Chasejxyz
Inkling
I think this is an important point to reiterate. There are people who think that if a kid comes out as gay or trans, it's a terrible thing because they see it as only a sexual thing, and kids don't have any sort of sexual thoughts or feelings, so therefore they must have been taught these things by a predatory adult. Queerness is a continuum, made of sexuality, romanticism, and gender identity. You can be asexual (do not have sexual attraction to anyone) and homorantic (falling in love with someone the same gender as you). USUALLY they align (a heterosexual person is also heteromantic) but not always. If you think about crushes you had when you were little, sex probably wasn't a part of it, but it was how you felt being around them, hence why a child can be gay. And being transgender has nothing to do with sexuality, again, this is why a child can be trans.
Also being gay/straight isn't an immutable property, such as having 2 arms, it's a descriptive one. A trans person is going to still have 2 arms if they transition, but someone who starts as a "straight man" and transitions into a woman is still* going to be into women, so now she is gay. Her attraction didn't change, it was how we describe it, since we don't say andro/gynosexual, we compare the genders of the people involved and label that.
Sexuality (and romanticism) is shoved into our faces all the time, we just don't notice it because we're so used to seeing it in the context of straight things. Two people of the same age sitting on a couch and buying kid's snacks on an app in a commercial are implied to be together and parenting a kid, so we're showing a straight/gay couple, we're choosing to show (or ignore) different types of relationships. A few years ago there was a Cheerios commercial with an intterracial relationship and some people absolutely lost it. A wedding planning site commercial showed various couples in it, including a lesbian couple, and people lost it and they forced the Hallmark channel to not show it anymore (this is the same channel that had a movie about a Jew learning The True Meaning of Christmas so....). If you're mindful and look at the media that's put in front of you, you're going to notice this a lot, and that it's almost always able-bodied cis-het couples. It's always conventionally pretty, able-bodied, smooth-skinned women in beauty product ads. You don't even see blind or 3 legged pets in pet food commercials! This is why representation is important, even if it's a "oh my wife and I love that restaurant" type of line**.
*This isn't always the case, though. There's compulsory heterosexuality, where someone feels like they HAVE to be straight because society. After coming out and being more comfortable with themselves--and being in a safer situation--they might discover they were never actually into [whatever]. Or maybe HRT changes their attraction. Every trans person is different because every human that exists has their own unique and complicated relationship with gender and defines their gender in their own way. Stuff is complicated! If people have any questions about things I would be more than happy to help
**You're probably wondering "hey didn't people get mad at Disney for doing that?" And the reason why that is is because Disney's PR team went out of their way to advertise their movies (live action Beauty and the Beast, Avengers End Game, Onward etc) as THIS IS THE FIRST GAY DISNEY CHARACTER!!!! EVER!!!!!!!! (you can't have multiple first ones, guys). They acted like it was this huge, ground breaking thing and they were SO BRAVE for doing this. And these throw away lines are incredibly easy to remove in markets where being gay is frowned upon, if not straight-up illegal. People had to re-watch Avengers to catch that line, it was so non-existent, but the Russo brothers acted like it was going to be a main character that would be gay. Disney is making these decisions to drum up sales in the west while protecting their sales in other markets, not becaue they actually give a hoot about representation.
But you're not Disney. If you put in a minor line like that and don't make it part of your marketing materials then it's not a bad thing. But also if you have a long series with a huge cast of characters and the ONLY queer representation is a one-time NPC with a throwaway line...then yeah that's not great. 1% of the population is transgender, which is more common than redheads. Roughly 10-12% of the population is some flavor of gay. You probably have more than 10 characters, do the math.
Auror
