My latest post for Money Crashers is something a little bit different from usual. It's a guide to the particular financial challenges faced by LGBTQ+ Americans and ways to overcome them. Some of these problems, like student loan debt, affect other Americans as well, and the solutions to those are the same for us as for our cishet peers. But others, like discrimination in housing and insurance or the cost of gender reassignment surgery, are truly unique to the LGBTQ+ community. They require more targeted solutions — some personal, some political.
It was a bit of a challenge for me figuring out how to use pronouns in this. The original title my editors proposed was "LGBTQ Finances: Money Issues They May Face," and that "they" felt misleading to me. It seemed to imply that I was speaking as an outsider—which, as a bisexual woman, I'm technically not. So using "they" felt like I was deliberately keeping myself in the closet.
But on the other hand, using "we" felt a bit misleading also. As a woman who's married to a man and has never been seriously involved with a woman, I really haven't had to deal with these issues in my own life. I've can't honestly say I've ever personally faced anti-queer discrimination in any form, and so it felt a bit dishonest to claim membership in this oppressed minority group.
In the end, my compromise was to say "we," but not say it a lot. I thought this would make it clear that, yes, I'm part of the community and I get you, while still allowing the article to be mostly about "you," the reader, and not about me. I hope I succeeded in striking the right balance.
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