Adam Smith is The Economist’s audience-engagement editor. He writes and talks about LGBT+ issues, and co-chairs The Economist Group’s LGBT+ staff network. Adam thinks the way that being gay became seen as part of a person’s identity both mirrors and diverts from the challenges facing transgender people.

I am a gay man who hasn’t always been “gay”. As a teenager I spent hours on anonymous internet chat rooms claiming to like men and women but really only chatting to men. I dated a young woman at school. I suppose people assumed I was straight. Through my twenties I avoided questions from my family about going without sex or a relationship. For years I wanted to sleep with men but I didn’t want to call myself “gay”. I wanted the behaviour, but not the identity.

Plenty of men have sex with men without calling themselves gay, especially in places where the sex act is a criminal offence or culturally unacceptable. “Gay men” are a subset of all the men who have sex with men. One day, knowing that men attracted me most, I looked at myself in the mirror and said the word: gay. “Gay” described who I was. My identity. I embraced that identity after years of hoping that it wouldn’t stick. I am just one of those men who sleeps with men who make their sexuality into a part of their identity.

For human society, as for the individual, it is a little leap to turn a common behaviour into something that is seen as an innate part of some people’s nature, or identity. With regard to being gay, this didn’t begin to happen in human history until the last century or so. Men had been having sex with each other for centuries before then. Likewise women with women. Gay sex is common in depictions of human life, from different eras, in stories, plays, drawings, and pottery—and all over the world. It wasn’t until the late 19th century when Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German lawyer, was the first to argue in speeches and pamphlets that same-sex desire was a part of who he was that the idea of being “gay” was first said publicly. He used another word than “gay”, and a slightly different concept to the one we use today (he actually saw it as a third gender). But fundamentally Ulrichs helped to expand “gay” out of something that people merely do into something that people are. His theories were largely rejected by doctors, psychiatrists and lawyers who sought to uphold the prevailing notion that same-sex love was a perversion and a danger. But he inspired the creation of the first gay-rights organisation in Berlin in 1897. Around 80 years later, Harvey Milk (pictured above) marched through American cities and called on fellow Americans to come out—to say the word “gay” and to stamp their name on it. As Milk believed it would, this identity-based argument led to legal rights, from anti-discrimination legislation to same-sex marriage. When you can convince someone that this harmless thing you do is an innate part of your identity, your nature, just who you are, then in societies based on the freedom of the individual, no argument against you can prevail. The most politically successful use of the identity-based argument is in the global gay-marriage campaign. That is probably because it is about love, rather than the more controversial subject of sex. Everyone knows what it is like to love. Gay activists claimed that our sexuality is a part of our identity, and then used the notion of love to make that point universal. This is how gay people became more and more accepted in society, and respected in law.

Transgender people, however, struggle more than gay people to be understood. It is a peculiar fact that in countries that are becoming more accepting of different sexual identities, the freedom to be accepted as transgender is lagging behind.

Transgender people are told ignorant things. You can change how you feel. You are confused. You are eroding the fabric of society. You want to ruin children. You don’t belong here. You want silly rights. These are all charges that were commonly laid against gay people in countries that now have same-sex marriage and widespread acceptance of gay people. That is not to say that gay people in countries like Britain and America never hear these statements any more, but they are far less acceptable than in the past.

Perhaps one reason for the lag in understanding is that it is harder for the majority of people to empathise with transgender people. If you are comfortable describing yourself as “woman” or “man” and most people believe you, then it is hard to imagine how you could feel otherwise.

When gay activists made their arguments about whom they want to love, it became easier for others to understand. Transgender identity is about how the beholder feels on the inside—so it is harder to explain.

One way is to talk about being comfortable wearing the clothes you want. But fundamentally transgender identity is not about wearing this shirt or that skirt, or even using this bathroom or the other one. It is about how someone feels on the inside. It is about how they alone feel about who they are. It is all on the inside. That makes it hard for others to grasp. But transgender people just want the world to perceive them in the same way as they see themselves. Society has to try harder.

What’s the first step? Ask a transgender person for their name. It is how they choose to describe in words who they really are.

This is part of a two-week discussion on transgender issues, with ten contributors. The other contributions are available here.