As part of an increasing trend towards celebrating LGBT history, a plaque has been put up, in York, honouring Anne Lister as a: “Gender-nonconforming entrepreneur [who] celebrated marital commitment, without legal ceremony, to Ann Walker in this church.”

Lister, the subject of an upcoming costume drama in which the actress Suranne Jones will be filling her breeches and top hat, has long been considered one of the first documented lesbians, thanks to her extensive diaries. And yet the word is nowhere to be found on the plaque, sparking both fury and concern that lesbian identity is being erased in favour of non-binary and trans identities.

The things we know about Lister are these: she dressed rather nattily in suits and trousers, sometimes went by the name Jack, was listed as female on her birth certificate and had sex with a lot of women.

There was a time - not that long ago - where ‘person with a vagina who had sex with other people with vaginas’ could simply be called a lesbian. And as the Venn diagram of sexuality and gender goes, that’s often still the case.

Of course, the word 'lesbian' did not exist when Lister was alive - in fact, our contemporary understanding of homosexuality owes more to 19th century sexologists like Havelock Ellis, who talked about ‘sexual inversion’ for someone who was attracted to the same sex.