asexualadvice answered:

Hi! I recently saw a post about the term “allosexual” being the already in existence Quebec term for “queer.” The term includes the ace community and I thought this was pretty important, because I don’t think any of us want to take away one of the only Quebec specific terms and keep it for our community! Just thought I would share this (:

These two asks came in within relatively close proximity, so I imagine there’s a post out there floating around somewhere that I haven’t seen yet!

That being said, this has actually come up before - it’s not only a Québécois term, but also the French term for queer. Since my QPP is bilingual in both French and English, I went ahead and asked her for her input on the matter, and this is what she had to say on the subject.

First off, the two terms developed independently of each other - we are not appropriating the term. This is actually more adequately described as an instance of what is known as “faux amis”, or false cognates - that is, words that look similar but have different meanings in the two languages.

While it does come from the same root, to mean “other sexual”, the other thing to consider is that context - particularly which language is being spoken, in this instance, makes it fairly clear which meaning should be ascribed.

That all being said - I haven’t seen the original post going around on the matter, so we’re just working off previous discussions on the topic.

- Di