Labeled to Death
Humans are born into a world and taught by label. A is for apple and B is for Butterfly. We grow up identifying things by which they were taught to us. O is for orange, P is for penis and Q is for queer. There are compartments for everyone and everything. The society created by people for people tell people exactly where they ought to be. It all goes along smoothly until you hit a hole in the road, also known as you no longer fit in.
It doesn’t matter if you are completely normal or completely nuts. Sooner or later you don’t fit in somewhere and it disturbs you. I know this from the very straight-laced folks I was raised up by. No matter how much they went to church, bought everything the neighbors bought or said everything the neighbors said; they were still struggling to fit in and just be accepted by their society.
I noticed the differences in people around me, but mostly in myself. It was a rare day when I agreed with anyone about anything when it came to what I wanted to do with myself. After I was born I was repeatedly told by the people around me that I was a sexually straight, religiously Catholic, ethnically German man of the white American race. I have been denying all of that ever since.
Over the last 30 years I have repeatedly found myself in situations where I am surrounded by people who have nothing in common with me other than being human. The silly thing about what I just said is that the most important commonality among us is the least respected. I find the fact that we are human is usually the last thing anyone wants to bring up. People want to talk about their differences and what those differences make them. They’ll talk about rich vs. poor, black vs. white, trans vs. cis, and gay vs. straight.
All of my life I have battled label for label and insisted that I am labelless. The person I battled the most about labels was myself. What mattered most when all the cards were out was what I taught myself to label. It was society who put them there, but it was I who kept them in place.
Just when I thought I had overcome the labels there came a new generation of them. Now we’re arguing about what type of man or woman we are. We’re debating about what shade of gay, straight or bisexual you are. We crawled over the labels of our forefathers to further label the labels and I just wanted to let you know that I don’t give a damn about any of it. The spotlight on the label of transgender these days only seems to heighten people’s need for a label. They aren’t happy with one or the other; it’s got to be many and just the right one!
I don’t give a damn if you are a trans man, woman or animal. I don’t give a damn if you are straight with shades of bi or gay with a speckling of queer. I don’t give a damn if you like to have sex with a lampshade in a whorehouse. I’m tired, in fact I am exhausted, of being labeled not only by you but by myself.
I am done being gay, straight, bisexual, queer, transgender, cisgender, sick, disgusting, perverted, fat, skinny, anorexic, obese, non-conforming, conforming, piggish, dickish, motherf*cker, leather daddy, lady boy, fairy queen, mistress, master and sissy slut. All things I’ve worried about all of my life and all for nothing.
You want to label yourself in order to be something. I want to unlabel myself to be everything. What’s so important about them letting you into a club they never wanted you to be in? Oh, golly Molly, I’m so happy that you fought your way into that room full of people hating your guts. To think you could have formed your own club of people who actually loved you. You could have created the club of forever loving human bodies without labels, types, shades and the guys from Professional Standards and Practices tapping on the window.
They asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I said “Everything.” I wasn’t kidding and I’m still not. All I’ve ever wanted was to experience as much as I possibly can before I drop my body. Because that’s all I am is a body with a brain leading the way. When it is gone I will no longer be a body. When that is so I must, absolutely must, be satisfied that I was so many things that I broke out of all labels and all that is left to be said is I got to be a human.
Category: Transgender Opinion