Member-only story
After a frustrating gatekeeping experience on my favorite LGBTQ forum (to remain unnamed) on Facebook, I’ve decided we need to talk about gatekeeping and labels, good, bad, and ugly, as a greater community. Not just the LGBTQ community, or the geek community, but humanity as a whole. Everyone uses labels to describe themselves and others, whether that’s gay or straight, atheist or believer, geeky or mainstream. It’s a facet of language that we cannot entirely escape, so we should really have an understanding of what labels mean to us, to other people, and the implications of using a label. I can’t possibly cover every label, so this article will be autobiographical, and explore these concepts through the lens of my identity: I’m a nonbinary gay bear married to a woman, and I’m a geek. So let’s talk about what that all means, shall we?
Why Do We Have Labels?
Humans use labels to communicate, distinguish, and discriminate. Thousands of years of history have seen this play out again and again. Labels of wealth, class, race, religion, age, gender, level of technological advancement, and even place in history have been used to apply laws to benefit some while objectifying or oppressing others. Slavery, colonialism, cultural erasure, and religious conversion are all built up on an “us versus them” label structure. Every atrocity from the Egyptian…
