Labels vs. Who you are.

 

Hello everyone, today I would like to talk about how labels can change who we are. It is hard to think that labels can change how I see myself and others. Did you stop to think about the power that labels have on you? Did you ever change something in you because someone said something about it? What confusions did you have about labels? The labels that I would like to dive deep today is “gay” or “lesbians.” When we understand the power of these labels, we will understand how people can be persuaded, when they are choosing their sexual orientation.

First, everyone is born with preferences, but pay close attention when I say preferences because I am not talking about sexual orientation. When I use the term “preferences,” I am using the literal meaning of this words, which means that I might prefer sports instead of dolls, or I might prefer to spend time with my men friends instead of my women friends, and it does not mean I am a lesbian; it genuinely means that I have preference. We live in a society where people assume truths about people if they show any preferences that are “atypical” to what society expects from them. A child has no idea of what sexual orientation is or means, how can this child define his sex orientation based on his or her preferences?

            In the first few years of people’s lives some of the preferences start to come up naturally with the development of the human brain. Some boys might like to paint instead of playing football, and some girls might prefer martial arts instead of makeup, and that is ok because all of us are different in a sense that we have different tastes and likes. At this point some parents and people around this boy or girl start to “find” reasons for this “atypical behavior,” which leads to labels, instead of simply recognizing the truth that everyone is different from one another. When someone creates a label for a person, that label becomes a part of that person. Can you imagine what is going to happen to that boy or girl that is barely starting to know him or herself, when he or she hears that is wrong for a boy to like to paint instead of playing football, or that is not normal for a girl to like martial arts instead of liking makeup? That is exactly what labels do. Labels set parameters of what a boy or a girl can do, when in fact it is totally normal to have preferences. From that people start to put that boy or girl in the box of gay or lesbian, based only in a preference. That boy or girls take that label as a truth about themselves.

             It is hard to think that the boy or girl has been pushed to believe that something is wrong with him or her, and he or she is something based on his or her preferences, when he or she is only experimenting and developing their preferences. But it is what happens everyday with people around the world. They are being pushed to believe that they are something, even before they really find out what they truly are based on their preferences. I truly believe that we can change that, I had close friends that went through it and are going through it because they believed that their labels were true about themselves. We need to stop it now. We can’t let labels define who we are and how we will live our lives. People are different from each other, and that does not define their sexual orientation.