Kay
Hello, my name’s Kay, and I hate labels. Please note that all of what I have to say about labels is informed by my own experiences. This is my opinion, and there are certainly people who don’t agree with me, but I’m hoping I can at least explain and share my perspective with you. We need labels to describe the world around us, it’s how we communicate. We look at a thing, we categorize its attributes, and we give it a name. All well and good. But it becomes dangerous when we use generalizations. We look at a human and we say “okay, this person has a lot of body hair, and male genitalia and more muscle mass. We’ll call it a man.” That was the original label. But then we stopped observing characteristics and then giving a label/. Now we give someone a label, and assume they have all the characteristics of that label that’s kind of what a stereotype is. Ant then we added rules. Men wear pants. Men must be hunters. Men can’t wear makeup, men can’t be overemotional, men can’t show vulnerability, men like sports, men like cars, men are sexist, men repress women. All of sudden man isn’t just a human with specific physical attributes, it has a million plus social connotations and unspoken rules that must be followed. If you don’t follow them, you’re wrong, you’re deviant. The label “man” came to represent a metaphysical concept, a collection of social and cultural assumptions and expectations. And of course, the problem is, that label doesn’t actually apply to anyone. There are men as well as women who don’t have quote unquote male physical attributes, there are men who don’t behave in way that is culturally expected of a man. Some men collect dolls, some men wear dresses, some men drive a truck seventy hours a week and then go home and watch “say yes to the dress.” Not one of those people fits the cookie cutter definition of “Man with a capital M.”
The same problems occur with the label of woman. If you were to poll the street at random asking strangers what a woman is, I bet you’d get a hundred different answers. Most people concoct a sweeping generalization in their head a tangle of characteristics that experience and society have taught them is a woman. None of those labels will be accurate. Not a single one of those definitions can actually encapsulate what a woman is “Man” and “woman” quickly become these amorphous concepts and the more you try to define them the harder they get to define until at a certain point they lose all their meaning. For years, I tried to fit these meaningless labels to myself. There are all these characteristics that come with being a woman that just don’t fit me, there are characteristics of a man that just don’t fit me. Some days I wear boots and a snapback and no makeup, some days I wear a dress and a snapback, sometimes I watch shows about cars sometime I watch cartoons, sometimes I put on makeup and wander around in boxers. Sometimes I wear lace and go to a baseball game. There are no generalizations that fit me, or any other person I’ve met. I’m not a man, I’m not a woman, I’m just me. I’ve stopped giving myself almost any kind of label because not a single one fits. Sure there will be a kernel of truth, but there will also be a bunch of stuff that’s just wrong. And people are too important and wonderful and diverse and interesting to broken down to a single word. How could that ever encapsulate who they are? You say he’s a black man, and that implies so much. But it doesn’t tell you he’s a father, that he’s never been arrested for anything, that he likes to paint, that he steals library books. It just tells you the color of his skin, and a ton of societal undertones and baggage that rarely have any bearing on one specific person.
I’m not proposing we stop using labels. we need labels, they are essential to basic communication. But I urge you to really think about the labels you apply to yourself and other people. Do they mean what you think they mean? Do they have any meaning at all? Regardless, don’t put too much value in them,/ and never rely on them to describe a person with any kind of accuracy. as I said before people are too important and wonderful and diverse and interesting to broken down to a single word.