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Am I the Right Kind of Gay and Trans for You?

Why our identities matter so much to us, why we bring them up, and why we use our favorite labels

Tucker Lieberman
Prism & Pen

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Tucker Lieberman seated in a wine-colored armchair, wearing a similarly colored T-shirt. He’s in his 40s, white, blue-eyed, balding and bearded. He has a quizzical expression.
Selfie, January 2025

We LGBTQ people often hear from people who aren’t LGBTQ that we talk about our identities too much.

It may not be meant as a personal remark about us or anyone at all. The person who’s saying it may have no specific incidents in mind. They may be talking about a book they haven’t read, so to speak. Yet they leap to a generalization, and they recommend a course of action.

They think we need their “unbiased” external feedback about what really matters. They suggest that we humbly fold ourselves into a shared political consciousness with no unique needs and no distinguishing marks instead of standing proudly on the margins. After all, from a distance, we simply look human just like everyone else. They’re here to tell us that, in case we didn’t know.

And what determines whether our identities would make a difference in our lives is — so they grandly assume — how they treat us. If they assure us that they’d personally tolerate us, then certainly no one’s ever been nor will be unfair to us. If they perceive us as regular people, we must have no differences worth mentioning.

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