I hate to ever cross the “labels are for cans” street but when they are for someone else’s benefit in spotting, identifying, summarizing you, otherwise for another person’s use more than your own benefit, that’s a red flag to me.
Yeah, sure, oppression is based on the opinion of the privileged class, true, yes-- but if we all identified in the extremely inept, contradicting ways a privileged demographic would label us in order to be realer that would take all self-determination out of our own hands and put it in theirs. It would take away most of the language invented over the past decades that helps us describe our experiences to one another, maybe even some of the least controversial terms. And it would probably be extremely inaccurate anyways, definitely misgendering for many people, full of shame and blame and projection of bedroom activities more than any internal/lateral suspicion or distrust could ever muster. And overall it would just be Awful.
There’s a reason we don’t, or shouldn’t do stuff that way.
You’re not for other people’s use and your identity is not some kind of field-guide to you. It’s primarily straight people that demand people’s interests, identities, whatever to be simplistic, binary, clear, and explicit to them so they can hurt, shun, avoid people they do not consider useful. Else, to sort into porn categories. We don’t need to perpetuate that unto ourselves as well.
Respectability politics do not work. It is not a mystery that the labels that are considered the most “real” or are also ones that straight people find the most comprehensible. And are often the ones that overwhelmingly are capitalized upon once “canned.”
