Labelling

Do you like men or women? Do you usually date both? Maybe you are attracted to transgender or intersex? Maybe you feel like exploring your curiosity? Or perhaps you don’t feel an attraction for anyone at all.

Your choices when you start dating someone are closely related to who and what you feel attracted to, in other words your sexual orientation is going to make the decision for you. If you thought you were free to choose, nothing could be further from reality.

Let’s start from the beginning;

Sexual orientation is the sexual, emotional and loving drive that you feel for a person, it shows who you are attracted to. There are many options regarding your sexual orientation, or at least many labels have been created to describe who we’re attracted to.

People that like same sex usually call themselves gay, lesbian or homosexual, people that feel attracted only to the opposite sex are known as straight or heterosexual. If you are not sure about which gender you’re attracted to your label is ‘curious’. Pansexual is the word that is used to define people who feel attraction for many different genders, it can be men, women, transsexual, intersexual. There is also the possibility of no sexual attraction to anyone so asexual is the word that is usually used.

We have lots of labels and we love to create new ones. But do we need to do that? Is it such an important thing to know the sexual orientation of everyone? Labels are cultural constructs that have been created to “help” us understand some situations and to basically classify people.

They can be good if you personally need them, but if labelling is going to make you feel apart, discriminated, judged or uncomfortable then you should consider that labelling is not for you.

The only true thing about sexual orientation is that people don’t choose what they like, they usually find out which sex are they are attracted to. It is like the colour of your eyes or your hair. Both are natural and both have been with you since you were born.

This doesn’t mean that you must experience only the people that you are supposed to feel attracted to because of your sexual orientation. The same way you can dye your hair or wear contact lenses you can explore with whoever you like even if they are “not supposed to attract you”. In fact many people explore with different genders and these actions don’t define their sexual orientation.

The only one that tells you who you are is yourself. You have the right to define yourself, you don’t need a label to define you because you are more than just a label, you are unique.