looks like “SGA” does in fact come from LDS conversion therapy culture
[Side note: People have already debunked the idea that it is AAVE, or that it comes from the Black community or other communities of color. But I’ll mention it here too: SGL, same-gender loving does, not SGA. SGA did not evolve from SGL.
It’s possible that people started using SGA because they confused it with SGL. But if you look at the results you get each year for SGA or same-gender attraction on Google and Tumblr, it doesn’t show up in communities of color. It shows up almost entirely in Mormon communities until it spreads to the gay community on Tumblr, where I can’t find any sign of it being used primarily by people of color. SGL is a very different story, with a very different history.]
First, from what I saw while digging around, “SSA/Same Sex Attraction” seems to most often be used for the feeling, sometimes interchangeably with “Same Gender Attraction,” while most commonly “SGA” is used as a descriptive label for people, as “Same Gender Attracted”.
Like, I haven’t done a whole study so I could be wrong, but it seems like websites that talk about it as a Bad Thing are generally using both even in the same article, one sort of as the verb and one as the noun. The term SGA is very, very common on those sites, and elsewhere.
For example, @usgabronicorns is a webcomic dating back three years ago by the USGA, the Understanding Same Gender Attraction group at Brigham Young University – a Mormon/LDS university. Their group’s Facebook page calls them “an unofficial group of LGBTQ/SSA Mormons in the BYU”, but the name of the group itself uses “SGA.”
One of their earliest asks says, “So, I realize that this is a tad snarky, but is the comic strip about understanding same-gender attraction or getting along with the feminized homosexual male stereotype? Will there be ‘masculine’ homosexual characters? Will there be female homosexuals depicted as feminine? (I just find the reduction of SGA to gender non-conformity highly problematic.) ”
The term first appears on Tumblr during 2011, in Mormon posts, a thread about the pink stripe in the bi flag representing same-gender attraction, and a thread about how aces aren’t queer unless they experience same-gender attraction.
All right, that doesn’t prove anything necessarily. But it doesn’t appear on Tumblr at all, at least as far as Google knows, in 2010. When I widen the search to include other sites, I find – surprise! – a ton of Mormons using the term.
Here’s a gay Mormon talking about her ableist mom and ableism in her church:
“In Mormonism, considerations of disability have carried over to the question of ‘same-gender attraction.’ In the last decade or so, there has been a rise of church leaders comparing ‘same-gender attraction’ to disability, as something that will be ‘repaired’ in Heaven (before this, there was a focus on ‘cure.’) In the Church, disabled people are pitted against gays as a way to instill humility.”
You can see a small handful of psych articles or Reddit threads where people seem to have picked up the term. But it’s very clear that it originally came from the LDS community. And not as a positive term.
This seems a lot like “AFAB/AMAB” to me, honestly. It’s a term that, on the surface, is handy for describing people, but very quickly descends into essentially being used to categorize people in ways that don’t make sense or are wildly fucked-up.
With SGA, it’s a lot of bi+ and nonbinary people who bristle at being labeled in ways that are clearly meant as “basically gay”; with AFAB/AMAB it’s nonbinary people who bristle at being labeled in ways that are clearly meant as “basically female/basically male”.
It’s ironic that I see SGA mostly being used by the subset of our community that objects to “queer” as a group descriptor because “it’s a slur and some people haven’t reclaimed it”. “SGA” and “SSA” (”same-sex attraction”) were invented so that people could talk about this stuff as a removable behavior, instead of an inherent and valid identity.
Nobody here is using them to reclaim them; everyone is using them oblivious to their origins and connotations, or denying those origins and connotations. The only people I’ve seen who are aware of the origins have explicitly said that these terms were used to abuse them and that they’re not interested in reclaiming or using them.
It’s a weird and confusing leap, to go from “this term (queer) that is used very widely across the community hasn’t been reclaimed by everyone and so no one should use it” to “this term (SGA) that is unknown to most of the community (I get asks about what it stands almost every time I reference it) is fine and totally inclusive, and is in fact the basis of our whole movement.”
Discussion ¬