The language we use to describe our identities is an important and powerful tool. Within the queer community, the labels we use to describe our lived experiences carry a lot of historical and personal importance. 

Queer people, especially trans people, should not have to sanitize their language or experiences in order to be more palatable to you. We need to give our most marginalized voices space to speak without their language being policed by liberals who feel the need to make everything palatable to consume it. 

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Oftentimes, this well-meaning language policing comes in the form of trying to make spaces “more inclusive.” This is not to critique the use of inclusive language in general, but this form of uber-inclusive language policing often shames queer and trans people who use specific historical labels that they believe best fit their lived experiences. 

One of the labels that is most policed in this way is the term “lesbian.” When lesbians are trying to describe their lived experiences, they are often asked to use the term “sapphic,” or “women loving women,” or “non-men loving non-men” instead. 

While these labels are great for describing a wide plethora of experiences and identities that face similar forms of discrimination, the lesbian experience is, in some ways, a distinct experience from these broader labels. 

It is important to acknowledge that the label “lesbian” holds historical and cultural significance, and people who identify as such shouldn’t have to broaden their language when talking about their own experiences just for the sake of inclusion. 

The importance of lesbians and the lesbian community is best demonstrated through the popularization of the acronym LGBT vs GLBT. Before the AIDS epidemic, the favored acronym for the queer community was GLBT.  

When mainly gay men started dying of AIDS during the AIDS epidemic, lesbians stepped up and became care providers and support systems for those affected by AIDS. For this solidarity, “lesbian” was put at the forefront of the acronym as a tribute to the importance of their role in the progress of the queer community.

So to ask someone to sanitize that part of their identity to make others feel more included in conversations they don’t necessarily have to be included in is harmful. It is harmful because it doesn’t allow lesbians to feel heard and seen in their own unique lived experiences and forms of discrimination that they face. 

Another label that is policed in a similar way is the term transsexual. A transsexual is a person whose gender identity is different from their sex assigned at birth and who has taken medical, hormonal or surgical steps toward their transition. 

Some people who fall under the transgender umbrella use this term to describe their unique experiences as someone who has undergone a medical transition. Since the term transgender over transsexual has gained popularity and mainstream acceptance, individuals who identify as transsexual are often told not to use the term because it is seen as a taboo and exclusive label. 

Because medical transition is a large part of the label, it is not necessarily harmful to identify as transsexual because of its exclusivity — instead, it can help people find community with others like them. Not every term has to include every single person’s lived experiences, and to tell transsexual people that they cannot identify with a label that they feel describes them best isolates them from communities and spaces where they can feel seen and heard. 

People within the queer community should be freely able to use the language that best describes their identity, especially if those labels hold historical significance, regardless of whether they feel exclusive or uncomfortable to you. Your comfort in conversations of queer identity and experience should not be the responsibility of the queer person who is sharing their experience.

Before you police the language a person uses to describe their own identity and lived experiences, take a step back and consider whether this language harms you or simply makes you uncomfortable. If you realize you were just uncomfortable, I would encourage you to sit with and unpack why their language made you uncomfortable. By doing this, you will help stop the needless isolation of queer people from communities of support through unjust language policing.