Identity
and labels seem to be surfacing a lot in my life at the moment. I even did my “Freelance”
project based on this idea. I had a coworker yell to me the other day “Hey
Lady! Welcome to work!” I was in a hurry to get inside and clock in for my
shift, so I responded in passing “Hey, but I’m not a lady,” and kept right on
walking. He later tracked me down all concerned that he’d somehow offended me.
He apologized several times before I got him to chill out, because I wasn’t at
all offended, and I told him exactly that. He says, “Well, okay, but what are
you? You’re not a lady, so does that mean you identify as a man?” Clearly this
guy operates in a binary world; man/woman, girl/boy, lady/gentleman. My
response was “Are those my only two options?” We ended up talking about labels
and identity for quite a while, but fortunately, he’s an open minded enough guy
that we were able to have that conversation and he walked away with a better
understanding of me and my dislike of binaries.
Labels are a funny thing. I don’t
like them much myself because they form small boxes with little wiggle room for
personal identity. They could function as mini closets in a way. Closest can
make people feel safe but they can also be oppressive. I know many who have
used them to keep themselves safe because of where they were living, working,
or because of how closed minded their families were. Closets can protect from
discrimination, assault, or harassment, but they can also infringe on personal
growth and a fully authentic identity. Labels are similar in that they can feel
constraining.
There’s a “How Gay Are You” test
floating around Facebook in the last few days, so for kicks, I decided to take
it knowing full well that I’d probably rank up there with the queerest of them
all. All in all, the questions were largely lame, yet mildly entertaining. The
title I ended up with was “Traditional labels are meaningless,” which was a
little surprising because I didn’t expect them to have that option. I figured that
the test would be fairly binary Gay/Straight with slight variations in between
(super straight, mostly straight, kinda straight, kinda gay, mostly gay,
entirely gay) because that’s what I’d seen so far. I certainly do adhere to the
idea that “traditional labels are meaningless” and have lived outside the
traditional binary most of my life.
I don’t label myself as a lesbian because
the definition of “lesbian” is smaller than I am, with little wiggle room,
making it feel oppressive to me. One would need to identify as a woman to use
that term, one would also need to be exclusively interested in (cis)women, and
never step outside of that. I know people who identify as a lesbian who
occasionally sleep with men, or who are transwomen, but I’ve also seen them
field discrimination from the lesbian community for using that label. I’ve also
known people who initially identified as a lesbian who later “came out” as
something else, meaning they lived in the lesbian “closet” for a while, but
then later adopted less structured labels like omnisexual/pansexual.
I was assigned female at birth, but
don’t adhere to the socially constructed roles for women in this society. I don’t
want to be seen as a (white) “man” in this society either though, because I
also don’t adhere to the socially constructed roles for men, nor do I want the
privileges that come with that identity. I am neither exclusively man nor woman,
I’m a mixture of both and everything in between. I’ve primarily been in relationships
that the world views as “lesbian,” though the people I’ve been involved with have
similar identities to myself, so are we really “lesbians?” The butch/femme
dynamic that is typically expected in “lesbian” relationships drives me nuts,
because mostly drawn to female bodied individuals who present on the masculine
end of the spectrum, but that’s too “gay” for some lesbian identified folks.
I am Kriya. I am genderqueer. I am queer. I am transmasculine. I am
non-binary. I get to queer my own identity however I see fit.
What labels are on your closet door?
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