User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-44988386-20200416234118/@comment-5918438-20200417004751

User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-44988386-20200416234118/@comment-5918438-20200417004751 Actually, Thread:248287 overruled that past decision not to have LGBTQ+ categories. It really just remains to find the best approach for characters.

This approach cannot work, though. We don't always have the luxury of knowing the specifics of a character's sexuality, or indeed how they identify. We cannot presume that a character is gay rather than bisexual, or bisexual rather than pansexual, based on a single instance of attraction. (And even with orientation established, plenty of queer women do not use the word lesbian to describe themselves, even setting aside the implications of applying such terms to historical figures. I wouldn't use the term in the body of Bill Potts' article unless she uses it herself, so it makes little sense to follow different standards for categories. It's an identity term, and does not simply describe an orientation.)

To my mind, either we find a source for LGBTQ+ as an acronym, decide that various constraints mean we have little choice but to apply it to in-universe characters anyway, or we go down an easier route: category:Non-heterosexual individuals. (This obviously does not speak for gender.) Anyone with a sexual orientation other than heterosexual (ie. who's attracted to people of their own gender, to more than one gender, or who states that they're asexual, etc.) goes in this category.

This frees us from making presumptions about characters. No need to work out which existing label, if any, Ianto Jones' sexuality fits into: he is not attracted only to members of a gender other than his own. That makes him something other than heterosexual, and more often than not, "something other than straight" is all we're given.

EDIT: Ah, OncomingStorm12th brought up the very same point at while I was typing up my bit. My apologies.