Labels - Tumblr Posts

I know- Right?!? --Why don't they just call 'em "Sea Dogs" instead?

Seals (& Sea Lions) Are Pretty Much Aquatic Dogs.

My gender is a void, a void containing a myriad of swirling galaxies, pulsing nebulae and white-hot quasars. Just like the universe, it's true identity can never be known by myself, much less anyone who has never experienced it

So “Meet the Artist” things where going around a while back, so ... have a self portrait, and some fun facts about how I normally look when I draw for you guys (i.e. when I’m at home on weekends and stuff)

you know, I think its best for you to decide what’s going on.

Source

funny and to the point, affective

The stereotypes do not determine who you are 🏳️‍🌈👌🏼

Isn't it funny how the whole concept of the punk rock movement was to escape stereotypes and labels and to promote the inclusivity of all people and the lovely things that make them different?

Yet, in the process... they labeled themselves, afflicted themselves with one of the most crippling stereotypes and became one of the most non inclusive and gatekeeping groups of all time. Most punk rockers spend more time debating what the definition of "punk" is, and kicking those out of the scene who don't fit their own personal definition, than they do actually chasing their own ideals.

And it's sad. I love the punk rock movement in concept... but the reality is very different.

In my studies and observations, I feel that punk was never about fighting for one specific thing. Punk was about radical individuality and accepting yourself the way you are. It was about fighting the system. It was about bonding together over music and fashion and culture so tightly that they could never break us apart. Yes, punk is a political movement, but it's not just about ONE political belief. It wasn't about what you believed but rather HOW you believed it.

The Ramones and the Sex Pistols were both right wing bands. The Clash was left wing. There's videos of punks from the eighties, the OGs, talking about being conservative and fighting for right wing politics. And in actuality, the whole idea was built on Anarchy anyway, not this dividing, ostracizing, black and white mindset that modern day American politics uses to turn us against each other and make us weak.

Are you fighting for what you believe in? Are you out there being bold and raising hell and never compromising or selling out? Fighting for the greater good of humanity, whatever that is to you? That's punk rock to me. Unfortunately, the new generation of punk rockers doesn't see things that way. Which is alright with me, I suppose. The title isn't worth enough to me to argue with my brothers and sisters over it. I'm just here to rock out and throw up the finger at the Man.

I never wanted the labels anyway.

In summary, punk's not dead. Just confused.

Thinking about how some dumbass tried to compare me to a pedophile because I go by xe/he.

Fun fact: in every single community, theres going to be degenerate freaks. doesn't mean you get the right to go after everyone of the community, just go after the degenerates.

Fun fact number two: most people have pronouns. Yes, that includes you, transphobes. He/him, She/her, They/them, etc. are all pronouns. I think it would be absolutely idiotic to say everyone who has pronouns is a pedophile, because most people again do go by some sort of pronoun. There are also other words that are considered pronouns, such as you, it, me, and I.

Fun fact number three: saying "pRoNoUnS iN bIo" is not the gotcha people make it out to be. In fact, it shows you can't diminish the actual argument, so you go after something unrelated. In simpler terms, it makes you sound stupid.

Fun fact number four: there are more pedophiles that are straight than there are pedophiles in the queer community.

I had a friend, that hated labels. I don't like using labels, either, but certain labels help discover more about yourself. Like falling into those labels helped me discover what I did and did not like, and let me get a better understanding of myself and redefine that label for myself. For my own personal label maker

"But are you SURE you can call youself" buddy, I'm ambivalent about labels you've never even heard of.

It seriously bothers me when people make a fuss about labels. If someone wants to use a lot of labels to describe themselves that is their personal, inoffensive choice and you shouldn’t get mad over it.

“Oh but you aren’t a product on a shelf, you shouldn’t let that define you, labels aren’t that important”

For you! And your experience isn’t universal! There are various reasons for one to use labels, including having a better understanding of themselves. I literally lived in a limbo of not understanding and pushing myself way too hard, to the point where I would hurt myself before I was labeled as autistic and discovered the label asexual.

Labels are quite useful and important to some. If they not for you, that’s valid! But don’t disregard their importance to others or shame people who use them.

To every gamer who has ever sent death threats, SWATted innocent people, DDOS'd companies they dislike, or hacked anyone's accounts to ruin their reputation--

To every Christian who has asserted that all non-Christians are evil, or gone to extremes to get their point across--

To every white person who has harmed another because of their color, or has encouraged supremacy to harmful levels--

To every male who has abused, raped, or maliciously attacked another human being--

To every extremist under every label in every group--

I AM SICK AND TIRED OF YOUR ATTEMPTS TO TARNISH THE NAMES OF INNOCENT PEOPLE.

Every time you selfish idiots commit these acts of malevolent terrorism, I get associated too, and so do all males, gamers, Christians, or whatever else you call yourself. In fact I'm so tired of this that I'm sick of having these labels, simply because they have such a stigma attached to them. All thanks to you. Perhaps no one is perfect, but you've taken it well beyond the line of simply being a misstep.

I hear of your exploits in the news every single day. I know I'm not alone; thousands of people hear about this stuff and feel the same way I do now. Congratulations, you got your attention - your 15 seconds of fame - and now you've ruined life for the rest of us.

Oh that's right, you don't care, do you? Not as long as you get your little laugh in and feel all self-righteous about everything, like you won something. I hope you get what you deserve, because your tirade has hurt far more people than you realize. Even after you have been called out and served justice, the rumors will spread, and the associations will linger, simply because you only thought of yourself.

I'm tired of labels and stigmas and biases and drama. Simply call me a counterexample.

“People like that are why I hate the whole group”

AKA “The 1% of individuals who act in a ‘deplorable’ way (to me) are why I generalize that to all the individuals with the same label who probably don’t do that thing, and then avoid the group because I expect that behavior”

Yes thank you for labeling me that, I love you too

We try so hard...

We try so hard to put the past behind us so rightly where it belongs, however we have a subconscious mind that can start playing tricks and mess with our heart.

I think this can be more so when we start to try and label what we have, labels like:

Boyfriend

Girlfriend

Partner

Couple

Relationship

Together

Using these labels can subconsciously can bring up past bad memories from previous relationships. Where if we just stopped labelling everything and just be in the moment...

This is where mindfulness can actually help us, as mindfulness practises encourages us to stop labelling things and just experience the whole experience through the feelings of the moment.

As part of a mindfulness walk that I lead we encourage you not to label the things that you hear and see, just enjoy the moment and immerse yourself in the full experience of sight, sounds and smells...

This is what we should be doing with everything including our relationships and free ourselves from the past, our subconscious minds and just enjoy being in the moment... because if we keep letting our subconscious minds rule, we will continually retreat away from the things and the people that make us so happy...

~ northern-spark-of-creativity

You can't go back and change the beginning,

but you can start where you are and change the ending...

stop labelling...

NCIS - Jimmy Palmer & Jessica Knight

A note on labels

As I am sure any cat owner will be able to tell you, someone else putting you in a box is entirely different from getting into a box yourself.

i think one of the most important things i’ve learned this last year is how labels are supposed to accommodate and describe us rather than act as strict parameters for who we allow ourselves to be (this applies to pretty much every type of label but i’m more specifically talking abt sexuality here).

for me, the term bisexual best describes my sexuality so it’s what i use. if in the future i realise it’s not a good fit anymore i can just stop using it and either be label-less or find a different one. changing labels doesn’t invalidate the feelings and experiences i’ve had, it just shows i’ve learnt more about myself as a person. it doesn’t mean i lied abt being bi either, just that i’ve figured out it’s not quite who i am.

realising this has made me so much more comfortable about calling myself bi, bc for a long time when i was questioning i was so scared that i was lying bc i didn’t feel i had enough ‘proof’ that this was a term i could use. but it’s not me that has to squeeze myself into the box i think i need to be in, but instead just living and trying new things and if i feel like i’ve found a place for myself i can stay for as long as it feels right - whether that be for good or not.

I’ve been getting a little bored of the stamps I use when I package Etsy orders, so I’ve made myself some address labels! The larger ones are for the customer’s address and the little ones are for the return address. (I did have to edit the top one slightly from how it appears here to give myself more space though.) I was tempted to make more, but I’ll stick with these two for the time being. I have a bad habit of being over-enthusiastic when I make things and ending up with too many to use! My shop: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/sarahfogg

On the issue of the ‘q slur’...

So, yesterday, I got into a rather stupid internet argument with someone who was peddling what seemed to me to be a rather insidious narrative about slur-reclamation. Someone in the ensuing notes raised a point which I thought was interesting, and worrying, and probably needed to be addressed in it’s own post. So here we go:

The word ‘queer’ itself seems to be especially touchy for many, so let me begin to address this by way of analogy.

Instead of talking about “queer”, let’s start by talking about “Jew” - a word which I believe is very similar in its usage in some significant ways.

Now, the word “Jew” has been used as a derogatory term for literally hundreds of years. It is used both as a noun (eg. “That guy ripped me off - what a dirty Jew”) and as a verb (eg. “That guy really Jew-ed me”). These usages are deeply, fundamentally, horrifically offensive, and should be used under no circumstances, ever. And yet, I myself have heard both, even as recently as this past year, even in an urban location with plenty of Jews, in a social situation where people should have known better. In short – the word “Jew”, as it is used by certain antisemites, is – quite unambiguously – a slur. Not a dead slur, not a former slur – and active, living slur that most Jews will at some point in their life encounter in a context where the term is being used to denigrate them and their religion. 

Now here’s the thing, though: I’m a Jew. I call myself a Jew. I prefer that all non-Jews call me a Jew – so do most Jews I know. “Jew” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Judaism, the same way that “Muslim” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Islam, and “Christian” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Christianity. 

In fact, almost all of the terms that non-Jews use to avoid saying “Jew” (eg. “a member of the Jewish persuasion”, “a follower of the Jewish faith”, “coming from a Jewish family”, “identifying as part of the Jewish religion”, etc) are deeply offensive, because these terms imply to us that the speaker sees the term “Jew” (and by extension, what that term stands for) as a dirty word.

“BUT WAIT” – I hear you say – “didn’t you just say that Jew is used as a slur?!?”

Yes. Yes, I did. And also, it is fundamentally offensive not to call us that, because it is our name and our identity.

Let me back up a little bit, and bring you into the world of one of those 2000s PSAs about not using “that’s so gay”. Think of some word that is your identity – something which you consider to be a fundamental and intrinsic part of yourself. It could be “female” or “male”, or “Black” or “white”, “tall” or “short”, “Atheist” or “Mormon” or “Evangelical” – you name it.

Now imagine that people started using that term as a slur.

“What a female thing to do!” they might say. “That teacher doesn’t know anything, he’s so female!”

Or maybe, “Yikes, look at that idiot who’s driving like an atheist. It’s so embarrassing!”

Or perhaps, “Oh gross, that music is so Black, turn it off!”

Now, what would you say if the same groups of people who had been saying those things for years turned around and avoided using those words to describe anything other than an insult?

“Oh, so I see you’re a member of the female persuasion!”

“Is he… a follower of the atheist beliefs? Like does he identify as part of the community of atheist-aligned individuals?”

“So, as a Black-ish identified person yourself – excuse me, as a person who comes from a Black-ish family…”

Here’s the fundamental problem with treating all words that are used as slurs the same, without any regard for how they are used and how they developed – not all slurs are the same.

No one, and I mean no one (except maybe for a small handful of angsty teens who are deliberately making a point of being edgy) self-identifies as a kike. In contrast, essentially all Jews self-identify as Jews. And when non-Jews get weird about that identity on the grounds that “Jew is used as a slur”, despite the fact that it is the name that the Jewish community as a whole resoundingly identifies with, what they are basically saying is that they think that the slur usage is more important than the Jewish community self-identification usage. They are saying, in essence, “we think that your name should be a slur.” 

Now, at the top I said that the word “Jew” and the word “queer” had some significant similarities in terms of their usage, and I think that’s pretty apparent if you look at what people in those communities are saying about those terms. When American Jews were being actively threatened by neo-Nazis in the 70s, the slogan of choice was “For every Jew a .22!″. When the American Queer community was marching in the 90s in protest of systemic anti-queer violence, the slogan of choice was “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” Clearly, these are terms that are used by the communities themselves, in reference to themselves. Clearly, these terms are more than simply slurs.

But while there are useful similarities between how the terms “Jew” and “Queer” are used by bigots and by their own communities, I’d also like to point out that there is pretty substantial and important difference:

Unlike for “queer”, there is no organized group of Jewish antisemites who are using the catchphrase “Jew is a slur!” in order to selectively silence and disenfranchise Jews who are part of minority groups within Judaism. 

This is the real rub with the term queer – no one was campaigning about it being a slur until less than a decade ago. No one was saying that you needed to warn for the word queer when queer people were establishing the academic discipline of queer studies. No one was ‘think of the children”-ing the umbrella term when queer activists were literally marching for their lives. Go back to even 2010 and the term “q slur” would have been basically unparseable – if I saw someone tag something “q slur”, like most queer people I would have wracked my brains trying to figure out what slur even started with q, and if I learned that it was supposed to be “queer”, my default assumption would be that the post was made by a well-meaning but extremely clueless straight person.

I literally remember this shift – and I remember who started it. Exclusionists didn’t like the fact that queer was an umbrella term. Terfs (or radfems as they like to be called now) didn’t like that queer history included trans history; biphobes and aphobes didn’t like that the queer community was also a community to bisexuals and asexuals. And so what could they possibly say, to drive people away from the term that was protecting the sorts of queer people that they wanted to exclude?

Well, naturally, they turned to “queer is a slur.”

And here’s the thing – queer is a slur, just like Jew is a slur, and no one is denying that. And that fact makes “queer is a slur so don’t use it” a very convincing argument on the surface: 1) queer is still often used as a slur, and 2) you shouldn’t ever use slurs without carefully tagging and warning people about them (and better yet, you should never use them at all), and so therefore 3) you need to tag for “the q slur” and you need to warn people not to call the community “the queer community” or it’s members “queer people” or its study “queer studies” – because it’s a slur!

But the crucial step that’s missing here is exactly the same one above, for the word “Jew” – and that step is that not all slurs are the same. When a term is both used as a slur and used as a self-identity term, then favoring the slur meaning instead of the identity meaning is picking the side of the slur-users over the disadvantaged group! 

If you say or tag “q slur” you are sending the message, whether you realize it or not, that people who use “queer” as a slur are more right about its meaning than those who use it as their identity. Tagging for “queer” is one thing. People can filter for “queer” if it triggers them, just like people can filter for anything else. Not everyone has to personally use the term queer, or like the term queer. But there is no circumstance where the term “q slur” does not indicate that you think queer is more of a slur than of an accurate description of a community.

If I, as a Jew, ever came across a post where someone had warned for innocent, positive, non-antisemitic content relating to Judaism with the tag “J slur”, I would be incensed. So would any Jew. The act of tagging a post “J slur” is in and of itself antisemitic and offensive.

Queer people are allowed to feel the same about “q slur”. It is not a neutral warning term – it is an attack on our identity.

I don't wanna be gay

I still wanna love girls

And I still wanna be a girl

I just don't wanna be

GAY

What's with all the labeling??

I don't like it

I wish love was really just love

And that's it...

Hot take but rigid divisions between queer identities and heavily-policed labels that are treated like diagnoses are really, really bad.

Trans men have shared histories with lesbians who have shared histories with bisexual women who have shared histories with ace people who have shared histories with aro people have shared histories with gay men who have shared histories with trans women who have shared histories with nonbinary people who have shared histories with etc etc etc etc etc.

Labels are important for people who want them, but we need to stop treating sexuality and gender as rigid boxes and checklists.

Tgirl Moans about Labels

Despite the title, I'm going to be moaning about microlabels (and briefly, pansexuality); however, you should be aware that I DO NOT think less of people that use obscure neo pronouns or labels.

Why we use labels

Labels like "gay" and "straight" indicate the scope of your attraction. Homosexual & Homo romantic create a distinction that clarifies the nature of your attraction. They help adequately and simply communicate who we are while also allowing people of our likeness to realise there's others like them— the inclusive element.

How do microlabels get in the way

If you ask me, some microlabels border on hyper specific obscurity that either communicates information that isn't necessary (from the outside looking in), or the information that is supplementary and better falls under "your type" or personality traits.

As an example, I have a friend that was looking for a label that encompasses them, as a bi person that only liked feminine expressing (not indentifying) people. Why does that need a label? That is deadass just your type. You like girly girls and femboys.

If we make hyper-specific labels for every aspect of ourselves, we will struggle to fit in anywhere because our label becomes far more individualistic than inclusive— it gets isolating in a way.

Moreover, people change. Your hyper-specific label might be invalidated by a single event that alters the way you think and feel. Then, you're stuck trying to find or craft a whole new obscure label.

When you finally figure that out, you gotta hope and pray people discover it, recognise it, understand it, and use it.

Pansexual's take on pan

I used to identity as pansexual but decided it didn't feel quite right. Not because of me, but because of the identity itself. But why?

Pan does whatever the plot requires

I liken pansexuality to a poorly explained fictional power. The scope and nature is never outlined by the story, so to the reader, the power seems to work (and fails to work) whenever it is convenient for the plot.

Pansexuality isn't a grounded label that every member of the community views the same way— to a worse extent than terms like Gay or Lesbian (more on that later).

In high school, lgbt friends described pan as being "bi with extra steps." Others have claimed pan is just bi with a minor somantic difference. Some people say that pan is just being bi but also being inclusive for trans people. From my understanding, pansexuality was an attraction not based on sex/gender. Personally, I think that idea makes pan more of a microlabel than a sexuality.

With that last concept of pan, it doesn't actually communicate a sexuality (i.e, who and how you're attracted to someone (or not in the case of asexuals)). Instead, it communicates details about the sexuality. It's like if I asked you who your friend is, and you told me that they play Pokémon. It's nice to know that detail ABOUT them, but that doesn't tell me WHO they are.

Based on the aforementioned idea of pan. You could theoretically be sexually/romantically available for members of all sexes, or a singular sex. But, just saying "I'm pan" fails to communicate which is the case.

Gay and Lesbian

When I was growing up, Gay and Lesbian fell under "homosexual." An attraction to the same-sex. Personally, I prefer the idea that it denotes attraction to the same gender. But, that's the newer take.

As a trans girl, I don't think it's fair to tell an older lesbian she's transphobic for claiming her lesbian status as a reason not to date a trans woman— why? Because, to her knowledge, that's NOT what the label means.

In that kinda situation no one is right. The use of the labels isn't actually universal and that creates in-fighting and division.

If you ask me, the entire damn system needs to reworked.. and no I did not write this entire thing with nothing in mind.

Where is your system

As I said, I do have something in mind.

THEN SHOW ME

but, I'd like to see if this post gets me slandered or something crazy first 🥲