah, right; I don't believe I'm inclined to open that particular can of worms at this time. (Do worms really come in a can? Do canned worms taste different from fresh?)...

...If, though, suddenly by magic I could be average height, 5'9" or 5'10" or so, would I? Now, the psychobabble-ishly correct answer would be, "Hell, no! I love myself just the way I am," and while I agree with the whole "You must love yourself" concept (hey, my porn bill is so high because of how very much I love myself--well, actually, I guess it's because of how very often I love myself), the real answer is, "Fuck yeah," I would. Or I would until I spent two minutes thinking about how in fairy tales when you get wishes granted it generally does not turn out well. Wish for your drowned son back, and a shambling thing drags itself up the porch to your door, and you have to use your last wish to make it go away. Wish for the power to make gold, and you starve in the midst of golden food. (Why didn’t Midas just hire a guy to feed him? I always thought that was kind of a plot hole.) Wish for a gigantic penis and…er, wait, that’s not a fairy tale; that’s porn; sorry. The point being: there’s always a cost to magic....

... So, should some good fairy (or elf) show up and offer me the deal, I suppose I’d have to turn it, regretfully, down. Seriously, this whole having-learned-a-few-things-from-life-and-shit sucks. Even hypothetically....

it's a great read and the full article is here:

http://open.salon.com/blog/floyd_elliot/2009/07/17/on_being_short