LGBTQI
Why Do You Need to Label Yourself?
And why should I care?
There is an alphabet soup of labels, and I just can’t keep up. Why should I have to? Why can’t people just be themselves and not have to put a label on it?
It’s easy enough to say this, but we only say it when it comes to sex/gender or politics. (I’m not dealing with politics generally right now though, so let’s stick with the sex and gender.) If I tell you that I am a college graduate or that I have a master’s degree, or that I am a college dropout, I am using (or attempting to use) the stereotypes around those labels to help describe myself. If I say that I am five feet and two inches tall with light brown hair, I am painting a picture of myself. Telling someone that I am an orphan is very different from telling them my parents are both dead.
No matter what words I use to describe myself, it will always be a shorthand. It takes a lot of words and a lot of time to talk about ourselves in depth. Labels help us to communicate who we are and to explain where we think we fit into the world. They also help to us to connect with some people while distancing ourselves from others.
For Queer people, labels are not only a way to express who we are and how we think we fit into our lives, they are a way to tell other Queers how we fit into the…
