Labels We Bear...Do They Have Any Bearing?

You’re walking down a dirt road. To make it interesting, let’s make it a dirt road in Turkey. You’re thirsty and the sun is beating down. There’s no danger that you will pass out from dehydration, but a cool drink of water does wet the appetite. In the near distance a human form appears. Unable to discern whether it is a man or a woman, you pause where you are, and let this unknown stranger make way in your direction. Step-by-step he/she gets closer. Unable to discern their gender from the clothing which adorns their frame, you remain in a state of curiosity and slight apprehension. Your thirst is now more pronounced and nudging your desire to engage the genderless individual in conversation to determine the closest possibility for whetting your whistle. Fifteen, ten, five feet from you. You catch yourself phrasing the question but then catch yourself. What pronoun fits? Sir, Madam? Stumbling over your thoughts and tongue you finally settle on “Excuse me. Might you guide me to the closet place to find a drink of water?” Silence reigns and then in a voice indiscernible of gender the stranger responds, “Around the corner you will find a fresh spring with the purest of water in the country.” Your question answered, you begin to move forward, but your innate curiosity has caught you in the throws of “Was it a man or a woman?” Yet, the reality is this, “Didn’t you get your most basic need met?” And, “Does it really matter the gender of the person who guided you to a place to quench your thirst?”

For whatever reasons, we humans have an innate need to be the consummate label makers, classifiers, and “put you in your place” organizers. It’s as if this is the only way to get through life, or is it. What if there were no labels and we began to just let people be people? There were no gay, straight, bi-sexual, transgender, queer, etc. We opened up the space for people to be free from any type of labels and simply just be human. Not saying it could work, just throwing it out there as an interesting way of taking all the combined energy we expend as a human race putting labels on one another, and wondering what would happen to that energy if it went somewhere else.

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So what would you do if there were no lables?

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