A few years after the publication of my first book, which was about my six years in a form of conversion therapy, another author invited me onto his podcast of “Queer Writers.” His show’s name should have warned me of what was to follow, but in the rush of scheduling, I entered the interview cold. At the top of the show the author introduced me as a “queer writer.” I clarified that I do not identify as “queer”; I am gay. None of that seemed to matter.

He asked at what age I first discovered that I was queer; what it was like growing up queer; about my favourite queer authors; for any advice that I could share with other struggling queer writers. I stumbled through my answers, each of which felt more disingenuous than the last. Whether he was aware of it or not, the author’s questions around my supposed queer identity had nothing to do with me or my unique journey; they were his projection of who or what he thought I was.

I am not queer. I am a gay man. And I do not buy the notion that “gay” must automatically be grouped into or conflated with the label of “queer.” The former is not the same as or even a subgroup of the latter. In fact, in many respects, the identities of gay and queer stand in direct opposition to each other. Like the host of the podcast, most people typically never bother to ask me how I identify. They learn that I am gay, and they simply assume that makes me queer. It does not.

Until recently, I never thought it necessary to define “gay” or “man,” but when I say that I am gay, I mean that I am same-sex attracted; when I say that I am a man, I mean that I am an adult male. In other words, I am an adult male who is attracted to other adult males. Males are one of the two sexes of a binary species Homo sapiens. Just as adult males are called men, adult females are called women; and just as same-sex attracted males are called gay men, same-sex attracted females are called lesbians. Gay men are attracted to other males; gay women, or lesbians, are attracted to other females. None of this implies that gay men or lesbians are queer, for the identity of queer is another matter entirely.

These definitions, it turns out, are important, because contemporary queer ideology does not necessarily accept them. In fact, it seeks to disrupt and deconstruct them. The word “queer” was long used as a pejorative against gay people. As a deeply sensitive nine-year-old in 1973, I still remember being called queer in my elementary school playground. I didn’t know what the word meant, except that it had something to do with the way I behaved, and maybe with the way I felt drawn, in very different ways, to other boys (as objects of attraction) and girls (as playmates). The kids who used the word probably didn’t understand it any better than I did. But the word was meant to harm, and it did.

I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that I took “gender studies” in university. I say embarrassed because a lot of confusion today around issues of sex, gender, and sexuality stems from queer scholarship. Judith Butler’s 1990 book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, in which she set out her theory of the performativity of gender, for example, is often cited as one of the early texts that contributed to gender postmodernism. The world has changed dramatically since my classes 15 years ago. Most of what I hear or read about sex and gender today were rarely entertained back then, at least not in any of my classes. Identifying as queer is now an affirmation, an inevitable embrace, of current gender ideology. I am not queer because I don’t agree with most of this ideology.

I don’t agree that someone can be born into the “wrong body.” Such a possibility implies that there is a “right body”—and all any of us ever know is the body we were born into. Bodies are not right or wrong; they just are. Experiencing distress with the body we were born into is something else entirely—but it still does not imply that it is a wrong body; it just means that the body is a source of distress.