k.d. was awesome. It is her music and her personality that make it such a great experience. I think labels can have positive and negative uses and I've been on both sides of the "argument" at different times ('no labels' mostly when I detested the term "bisexual" and didn't like other people pigeon-holing me). I have always, though, respected self-proclaimed labels around issues of sex, gender, orientation, ethnicity, race, etc.
I'm a strong believer in relativity where identity is concerned. I've met men with "girl parts", men who fuck men who aren't remotely gay, intersex people who have not designated a gender, people who believe our President can't be African-American even though his father was African and his mother was American, and people who accurately designate race as a false concept.
Since their are about nine factors which determine gender, the last and most definitive of which is self-identification, then gender, for me, falls on a spectrum of relativity. Sexual orientation is almost as easy to define as gender. After studying just my own family's genealogy, I've come to he conclusion that ethnicity is in many cases a guess and race is, indeed, a false categorization. Melanin content, eye shape, and inconsistent genetic anomalies are a poor basis for defining a race of a species.
What I'm getting at in a long-winded sort of way is that I generally agree that labels are for the dogs, except in the case of self-identification. People will always strive to define themselves and others. We need to move toward a social system of accepting everyone's self-identification or choice to not self-identify, and use that, rather than observation, to define people's characteristics. We can observe that someone has dark brown, peach, or yellow skin without jumping to any conclusions, except possibly about the condition of the drunkard's kidney.
That's all in a perfect world, but a boy can dream. [Insert MLK Excerpt Here]
Re: k.d. lang
I'm a strong believer in relativity where identity is concerned. I've met men with "girl parts", men who fuck men who aren't remotely gay, intersex people who have not designated a gender, people who believe our President can't be African-American even though his father was African and his mother was American, and people who accurately designate race as a false concept.
Since their are about nine factors which determine gender, the last and most definitive of which is self-identification, then gender, for me, falls on a spectrum of relativity. Sexual orientation is almost as easy to define as gender. After studying just my own family's genealogy, I've come to he conclusion that ethnicity is in many cases a guess and race is, indeed, a false categorization. Melanin content, eye shape, and inconsistent genetic anomalies are a poor basis for defining a race of a species.
What I'm getting at in a long-winded sort of way is that I generally agree that labels are for the dogs, except in the case of self-identification. People will always strive to define themselves and others. We need to move toward a social system of accepting everyone's self-identification or choice to not self-identify, and use that, rather than observation, to define people's characteristics. We can observe that someone has dark brown, peach, or yellow skin without jumping to any conclusions, except possibly about the condition of the drunkard's kidney.
That's all in a perfect world, but a boy can dream. [Insert MLK Excerpt Here]