Preliminary Notes on the Concept of FLINTA
16 Feb 2025 - Joyce Laurie
Okay, so this site is called Flinta Forum. What’s Flinta? Well, it’s a bit of an in joke.
I encountered the phrase for the first time at MERGE Pride 2023. They had a “FLINTA* DARKROOM.” The term seems to come from German gay club culture, where they have a shared endemic problem: how do you stop cis gay men from gaining hegemony over everything? (“T4TLUVNRG” becomes quite farcical in this light — no shade!)
Well, you need a word to describe people who are not that. But being against “men” leaves trans guys a little out in the cold (and I hope they stay warm!) So FLINTA, then: Females, Lesbian, Intersex, Nonbinary, Trans, Agender. Those all have cognates, so it’s the same in German as English. Anyone gay who isn’t a cis gay guy is basically one of these. They throw a little asterisk at the end to ensure they capture everyone on this side of the polarity.
It’s a little absurd in that it’s blatantly more exclusive than inclusive. It definitely has the sound of a word you’d put on a door to turn people away. And “flint” is a very sharp word — do Germans have this association?
Nevertheless, in my usage it’s a word that has power in the way words need to. When I describe “what’s happening with the Flintas,” it very cleanly points to our little walled garden of trans lesbianism. A centered transfemininity and those we feel the safety to include.
My little troublemaker agenda is to shear this word of its context — (deference to german club culture, or ironic disavowal thereof) — and even its acronymic denotation, and just make it a dumb clear word for the things we are, without worrying about what it includes or excludes.
We always seem to be working beyond language, anyhow. This much is clear from the ongoing legal battle against our rights — even our supposed champions don’t know how to talk about us.
Picture, if you will, an image macro at the end of this, because I’m not sure if we have those capabilities yet at Flinta Forum HQ:
P.s. the MERGE Flintas darkroom kinda sucked. When I peeped in the door it was just two people on the bed in the corner. We have our best and brightest working on a way to square this circle — shoutout to angelRay and MIX NYC.