Labels don’t define people. People define labels.
I was reading an article in LGBTQNation the other day explaining how many ways one may interpret and define queerness, nodding my head throughout because I am familiar with the labels in current use for us non-binary, hard-to-define types. Many of us have chosen to avoid single definitions and instead opt for a small stream of labels to pinpoint where we stand on the sex and gender side of life. For example, I identify as Queer, Bi, BDSM-Pansexual (i.e., sex and gender are less important than a BDSM connection), Dominant, cis-female, poly, and indeed I’m all those things but also none of them.
For example, I’m functionally bisexual — my long-time female submissive partner is my wife, but overall, I’m far more sexually attracted to men (gay, straight and trans) than to women (lesbian, straight and trans). The exception is when the woman is into BDSM. Then she jumps high up the scale of hotness for me, and I desire her more than any non-kinky man — which is what makes my marriage to my beautiful kinky wife possible. My husband is similar: he identifies as het, but gender doesn’t really matter as much as the person’s enthusiasm for BDSM.
Similarly, while I’m a cis-female and I’m comfortable with it now, I wasn’t for most of my youth. I didn’t like my female body, hated my breasts, had huge anxiety about people messing with my vulva, and wished I was a gay man with the kind of body that turned me on. I definitely felt like I had more in common with gay men than with most of the patriarchy-poisoned straight guys I hooked up with.
Lovers occasionally said, “You’re like a man in bed” because I had few inhibitions about initiating or taking the lead. It used to make me happy to hear that, although I also suspected they were kind of negging me because they were flustered at a woman who didn’t act all disempowered and ashamed in bed, or shy about playing with a penis, and who seemed so comfortable setting boundaries and expressing likes and dislikes. They defined “woman” as “passive and clingy.” That wasn’t me. I never felt like a “real woman” because of it. I never dreamt about a perfect wedding either, much less wearing a white gown and a frilly blue garter. I tried it once in my confused 20s and felt like I was in drag the whole time. I married Will wearing black leather and lace. That was so me.
And, yes, functionally I’ve been dominant for my entire BDSM life of 35 years, but I also bottomed early on, persuaded by a male dom friend that I needed to learn from the bottom up (insert *eye-roll* here). Yeah, no, I don’t believe that anymore. I don’t think a naturally dominant person can experience what a naturally submissive person experiences on the same spiritual and psychological levels. I see how it is for my girl and I know I could never go to that place of total trust and mystical surrender. I never had those fantasies, hate pain and discomfort, and never felt the kind of passion she and other subs have for pleasing. At the same time, I know that nothing is fixed in stone when it comes to sexual identity. I mean, what if I crushed on the hottest, sweetest, toppiest Daddy in the universe and he wanted to do me? Would I turn that down? YOLO!
Finally, I’m poly, but not really that either. My triad refers to ourselves as poly as an easy way to explain our family. But functionally, we’re more Old Guard Leather. Our sub is monogamous to/with the two of us, but both Will and I maintain the privilege of doing whatever and whomever we want if that itch needs scratching. I’m just flat out non-monogamous because I have always felt rigid monogamy was inhumane. I saw so many unhappy marriages among my parents’ friends, it just made no sense to me that anyone would lock themselves down to one person when whole worlds of pleasure existed.
I’m glad we have a metric shit-ton of labels these days because it shows me people are increasingly embracing the innate diversity in our species. They’re not satisfied with the narrow old labels. If they’re going to be labeled, they want words that at least more accurately represent them on their terms. Good! People have just as much of a right to invent new labels as the old pseudo-scientists had in the first place. Labels don’t define people. People define labels.
I no longer believe in the concept of sticking clinical labels on people except for clinical convenience (to be aware of individuals’ needs) and demographic research, for stuff that happens in doctors’ offices or research labs and nowhere else. The people who invented the concept of sex and gender labels in the first place were the Victorians and, as with nearly all of their sex “science,” they got most things wrong, egregiously wrong. They made up male-privileged explanations for why they were right and kept hammering on malicious ideologies long into the 20th century. You know, like trying to convince people that if they jerked off or had sex outside of marriage, their brains would rot and their genitals shrivel. They wrote volumes on how women didn’t naturally have a sex drive and those who did were nymphomaniacs. They defined homosexuals as criminals or “mental defectives” or both and said they suffered from sexual inversion. Lesbians barely existed and when they did, they were unnatural anomalies labeled Tribades. Words cannot describe the nauseatingly hateful European male privilege that disguised itself as objective science in early psychiatry.
Sex and gender labels have created universal malice, social divisiveness, and heartlessly bad medicine. The idea that societies and legal systems today categorize social rights according to patriarchal labels, and that we legally harass and socially ostracize people according to who they like to sleep with, how they identify, or what they like to do in bed is anti-humanitarian. Building a social hierarchy on that basis is a monstrous social injustice. It’s dangerous nonsense that promulgates hatred and inequality.
It has led to malcontent heterosexuals using the labels as an excuse to declare themselves the ruling elite. Fuck that. We are all human beings. We all deserve the same human rights. We don’t need to be labeled. I’m queer af but one day I’d like to see the world move forward to labeling everyone as simply HUMAN, equal in rights, liberties, and dignity.
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