I think you really get to the heart of this problem, which is that labels are liberating or useful for people only insofar as they choose them themselves. It's never the job of a community or even an individual to apply labels to people for them, no matter how helpful we're attempting to be. It's up to people on a case-by-case basis to decide how and when and to what extent they'd like to be identified as part of a group.
This reminds me of a guy I met in London who was in a relationship with a mtf trans woman. He identified as straight, but a lot of his friends--even the well-meaning ones--tried to convince him to "come out of the closet" after he started seeing this woman on a regular basis. They were trying to be supportive, but in doing so they were (a) completely misreading the situation, and (b) attempting to paste a label on him that he neither wanted nor identified with.
Yeah that is really rude. Especially for the trans person. A straight male struggling to convince people of his straightness isn't necessarily as sympathetic a situation for me since you know, you're a straight male. Whatever. Although props to him (!!!!!) for being with a trans female. That's fucking awesome. So many straight men would be weird about it and very ignorant about what that means. No, I find it especially rude to the trans person because this is a person who has struggled her entire life to be defined as "woman" and so finally you get this identity physically and by calling your partner gay they are essentially robbing you of the gender you're identifying with. You're saying, "you're not REALLY a woman. You're a man. You are a gay man." Which is bullshit.
Yeah, I never got to meet his girlfriend. We were at a pub and she was supposed to meet us after class or something but then didn't feel up to doing the bar thing, so I didn't really have any access to her side of the story. But I can imagine that it must be super hurtful to be misgendered and trivialized when you've spent such a long time trying to build an identity for yourself that makes sense to you and makes you happy. Which is really the whole point of being an adult, right? So there's this sense in which people who try to do your labeling for you are also infantalizing, at least to a certain extent, because it suggests that they don't think you're capable of articulating your own identity--at least not to THEIR satisfaction
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It is condescending and extremely egocentric. Because you're saying, "this is a scenario I don't understand thus it must be wrong. I will revise it according to my own world views instead of accepting yours and then forcing you to agree with it." It comes from a place of friendship because they think you're confused and they don't want you to feel like they wouldn't understand if you came out as gay. Unfortunately, what they're also revealing is that they are unable to comprehend the myriad of cis/trans/gay/bisexual/heterosexual combinations our society must now make room for. Accepting this new world view is as simple as simply taking what someone says of themselves at face value but it can be so hard sometimes, especially if you're someone who thinks they've got everything figured out, because there's a compulsion to then think other people don't have things figured out. Like how gay people will tell bisexual people they are just confused, when really it's totally possible to feel equal or someone sliding scale sexual feelings for
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This reminds me of a guy I met in London who was in a relationship with a mtf trans woman. He identified as straight, but a lot of his friends--even the well-meaning ones--tried to convince him to "come out of the closet" after he started seeing this woman on a regular basis. They were trying to be supportive, but in doing so they were (a) completely misreading the situation, and (b) attempting to paste a label on him that he neither wanted nor identified with.
-C.
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