... we ourselves are in no position to change words like "rape" and "sexual abuse." Further, these are not words that should have their negative meaning stripped from them, by us or anyone else (including the antis), because such forms of sexual violence and coercion are real atrocities that occur to real people. We should never make the same mistake that the antis do, which is to use these terms in ways that attempt to detract from this reality. Words for the various forms of sexual violence need to be part of our legal and cultural vocabulary, because they describe real phenomena that need to be identified and stopped when they do actually happen.

Words like "queer" were salvageable and alterable by the gay community over time, because "queer" only ever meant "strange" or "unusual," terms that have a good degree of built-in subjectivity and ambiguity even among the mainstream thinkers. They can have a negative or positive, or even totally neutral, connotation depending upon context.

But NOT so with words like "rape" or "sexual abuse." They describe real atrocious acts that have no convenient ambiguity to work with, and it was very cruel and wrong-headed on the part of antis in the realm of law and the media to misapply these terms to acts that are not coercive and do not involve actual violence, blackmail, etc. And we are equally foolish and wrong-headed to attempt to do the same "in reverse," especially considering the very strong perception the public has of us to begin with. We are playing with fire in a way that is going to burn us in the end, not the power of our adversaries and the lie-mongers in society.

As for that example you used, mainstream thinkers in the adult world that currently control global society do not respond to ambiguous use of such strong words like those kids you mentioned, because adults have spent far more years having the meaning of such terms ingrained into their psyche like a nail pounded deeply into a wooden shelf by a hammer. They are not going to let us change their perception and well-understood definition of the word, because we do not have the degree of popularity that the antis often enjoy. We totally lack the power to "re-apply" the meaning of words based on frequent usage like those in positions of popularity and authority, which includes many antis at the present time. Words like "pedophile" may be arguably salvageable due to their initial clinic usage, but even so many in the community have--wisely, IMO--chosen the alternate route of coming up with new, un-tainted terms like "MAA," "MAP," and "Kind" to describe us.

Do not overestimate our influence on society and even for a second believe we are on an even keel with the antis at the present time when it comes to influencing language in the way you are trying here, i.e., taking very well-established, ambiguity-free negative terms that were always used to describe very real atrocious acts and then attempting to "purge" them of their negative meaning by using them repeatedly to refer to other acts attributed to us. It's a very losing strategy on our part, and it needs to be opposed. Sorry that we will be at each others' throats about yet another thing, but this is too big a disaster-in-the-making for me to just ignore because friends and people I respect happen to be among those who are jumping on this dangerous bandwagon.

My apologies ahead of time for the future head-bashings we will exchange on this, but I wouldn't do that if I didn't think it was anything less than absolutely necessary.