What label/s do you use to describe yourself?
It’s a fair question to ask because to relate and connect in the social world we need to define and differentiate. Labels are useful, they give us an indication of a person’s lived experience, orientations, inclinations, preferences, political leanings, and how they navigate the world.
I could say I’m a Gender Queer* person, assumed female at birth (AFAB), transmasculine*, living with several disabilities and from a mixed-race background, and very, oh so very radiantly Queer – yet what does that actually tell you about who I am?
In my mind, it doesn’t say much about who I am. The same goes if answering that question no matter how anyone identifies, or what labels they use.
We’re stardust, fungi, carbon, pollen, sunlight, electricity, plastic, and various technologies……..remember, we have more in common than we do in difference.
We live in a colonised, patriarchal regime that fetishises identity and fixedness. This informs how we perform, present, and reproduce ourselves, and how we read the world. When we internalise these assumptions and attachments around fixity and labels, we’re likely forgetting that we’re in evolution, we a ‘becoming’; we’re fluid, not fixed. We’re fractals, mandalas, flow, and energy, not the reductive, fixed labels we assign to determine which boxes we ‘fit’ into.
Why are, and when are labels important?
At 18, as a ‘baby-dyke’ in 1996, a good friend took me to a gender clinic in Brisbane. The practitioner ‘Diag-Gnonsensed’* (diagnosed) me as a ‘transman’* yet I knew I wasn’t a man. This wasn’t the label for me, nor who in my heart I knew I was and still am. The consensus of the other Queer people around me was that I was ‘bi-gendered’. I wasn’t going to transition as, or to a man so instead I got a ‘bi-gender’ symbol tattoo and left it at that. Interestingly, at present any term with the word ‘bi’ in it could be considered politically incorrect, as ‘bi’ implies only two, and infers inhibitive binary and dualistic notions.
Non-ableist language changes over time too. When I was working with PWD*, we used entirely different language to refer to PWD. I’m unsure if I want to write those labels down now (so that within itself is testament to how labels change over time). I feel comfortable writing that we used the adjectives ‘People with different abilities’. Yet now, 17 years later one could see how this could read as dismissive of PWD, as we ALL have different abilities.
We are not our abilities, our gender, our sex, our race, our background, and/or our sexuality we are not even our identity – we so, so very much more.
Labels reduce the most expansive aspects of our common humanity; compassion; love; vulnerability; kindness; intimacy; humour; tenderness and care and reduce them to fixed descriptive terms. Labels can dehumanise and subjugate us into having limited identities, yet it’s the attachment to these labels I feel, that undoubtedly causes issues.
We develop alliances, groups, and entire cultures based on our attachments to these labels. Please consider how many groups you’re involved in where you’ve had to self-identify to join. Eg. a sports team, health center, or services you access. In considering our attachment to the changing meanings that we assign to reductive labels, I ask you: how can we form quintessential connections? And do these groups exclude people who have no discernable labels? To me, this demonstrates how investing in attachments to labels can be dangerous, damaging, and debilitating.
So yes labels are important, yet labels aren’t relevant in all situations or contexts, and certainly not from all perspectives.
When we let go of our attachments to labels, we can embrace the knowing that we all need love; we all ARE love, that we all deserve to have our basic human rights respected and we all have different abilities at different times, regardless of what labels we assign.
Danny – Academic, Advocate, Educator, Public Speaker, and Volunteer
*Gender Queer – This is a term I use to refer to myself as someone who does not identify with a specific, congruent, consistent, fixed or traditional gender. People who are gender queer may not identify with a gender at all, or at times identify with a gender outside of the gender-binary. Being Gender Queer, is inherently, Queer, and thus is essentially indefinable within our current discourse.
*Transmasculine – This is a term often used by people who were AFAB, and who identify, embody, and/or present moreso on the masculine aspect of the gender continuum. This definition is predicated on the assumption that there is a gender continuum.
*Diag-Gnonsensed – This is a play on the term ‘diagnosis’. It’s a term I use so as to take back my power after many years of being (overly) pathologised as a transgender person, and a nod to the concepts of Gnosticism and nonsense. It is not intended to take away from the legitimacy of diagnoses as being largely helpful and relevant.
*PWD: People With Disabilities
For further information:
- Watch our Round Table Talk where Danny, together with storytellers Emily, Garth, and Dan share their experiences.
For community-based glossary of labels and terms
For basic information and an introduction to Queer Theory
For Government issued information on common LGBITQA+ labels and terms
- The Gender Centre Inc
