Westerners have a bad habit of rewriting history in a way that fits the narrative they are trying to spread. They erase the inconvenient truths that question these narratives, regardless of how important these histories may be to certain communities.
An obvious example is how we tell the story of Christopher Columbus. We disregard that he essentially committed a genocide and teach the children of the U.S. he discovered America (which he did not) and omit the fact that he slaughtered countless Native Americans to seek power and wealth. We even give students a day off of school in his honor. We should be looking at this as a day to mourn, not a day to celebrate. This is an event that is extremely important to remember and acknowledge, especially for Native American communities. Instead of honoring those lost in Columbus's name, we celebrate him.
It does not end there; we are also very quick to erase the histories of LGBTQ+ people throughout history. People who engage in same-sex relationships are written out of real-life narratives and only documented as medical cases. Same-sex relationships between women were not even viewed as important enough to document because women were thought to only have value in relation to the men who accompany them.
Trans histories are erased to an even greater extent. Every story that could potentially be about trans men, or those who were assigned female at birth but are not female, becomes a story about upward mobility for women. We turn it into a story of women who dress in drag in an attempt to blend in as a man to make it in a patriarchal society. While that is not necessarily untrue in many cases, there are countless cases when the documentation more closely matches trans narrative.
The most important part of all this to remember is that this is still happening. It is hard to think of it that way because it is not yet history, but by under-representing people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and other demographics in media, we are cutting these people out of our history. By acting like these people do not exist, we create a narrative that is almost solely white, straight, cisgender and largely male. These demographics exist and have for quite a while, so it is time to expand this narrative. It is time to construct a more accurate history.
