Thoughts of a Doubting Christian ✓

What's With All The Labels?

Many people are confused by all of the various labels in the LGBTQ+ community. "What's the point?" they may ask, or "Why do you need all of those, anyway? Labels divide us. Why can't we all just be human?" This comes up often, so I want to address this topic today.

To clarify, their labels help sort people into categories, yes, but that does not mean that the community is trying to place wedges between people of different sexualities. They are just trying to give a name to their experiences, because words are powerful and help us understand the world. Queer people don't think they're better than anyone else, and they're not being "special snowflakes." They just want to be able to put words to how they feel about relationships or their gender identity. That's it!

I think because most people are straight and cisgender, they don't understand the need for all the labels. (After all, if everyone was straight and cisgender, there would be no reason for all the labels in the first place!) Cisgender means that someone identifies with the gender they were assigned at birth, for example, a woman who was born biologically female. Straight usually implies the person is both heterosexual (sexually attracted to members of the opposite-sex) and heteroromantic (romantically attracted to the opposite-sex).

Even now, some of you might be confused as to why I broke being straight into categories of "sexual" and "romantic." That is because most people use heterosexual as a catch-all label to describe their attractions, so the idea of separating attraction into different components might be foreign to them.

Let's use examples to make this topic easier. Our example woman, Ming Hui, identifies as straight and is attracted to men. When she sees a man that she finds attractive, there are different types of attraction she may experience, including:

~ aesthetic attraction — attraction due to aesthetically pleasing features, such as looking at a beautiful person because they are beautiful (i.e. without sexual desire);

~ sensual attraction — the desire to do sensual (but not necessarily sexual) acts with a person, such as cuddling or kissing;

~ romantic attraction — the desire for a romantic relationship with someone and/or the things that come along with it; and/or

~ sexual attraction — hard to define, but most often includes wanting to touch and/or be touched by someone sexually or desiring to have sex with someone.

Not everyone will agree with my definitions; I'm just trying to give people a rough idea of what I'm talking about. Most people experience these all at once, but that isn't necessarily the case. People can experience sexual attraction without romantic attraction, or aesthetic attraction without the others (for example, a straight woman admiring another woman's beauty without any other feelings). We will come back to this idea later!

For now, let's go back to Ming Hui. Say that some point in her life, she starts realizing that she also feels attraction to other women. Now she's confused, because she no longer fits into the straight category. Luckily for her, there are labels to fit this scenario!

Ming Hui most likely fits under the bisexual umbrella (sexual attraction to more than one gender). She could be heteroflexible, i.e. mostly attracted to the opposite-sex with occasional attraction to other genders. (There's also homoflexible or lesbiflexible, i.e. those who are mostly attracted to the same-sex but sometimes other genders.) She could be bicurious, used to describe people with a preference for one gender but a desire to experiment with other genders. Of course, she could be bisexual (sexual attraction to two or more genders), polysexual (sexual attraction to most but not all genders), or pansexual (sexual attraction regardless of gender; also known as attraction to all genders or being "gender-blind").