Labels: Positive or Negative?

[Demigoddess]

Demisexual. Queer. Aromantic. Polysexual.

All of these are labels we use to describe ourselves, our feelings, our orientations, and more. Most people use at least one label to describe themselves to others, but I've recently heard another side of the story: some people, specifically those under the LGBTQQUIA spectrum, feel that these labels do more harm than good. Many have told me that they feel these labels restrict them, rather than describe them, or make them feel like they belong to a community.

Personally, these labels do give me a sense of belonging, and they remind me that I'm not "broken," and that I'm not the only one. How do you feel about your labels? Or just labels in general?

[Kaizen]

Somewhere on Captain Awkward's site someone had what I think is a pretty good analogy for labels (at least how I feel about them): it's like literal labels on a jar. You go to the store, you can find your favorite peanut butter by looking at the label. It helps you identify it. You can look at more details on the label if you want to know more about it. But the label doesn't tell you everything about the peanut butter, stuff you can only find out by actually experiencing it, itself. It just gives you general information about it that you can use to understand it a little.

[Mo]

For me, labels are in a mental category marked "Helpful! Until they aren't."

There have absolutely been points in my life where it was helpful to have words to describe how I felt about my gender, my presentation, and my sexuality; having a label to put to how I was feeling helped me connect with other people and feel a little less lost as I figured things out. But I've found that a lot of my personal identity-feelings don't fit neatly in an established category, so sometimes they feel stifling. There are some labels I'll happily claim and others I have left by the wayside, or only use if I'm in a situation where I know I can't go into great detail and it's better to give someone an incomplete picture of myself than one that's entirely false.

I see identity labels as tools; they can be helpful, and I don't see a reason to throw them out, but that doesn't mean they're good for every job either!

[Jacob]

This is a really interesting topic demmigodess, I love this sort of conversation.

I'm just sitting here thinking about it and another, quite different analogy which comes to my mind is thinking of labels as stepping stones... Just like trying to cross a stream and putting a rock down to get a bit further, I think labels are also something we can jump onto temporarily and use to reach that little bit further towards someone who otherwise might just not get us.

In my life, dyslexia is a good example... I struggle with written tasks, and reading, and when at university I couldn't ask for any support with this unless I got myself on the list of people who were dyslexic. So even though I don't like all the assumptions that go with it... I took the test, which said yes, I struggle with those things, and so I could get that support. That's a really rigid system, where you need those stepping stones, unless I used the label 'dyslexic', I wouldn't be able to get help.

I think in sexuality its similar... So when someone makes assumptions that everyone is straight, I might say "hey there, actually I'm queer, and more of us are than you think", I've used a label to make a point, for that moment when I needed it. But, if I'm dating, I'm probably seeing people who are already on the same page as me and usually don't mind what label I use, they're more interested in whether I'll be a good or bad person for them to date. I feel like those people are already closer to my wavelength so I don't need a label to communicate who I am to them.

[Sunshine]

I've thought about this an awful lot at different times in my life...

For me, one of the problems with labels like "gay" is that as soon as the label is used, the labeled person is often defined by that one trait alone. Know what I mean?

For example, when I was at university, there was this guy who came out after about a year or so. It wasn't an official thing and he hadn't ever claimed not to be gay, he'd just never mentioned it before so most of us didn't know until he started dating another guy in the area and brought him to student events and such. Nobody was nasty about it or gave him / them a hard time or anything, but suddenly he was The Gay Guy and all the other aspects of his identity sort of faded into the background. Even for me, which I was really shocked to notice, because, well, I had thought I was beyond all that. Also, as soon as I knew he was gay, I started to think he looked really gay and that a lot of stereotypes about gay men really applied to him, whereas I hadn't thought about any of those stereotypes in relation to him before. Because these things made me feel guilty, meeting him became really awkward (I mean more awkward than meeting people is for me at all times). Thank goodness he was (probably still is) the kind of person whom you have to work really hard to offend.

I've seen with a very close friend of mine how this sort of thing can cut pretty deep, though, to the point where she's actually asked me "would you still love me if I fell in love with a man?". How can this even be a question? We weren't having sex or were / are romantic partners, so why would I mind if she had feelings for anyone else, male or female? Did she think at that point that if she wasn't gay, her whole self would crumble before my eyes and I wouldn't know her well enough any more to like her? I said I loved her when I first knew her and we were so little we didn't even know what gay was and that ended that discussion, but I'm still kind of chewing on it.

If you put a sticker that says "applesauce" on a jar of applesauce, that's one thing. But if you put a (mental) sticker with one word only on a human being... I don't know. It seems inadequate.

Of course you often need labels for political and / or social purposes. Any time you need the support and visibility of a group, it's good to define who is going to be in it. But I wish we could just see it that way, as "this person is a member of this group. And also this group. And this group..." It doesn't mean they are defined by the group or have anything else in common with any other group member.

As for myself, I want to put as few labels on me as possible.

[Heather]

Just out of curiousity, if anyone's up for it, mind talking about the term "label," period, and thinking about words we use to describe ourselves in any given way as labels, rather than simply as words or adjectives? What makes one word a person uses to describe themselves a label, while another is only an adjective? Are there only some terms people use about some things to describe themselves "labels," while others, also used to describe the self or parts of it, aren't labels?

I always feel confused by this framework as a whole (and it might be a simple matter of generational difference), particularly when it takes what in my view are just words that can be used to describe part of us or a state of being -- much like say, we use "tall" or "short" or "well" or "sick" -- and sets them up as something else or something bigger, or as something where there's some kind of expected or felt limit on the words used, like the idea anyone only gets one for any given part of who they are. Not a critique of this framework or doing that, just something I'd love to hear folks talk more about.

[Jacob]

I think that makes a lot of sense.

I think that's a really important separation... because the framework is the thing which I (and probably other people) feel discomfort with rather than the words themselves.

[Sunshine]

This is getting harder and harder to wrap my little mind around...

I suppose an adjective is a label when it's understood to imply more than the word itself or when it's used to sum up a person's identity or major part of their identity. And I have a problem with labels because I doubt that a single word can adequately do that, but have found out to my dismay that my brain tries it anyway, even though I know it's wrong and I don't want to think that way.

I also have a hard time grasping that some people intentionally label themselves. My understanding is that person A says "I'm gay" and means "I am primarily attracted to people of my own gender", but person B hears: "I am Gay and this is who I am". But sometimes, person A does really mean to say "this is who I am". It confuses the heck out of me, and I don't know how to respond because I don't know what the intended message really is or what is expected of me now.

[Heather]

Here's a thought/question: does anyone feels like an adjective for something to do with identity is more loaded, or might feel bigger, at times of life, like adolescence and emerging adulthood, when (or in general, if this always feels this way for someone) a person might feel like they are trying to latch onto something permanent, or feel like if they DO use a word, it will be thought of as permanent?

Something that comes to mind with this are when adults sometimes respond to young queer people identifying as such with "It's a phase." Of course, pretty much everything in life, and all of who we are, is phasal, and that never means anything is necessarily more or less meaningful, so that always seems silly to me, but you're rarely going to hear someone saying that to a person in their 50s, for instance, even if taking that identity or word for it is new.

Perhaps -- sorry, this is coming out more convoluted and obtuse than intended! -- during times of life when identity feels either so tough to get to OR like every piece of identity is so huge, it's easier for mere words to feel like "labels?"

[Karyn]

Going back a bit to Heather's question about labels vs adjectives, and what makes something a label as opposed to just a word we use to describe ourselves, I've noticed that a lot of the time labels relate to some social category that seems to be important. So I wouldn't tend to think of "tall" or "short" as labels because as a society generally, we don't tend to divide people into groups that get treated differently based on those characteristics. Whereas "gay" and "straight" for example, are labels because they describe not only sexual orientation but the social categories that have been created based on sexual orientation. (Hopefully that makes sense.)

I'm not sure about when/if identity labels tend to feel more important...but it's an interesting point to think about!

[Redskies]

I have some identity-words which are really important to me and communicate important parts of my identity and sense of self, but they're not labels to me. Perhaps because they feel comfy and fitting? Even though they have that importance, I really don't feel defined by them or like any one or all of them sum up my identity. Eg, Bisexual. I love my orientation-words so much, maybe because it was so great to discover that there are other people in the world who share those similarities with me, that the way/s I feel is A Thing, and that in this respect I am not a solitary peculiar soul. I've been in places with a bunch of other bi or bi-umbrella people, and the range of people was so great that I can't think of any "type" of bi person, so i don't feel restricted or limited to any particular way/s of Being.

I didn't use the word in my late teens/early 20s when I was really finding my self and my space with it. It sounded like a label then; I think I assumed that bi people were a certain kind of people, a kind of people I wasn't. For me, information about the world, about what other people meant and thought of when they used the words, was a big player in coming to realise that these were my words. I'd say for me, it wasn't really about permanence, but about "what does this word even mean?" What I was concerned about was not knowing the world well enough, rather than myself, and maybe running into a bunch of trouble because I'd accidentally communicated something I hadn't intended.

I'd contrast how I feel about identity-words I love with words describing political beliefs. On me, those do feel like labels and I mostly avoid using any about myself. I know what I believe, but I'm not very sure if the groups of people who use any of my maybe-words do really share the things with me that are fundamentally important in that context. So, it feels like a big deal and potentially scary and wrong, and a label that might not fit because I don't actually know exactly what I'd be calling myself and what everyone else would understand it as. I'm not worried about things potentially changing, but I Am worried about accidentally saying "I like apples!" when what's true and what I meant is "I like grapes!" I wonder if the scariness and the loadedness is more to do with newness and discovery than specifically age? (I'm not trying to make this Not about age: there's so much discovery throughout adolesence and young adulthood that age automatically becomes a huge player.) I'm a few years later on the learning curve of finding who the people are with similar political opinions to mine and what they usually call themselves than I was with orientation, so I don't yet know if I'll ever have any political-words I like or whether this context works differently for me.

Sunshine: I wonder if what you're getting at is that orientation-words do have different functions and contexts. For "queer" (deliberately using one of mine), there's "I have attractions and/or behaviours that aren't straight", "I belong in the queer community, these are my people" and "my socio-political outlook is queer, I reject those gender and orientation norms". For most people, some kind of combination of those is true, but there can be and often are some giant differences in how much each of those matters for each person, and how much it comes across to everyone else. Is that the kind of thing you're thinking of? I agree, it can be super-complex! I don't think there's an easy answer - and there's certainly no code for automatically understanding what any individual means - but I think we can muddle through by knowing the very general space someone's in from the start and then finding out the rest just by getting to know the individual person as we go along.