CHENNAI: While the LGBTQIA+ community is extremely diverse, most people have heard only some of the terms. Gay, Lesbian, and Trans* are terms typically discussed in popular media with some (not enough) literature on them. However, most terms of the initialism hardly find any space on the new front cover of a newspaper.
Growing up, I realised that I am not straight because my attraction is not limited to women. However, it was a confusing time because there was no representation anywhere that could validate my feelings. It was in class 7 that I heard the word gay. It was a newspaper article that described gayness as men’s attraction toward other men.
Excited, I turned to my desktop computer and onto the Internet through the dial-up system, waiting anxiously for the web page to load I was amazed! Some people not only felt same-sex attraction but happily lived with their loved ones as partners. I came across the politics behind gay rights and how, slowly, more and more countries were understanding homosexuality and had started decriminalising it. Having read enough, I shut the computer, thinking, ‘I am attracted to women too, so I am not gay’; not knowing that other sexualities that exist. It was only years later that I decided to revisit the feelings.
Initially, I took up the label of bisexual to define my experience. Bisexual is an umbrella term broadly described as an attraction not exclusive to people of one particular gender. But for the longest time, I felt uncomfortable with it. Then, for a while, I gave up all labels and called myself me. However, I realised that a label for me was important because I wanted to separate my struggles from the rest of the cishet (cisgender-heterosexual) population and be in spaces of importance, proudly, as a non-straight person. So, I continued on the journey of finding one for myself.
It only got more difficult because people often look to put other people in boxes; boxes that they recognise. Anything that doesn’t fit the box is labelled as ‘strange,’ ‘different,’ and eventually ‘dangerous’. Slowly, one of the boxes is categorised as ‘abnormal’ and kept on the side to perish. The need to find a label that helps others understand my experience had somehow become about them, not me. That is when I started studying gender and sexuality as a subject to comprehend the nuances.
From my learning, I conceded that the term queer comes closest to defining how I experience life.
The term itself was a slur for the longest time; however, it was eventually reclaimed by the LGBTQIA+ community. Now, it has become an umbrella term that essentially means non-normative. I find solace in this term because it keeps the fluidity of my sexual and gender experience intact. It allows me to be my most authentic self, which encounters attraction without caring about the gender. The term queer is also political. In writing, queer-ing something means destabilising the normative.
The term challenges the existing institutions and structures of power by presenting better alternative ways of distributing the power equally. This term is now more common among Gen Z, and a lot of people are adopting it to separate themselves from the normative without having to confine themselves to a particular idea of what a person should look, dress, express or behave based on how they identify themselves. The term allows fluidity to many. Having said that, any label (including gay) is an umbrella term for many other identities, but the term queer is the one I resonate with the most.
One big aspect that often gets missed out when we discuss LGBTQIA+ issues is the struggle of finding oneself a word that validates their experience and gives it a place in narratives, in discussions at home, and in articles like these. Due to lack of representation, every person in the LGBTQIA+ community goes through the phase of finding an assigned space in this world; most often, for the members of this community, such spaces are absent. This is when labels come into play to the rescue.
However, here is when it gets tricky — most of the language we use to understand experiences of gender and sexuality comes from the West and the English language. Hence, only a tiny population in India has access to the vocabulary and terms, even if a significant percentage of the population might be part of the community.
Dependency on one particular language has become a problem with LGBTQIA+ activists who feel that the current framework is not linguistically inclusive and leaves out identities that might not necessarily fit into it. However, the initialism of LGBTQIA+ remains inclusive and can be contextualised. For example, the members of the Hijra community come under the trans* umbrella of the LGBTQIA+, even though this community is particular to South Asia. Further, the + allows every and all experiences to define themselves and become part of the initialism. Choosing a label is a decision that is personal, and sometimes political, but the fact remains that all identities are valid with or without the label.
The writer is a gender and sexuality trainer and mental health enthusiast, talks about their journey with labels and the avenues it has to offer.
For those still on the journey