When I was assigned this essay, I knew I had wanted to research one of what I knew to be many prevalent social issues that I had witnessed emerging within my community during my lifetime. Being a patreon of the creative arts and also a part of the LGBTQ+ community, I have always found my largest writing inspirations within writers that have shared those experiences with me from afar. I attribute so much of modern social acceptance for the community to those writers not only willing to, but demanding to approach shunning and oppression in the most intellectual, understandable ways they can through their art. I noticed many more attribute it to the accessible advancement of knowledge brought by the digital age but, through researching this phenomenon, found that digital communication was actually a more exclusive medium than appeared. Digital communication presents abundant nuances to not only conversation but, consequently, social learning and awareness. Separating my knowledge from the assumptions I had heard throughout my community proved to be quite insightful, as challenging as it was to find sources that directly supported digital harm in the context of my community. However, this process taught me to be confident enough in a stance that sources can support each dissected part of it, my own insights eventually creating an argument that is entirely personal. I can use the language of others and make it my own. 

As a writer, I always strive to create for those that could have written my words themselves, but perhaps did not know where to start. As a writer, I am also way too familiar with that feeling. For this piece, I wanted to appeal to that very audience—LGBTQ+ folk that have possibly been shunned for expressing themselves or their love, or even their experiences about what affects them above their silencers. In an attempt to appeal to this audience, I used common labels within the community to root out any possible confusion or overwhelm, particularly “queer” and “homosexual.” These words having been used oppressively in the past, I also knew that my clarification of their adaption by the community would not only inform this audience, but provide comfort in that society has progressed beyond using those words in an ill manner. My motivation when I write is to turn something broken and essentially throw a ton of cool colors on it, and that is what I carried with me when trying to appeal to this audience. 

Both of these aforementioned purposes impacted my writing the most above all else. To me, there is a crucial difference between a writer supporting a claim they have no personal stake in—which is a lot like commenting “I agree” under an article—and bringing their personal experience into their research to put what has always been their thought process into words. Without a personal stake, the narration does not plead, and creates another difference between passion and passive. It was the modern progression of my resilient community that prompted me to research deep into the issue and present the conversation of linguistic nuance in the most authentic way that I, personally, knew how. I wanted to end with a piece that I not only felt I learned from, but one that I had experience to offer in my research. Modernly, I worry about the ability for such social progression to continue within my community, but I will hold onto the hope that with enough words, it can. 

The digital age has integrated anonymity into communication. Because of this, digital spaces offer an array of conversational opportunities that, separate from live dialogue, hinders both emotional and intellectual awareness on both ends of an exchange. Behind a screen, social variables, such as reception to conversational cues and mutual awareness of educational backgrounds, can become lost. Language with generality, carrying with it ambiguity or progressing significance, is especially threatened by this loss of interpersonal intimacy. On a larger scale, this could threaten language progression in relation to minority communication and identification among those raised in post-progression societies. This essay will explore how Generation Z’s communication across digital spaces, as opposed to in live interaction, can hinder the social progress established within the usage of generalized sexual identity-based labels. 

Generation Z disproportionately encompasses the most frequent users of these communicative digital spaces. Database for consumer behavior Civic Science’s 2023 survey regarding the usage of these spaces between generations proves their immense presence, with 90% of respondents ages eighteen to twenty-four reporting their general usage of social media platforms. Particularly, the survey found this age range to be of the strongest presence on sites entailing indirect communication, textual on Instagram or Snapchat and through public commentary on Reddit (Shriber). Generation Z’s communicative presence in these spaces implies selective association with communicators and, therefore, selective perspectives heard through them. Miscommunication is also inherent to these spaces. Behind a screen, users become unreceptive to tone, facial feedback, body language, and unedited dialogue, social cues that communication and psychology professionals at the Social Skills Center define as necessary for emotional comprehension of messages (“Recognizing Social Cues For Enhanced Social Skills”). Without these conversational aspects, empathy risks becoming excluded from the dialogue, intended messages more vulnerable to emotional misunderstanding. Messages carrying connotational ambiguity can become even more difficult to decipher for their intended usage. 

  The term “homosexual” is one such example. Within the last few decades, the label has carried with it both conflicting and changing significance. The 1952 publication of the American Psychiatric Association’s “The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” the earliest inclusion in the collection of texts commonly used for diagnoses within professional psychiatric practices, established the identity as one of atypicality. The text describes it as a “sociopathic personality disturbance” under the broader category of “sexual deviance” (The APA Committee on Nomenclature and Statistics 15). The label’s first professional description weaponized its presence in a given patient, establishing a sexual identity norm that it implies homosexuality to be harmfully divergent from. Subsequently, this description stigmatizes its usage as a social identifier. However, the fifth and most recent edition of “The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” eliminates this classification altogether. Instead, the text includes a diagnostic protocol establishing that “judgment that a given behavior is abnormal and requires clinical attention depends on cultural norms that are internalized by the individual and applied by others around them” (The APA Committee on Nomenclature and Statistics 324). This requirement addresses the personal oppression of a homosexual identifier’s social upbringing rather than an abnormality within the identity itself.  By destigmatizing the label and separating it from a preestablished sexual norm, this text establishes a more accepting and receptive social attitude into the label’s classification. Thus, the term modernly becomes an objective, harmless social identifier through efforts of social and emotional comprehension. Conversational impersonality, however, presents a nuance to this progression. In the Journal of Social and Political Psychology’s 2022 study on the textual usage of LGBTQ+ identifying labels, researchers analyzed the reactions of observant lesbian, gay, and heterosexual participants upon a texter’s usage of the “homosexual” label.  As is the case with the aforementioned communicative digital platforms, the participants did not have prior introduction to the texters. The data concludes that  “[lesbian, gay] and heterosexual participants reported more negative perceptions of the target who used the homosexual label than the [lesbian or gay] label. For example, participants perceived the target who used the homosexual label as less accepting and more closed-minded than the LG label user, and desired more social distance from the homosexual label user” (Kruk et. al. 384).  When conversation exists separately from mutual awareness to personal language association, social and emotional awareness on both ends of the communication are stunted. Thus, the “homosexual” label, carrying with it an oppressive history, risks further weaponization in such contexts.

This label, however, is not the only used within the LGBTQ+ community to carry with it an oppressive history and conflicting connotations. As discovered by history and psychology researcher Meredith Worthen at the University of Oklahoma, the term “queer” was commonly used to describe odd nature in the sixteenth century—a gateway to its usage as an insult towards LGBTQ+-identifying folks in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, in an act of rebellion and reclamation, the term was repurposed by the LGBTQ+ community as a generalized identity label amidst the 1990s  (Worthen ). The label now signifies the community’s social progression as opposed to social oppression. Self-described queer identity is, in the twenty-first century, commonplace. A 2025 study conducted by the Pew Research Center reveals that when LGBTQ+ adults were polled on their identity, 48% described themselves as queer. Furthermore, a significant 59% of the polled queer-identifying adults are between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine, representing the aforementionedly most prevalent in the digital age (“A majority of young LGBTQ adults describe themselves as queer”). Through separating the term from its originally oppressive meaning, the community’s adaptation of its reclaimed meaning simultaneously identifies many members of the LGBTQ+ feeling otherwise unencompassed through different labels. Generally, interpretation of the term “queer” depends on both social and emotional comprehension of community members’ histories and present comfortability.  

However, the mutual comprehension of such an ambiguous term begs the bigger question  of LGBTQ+ social and historical literacy among Generation Z, the generation having not arisen during the term’s progression. Political researchers at the advocatory Movement Advancement Program in the United States find that in public school class curricula, nineteen states have implemented at least one censorship law specifically targeting LGBTQ+-based education. Contrarily, only eight states have implemented laws requiring that LGBTQ+ history be taught to students in instruction pertaining to social sciences  (“LGBTQ Curricular Laws”). This makes LGBTQ+-centric education less accessible to a myriad of students, especially those in Generation Z that are modernly prone to learning in environments with purposefully restrictive laws. An education barrier is, thus, placed onto identity-based labels, especially when more commonly accessible modern dictionaries still define  “queer” itself as “odd” (Worthen). Motivation to seek such information outside of formal instruction similarly depends on geography, as intention to seek untaught information depends upon a platform user’s ideology regarding it. This becomes prevalent upon the Public Religion Research Institute’s research findings from a 2023 atlas on American attitudes regarding LGBTQ+ support. A majority of the states that require LGBTQ+-centric education, notably California, Oregon, Illinois, New Jersey, and Connecticut, maintain an overwhelming politically left-leaning population that, consequently, tends to be more supportive of LGBTQ+ identification. However, the population of the politically right-leaning states that introduce the educational restrictions, particularly Texas, Kentucky, and North Carolina, tends to express less support  (Views on LGBTQ Rights in All 50 States: Findings from PRRI’s 2023 American Values Atlas). Thus, those developing in populations with more supportive LGBTQ+ ideologies are more likely to continue attending to information on the community’s history and modern presence in the few states requiring it than in the many that inhibit it. Ultimately, this restricts progressive communications that could lead the uninformed to either misinterpret or harmfully misuse the term “queer.” The label could, in this instance, become weaponized once more. 

Identity-based language proves to be of consistent evolution, terms destigmatized and actively used by members of encompassed communities. As the terms evolve, the proper communications of them must follow. These terms can continue to potentiate through authentic communications sensitive to emotional cues and personal upbringing, the terms one step closer to being used as learning tools rather than ambiguous descriptors. With this, the social progression of the LGBTQ+ community can mitigate oppressive conversational threats and socially advance through knowledgeable support.