hey cas, english isn't my first language and youre an english teacher so i thought id come to you with my question ( i love the emoji)
why can we say "im a lesbian" but not "im a gay"
like why does gay/bi/trans/etv have to be followed by man/woman/person/bean/wtv but lesbian can be jsed both ways?
pls it's been deiving me insane
Okay so I'm going to break this down into simplest terms for others who are reading, in case they're not sure. I'm not implying that you're stupid, just so you know!
Let's start with some (very simplified) definitions. I acknowledge that a lot of these terms are much more complicated, but just for this, I'm going to use simple, educational terms.
Noun: a part of speech; a person, place, thing, animal, or idea
Adjective: a part of speech; a word that describes a noun
Article: multiple definitions, but in this case it is a word placed in front of a noun to make it general or specific (a, an, or the)
Gay: ADJECTIVE; attracted to people who are the same gender
Lesbian: NOUN; a gay non-man
SO given these definitions, let's look at these phrases:
If we replace the words with the definitions, here's what we get:
'The (non-man who is gay).'
'The (attracted to the same gender).'
We can see now, based on definitions, the first phrase is grammatically correct because it contains an article (the) and an adjective phrase (who is gay) that are both attached to an implied noun (non-man). HOWEVER, the word 'gay' does not imply a noun. It is simply a describing word, so to say 'the gay' would be incorrect because the article 'the' is supposed to be used with a noun, as is an adjective. To make it complete, we would have to say 'The gay person.'
TL;DR, because the word 'lesbian' implies that it is a non-man, it turns the word into a noun, not just an adjective. So we can use the articles 'a' and 'the' with that word.
Also it's worth it to note to others who are reading that to say 'the gay' or 'a gay' could be taken as offensive, especially if you are not in the community.
I hope this makes sense? English is stupid...