Labels: Or, would you like a side of finely sliced and fried white-fleshed ground vegetables with that?

About ten years ago, I was finally comfortable enough with the whole wicca thing that I actually started telling people about it. I even used the big-W word: witch. Most clearly of all those conversations, I remember the one with a close friend who wanted to know, "But why do you have to label yourself?"

It's a common question, but it doesn't make any sense. Ninety-five per cent of our useful language consists of labels, and we never question them. Labels are useful gadgets. They allow us to get what we want efficiently and easily. I don't know about you, but I am very glad that I can walk into a fast food restaurant and say, "I'd like a burger and fries with a Diet Coke, please," and know that I'm not going to end up with a raw fish and a pda swimming in bechemel sauce. I like to be able to say, "You kicked me in the shin!" Not: "You kicked me in the front of my lower leg!"

One might counter-argue that it's different than labelling people--but, not so. We all label ourselves, constantly, compulsively; we collect labels like my grandfather collected stamps, and end up leaving to our children on our passing a basement so filled with labels that there is only a narrow passageway from the foot of the stairs to the wall. I couldn't list all my labels if I wanted to, but here's a start: I'm a woman. I'm 31. I'm straight. I'm married. I'm a mother. I'm a government employee. I'm a writer. I'm a reader. I'm a scrapbooker. I'm an indifferent gardener. I'm diabetic. I'm asthmatic. I'm an insomniac. I'm not a cat person. I'm a print addict. I'm tall. I'm an environmentalist. I'm a feminist. I'm a first-born.

Imagine how many words it would take to rewrite all of those three-word sentences without labels. "I have been alive for thirty-one rotations of the planet Earth around the sun." That's unwieldy, and I don't know about you, but I'm just as glad that I don't have to write all that out on my tax forms every year. "I have a chronic autoimmune disease that has destroyed the function of my pancreas, leaving me dependent on injections of insulin to stay alive." Whew. What a mouthful every time I want to justify ordering a Diet Coke in a restaurant, or explaining why I have that little electronic gizmo inserted in my hip.

Imagine being a vegeterian in a world where the word "vegetarian" either doesn't exist or is so loaded with negative innuendo that you wouldn't dare use it; how much of a pain in the ass would it be to go out for lunch? Imagine, if you have asthma, that you don't have the word "asthma." How much would it complicate your life when you have symptoms and can't enjoy your normal activities to have to explain to everyone around you what's going on? Imagine if you're an alcoholic but you can't use the word "alcoholic" and someone is offering you a drink. Imagine that you're allergic to cats, but the word "allergic" doesn't exist, and someone with two cats has invited you over for dinner. Every time you have a choice of either letting it pass--not explaining it and looking odd--or explaining it. Wouldn't it get tiresome? Wouldn't you find yourself longing for the right word, wishing one existed?

I think what people mean when they ask, "Why do you have to label yourself?" is: "Why would you want to assume a label with negative connotations?" No one asks me why I want to label myself female, after all, or label myself a mother or a wife. Witch is another question. 'Good God Andrea, why on earth would you voluntarily call yourself a name that has been used to justify the murder of hundreds of thousands of women in European history alone?'

A much better question, and a more interesting one. Why do I call myself a witch? In part, because I am one and the prejudices and bigotries of other people are not going to make me ashamed of myself; in part, because the negative history of the word is wrapped up in a cultural misogyny so deep that it slaughtered uncounted numbers of women and children primarily for not living the prescribed cultural script, and using that word--that very laden word--is a way of opening up that conversation. Of giving myself opportunities to say, "well yes, but did you know that the women most likely to be burned at the stake were unmarried women or widows with their own property? Why should I allow other people to use that as an insult? To my way of thinking, it's the ones who think of it as a perjorative who ought to be feeling a bit slimy about it."

Diabetic, too, gets a bit of heat in some quarters, and I honestly understand the desire not to be defined as a person by one's illness; but as long as it's in context with the hundreds of other labels that help to make up who I am, I don't care.

The problem isn't with labels or labelling, the problem is that some labels have been hijacked; they have such negative cultural baggage associated with them that no one in their right mind wants to adopt them any more. The problem is that the old accuracy of those labels has been buried under decades or centuries of misuse so that they have become primarily insults. The word "liberal"in the United States comes to mind. "Midget" is another example: if people had always used it only to mean someone who was very small and normally proportioned, it's likely I would have no problem using it to describe my daughter. But it was hijacked and used as a perjorative, used to draw in audiences for freak shows or circus acts.

Labels are great, as long as they're the right labels. The right label is the fewest possible words that convey the most information you want and the fewest extra negatives: Writer, Actor, Artist, Civil Servant, Engineer, Architect, Academic; just about any job title you can think of is a label (and when we meet someone who says, "I'm a teacher," most of us don't demand, "Why do you have to label yourself?"). But for some of us, there is no right label; what used to be the right label has been warped into an insult. But just because there is no good label doesn't mean that the need for one has disappeared.

The alternative is to forever and endlessly explain things, and it's tiresome. I don't want to have to recount Frances's entire medical history to the nice lady at the children's clothing store who tells me that children are rarely potty-trained at one year old so why bother buying panties? Or that kids grow so fast, I shouldn't bother buying anything in size 3-6 or 12 months, because it won't last. When another mother gives me the evil eye at the food court because my "little baby" is eating french fries, I don't want to have the choice of saying nothing (and letting her believe that I am a terrible mother who knows nothing about infant nutrition) or explaining the whole thing. And it's easy enough to say, "Who cares what they think?" But when a stranger judges your mothering harshly based on misinformation, it hurts.

And humans are curious. We're animals with big brians and we like to figure things out, and part of that is taking anomalous information--wow, she looks like she's one, she acts like she's three!--and fitting it into our internal map of how the world works. And I wish I had a short, easy phrase, one or two words, that would satisfy the benign curiosity of strangers without taxing their patience (by its length) or robbing Frances of her dignity. I wish I had a label. A nice, easy label, a pretty one, one I can bring out on Beanie Baby when I'm writing about the issues that do come up around her size, something to orient new readers without boring the old ones. I wish I could say, "Because she's _____," and people would nod--they would understand, I wouldn't need to keep explaining all the time. I wish Frances had a label for herself, when she's older--for when teachers stop her in the hall at school, certain she doesn't belong there; for when assholes take her picture uninvited at the amusement park;* for when the lifeguard tells her that she can only swim in the pool unattended when she turns ten; for when the manager at the fast food restaurant tells her they can't hire anyone under fourteen; for when the cashier at the movie theatre doesn't want to sell her a ticket; for when her classmates ask her, "what's wrong with you?" And they will ask. You know they will. People have asked me often enough, and kids are not usually more tactful than adults. I want her to be able to say, when it's convenient, when it's helpful, "I'm ______." Something to deflect the curiosity when it's not wanted, to turn the subject of conversation, something pat and handy.

She is a dwarf. Even if she were some day to no longer be small enough to qualify, an event that is so exceedingly unlikely that it irritates me whenever someone suggests it, right now she is solidly, comfortably below the height threshold. Far enough below that I do not seriously wonder if she will stay there. She will. She is a dwarf--but with all the connotations of the word, all its Tolkeinesque baggage, I don't know if I want to use it. She's also a Little Person. It's less potentially offensive, but does it smooth communication or hinder it? How many people will understand what it means when I use it? Do I want to have to explain what Little means every time? No. The point of communicating, of writing, is to tell people what you mean clearly. Words are no good if no one else understands them.

I want her to have a label. I want something like "vegetarian," something like "allergic." Something that will tell people what it is they need to know or what we want them to know, but that doesn't have a history of abuse and intolerance behind it.

I think I assumed, in my last post, that everyone would understand the desirability of having labels. But maybe one needs to experience not having one when it's needed to understand how useful they are.

This is a whole lot of whining about something that, in the ultimate scheme of things, is ultimately trivial. Not having a label is complicated and irritating, but it doesn't take food out of our mouths and it doesn't kill anyone. But every time I write a post here about Frances that relates to something unusual involving her size, my fingers hover over the keys: "Because of Frances's...." Frances's what? Dwarfism? Short stature? Undiagnosed genetic condition? Size? Tinyness? I put one word in, I take it out and put another in its place, I delete the sentence and try again, I write around it for as long as I can, I change my mind, I put it back, I try another word, and then the next day I use a different one. For Frances more than anyone, I want not just the good-enough word, but the right one; but it doesn't exist. And it's a small thing, it hardly bears mentioning, but it gets under my skin sometimes and itches something fierce.

~~~~~

*This happens a fair bit, and if you're ever tempted to do that, for the everfucking love of god, just don't. You are not as subtle as you think. One woman on a list I'm a member of wrote of how she went to the theme park with her kids, and she and her kids all have a skeletal dysplasia which makes them quite short and changes their proportions, and someone followed them around taking pictures of them with a camera phone. Eventually, she got pissed off enough to whip out her digital camera and take that woman's photo--apparently, the camera-photo-taker was simply appalled and shocked that anyone would treat her so disrespectfully. So yes, some people are so completely fucked up that they simply don't matter, but they can still make you miserable and ruin your day.

Posted by Andrea at August 14, 2006 11:16 AM under Being Small

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