bucklesinthesun:

telegantmess:

telegantmess:

have likely never felt the flood of relief that there is a WORD FOR WHAT YOU ARE after spending years wondering if you were broken, what was wrong with you, feeling ridiculously isolated and having other people complain about things you can’t change about yourself. If there’s a word for it, that…

I’m just gonna copy and paste this over here:

profoundish replied to your post: I agree! But I think a lot of people are raising the legitimate concern that labels can never be fully identifying. “Bisexual” is honestly not a comprehensive label for me; in order to describe my sexuality fully, I’d need to write an encyclopedia.

Its interesting to me how I never once in the post made a prescriptivist argument, suggesting that everyone must have a label or that they must like it. Nor did I suggest that labels are always freeing, or that coercive labeling is a good thing, or that discovering that you prefer to stay unlabeled is bad. All the post pointed out was that “why does everyone need a label” conversations are often tied into not wanting to recognize privilege, and when those conversations are used to identity police, they become oppressive bullshit pretty quickly (like this post here). Those concerns that you mention are legitimate, though they are reacting to issues surrounding labeling and not anything I actually said.

Because I had a similar problem for a really long time, not having a good way to describe myself and my sexuality and the way my brain works because a single word didn’t seem to be enough. Hell, I think I wrote something exactly like your response here in those days in an attempt to describe myself. So I understand the concerns, and I share them.

I’m just kinda fascinated how so many people projected the prescriptivism on my words. I think it says something about how we expect these conversations to go.

I’m also kind of interested at how the post has developed a bit of a life of its own. So I’m tagging some of the people who have posted concerned reactions in case any of them were curious.

As much as I feel that labels are kind of inadequate for a lot of things (and confining in many cases), there are moments when they can be therapeutic in that their existence indicates that other people are having the same experience as I am. That moment when you can go “I’m not alone” is a good one. Also, taking up a label that applies to you in the service of a good cause can be important.

exactly

(via bucklesinthesun-deactivated2013)

telegantmess:

have likely never felt the flood of relief that there is a WORD FOR WHAT YOU ARE after spending years wondering if you were broken, what was wrong with you, feeling ridiculously isolated and having other people complain about things you can’t change about yourself. If there’s a word for it, that…

I’m just gonna copy and paste this over here:

profoundish replied to your post: I agree! But I think a lot of people are raising the legitimate concern that labels can never be fully identifying. “Bisexual” is honestly not a comprehensive label for me; in order to describe my sexuality fully, I’d need to write an encyclopedia.

Its interesting to me how I never once in the post made a prescriptivist argument, suggesting that everyone must have a label or that they must like it. Nor did I suggest that labels are always freeing, or that coercive labeling is a good thing, or that discovering that you prefer to stay unlabeled is bad. All the post pointed out was that “why does everyone need a label” conversations are often tied into not wanting to recognize privilege, and when those conversations are used to identity police, they become oppressive bullshit pretty quickly (like this post here). Those concerns that you mention are legitimate, though they are reacting to issues surrounding labeling and not anything I actually said.

Because I had a similar problem for a really long time, not having a good way to describe myself and my sexuality and the way my brain works because a single word didn’t seem to be enough. Hell, I think I wrote something exactly like your response here in those days in an attempt to describe myself. So I understand the concerns, and I share them.

I’m just kinda fascinated how so many people projected the prescriptivism on my words. I think it says something about how we expect these conversations to go.

I’m also kind of interested at how the post has developed a bit of a life of its own. So I’m tagging some of the people who have posted concerned reactions in case any of them were curious.