Language use provides subtle, but often accurate, reliable, and popularly misinterpreted evidence for socio-cultural attitudes within a community. While the nature of the relationship between those attitudes and associated language use is murky and provide little by way of actionable guidelines, language use and, over time, the change in language use can provide a gauge of concurrent social advance or regress.
Such is the case for examining sexism within the GLBT community (and potentially comparing it with the greater population at large). For example, the word "gay" itself is arguably the most canonically sexist word in current English use, yet compared the attention paid to other examples of sexist language use its use has largely gone without comment.
A number of questions are raised by this sort of phenomena -- is it the reaction to sexism in "gay" sexist language that is different, or, as a sub-culture, is the sexism exhibited in the GLBT community of a qualitatively different nature?
There are not many answers currently, as little effort has been expended to investigate them. Thus, this presentation will serve more to highlight some of the linguistic evidence that sexism is extant in the GLBT community and what sorts of questions must be asked in order to determine what, if anything, should be done to combat it.