A Facebook acquaintance of mine recently expressed shock in response to a post about the above-mentioned pending Texas Supreme Court decision. “I had no idea that was even a thing. That’s messed up!” she breathlessly exclaimed. This is a person who identifies as queer despite the fact that she has never dated a woman, and as near as I can tell her only sexual experiences with women have been in threesomes with her boyfriend. It’s understandable that she wasn’t following a pending legal case that would have had no effect whatsoever on her life; why the hell should she?

I am engaged to a woman, we live in Texas, and I worry about that pending Supreme Court decision every single time I work on planning our wedding, turning what for most women is a joyous project into a pitfall of anxiety and fear. When my fiancee and I talk about where we’d eventually like to live together, we must consider not only which state would be best for our respective careers and family ties, but also which is least likely to be hostile to our very existence. I must carefully consider when and where I use the bathroom lest I be mistaken for a man because my hair is up or I’m not dressed femininely enough. I have to wonder whether or not one of the men I sometimes work with, who has on more than once occasion made “dyke” jokes, really believes some of the awful things he says.

If you have never been in a same sex relationship, nor have ever transitioned — or are in the process of actively transitioning — from one gender to another, then these are simply not anxieties that you will understand. So whom does it help when you, a person with vastly different life experiences and stressors than people like us, claim our identity as your own? I can tell you with certainty that it does not help us. Being queer wasn’t an identity I ever decided to have or try on for kicks; it was the result of a painful and prolonged process, to accept and understand that who I was and who I loved would involve real, sometimes very unpleasant consequences. Most gay/bi/trans people have a similar story — or a much worse one.

And before anyone accuses me of “erasure” or “identity policing” or another thought-terminating cliche that ilk, consider that one of the principal failures of identity politics is the refusal to discern between the different levels and severities of harm. I can present no better evidence of this in action than the following following excerpt posted right here on Medium by an ostensibly bisexual “high femme” not one day after the Pulse shooting in Orlando in which 49 LGBT people were killed and a further 53 were wounded:

“ Bi erasure and femme invisibility…means I get dragged back into the closet every damn day. It hurts every time, but today in light of this already bleeding wound, biphobia and erasure is excruciating.”

Let me again frame the above quote for emphasis: One fucking day after the deadliest and most devastating act of mass violence ever perpetuated against the LGBT community in the United States, this person felt the need to equate — and in fact prioritize — the pain of invisibility over the pain of actually being gunned down, murdered and/or severely injured. You know what? You know fucking what? I’m going to take a super big leap here and say that actually being shot and killed by a terrorist explicitly because you are gay and attending a visibly gay nightclub far outpaces the “pain of invisibility.”

Perhaps you still believe that what I’m saying here is, at best, biphobic — that I’m denying the very real lived experiences of people who have experienced same sex relationships and then later gone on, for whatever reason, into relationships that are seen to the outside world as heterosexual. I am not talking about those people here. Hell, I myself have been one of those people. I have dated men and women both before and after transitioning! I know firsthand how painful it can feel to have one’s past experiences erased or ignored by those around me, and how lonely it can feel to lose the sense of community that comes with LGBT life, after entering into a relationship that reads “straight” to the outside world. People in situations like this have actually lived their lives in such a way that have, at one point, shaped who they are and put them under many of the same stressors and threats faced by other LGBT people. They are our brothers and sisters and absolutely deserve our respect and protection.

The travesty that I am specifically calling out here is the fact that we have expanded the umbrella of “queer” to include people who’ve never once felt a single drop of rain; an umbrella that is already stretched to the point of breaking in half, at which point it will help to protect no one.