Gender and sexuality can be very confusing. As soon as I began to realize that gender is not a binary and that there are more than three sexual/romantic orientations, I began to understand a bit more about other people and a bit more about myself.
Going into my first year of college, I was quite socially unaware. I had little knowledge of my own privileges and was pretty much the worst kind of ally to the queer community you could imagine. However, as I became exposed to the beautifully diverse culture at my school, especially the queer community, I entered a long semester of self-reflection and growth. I had always felt different but I did not quite understand what it was that set me apart from my peers in grade and high school until the end of my first year of college.
While there were a lot of facets of my identity that made me feel isolated from the predominately white, upper-class, straight, and cisgender students that made up the population of my catholic high school, I did my best throughout my four years there to sweep it all under the rug. I barely talked about being biracial and hid my large stomach and arms with the long sleeved, dark polos and sweatshirts that were included in the uniform.
Part of this lack of knowledge was due to the atmosphere of the school of being catholic. The other reason being that the culture was hyper heteronormative, due to the firing and resigning of out lesbian and gay faculty members.
Regardless, I did not truly realize or understand my sexuality until college. This was the first time I had ever even heard of the word "asexual" in reference to people's sexuality. Upon delving into what that actually means, something had changed for me. It was like I was wearing sunglasses my whole life and I had, at last, taken them off for good. I finally began to understand why I had felt so different growing up. I had gained a deeper knowledge of myself.
In the vast diversity of sexual orientations, romantic orientations, and gender identities, new terms are being given to help people explain their identities as they relate to gender and sexuality. With this, it becomes harder and harder to find an umbrella term to refer to the larger community of marginalized genders and sexual orientations. As you might have noticed, I like to use "the queer community". However, I know older members who don't prefer this, as the word was once (and can still be used) as a slur.
Other people use "LGBT" (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) or "GLBT" to refer to the whole community without using the word "queer", whether to avoid the pejorative history, because they are negatively impacted by it, or because they do not know the word has been reclaimed by the community. Either way, the initialism is still exclusionary. There are far more identities on the gender and sexuality spectrum than LGBT. For example, as mentioned before, asexuality exists.
Another initialism I use to describe the alphabet soup of gender and sexuality is LGBTQIA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual, and more). I am guilty of just using LGBTQIA (without the "+") as well. I don't have a problem with people using just LGBT or some combination of LGBTQIA. So be it. What I do have a problem with, and the reason I am writing this article is when people try to claim the "A" to stand for an ally.
Let me just start by saying that I do not hate allies. That would be silly, every marginalized group needs allies to use their privileges to leverage the voices of the oppressed when it is appropriate. However, "ally" is not an identity. As much as we need allies, they do not belong to the community, they belong alongside the community.
Being on the asexual spectrum, of course, it is important to be to have the "A" stand for asexual. I'm biased, I get that. However, you can't just erase a whole sub-community. We exist too and we want to be included. I know the initialism LGBT doesn't include the "A", but if you do include the "A" please let it stand for asexual.
The asexual community (ace for short) is pretty invisible within the larger LGBTQIA+ community. The least anyone can do is have the "A" stand for us. We get forgotten enough.
