It’s also the respected academic term?? The acronym isn’t static and it’s usage is varied by things like generational difference, location, and knowledge of the community. Even just in the U.S. in the last few decades the common usage gone from GLBT to LGBT to LGBTQ, to LGBTQA/LGBTQIA/LGBTQIAP/etc (Which, let me tell you as someone who has given presentations in the past using these updated acronyms, are all real mouthfulls), to LGBT+.
Also yes, queer is more inclusive! Especially coming at it from an academic standpoint, people didn’t always use or identify with the terms we use now and you can’t always try to cram them into our modern perceptions of sexuality. We can argue for years about whether a famous historical figure was gay or bisexual or straight and trans or whatever, but if we can all agree that they were somehow queer then using that term allows us to move past the debate and into productive discussion. And not everybody everywhere shares the same terms for sexual and gender identity, or even the same concepts of those things, so queer really is a more inclusive term in a lot of cases.
Like yeah if you’re talking specifically about gay or trans people you can just say gay or transgender, but if you’re talking about more than one identity or someone who doesn’t conform to our perceptions of ‘LGBT,’ or a person or people whose identity you don’t know, queer is just the better word.
