This. I feel like the more terms we create to specify the nuances of reality, the more niche labels get created to differentiate from that new word. It’s a recursive tree that betrays reality into increasingly disconnected illusion we tell ourselves is reality but isn’t.
I actually yearn for a world where labels don’t really exist the way they do now. I know that sounds crazy at first, but how beautiful a world where you can meet your friend John, and introduce him to someone, and there’s no immediate categorization of this person’s identity. It’s probably a pipe dream, I recognize that, but so many of our definitions now are defined in opposition to something else. Gay is not straight, trans is not cis, bisexual is not gay or straight, ethnic means not white (in our current context).
And it’s not like I think labels are inherently bad, but one of the sayings I try to live my life by is: methods are meant to serve us, not us serve methods. When we make once helpful tools into a false reality, we end up serving the things meant to simply aid us. I don’t know exactly how it would look, and that’s the cool part: I don’t have to, it would be a societal discourse. But to have all these competing, oppositional, binding terms simply be subsumed under personhood. Which of course demands the ending of normative culture: heteronormativity, whiteness, patriarchy, etc. As currently, those are our “normal”.
But in a just society would it be so bad to simply see a person and just let them be them? Maybe it would be, maybe I’m leaving out crucial aspects in my limited, single outlook. But man, I can dream.
This. I feel like the more terms we create to specify the nuances of reality, the more niche labels get created to differentiate from that new word. It’s a recursive tree that betrays reality into increasingly disconnected illusion we tell ourselves is reality but isn’t.
I actually yearn for a world where labels don’t really exist the way they do now. I know that sounds crazy at first, but how beautiful a world where you can meet your friend John, and introduce him to someone, and there’s no immediate categorization of this person’s identity. It’s probably a pipe dream, I recognize that, but so many of our definitions now are defined in opposition to something else. Gay is not straight, trans is not cis, bisexual is not gay or straight, ethnic means not white (in our current context).
And it’s not like I think labels are inherently bad, but one of the sayings I try to live my life by is: methods are meant to serve us, not us serve methods. When we make once helpful tools into a false reality, we end up serving the things meant to simply aid us. I don’t know exactly how it would look, and that’s the cool part: I don’t have to, it would be a societal discourse. But to have all these competing, oppositional, binding terms simply be subsumed under personhood. Which of course demands the ending of normative culture: heteronormativity, whiteness, patriarchy, etc. As currently, those are our “normal”.
But in a just society would it be so bad to simply see a person and just let them be them? Maybe it would be, maybe I’m leaving out crucial aspects in my limited, single outlook. But man, I can dream.