part of my philosophy about labels that i think people get hung up on is that i firmly believe language is fake, and therefore, labels are a little fake.
i think this can sound a bit like “oh who cares what people want to call themselves (i know its not what they really are)” but it’s really not what i’m trying to say at all.
here’s the thing: i am not inherently a nonbinary aroace person. those words aren’t coded into my dna or the universe or whatever. i have experiences, and those words are the ones that i think best describe those experiences at the moment. there’s another timeline where i care less about my gender and describe myself as a bambi lesbian. or care more about my disability, and go with autigender. or i could lean hard into the physical aspect, and call myself a straight trans man (with dysphoria and sensory issues that cause sex-repulsion). none of those would be wrong, because they could all conceivably describe the same experiences, just with certain aspects being emphasized and certain others being simplified.
a corollary to this is that no one is actually “secretly” anything else. that pan person isnt “actually” bi, because bi is also a made-up term. they’re pan, because that’s the word that they choose to use. and if someone chooses to use a lot of words you find strange? that doesn’t mean they don’t have experiences in common with you that are worth listening to.
The thing I find really interesting about language…. is that having words helps us conceptualize and understand things–so on the one hand words INCREASE our understanding of things
Ex: the existence of the word schedfreude helps us notice and acknowledge that feeling, the existence of more color words or weather words lets us draw finer distinctions
On the other hand words also create artificially constructed boundaries around concepts that are not finite or sharp-edged. So words also LIMIT our understanding of things.
Ex: “species” is a word with a scientific definition that helps us group life in useful and meaningful ways, and yet species is not a real thing in a concrete, limited sense, so plenty of overlap and edge cases exist. By simplifying, it is easy to overlook part of reality.
(Tangent: “words” here can be used somewhat interchangeably with the concept of “categorization” which is a very important tool the human brain uses to create really complex but manageable understanding of an infinitely complex world)
