THE
INSIGHT
TROUBLE WITH LABELS There’s a power in naming things and in not naming things By Paul Gallant
Back in the 1990s, one of the hopes I had for feminism, and its flamboyant offspring gay liberation, was that gender would become a far less important way of seeing each other and organizing the world. Sure, in the realm of sexual desire and romance, gender would likely (though not always) direct who we’d choose as life partner, fuckbuddy or something-in-between. But I expected that sexual orientation and gender identity would become more like having a preference for a certain ice cream flavour, a preference that’s important when standing at the gelato-shop counter, but with few implications in other aspects of one’s life. You know: a single straight cis male scientist wears dresses to the lab and practises kickboxing; a polyamorous cis butch lesbian gives manicures; a monogamous straight trans woman runs a mining company and wears ties to the office.
intent on nailing things down. Lots of nails. And a label on each nail. In the straight mainstream, “gender reveal parties” have become all the rage, festooned with all the pink-and-blue clichéd signifiers of masculine and feminine, based on whether certain body parts are spotted in an ultrasound. Considering research that sexual orientation and “sexually differentiated childhood behaviour” may be influenced by hormones during gestation, this seems like a desperate (and futile) parental effort to lock things down before the process is complete, a ritual cleansing to shore up gender norms before a child opens their eyes. Conversion therapy is, it seems, for loser parents who didn’t act early enough.
My prediction was a little right, but completely wrong. North American society has certainly become more obsessed with all the possibilities of sexual and gender identity. But rather than the freewheeling, boundary-less utopia of my imagination, we seem
We might also imagine a spectrum for intensity of desire – from asexual, which used to be thought of as a dysfunction, to (to use a label close to my heart) sex-positive slut, which used to be thought of as a pathology. Another spectrum runs from romantically oriented
NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2020
But the progressive side of things has also grown more rigid. While old-school labels like the affectionate “tomboy” have fallen into disfavour – why suggest that a sporty girl is boy-like? – our new And all those aspects of a person might change over time. Our labelling system has an ever-expanding but very precise menu. conventional notions of what is men’s stuff and what is women’s, “Cis” or “trans” might be considered base ingredients, though these what is straight and what is gay, would (outside the bedroom) identities may be less relevant if one identifies as non-binary. Then break down into a blur of individual characteristics. If a person there’s sexual orientation. Though many people see sexual orientation conforms to stereotypes, great. If they don’t, also great. The glass as being a hetero or homo switch, it’s been largely regarded as a ceiling would be shattered, men would be more in touch with their spectrum since Alfred Kinsey’s studies of sexuality in the 1940s feelings, homophobia would seem nonsensical and the world would and ’50s. Kinsey gave us his six-point scale, so that bisexual, with an equal taste for men and women, sits at position number three. be a happier place.
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