A conversation I had over the weekend while coming out to family/talking to family about my asexuality prompted this little rant. Family says: “I don’t like labels, why do we have to go around labeling everything? Can’t it just be whatever you are you are?”
Labels are things that are assigned by other people to you, like when someone externally throws around the words nerd or jock. A label isn’t a label if it is what you call yourself. What you call yourself is the way you identify, your identity. The conflation of label and identity is just as bad as the conflation of sex and love, the conflation of sex and gender, and the conflation of behavior and orientation.
We should:
1) stop labeling other people for them. We (asexuals) don’t want to be labeled by external forces any more than any other group else wants to be.
2) talk about how labeling is something done by others to us, not the internal process of using language to describe what your world experience is. Deconflation, anyone!?
3) Let people self-identify the way they view themselves and the experiences they’ve had in the world, and then reflect those identities back in genuine ways.
Self-identifying gives people a way to describe their experience in their own words, use terms they are comfortable with, and be selective about what they share or don’t share. Self-identity can change over a lifetime just the way that interests or hobbies or where you live can change. I don’t look at a Californian and say “Oh my god you’re so Southern” without knowing first that that person identifies as from the South (for the record, I do identify as from the South/a Southern woman). Instead I might say, “You are so hospitable, it reminds me of my Southern roots.” Then if they self-identify too, now we’ve got something in common.
When someone suggests that we’re all just labeling ourselves into the very boxes we seek to destroy, I think about labeling the leftovers or label a notebook for school. A notebook and leftovers lack sentience and can’t define themselves (if they could we’d live in a very interesting world indeed) so we need to provide a label for them. This translates to the human experience is when we “provide” labels for those who “can’t” provide them for themselves. People try to guess your identity in the form of assigning you a label. Wouldn’t it be easier to just ask how you identify?
Just some thoughts. Anyone else spending massive time with family in the graduation season and having interesting acey discussion?
