Categories Are Not Always Negative

So I’m noticing that a lot of people are seeing categorizing as inherently bad because it either a. oversimplifies reality or b. means that you treat people in a category differently. I disagree with both of these criticisms, both on the level that I don’t think they’re always true, and on the level that I don’t think either of them is always negative. There are of course circumstances where labeling things and people is not the most appropriate or helpful thing to do, but there are ABSOLUTELY times that it makes communication and understanding easier. Let’s talk about that.

In both of these cases I want to look at mental illness/neurodiversity/different brains as an example.

Let’s start with the first issue, oversimplification. Are labels an oversimplification? In some ways, all categories must necessarily be an oversimplification. Of course in some ways all individual words are an oversimplification. What a useful label is, is taking a complex idea and shorthanding, giving it a one word name that allows us to refer back to the larger, more complex idea. Let’s take the label “anorexic” as an example. My lived experience of anorexia is far more complex than the word “anorexic” can communicate, but if I tell a stranger “I was anorexic for 5 years,” I have communicated a fairly complex idea to them relatively quickly. I don’t have to explain all the individuals symptoms of anorexia, or the fact that it was a mental illness. I can sum it all up with one tidy word.

Yes, it is possible that you don’t have a good understanding of what anorexia is. Maybe you assume that all people with anorexia are teenage girls, or you really don’t know what anorexia is. That can be a problem and lead to misunderstandings, and when we have a lot of people who are not educated about a particular label, it becomes less and less helpful to use that label. There is some push and pull between brevity and explanation, and in any given conversation it’s good to weigh whether you’d rather explain more to ensure you’re truly understood or be more brief and risk misunderstanding.

Additionally, most words run the risk of misunderstanding. “Smart” is not a label in the traditional sense, but many people have differing understandings of the word smart. It is a natural quirk of language that we don’t all hold the exact same definition of a given word, and to ensure clarity we may need to double check with people. It still seems to me to be easier and faster to use a label like “anorexic” and then check in about specifics rather than starting from the ground up and educating where necessary. It’s useful to have a word that summarizes a complex idea.

As to whether labels push people to treat others differently, I’m going to question that primarily on the basis that sometimes the point of a label IS to receive different treatment. Also we should note that some labels don’t result in people treating others differently, like blue eyed vs. green eyed. Labels don’t ALWAYS change our behavior. But sometimes they do, and let’s talk about that.

In this case let’s take autism. I’m autistic. Many people think that it shows kindness and respect to look someone else in the eye, give them a hug when they’re feeling down, invite them to a party if they’re friends etc. Those are things that make me incredibly uncomfortable, and if I can communicate “please respect my lack of eye contact, please give me more physical space, please don’t take me places that are loud and overstimulating” by telling you that I’m autistic that’s fucking fantastic for me. I WANT people to treat me differently because I have different needs. Many people do. Sometimes labels are important because they help us understand what someone prefers or needs to get by in life (see: introvert/extrovert divide and why we’re so into telling people if introverts or extroverts). It’s why I prefer “Treat others the way they would like to be treated” over “treat others the way you would like to be treated.”

Sometimes that “summing up” usage of a label makes it easier to understand a person’s needs or wants. It turns out that it’s why we use labels in the first place (not just on people either. If something is labelled “hot” we understand more clearly how to behave around it). Yes, it is possible to go overboard on this one. Not every autistic person is the same. You shouldn’t treat all autistic people exactly like each other. We’re all individuals. But until you get to know me, having a particular label can help you get a handle on likely behaviors that will be good for me.

 

Essentially labels cannot be the ONLY way that we understand people, but that doesn’t mean that they’re NEVER helpful to understanding people, and I think that many people who resist labels ignore the fact that without them it’s harder to communicate, harder to find like minded people, and harder to understand yourself.

Can You Tell Me What I Am?

One of the most common questions that I get when I blog or talk about sexuality is “I think I might be demisexual/asexual/whatever, how do I know?” I’m certainly not the absolute expert on how to figure out your sexuality, and I’m still in the process of coming to an understanding with my own (we have an uneasy truce at the moment). But I have spent a great deal of time and energy trying to understand my sexuality, and so I thought I’d share some of the things that I’ve found helpful to keep in mind or to try when trying to figure out what the heck your sexuality is.

There are a few guiding principles that most people who talk about sexuality all suggest as good places to start when you’re thinking about sexuality. The first and probably most frustrating of these is that no one else can tell you what your sexuality is. At the end of the day, you are the one who knows yourself best and who will understand what identity feels right to you. This means a lot more work for you, but it also means that no one else gets to police your identity or demand certain performances from you in order to “count” as your chosen identity. It’s better that way, I promise.

Relatedly, there is no “right” answer about what your sexuality is. Sexuality is a fluid thing. What feels right for a while might change with new experiences, and your understanding of yourself absolutely changes. You can change how you identify. But there’s also no identity that will be exactly you in every nuance and stereotype. You don’t have to check off every body of “homosexual experiences” or “asexual identifiers” in order to identify as those things. People are complicated, and if you think that your overall experience falls into a particular identity, then that’s probably you. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to work for you.

On that note, keep in mind that identity terms exist to help you. You don’t owe anyone anything when it comes to figuring out your identity. They’re there to help you understand yourself and communicate yourself to other people quickly. You don’t have to follow some sort of dictates in order to carry out your identity, you don’t have to stick with one once you start identifying, you don’t even have to identify as anything if you don’t find it helpful. Identity terms are useful to give us different potential templates of sexuality. “Oh hey, there are people out there who experience sexuality in x way and I also have y element of that, that’s nice to know. I wonder if they have any experiences or suggestions for how to successfully navigate dating?” Keeping this in mind can take some of the pressure off. This is something you’re trying to understand so you feel more comfortable and happy and maybe have more tools and support to figure out how you want to relate to other people. If it’s not helping, you don’t have to do it.

So with these guiding principles in mind, here are a few things to try. First, research! What are some of the labels that are out there? Here’s a good list to get you started with some basic definitions. It’s one of the most complete I could find, but if something sounds like it might be you spend some more time Googling see if it leads to anything else. One of my favorite resources for asexuality is AVEN. If anyone in comments has suggestions for resources about other sexualities (I’m not horribly well versed in most queer resources), please leave them in comments!

It can also be helpful to talk to close friends. They can’t tell you what you are, but bouncing ideas off of someone and hearing their perspective on what they’ve seen you do in the past can help clarify things that might have seemed muddy before. If you’re going to ask someone who’s more of an “expert”, it can be useful to have specific questions, e.g. I thought I didn’t want sex because of my upbringing, but now I’m not sure. Is it possible to be asexual if you have a history of conservative sexual messages? Someone who doesn’t know you can’t speak to your personal situation, so asking about facts that require their expertise is probably a better way to utilize their help.

It can also be useful to “try on” different labels. This can mean different things to different people. I’ve been “trying on” asexuality for a while now. I started by thinking of myself that way privately, then mentioning it to a few close people, then openly using it as a template for my relationships. Over time, I’m not sure how well it’s fitting with my experiences, so I might end up trying something else on instead. That’s ok. Sometimes you realize something doesn’t fit you when you first start trying to think of yourself with that term, and that’s ok too. Take whatever time you do (or don’t) need. There is no penalty for “I don’t have it figured out yet”.

One thing that I’ve found incredibly helpful is reading narratives/blogs/stories from people with a variety of different identities. It gave me a better feel for what the subjective experience of different sexualities was like, rather than a colder “definition”. It can be easier to empathize or imagine yourself in a narrative than in a definition.

If anyone else has suggestions or tips that they found helpful while trying to understand their sexuality, please leave in comments.

My Friends

There are people in my life who challenge me. They make me aware of the things that I once thought and that still creep into my mind. I look at them and I see the lies float past and my only defense is to remind myself “this person is my friend. They are wonderful. I love them. Every person I think these thoughts of is a friend, wonderful, loved. Each person I think these thoughts of has the rich individual experience that I do.” These people teach me about the inner lives of difference.

 

I have a friend who’s severely overweight. I don’t see him often, and in my mind he loses weight. I bring him closer to what I view as normal, closer to everyone else I know. The other day a picture of him popped up on Facebook and I felt a flash-flood of disgust before the shame set in. This is my friend. How dare I change his body to fit my expectations? How dare I ask myself who he is to be Other? How dare I feel disgust at him, someone who feels and thinks and exists in all the complex ways that I do? How dare I reduce him to his body, to the intimate ways that he feels the world and fills the spaces around him, ignoring how his neurons fill that body and his mind is so intimately tied with its senses and he is his body?

 

This is one of my challenges.

 

I have a friend who is trans*. Most days I don’t think about his sexuality or his gender. Most days it doesn’t matter because he is my wonderful, sweet, perfect friend. But every now and then I find myself wondering, my mind probing at what he’s like, asking what his name used to be (I’M SO SORRY), and I know I’ve crossed the line when I remember that his body and what his body looks like is so much less than the whole of him. It is such a miniscule piece, one that is so unimportant to our relationship that I can’t fathom why I would wonder about it. He is so much more. His stories, his perspective, his experience: they transcend my questions about his genitalia (and let’s be honest, I really shouldn’t have those questions anyway).

 

This is one of my challenges.

 

There are so many of these people, people who are complex and interesting, people who are my token people. I wish they were not my token people. I wish I knew more of them (this is not helped by the fact that I am antisocial). I wish I could understand their lives in a deeper way, and my challenge is that I have only one and I must fight against making them a token in my life. They challenge me every time I recognize them as more  than an idea, more than their weight or their gender or their sex or their race. I know that they are more than that, and my training in this world has left me incapable of separating them from it. And so they challenge me.

 

I want to tell myself their stories. I want to be honest with myself when I see others like them and remind myself that they see the world each day through their own eyes, that they struggle and love and feel, that they wonder and feel hurt and imagine how I see them. I want to see them with full lives, with full minds, with full thoughts. And so my friends challenge me, and I thank them. They remind me that behind each pair of eyes, each face that I don’t understand, there are worlds I cannot imagine.

Why Study Religion?

I am an atheist. You may have noticed this from some previous posts. I know I keep it pretty subtle, but you kids are quick. You probably picked up on it. However despite being an atheist, I majored in religion in college. This confuses some people. Some people in the atheist movement seem to think that we need to get rid of religious education altogether. This confuses me.

I don’t think that anyone should have to defend what they find interesting to study, but I do think that it’s important for everyone to recognize what it is that we can learn from religious studies and what skills they give us. Religious studies are hugely important to our understanding of the world and our place in it. While an atheist may not need a deep understanding of theology to feel that they understand their world and their self, there are BILLIONS of other human beings on this planet who do believe in a god, and that if I can’t make some attempt to understand this important aspect of their life, then I am not only being self-centered, I’m also shooting myself in the foot in terms of my ability to make relationships and find opportunities with these people.

Religion is often heavily integrated into culture. If you want to be able to seamlessly interact with people from a variety of backgrounds, then having a basic understanding of a variety religions is integral. This will allow you not to step on toes inadvertently, to understand where someone might be coming from, and to even “speak their language” as it were. In addition, religion is a huge motivator for a lot of people. I may not agree with extreme evangelicals who preach gender complementarity, however I have done a LOT of reading about their positions, and I can at least understand where they’re coming from and why they espouse the beliefs they do and act in the ways that they do. By understanding where they’re coming from, it’s a lot easier for me to engage them.

If we are to be educated citizens of the world, it’s important for us to have some basic familiarity with the major backgrounds that people can come from, and with the different assumptions that those people will have that are different from our own. Sociology and anthropology are important for just these reasons, as are the humanities, which give us a glimpse into lives different from our own. But this includes religious beliefs, because these inform politics, culture, personal actions, human rights, and just about every other facet of human life that you can imagine. If an atheist feels that they don’t need to know about religion because they don’t believe in it, they clearly are not looking at the real world and the role that religion plays in the real world. You don’t have to agree with something to recognize how important it is in the lives of others and how much more effective you will be at navigating the world if you have a basic understanding of it.

Because of my background in religion, I am more easily able to converse with religious individuals about their beliefs. I like to think I’m less judgmental than I would be otherwise. I’ve thought deeply about the motivations that people have for holding the beliefs they do and what benefits religion brings. I can be a more compassionate individual because of my background in religious studies, as well as understand what’s happening around me more thoroughly. Who wouldn’t want this?

 

Written by Olivia James