LGBTQ and… not us?

[Anonymous]

Sometimes I see LGBTQA and get a bit excited but often times we are left out! Why do you think that is and does it bother you? One thought is that we aren’t having sex so what does that matter, we aren’t being discriminated against. The other side of that is the constant feeling of being “different” or “wrong” and having difficulties forming relationships and families, like the other letters. Any thoughts?

[Anonymous]

Hello! I think your question is really interesting so I’m gonna try to give my opinion but please forgive me if my English is wrong! I always talk about the “LGBT+” community to include everyone. To me the + includes all romantic and sexual orientations and gender identities that belong to minorities. I agree that we do not face the same difficulties as other members of the LGBT+ community , hence the fact that we do not always appear in the initialism. (That being said, we can face similar difficulties sometimes, for instance if you are homo/bi/pan romantic and you’re holding hands with your same-sex soulmate in the streets, you may end up in trouble too). To me, including asexual people in the LGBT+ community is important to make people understand that asexuality is a sexual orientation, not a sexual dysfunction. So I don’t really know how to conclude but I would say that, sure, maybe we don’t need same recognition as other LGBT+ members, but we need recognition too because too often people don’t know about asexuality and they can try to make our orientation invalid which is exhausting. (Also: the letters LGB stand for lesbian, gay and bi people, but what about pan people? Actually there are a lot of letters we need in the initialism, hence the + in “LGBT+” that can include more people (in my opinion).)

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