Becoming Your Label

As I've said, people have a lot of labels. Some of them they wear for life, like their skin color; others fade with time, such as age and class; others come upon them suddenly and in a life-changing event.

I can name the labels that came upon me that way: atheist, transgendered, anti-racist.

When a label comes upon you, it often comes as something of a surprise. Sometimes you've purged a label that already covered that aspect of yourself, but sometimes the other label comes in and forcibly removes the old one. And sometimes you're surprised by a label that's always been there, because something you've just seen or done has made you deeply, acutely, aware of it.

I've had all of this happen to me at one point. Releasing my "Christian" label was an intensely painful process; taking on the "atheist" label took several months. When I took on "transgendered," I had already discarded "cisgendered" as a label that had never applied and adopted "girlfag." When I discovered "white," it was more a realization that it was more than just a skin color - that there was an identity that went along with it and that it was something worth mentioning about myself.

In each case, I had to figure out what the label meant for me. And in each case I went through roughly the same process: reading, learning, trying to understand the societal nuances that made this label, comparing myself to other people who had this label. And I made the same mistake each time: trying to become as similar as possible to other people who had the same label.

It started out when I became an atheist. Even though I use that label to describe myself, I'm not an atheist by the popular definition. I believe that there may be gods out there (not an overarching God, but smaller gods), and perhaps some kind of ghosts, and while I will not outright believe a claim without any evidence I will not immediately disclaim it for lack thereof if it is not actually possible for me to acquire evidence. (You might call me a "somewhat credulous skeptic.")

But when I got out on the Internet and started reading the writings of other atheists, I found that our beliefs didn't really match up. Most atheists prefer a "nonexistent until proven otherwise" approach; a demand for hard evidence before they believe in the proffered spirit. I see nothing wrong with that; they haven't have the same upbringing I had, regaled with tales and the occasional witnessing to miracles that, if they happened as reported, could not reasonably be explained scientifically. I would also not expect them to take these stories as evidence, since most of them were related to me through parties and their veracity is greatly suspect. But I cannot discount them.

And yet, I tried to. Not intentionally, of course. But the more I read of other atheists and their rather stricter worldview, the more I began to feel the subtle societal pressure to conform to the same standards. After all, if so many of them believe this way and I don't, it must be because I've got something messed up. And after a while I found myself parroting the things they were saying, repeating the "pics or it didn't happen"-style phrases, and insisting that gods were all in people's heads.

After a while - and with the help of my sister - I realized that there was a problem. There was no good reason for me to be acting that way. I had reasons to believe the things that I did, and denying them wasn't making me more skeptical, just conformist. In essence, I was trying to be the most atheisty atheist I could be.

I had the same problem when explaining my atheism. I originally abandoned my faith not because of evolution, or science, or the many horrible deeds committed by Yahweh throughout the Bible, but because I had been shown that Jesus was not the Jewish messiah. But when people started asking me why I wasn't a Christian, I started abandoning that story - in favor of the much more commonplace (and rather overdone) explanations I had heard from other atheists. Again, I was trading in my identity for the group identity.

It was harder to do that when I realized myself as transgendered. Right away I realized I didn't fit the "standard" (see also: stereotype): I wasn't male-to-female, I wasn't attracted to the same sex, I hadn't pervasively felt from the time I was young that I must belong to the opposite gender. It didn't take me long to realize that my limited grasp on the subject was... well, limited - in fact, that's what led me to taking on the label in the end. But even after I had learned the subject extensively, even after I knew that people could manifest at different times and be attracted to different sexes and identify as androgynous or two-gendered and everything else, I was always trying to discount my own experiences. I would compare myself to others, and since I never fit the common story - I didn't identify as male as a child, I was never uncomfortable with my lower genitalia, I wasn't attracted to the same sex - I was convinced on some level that I wasn't really trans, or that I wasn't trans "enough" to count. I think in a way I was still trying to convince myself that I didn't have to be trans. But in a bigger way I was making myself feel inadequate because, after failing to fit in with the larger world around me, I had found a world that I actually might belong to - and I still didn't fit in. I felt like I was the freak among freaks.

The third event deals not so much with a label I like to use, but in a label that due to my upbringing I am saddled with, and bear the results thereof: "white."

In an earlier post, I mentioned the blog Stuff White People Do, an educational resource on "the ways of white folks - I mean, some white folks..." I followed a link from one post to another post (readable here), and in the comments section there was a discussion that had become rather heated.

The post, you see, was on the way some white people treat black women. They see them not as vulnerable human beings, but as people of steel, capable of taking whatever flak the world throws their way. This stereotype, the black ladies explain, is perpetuated by modern media, which has portrayed every black woman ever as that type of character (which they refer to as the "sapphire" stereotype), or as an older, takes-no-guff, fiercely-protective and overweight woman (the better-known "mammy.")

White people read this, and understood this, and knew that the black women were right and they needed to do better. So they asked (and I wondered) a seemingly innocuous question: "How do we treat you like people?"

The reaction was swift, completely unenlightening, and deeply revealing of the problem at hand: "You know already."

And I (though I did not participate in the conversation), and several other white people in the thread, said "No, I don't."

It was all nonsense, of course. I already knew what had to be done. In fact, I'd already written about it in my Peach People post. But I'd fallen prey to that quintessential white fallacy: getting hooked on labels.

One of the black ladies had mentioned that white people tend to be bad at socializing with black women. I (and, I expect, the other white persons who asked the same question), remembering that I was a white person, hastily made the conclusion that I had made a mistake in my line of thinking and that I had somehow missed some crucial piece of information that would teach me how to treat black women like people.

What I, and seemingly a number of other white people, had failed to realize was that I was completely overthinking the situation. And it was the black ladies - one very patient and frustrated black woman, in particular - who finally put us in our place and made at least one white person (that'd be me) feel very, very silly - and very, very white.

See, once again I had conflated a label with an identity. First I assumed that because the label "white" applied to me, I must be vulnerable to the same fallacies as the other white people that had been described. Then I assumed that the label "black" entailed some kind of enormous cultural gap - something that made the fact that they were also human and women rather trivial when deciding how to treat them. If I really wanted to know how to treat a black woman as a human, all I needed to do was see her as - well, a human.

Each of these stories belies the same problem in the use of labels. There is no doubt that labels have a purpose - they enable one person to get a loose grasp on another person's identity at a quick glance. But labels are not an instant guide to an individual's personality. Each label is a facet of a person, not the whole person - and yet their entire being is affected by that facet. Labels are further divided into sublabels, which in turn are shaped by quirks and nuances that make the overall label nearly meaningless. Labels are not useless - it is true that all persons with a particular label have something in common, whether a little or a lot. But it is important not to overvalue their meaning, not to assume any specific meanings for a label, and not to get so hooked on one label that you ignore the other facets of a person's being.

And yet I managed to do it three times before I ever figured out what I was doing wrong. Sounds like I've got some work ahead of me.