Erasure

Today is, as every year, National Coming Out Day. What springs to mind is people "coming out" (a weird thing to have to do in itself) as gay, but it certainly goes beyond that. There's the whole GSM (Gender & Sexual Minority) or LGBTQIA spectrum - lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (including pansexual), intersex and asexual. Now, a minority of the "coming outs" will be nonbinary trans, or intersex, or asexual, but it doesn't mean those of us should be glossed over.

Marriages that are legally same-sex are known by most media outlets - including the BBC, who should know better - as "gay marriage". This is a gross generalisation. While plenty of these marriages are indeed between gay couples, they also include people who are bisexual, pansexual, asexual, and so on (even, rarely, some heterosexual people). If I ever married it wouldn't be a gay marriage any more than it would be a straight marriage, as I'm neither gay nor straight, so it's a good thing the BBC don't cover my wedding as I'm sure it would confuse.

What's the use of lumping all these groups together as "gay" when they're really something else? It's just laziness that leads to erasure. How many people have even actually heard of asexuality or pansexuality? That's a case in point.

It's not just sexualities that get generalised as "gay", either. There is a huge problem of transgender, and intersex, erasure. Revolutionary trans women like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson led the Stonewall riots, yet, 45 years on, the charity Stonewall is only just waking up to the fact that LGBT(QIA) doesn't just mean "gay".

Then there's the fact that, historically and presently, a lot of people perceive being transgender as just a way of someone being gay. Again, gross generalisation. There are plenty of gay trans people, but there are plenty of trans people of all sexualities, there really is no correlation. And if you think a trans person who is straight in their gender identity, is really just a gay cisgender (non-trans) person, that's a complete erasure.