moving target

moving target (plural moving targets)

1. A goal that is constantly changing.
   • 1997, “Foreword”, in Riki Anne Wilchins, Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender, Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, →ISBN, page 15:

     Who knows what to call transpeople these days? The dominant discourse in the transcommunity is at best a moving target. Transgender began its life as a name for those folks who identified neither as crossdressers nor as transexuals—primarily people who changed their gender but not their genitals.

   • 2019 May 16, Erik Adams, “A potent satire has its wings clipped in Catch-22”, in The A.V. Club‎:

     There’s palpable peril in the squadron’s ever-mounting bombing runs, and Cathcart’s moving target of a mission quota makes a clever parallel to contemporary America’s Forever War, but the flight sequences wind up acquiring a deadening repetitiousness

• “a moving target” in Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Longman.
• “moving target”, in Cambridge English Dictionary, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, 1999–present.
• “moving target” (US) / “moving target” (UK) in Macmillan English Dictionary.