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A thread about labels (because for some reason that is what I am thinking about today).
I see a lot of people treating identity labels as prescriptive, rather than descriptive. That's a problem. This fuels so much discord within and towards the queer community. (1/too many)
I see a lot of people treating identity labels as prescriptive, rather than descriptive. That's a problem. This fuels so much discord within and towards the queer community. (1/too many)
It's important to remember that most of these labels are decades old, at best, and that their meaning is socially constructed and fluid. That's just how language works. That's not to say that they are meaningless, or not useful. Just that they are only descriptors. (2/?)
You could ask 5 different bisexual people what bisexual means to them, and get 5 different answers. That doesn't mean that 4 of them are wrong. It means that the word means something a bit different as self-applied to each of those people. (3/?)
Finding the label(s) you identify with can be a freeing and rewarding process, so it is understandable that once people find labels that work for them, they become protective of those definitions. (4/?)
If someone is a lesbian and to them that means they are only attracted to women, it is easy to see someone else who uses that term in a different manner and say "you are doing it wrong! And that muddies the waters about what people think about me!" (5/?)
Well, those waters are already muddy as hell. Continuing with this example, an argument I see often is that the existence of bi lesbians will make men think that it's okay to continue hitting on a woman when she tells him she is a lesbian. (6/?)
If men won't leave you alone when you tell them you aren't interested, is that the fault of some bi lesbian existing elsewhere? No, it's the fault of men who don't respect consent! Labels being misused aren't the issue here, predatory men and rape culture are. (7/?)
I see people treating labels like RPG classes. "If you take a level in gay, you unlock these abilities. But remember, while you can multi-class in gay and trans, you can't multi-class in gay and non-binary." That's not how any of this works. (8/?)
When I started to figure out my gender, I put a lot of weight on answering the question "am I trans?". It wasn't until I reframed the question as "how do I see myself, how do I want others to see me, and what do I want to do about it?" that I could find myself. (9/?)
After I figured that out, it turned out that I wanted to use she/her pronouns, use a feminine-coded name, present more feminine, take HRT, and be put into the broad social category of 'woman'. Then, it turned out that the label "trans woman" was a useful shorthand. (10/?)
I see this misunderstanding at the root of a lot of groups that spread hatred: exclusionists, transmeds, even TERFs. TERFs for example will cling so tightly to their definition of 'woman' that they refuse to accept someone they see as different from them using that label. (11/?)
Transmeds will cling to a rigid definition of what it means to be trans, that if you don't do X, Y, and Z, then you haven't earned the right to call yourself trans. Like my previous examples, they claim that someone different from them using the same label hurts them. (12/?)
I guess my point with all of this is: stop? Please just stop? This isn't helping anyone. Use the labels you find useful to describe who you are, and stop policing others. There are far too many cops in the world already. (13/END)
