BUENAS NOCHES & FUCK AI

Closest match: Psylliodes chrysocephala genome assembly, chromosome: 4 Common name: Cabbage Stem Flea Beetle

There's two major philosophies when it comes to labels, they don't have names to my knowledge so I'm gonna call them Reflective and Telegraph.

The Telegraph Label philosophy states that labels primarily function as a means of conveying useful information about one's self to others. It's telling others what pronouns, what parts and what genders that person has or is attracted to. This is usually pretty straightforward, the stuff someone interested in dating you would check before asking you out to avoid embarrassment.

The Reflective Label philosophy states that labels are primarily a tool for describing an internal experience. Putting words to feelings for the benefit of the self. This is how we get lables like stargender or autismgender. These aren't meaningfully useful labels that tell others what to expect physically or what pronouns to use. But that doesn’t mean they're useless. In the case of someone using autismgender, that label probably describes the internal experience of the ways a person's autism impacts their views on and performance of gender. Stargender likely explains not that they literally see themselves as a star but rather that their internal experience of their prefered gender performance makes them feel a way that reminds them of stars or stargazing.

And this applies to sexuality too. Boy lesbian might seem antithetical but ultimately that label isn't there to tell others anything. It's merely a comfort to have words to describe a mess of feelings and social dynamics.

And for clarification, anyone calling themselves a boy-lesbian probably isn't the cis male boogieman forcing lesbians who aren't interested in cis men to date them or else be labeled a bigot. That boogieman doesn't exist. A more likely explanation is that a nonbinary or trans person has a complex relationship with their changing gender that doesn't trigger a change in the way they see themselves in relationships and attraction thus causing them to keep or adopt the lesbian label despite the gender weirdness going on.

I see a lot of infighting about what people call themselves and whether or not certain combinations can even physically exist. And Y'know what? I don't think that's terribly productive. Neither philosophy is wrong. People are just using labels to address different root problems.

What makes reflective or symbolic labels worthwhile is precisely this opacity. That they require work to understand is what leads to the creation of new shared knowledge and collective meaning making. Creating more ways to describe, interpret, and understand the human experience is intrinsically valuable. Refusing to engage with these kinds of labels implies that one believes the totality of human experience to be adequately summarized by extant linguistic forms. However, modern language is heavily reliant upon taxonomic and diagnostic terminology designed to index as narrowly as possible a sign to a specific and exclusive signifier. This semiotic practice is informed disciplines and ideologies which are expressions of structurally prejudiced societies which defined (and still presently define) social position through exclusion of the other. Put more plainly: the insistence on only using pre-existing indexical/telegraphic labels comes from the same impulse that existing oppressive norms. Having internalized this modernist approach to semiotics, we replicate it amongst ourselves to the same effect of excluding those we do not yet and do want to understand.

I’ve just been thinking about all the ways Grace and Rocky would try to cook up taumoeba on their way to erid!