LGBTQ+ Issues

Imagine you walk into a Cotton On store, and each part of the store is categorised. To the right are the minidresses, the midi-dresses, the maxi dresses, to the left are the mom jeans, the straight jeans, the skinny jeans, and so on. And these categories are helpful, because they tell us where everything in the store is. But if you go to, say, the minidresses section, Cotton On has further labelled all of the minidresses, you have the Rory Square Neck Mini Dress, the Tina T-shirt Dress, or even the Woven Lucy Strappy Tiered Tunic. But here I am still trying to figure out at what length does a mini dress stop… and become a.. midi dress. Labels are a part of our everyday lives, whether it comes to the grocery store, or a cotton on, or the sexual identity of a person. And with the growing popularity to explain oneself by a label, we seem to be spoilt for choice.

‘You can’t always rely on a diagnosis or label as a means of identifying and presenting who you are. You shouldn’t feel forced to adjust your identity when it may not be necessary.’ Chloe Edwards, a Pride Alliance member of the College of DuPage in Illinois, highlights the idea that the use of labels in society can be harmful in the sense that people feel the need to fit themselves into a category to fit in with others.

As humans, we have the innate instinct to categorise things and put things in boxes, maybe to try and comprehend the complicated world we live in. However, sexuality isn’t just an IKEA where you can find the perfect storage for every individual case, rather it is a spectrum, and anyone can fit anywhere.

When I did a google search to see how many sexual identities exist, one website said 15, another said 23, and another said 46! There are several different opinions on the use of micro-sexualities. The term gay can be traced throughout history to Ancient Greece, which dates back almost 4,000 years. Identities such as omnisexual, attraction to all genders but with a preference, or abrosexual, an individual whose sexuality is changing and fluid, are first being seen in history nearly 6,000 years afterward. ‘When it comes to sexuality, your true identity should be more than just a few characteristics. We don’t need to go out of our way to define ourselves and cram us into new boxes when the old ones no longer fit.’

So why do we, as humans, love labels so much?

Labels are a part of our subconscious thought. We can’t help but define everything: humans love to find patterns, make connections, categorise things. Our brains use associative thinking to fit everything into these boxes, because if we had to treat every single thing we saw as one-of-a-kind, our brains would be overwhelmed. We can’t stop the brain from being spoilt for choice, which is why people have adopted the love of finding a definition, or a classification, for every individual thing, or feeling, or identity.

This concept was explored by iO Tillett Wright, a non-binary activist, who created the project Self Evident Truths with a mission to photograph anyone in the United States who is anything other than 100% straight. They ended up photographing around 10, 000 people, and each time they would, they would ask the person to, ‘quantify yourself on a scale of 1-100% gay’. And what they discovered was that while some people identified as the whole 100%, there was a vast spectrum of in-betweens who identified somewhere in the middle of the scale. Wright presented the idea that sexual orientation is actually a very poor binding agent, as within this spectrum there is just as much polarisation as in the human race.

For example, say you meet two people who are bisexual. One of them may be equally attracted to both men and women, whereas the other may be 30% attracted to men and 70% attracted to women. Or perhaps they are 40% attracted to women and 60% to non-binary people. You could have a hundred people who identify under the same term ‘bisexual’ but experience a hundred variations of attraction. Wright's work highlighted the differences of all of these non-heterosexual people and portrayed the complexity of humanity; that we’re not one dimensional, that there could be fifty shades of gay. And that one day, they hope that all of these boxes we use to over-simplify things will fall away and we will just be left with the diversity of humanity.

And that’s just sexuality! People’s exploration of their identity isn’t just connected to their sexuality. Yes, biologically speaking, people are born with XX or XY chromosomes, giving them male or female genitalia. This may define their sex, but for many this doesn’t encompass their gender identity. For some people, gender identity is a part of themselves that they are constantly exploring and questioning. If I were to ask someone what genders exist, many people would respond with male and female, however gender, just like sexuality, stretches far beyond these two binaries.

There are many gender labels. Gender is such a complex part of someone’s self, and is recently being brought into mainstream conversation. Instagram, for example, has included a new feature that allows you to display your pronouns in your bio. This small effort was so necessary, because it validates the exploration of peoples’ gender all over the world. However, these gender labels are equally as validating as they are a struggle. Our society has been trained over centuries to see peoples’ sexes as their gender, and further connect an image to these labels. A female has a vagina, long hair, feminine features, gentle. A male has a penis, short hair, facial hair maybe, strong. The labels we use to identify gender have been fitted to a certain look, and this further puts the pressure on people of having to tick off all of these features to be allowed to use these identities.

We have certainly come a long way but we are not there yet. So how do we move on? The society we currently live in doesn’t have the capacity to celebrate the diversity of humanity without needing to categorise. We need to use these categories and labels we’ve created to cultivate openness and compassion in our community. In fact, allowing people the space to explore their identity without having the pressure to get it right straight away is the benefit of having these categories and labels.

In the census for example a clear definition needs to be made between sex and gender. It is not just simply ticking a male, female or other box. There could be a separate spot for gender or let’s get rid of box all together?

Gender is just starting to enter the conversation, and with that comes a lot of questions. My school is an all-girls school, for example, so how does one define that and govern it? If someone is biologically born female, but identifies as they/them, or even he/they, where does that fit into the all-girls idea? With this growing prevalence of gender comes a sort of grey area, where we are unsure of where everything fits in. We really are spoilt for choice, and being spoilt for choice is not making this situation any easier.

But we can’t shy away from it, we need to open to conversation to find these limits, so that being spoilt for choice is not seen as negative or confusing, and then we can finally say that not all mini-dresses have to be strapless to be a mini-dress. And not all maxi dresses have to be loose fitting to be a maxi-dress. You don’t have to tick all of these boxes to be yourself.

My parents are watching Stranger Things right now, like me, my friends, their friends, and everyone else in the world, it seems. And my family tends to never do things by halves ‒ by the time they had finished, they had created an opinion on every single character. Obviously, he conversation of Will Byers’ sexuality came up ‒ do we think he’s gay?

My mum rolled her eyes, I remember. She said, “God, your generation. Everything has to be gay.” My dad said nothing. He’s not homophobic, he swears, but he hates having it shoved in his face. ‘It’, as if queer representation in media is a particularly bad smell instead of the sexuality of one teenager in the eighties. And it really made me stop and think for a moment. Because there’s so many characters in Stranger Things, and there are two, maybe three, whose sexualities are actually discussed whatsoever, but everything has to be gay, right? Queer representation stands on a tightrope with spikes on each end. Representation for a diverse audience is necessary for the diversity of the world as a whole. But humanity is obsessed with binaries, extremes, and patterns; there’s a kind of innate obsession with maintaining the status quo, which in turn becomes a horrified fixation on anything considered outside of the norm.

Queerness in an industry that bases its ideals and values on media that actively erases the lives of queer individuals will always stand out as something strange, and strange is unacceptable to a society whose foundations rely on the strength of their tradition. I point you again to the tightrope metaphor: backtracking into more ‘traditional’ views isolates the queer community; any attempt to move forward is proof that everything and everyone must be culturally and socially diverse, which terrifies the population that has been comforted by their own conformity. Unfortunately, this tends to result in corporations being backed into a corner. They must prove their acceptance of LGBTQ+ rights with an intense and extreme zeal, but the minute they keep their rainbows up past the 30th of June, and they’re clearly pandering to the gays and need not be tolerated, so what is there to do?