"There are too many labels these days!”
If a new label was created every time I heard someone say these words, there would be twice as many as there already are, and I can't deny that there are currently a LOT. However, in the eyes of many (particularly Baby Boomers and Gen. Xers), people can only be gay or straight, male or female. There are no other options. You have to be something, but anything outside those narrow binaries is deemed either too confusing to bother understanding or simply made up.
I discovered the term "asexual" when I was in 8th grade. I Immediately, I recognized myself in it and started openly using it to describe myself. Pretty soon, I encountered a lot of fun responses, responses that almost every out ace/aro/bi/pan/trans/non-binary/etc. "labeled" person has dealt with. “That’s impossible.” “That’s weird/confusing.” “That will change.” “You’re too young to know.” Rinse and repeat this paragraph with a few more uber-specific terms describing my romantic orientation.
Maybe all of those typical response statements are founded and true. And even if they are, I should still be allowed to use whatever damn label I want. Because if you feel it, it's real. On Tuesday, I listened to a segment of NPR’s Brand Over Brain podcast entitled “Is Authenticity Real?” In his interview, Joseph Pine asserted that “there is no such thing as an inauthentic experience” because experience itself is internal. It is impossible to have a dishonest emotional response. So whatever you experience exists simply because you’re experiencing it. The question that remains is how to describe it.
All that a label does is describe what you are experiencing or have experienced. They are mere adjectives. There is no inherent category; we create the categories by creating the words that describe them. So yes, these identities are technically made up. But that’s just how language works! If I had an accurate Magic 8 Ball or an Alethiometer (the truth-telling device from The Golden Compass), it wouldn’t be able to say whether anyone is truly [insert label here]. The best that I, or any of us can do is to pick the word that’s the most accurate. It would feel dishonest if I called myself a word that doesn’t truly describe me; at this moment, I and many, many others are not comfortable identifying as hetero or homosexual. But without a label, we can't describe ourselves and may even feel we lack identity. It is straight up naïve to maintain that there are a small, fixed number of ways of experiencing life, especially in areas as complicated as gender and sexual/romantic orientation.
Labels are personally important to me. They provide me with a sense of identity. They make me feel like what I’m experiencing is valid and real and okay. They bring me together with other people who feel similarly. You deserve to accurately communicate who you are. We all do. But after receiving the above responses, I was embarrassed. I stopped telling people I identified on the asexual spectrum for years, substituting that I "hadn't been sexually awakened" or was "just not very sexual" or was "waiting for the right person." All of those things were true when I said them! But they didn't negate my asexuality, which merely describes my lack of sexual interest in people.
Labels don't have to be permanent. My choice to describe myself using a certain word is not a denial of the fact that things can and might change. People change. Sexuality, especially, is fluid, and I believe gender can be as well. But I don’t know how I’m going to change, or whether this part of me will. None of us can know. So why not just call yourself the thing that best describes you as you are NOW? I’m not going to preemptively say I’m heterosexual, just in case one day I want to have sex with only men. I don’t know whether that will happen, and I should be allowed not to know. Why pressure a person to predict their own future? Why not let us live the most stress-free, honest, flexible, HAPPY lives we can? We change every day. Labels can accommodate that. Labels can accommodate ANYTHING, because we’re the ones who make them!
At the end of the day, labels are about what means what to you. No one exactly fits the definition of a word. By someone else’s standards, I might be something totally different than what I call myself.There are a million weird, messy gray areas--WE are a million weird messy gray areas!--but we have to do the best we can in grasping for identity.
What is wrong with using a descriptive word to communicate what we experience, however temporarily it may be? Why not get specific? Why not learn some new words? Maybe one of them will even apply, and maybe you'll suddenly understand something about yourself you've been unable to articulate your whole life! Embrace labels! Stick on every label that applies! Or don't, and that's okay too. But even if you choose not to, remember that we're all in control of what we call ourselves. I’m sorry it’s so confusing. It’s just gonna be confusing. I'm confusing, you’re confusing. We’re all confusing. But some of us need labels to help diminish our confusion about ourselves just a tiny bit.
