Galvanic Ink

Let me preface this post by saying that I’m not a member of this community. My perspective isn’t going to be one in which I try to explain the intricacies of the LGBTQ+ community because I don’t know them. While I know a lot of people in this community, I don’t interact much with them since they tend to live in other cities. This post won’t be one with the intent to enlighten or inform, rather to simply express my own view on a community which is growing in both size and acceptance. But, I’m not really talking about the LGBT community as much as the Q+ community.

You see, while the communities of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders have been growing more greatly understood by people in all walks of life, I still notice that many people I speak with on a daily basis are confused by anything past these four primary orientations. We can all understand that lesbians are homosexual women; gays are homosexual men; bisexuals are both men and women whom are attracted to both men and women; and transgenders are people born of one gender which later transition to a different gender (be that men-to-women or women-to-men). Easy. But it becomes more confusing the further you go on the list.

For example: a large number of people couldn’t tell you what the functional difference is between gays and queers. Let alone the difference between bisexuals and pansexuals or agender and asexual. I’ve done many internet searches throughout the years, but I don’t think I will ever retain the meanings of fluid, omnisexual, intersex and others. All of these different and extensive descriptors just get confusing to a lot of people and, more often than not, I’m told some variation of ‘I have nothing against them, but can we just stop labeling every little thing?’

Well, the answer to that is a resounding ‘yes’. But, not because people necessarily want to. We live in a society which has forced labels onto us. Gay, straight, male, female… it doesn’t really matter what the label is. Labels have been around since before recorded history. It’s one of the things that have made it easier for us to wrap our head around complex topics. However, the label doesn’t have any true substance to it.

Take currency for example. Money isn’t a real thing. It’s just a way for us to identify some degree of worth (we won’t be going into the corruption of money, just the vague description). When a person works hard, they may posses a certain amount of money. This money represents the value of their contribution to society. When you have little money, it may be seen as though you contribute little to society. But the money itself doesn’t have any true value on its own. I could take a stack of $100 bills to Fiji and the natives would find it hard to care about me.

Money only exists to keep track of the contributions of a person when we don’t know the person well enough to determine their contributions without it. Of course, this is only in an idealized materialistic society. We can all recognize that this isn’t the case in reality. Much the same with labels.

A label doesn’t mean anything. It is only a descriptor that allows us to understand some aspect of an individual’s personality. The personality, like the contribution to society, is the thing that has tangible worth. When a gay man meets a straight man, he can assume that the straight man has little worth to him in regard to sexual or romantic intimacy (Please keep in mind that we are only talking about a person’s romantic worth, not their overall worth. These are two very different qualities and the overall worth is far more nuanced and subjective to be explained in a simple post).

It is important in such a label-based society that you label each minor factor that can determine another person’s compatibility with you. I would never be compatible with a lesbian, so it’s imperative that I recognize the label so as to not offend her or put myself in a compromising position. If you aren’t compatible with someone who is transgendered, then you should be able and willing to recognize their label.

We can now extend these labels past the big four. What happens when someone doesn’t feel comfortable identifying as one of these? If a person was born a female, doesn’t feel the need to transition genders and doesn’t feel at home with the labels of straight, lesbian or bisexual? Should we force them to pick one and get over it?

As mentioned previously in my post on body modifications, when you are forced to present as something you aren’t, you suffer from a lack of confidence and personal identity. Being allowed to outwardly present the way you feel on the inside, you become happier and more confident. Should we simply deprive these people of this benefit just because we don’t understand why they would rather identify as omnisexual? Isn’t that fairly selfish of us?

After all, the way someone identifies has little to no impact on our lives. Neither party would be happy if I were forced into a relationship with a lesbian, so knowing that a relationship would be better avoided, we would simply part romantic ways and find someone that makes us happy. Identifying and accepting a person’s orientation literally has no downsides. Why should this be something we reject?

One thing to remember is that not all orientations are created to house a group of thousands of people. If one girl is born who grows up to fall in love with a male peer, we might consider her to be a straight woman. But in her head, she may not have fallen in love with him because she is attracted to men. She may have felt little to no attraction to either men or women before this particular man came along. She may have fallen for only his personality and is only intimate with him because she enjoys sex and he is the one she is okay having sex with. For these reasons, she might reject the label of ‘straight’. She may easily have fallen in love with a woman who had the same personality. If she doesn’t identify as ‘straight’, what should she identify as?

The answer isn’t as important as the message. If a person is born who feels uncomfortable for their entire life because they don’t identify with any particular label they have ever heard of, is it our right to tell them that they can’t own a label that they came up with? Some (albeit, not many) labels in the LGBTQ+ community only exist for a tiny group of people who have never felt comfortable identifying with any of the other labels they have heard of before. This fact shouldn’t omit them from being accepted by society as a whole. The LGBTQ+ community, and others like it, tend to extend it’s arms to anyone who needs to be accepted with a label that might otherwise get them rejected. The power of this acceptance cannot be understated.

The LGBTQ+ community has a large rate of suicides. This isn’t because of the ridiculous amount of labels, but because of the outside community’s unwillingness to accept those who deserve to be accepted. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what a person’s label is. The label only exists to help these individuals find acceptance and to help others recognize degrees of compatibility.

I didn’t feel the need to write this post because I wanted to explain what the Q+ community is, rather than why it needs to exist. Living in a world without labels would only cause more confusion when trying to understand others. It would only cause more depression and isolation in those who think they are the only ones who have ever felt a certain way.

Yes, it’s kind of annoying to try and memorize the countless new labels which have popped up since the 90’s, but it’s not on you to learn them. It’s not on you to understand them. It’s not even on you to ever think about them. It’s only on you to accept that they exist and not be a prick about it. That’s all anyone’s asking.