I’m talking to you journalists, bloggers, commentators and social media hashtag creators. I’ve got a request, a suggestion, even a call to action — if not quite a call to arms.

I’m passionate about helping the underserved, the misunderstood and those picked on by others. I applaud those who shout the loudest about Black Lives Matters or Trans Rights. I get disheartened by those who think the definition of a woman is tied to an ability to conceive or how circumstances shaped their earlier life.

I also believe change happens when lots of us tackle a challenge from multiple angles — the angry demo AND the quiet legal work, the grandma who cares and the politician with direct power, the multitude (that’s you too) with a tsunami of likes and retweets for that trending topic.

Words matter. Names matter. We see how ‘Obamacare’ turned from a rallying cry for many, to a weapon for others. If US journalists and TV news had stuck to calling Obamacare what it really was, the Affordable Care Act or even the ACA, the bill would and could not be so readily and easily weaponized. Each CNN, NBC, NPR or other mainstream headline that said Obamacare not ACA, skewed a Bill with many provisions people wanted and liked, into an ideological bomb dropped whilst exploding in every article shared on Facebook. A catchy shorthand obscured the truth.

So, that leads me to the point of this OpEd. The world is not us and them, it really should be, and damn it, ultimately is just us. So the words that matter to me today are LGBT, LGBTQI and the other variants and words that create separation. These are words that talk to a grand coalition between lots of thems, the thems that get their name in the acronym, those who don’t, and those who some deem not worthy or relevant enough for a letter. It’s simply not about us, all of us who care, or the us who are.

LGBT/QI is, and more importantly has been a really important word. But we are now in a place where many see less of a simple single tick box to check, but see a meandering and often evolutionary journey across the plains on sexuality, gender, life experiences and pleasures. Its both about you, and how you interact with others. We need a word that matches the times, just like how 1910 Suffragettes became 1960s Feminists as the journey, the fight and its victories carried the movement forward.

Queer is a weird word too, reclaimed by many in recent years as a more inclusive term to cover a wider spectrum of not-straight or not traditionally gender compliant. To others — me included —it’s a word that is both divisive and angry. Used in decades of confrontations its too closely tied to political fights and even those who use Cis as a belittling insult. It’s a word of nuanced academic study and dissection that plays badly out in the wilds of our complex society, in those bubbles many bubbles away from yours. More importantly, it does not relate to the more personal and internal, who you just ARE, not what you chose to do about it.

You might feel asexual, or been defined as a girl on a birth certificate where your mind, even your chromosomes, tell a different story. You may have flirted and explored androgynous looks at 16. You might live a straight male life, but Jägerbomb experimented at college and maybe still would again for George, Brad or Taron. There is no one way to be, you might even be a few or many things between your teenage self and you in later life. More importantly there is no one right way to be, or any one box that can define you.

So how do we refer, relate, infer and hashtag those whose story falls out of the center of the bell curve of sexuality and gender, even if they just fall out for an hour once in their life. Or even better a word that doesn’t exclude straight, opposite sex romancing family and friends, but does highlight, celebrate and makes equal each shade of life’s spectrum.

We have that word (and a flag) already, we are a rainbow of sexuality and gender — each a little distinctive, but each is an integral part of the whole. One color goes missing and we are no longer a rainbow, no longer a cohesive whole. One can even alternative-truth that a color doesn’t exist in your country, but your art, politics, patent applications and family units show that yes, rainbows are the same around the world.

Yes Rainbow might sound weird, but think about all those bright 30s songs about having a gay time — that word was weird too until it wasn’t. Homosexual used to be THE word — but can you imagine Lester Holt using that today on NBC World News Tonight?

We are all different, and we are all one. Time for that Rainbow.

#OnTheRainbow #Sexuality&Gender #Rainbow #RainbowSG #WeAreRainbow #TheRainbow