There is a certain taboo around the word LGBTQIA+. Even today, many people, both inside and outside the community, seem to prefer that it remain somewhere in the background, covered by a cloak of silence. People may acknowledge that it exists, but they do not necessarily want to discuss what it means, where these differences come from, or why society responds to them in the way it does.
There are many ways to approach the subject. This is only one of them.
The first thing that becomes apparent when looking beyond the label is that the people within the LGBTQIA+ community are not fundamentally different from anyone else. They have insecurities, confidence, affection, ambitions, fears, humour and contradictions. Yet there can also be a peculiar self-consciousness in people who have spent a significant part of their lives knowing that some aspect of them does not fit comfortably into what society considers ordinary.
That observation raises a more fundamental question: what exactly is this difference?
Take homosexuality. A gay person is generally understood as someone who experiences sexual attraction toward people of the same sex. But where exactly does that characterization begin? Does a person have to establish a physical relationship before the category applies? Obviously not. Attraction exists before action. A person can experience desire without ever acting upon it.
This distinction is important because it separates attraction, behaviour, identity and biology. They are related, but they are not the same thing.
The same problem appears when trying to understand gender. A person has biological characteristics, but society also assigns meanings to those characteristics. A boy who likes dolls, painting, dance, makeup or nail polish has not violated a law of biology. Yet society may tell him that these things belong to girls. The activity itself is neutral. The gender attached to it is a social classification.
This raises a strange question: who decided that certain things belong to men and certain things belong to women?
Biology certainly creates differences between the sexes. Reproduction requires particular biological roles, and as organisms became more complex, reproduction also became associated with different requirements such as nutrition, protection, parental investment and care of offspring. Different members of a species therefore developed different biological and behavioural roles.
But humans did something more.
They built social structures around these differences.
A biological distinction could become a social role. A social role could become a norm. A norm could become an expectation. And an expectation could eventually become a hierarchy.
Patriarchy can be understood, at least partly, within this broader process. Biology provided differences. Society constructed meanings and institutions around those differences. The hierarchy itself is not contained within the biological distinction.
Nature does not tell a boy that a particular colour belongs to girls. Nature does not tell a woman that she should behave in a particular way because she can reproduce. Nature does not tell a man that emotional vulnerability is feminine. Those are human constructions built around biological differences.
The natural world itself is also considerably less tidy than the categories humans often prefer.
Some species of fish, for example, can change sex during their lifetime. This does not mean that human beings are equivalent to those fish, nor does it mean human biological sex can simply switch in the same manner. The point is more basic: biological systems can be considerably more varied and flexible than the rigid categories through which humans often describe them.
Sexual behaviour presents another interesting complication.
Reproduction is one function of sexual activity, but it is not the only possible function of intimacy. Physical intimacy can be a powerful means of attachment and connection. Love and bonding are not restricted to relationships that can produce offspring. Humans form profound connections with parents, children, friends and partners. Social animals form bonds with one another in ways that cannot always be reduced to reproduction.
This changes the way same-sex intimacy can be viewed.
If the only criterion used to evaluate sexual intimacy is reproduction, then same-sex intimacy appears to have no reproductive purpose. But if intimacy is also understood as a mechanism of attachment, affection, pleasure and social connection, the question becomes different.
The absence of reproduction does not automatically make an intimate relationship biologically meaningless.
Nor does it make it unnatural.
The mistake may lie in assuming that everything an organism does must have one direct evolutionary purpose.
This also complicates the idea of "normality."
A heterosexual relationship can produce children, but not every heterosexual relationship does. A person can love someone without reproducing with them. A person can experience attraction without acting on it. A person can form an intimate bond with someone who is biologically incapable of producing offspring with them.
The human experience is larger than reproduction.
Yet society has historically built many of its expectations around reproduction, and those expectations have influenced how people understand attraction, relationships, masculinity and femininity.
When a person repeatedly encounters a mismatch between their own feelings and the expectations surrounding them, something else can happen.
They may begin to feel that they are different.
Human beings are intensely social organisms. We seek people who understand experiences that others do not. A person who feels isolated may eventually discover someone with the same experience. Then another person. Then another.
A community begins to form.
This is an important distinction.
Nature can produce variation. Society produces communities around shared experiences of that variation.
The LGBTQIA+ community is therefore not a biological structure that exists independently of human society. It is a social formation built around real experiences involving sexuality, gender, sex characteristics, identity and attraction.
That formation provides belonging, protection, language and recognition to people who might otherwise feel isolated.
But there is a consequence to creating such a broad umbrella.
The acronym itself contains fundamentally different kinds of experiences. Lesbian, gay and bisexual primarily describe sexual orientations. Transgender concerns gender identity. Intersex concerns biological sex characteristics. Asexuality concerns sexual attraction.
These experiences can overlap, but they are not identical.
The umbrella therefore increases breadth, because more people can find a place under it. But breadth can come at the cost of depth. The larger the category becomes, the less precisely it describes the individual experience of every person within it.
That may explain why disagreements can exist even among people who are placed under the same umbrella. Some transgender people, for example, may not identify with the broader LGBTQIA+ movement or may oppose particular aspects of it.
There is nothing inherently contradictory about this.
A collective identity does not require complete agreement among all its members.
In fact, this is a general property of human communities. Once people gather around shared experiences, they develop culture, values, symbols, language and political interests. Eventually, those structures acquire lives of their own.
And that introduces another problem.
Once a social category becomes established, it can be used by people for different purposes.
There can be people who genuinely find protection and belonging under the umbrella. There can also be people who use the identity for reasons that have little to do with the experiences that originally gave rise to the community.
From the perspective of the individual, even that person's actions may appear justified. Every human being has the capacity to construct an internal justification for what they do. Someone can believe that their anger, aggression or actions are necessary and correct.
That does not automatically make the action humane.
Anger can have a legitimate origin without every expression of anger being legitimate.
This distinction matters particularly when social movements become places of conflict. A person can have experienced discrimination and still behave cruelly toward someone else. A group can have suffered injustice and still contain individuals who act unjustly. Suffering explains behaviour; it does not automatically absolve it.
At the same time, it would be equally simplistic to judge an entire social structure by the actions of some of its members.
That is where the second perspective begins.
Everyone has the right to present themselves as they understand themselves. Everyone has the freedom to hold beliefs and to live according to those beliefs, within the limits imposed by the rights of others. The fact that a person understands themselves differently from the majority does not make their existence illegitimate.
But the same principle applies in the other direction.
The existence of a social category does not give every individual within it automatic moral authority.
A community is made of individuals. Individuals are capable of compassion, courage, selfishness, cruelty, wisdom and error. The umbrella cannot erase that complexity.
Perhaps this is why trying to judge an entire social structure according to the standards of the society observing it becomes problematic. A community that emerged partly because its members felt misunderstood cannot be expected to fit perfectly into the expectations of the society that misunderstood them in the first place.
There is also a deeper irony here.
Society creates categories to make human variation easier to understand. Then people who do not fit comfortably into those categories create new categories for themselves. Those categories create communities. The communities develop their own boundaries and norms. Eventually, the new categories can become just as rigid as the old ones.
The process keeps repeating.
Perhaps the more useful question is therefore not whether a particular identity is "normal" or "abnormal."
Perhaps the question is:
How did a difference become a category in the first place?
Biology gives us bodies and biological variation.
Psychology gives us attraction, attachment, perception and individual experience.
Society gives those experiences names, expectations and meanings.
And humans turn those meanings into communities.
The LGBTQIA+ community sits somewhere within all three layers. That is precisely why it is difficult to understand through a single explanation.
It is biological in some respects.
Psychological in others.
Social in others.
And deeply human in all of them.
Perhaps the most useful thing that can come from looking at Pride is not deciding what the community is supposed to be. It is realizing how quickly human beings turn differences into categories, categories into identities, identities into communities, and communities into structures of their own.
The umbrella protects many people.
But an umbrella is still an object constructed by humans.
And once enough people stand underneath it, they will inevitably disagree about what it is supposed to protect, who should stand beneath it, and where its edges should be.
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