"It'd be weird if someone didn't have someone they liked"
No you blue haired jerk, that's not weird. I know this isn't a manga about asexuality, but that's really annoying to read lol
weird/abnormal/not normal =/= bad
Being incapable of romantic love is, from practically every perspective, certainly not normal - whether you equate being not normal to bad is on you.
These terms and feelings ('weird', 'normal', 'abnormal', 'disorder', and even things like 'disease') are kind of a mess in our society, even if you ignore LGBTQ+ concerns.
Even if we view "normalness" in a completely objective way using statistics, where do we put the line? Basically, the first problem lies in that 'normal' is a binary metric in a lexical sense. This means any debate over 'normal' vs 'abnormal' requires both parties to constantly define the terms and thresholds involved, as well as their rationale for using those thresholds (ideally backed by broad studies of word perception for a given population).
And this isn't even touching on the second, arguably larger problem: that some of these words have a connotation that is negative (sometimes very negative) even if the denotation does not suggest that.
Like if a small child (female) came up to you and asked if them liking girls made them weird, you would probably say "no" out of hand. This is because you know that the answer this child is looking for is about acceptance, not about statistics.
For a non-LGBT example, Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) uses the term 'disorder'. This term means 'contrary to the order of things'. From a purely denotational perspective, not only is this accurate, but it is probably also an accurate description of the entire LGBTQ+ spectrum. It is fairly easy to argue from a purely statistical perspective that being a lesbian is a 'disorder' and 'abnormal'.
Obviously, nobody reasonable would use that language to describe LGBTQ+ people because of the extremely negative connotation (especially on 'disorder'). On a related note, there has been increasing pushback against using the term 'disorder' in both ASD and DSD (Disorders of Sexual Development - a clinical umbrella term for most intersex conditions) for this exact reason. The latter is often called Differences in Sexual Development now as a result.
I don't know other languages very well so I'm not sure how much of this is an English problem and how much of it is just a "humans associate frequency with correctness" problem (we tend to view rare things as bad). Some of it is also a "medical terminology adapted as self-identification terminology" issue.
I'm not sure how to fix any of it either. Even if we switch the terms out for ones that have cleaner connotations (which does make sense), if the problem is really just human nature, then we'll just have the same problem 50-100 years from now. To use the DSD example, a century from now 'differences' may seem as offensive to us as 'disorders' is now. I guess that's a problem for future generations, though.
/Weird(probably)SideRant
last edited at Jun 2, 2022 1:17AM