What's in a letter?

This paper studies how LGBTI, the acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex, entered the European Union’s (EU) discourse. We focus on its early stage of institutional formation. We elaborate on our understanding of proto-institutionalization as involving mechanisms of convening, proselytizing and strengthening rather than top-down instructions or coercion to understand the (trans-) formation of cultural patterns. It is argued that categories have an enormous potential to serve as carriers of meaning between social entities and cultural distances. We show that within the EU landscape, the role of the LGBTI Intergroup of the European Parliament is particularly important because of its interesting position at the intersections of EU entities and civil society. The European Parliament’s LGBTI Intergroup’s activities of recruiting allies, packaging and disseminating information and bringing people and ideas together, illuminate the nature of recombining discourses and practices of formerly separate domains. We conclude that the convening of even opposing perspectives requires an anchor topic, for which Human Rights serve to integrate intersex into the category of LGBTI.