i don't like labels
Ahoy there!
So, for a while I've started to become more detached and avoidant of labels. Not in the emotionally-unavailable-what-are-we-question-to-your-crush kind of way. I mean self identification and needing to reduce oneself to a series of labels.
I have a friend who is trans and explained that she's Demisexual, or as she rephrased shortly thereafter "bisexual with extra steps". She later started to lament about how a lot of people in queer spaces have this sort of obsession with "identifying" as something in an attempt to try to fit in, when it often does the exact opposite.
I think sometimes to that video my friend Suliman posted of a tiktok of someone who is gender non-conforming, giving a laundry list of their neopronouns as well as other identities such as "temporarily able-bodied and cat parent in mental health recovery". We got a good chuckle out of it, but I think it brings to light the almost absurd lengths we go to put labels on ourselves.
I sympathize with wanting to find common ground with people, if you're someone with ADHD it makes sense you'd want to find other people who are ADHD. But when you start trying to package yourself into these hyper-niche boxes just to be "not like them", it gets a bit weird more often than not.
I find we are better off being overly elaborate in our language. For example, if you ask me about my sexual orientation, I'll probably just shorthand it to "straight". In reality, if you asked me to specify my type, I'd say vast majority women, but femboys are on the table too. You might think "that actually makes you Bi" or "that actually makes you heteroflexible". I don't care, it's largely irrelevant, I'm happily married to a cis woman and never been romantically involved with someone of the same gender or sex-at-birth. It becomes pointless to a certain extent and a waste of energy.
Look if you wanna call me something else, that's fine, but I'm not gonna waste the energy trying to exactly determine what category I can get stuffed into. I'm certainly not going to be emphatic about any of it either. I'm not gonna argue with you over it to defend a certain identity.
I feel like labels once they get too specific end up leading to more fracturing.
For example, retro gamer can help you find other people who play older games. But if you "identify" as a "Semi-Nintendo 3rd Generation Retro Gamer" I'm gonna look at you like you just grew a 5th head.
Another example, left-wing spaces particularly online, you get the anarchists arguing with the Marxist-Leninist arguing with the Maoists arguing with the Democratic Socialists. At a certain point, you just gotta say "fuck the label, lets overthrow the ruling class and figure out the petty politics afterwards".
We begin to focus less on where we align and pushing forward because we are too busy arguing theory and semantics.
Which speaking of semantics, that's what it seems a lot of labels are. Just nitpicking semantics. At a certain point you gotta ask yourself what difference does it make? What difference does it make if I'm a "girl dad" or a "boy dad", I'm just a fucking dad. If you find you can ONLY relate to people with the exact label as you, that is a problem of YOU and your inability to talk past superficialities. If your entire personality can neatly fit in a post-it note, that makes you less interesting of a person in my book.
Religious sects are like this too. At some point all Christian sects are just some variation of Protestant.
To a point, all a label does is detract from getting to know the person. Part of me wonders if all this fixation on labels comes from social media. You only got X number of characters to put in your bio, better make 'em count.
It's kinda the same irk I have with calling blue a "boy's color" or pink a "girl's color". It just feels like nonsense to win some kind of purity Olympics and enforcing in-group/out-groups within in-groups/out-groups.
It can also have the impact that people don't understand the label to begin with and thus you have to further clarify anyway. An anti-Zionist to one person is going to look different to another depending on what definitions each person is working under. One might just think you are an antisemite because of the context of how anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism do become intertwined the other might think you are just anti-Israeli government.
You're honestly just better off explaining the verbose and letting the other person define whatever that means in their head.
Idk, I'm just spitting my brain at this point. Feel free to yell at me or say I'm missing/oversimplifying.
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