Away with the labels!
I’mma explain something very simple to all you people who keep telling asexuals to stop labeling themselves.
Labels help us have conversations. Labels help us acknowledge experiences. Labels exist because when things exist, they have a name.
When you tell us repeatedly that we shouldn’t name how we feel, you’re telling us you’d rather we have no words to discuss our lives. No words to share our experiences. No way to understand that someone else is going through what we go through.
You’re claiming we shouldn’t have labels because you assume “labeling ourselves” will trap us into using the chosen labels forever, but that’s not how it works. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen someone get made fun of for “waffling” when they start questioning their identity, compared with the equal number of times I’ve seen someone get mocked for using a label to suggest they know themselves.
“But whyyyy do we have to LAAAAABEL everything?” is ridiculous. We “label” because when we have a word, we can acknowledge the existence of the thing we named. Don’t tell us we need to move past the need for labels. Labels don’t mean we want to be special, or that we want to belong. We’re not using them to exclude you, or to separate ourselves from you. We’re using them because things that exist have words.
We exist. It’s about time that we had a word that lets us say so.
Anonymous
