Why I Don't Care About My Labels, and You Shouldn't Care About Mine Either

Over the past five years, I have identified as every label from the acronym LGBTQ. When I was 13, I was convinced I was bisexual. During that year, I conflicted between identifying as a lesbian and bisexual, eventually settling on bisexual after a few months of internal debate.

At this time, I was still female-identifying. Once I got to university, I stopped identifying as bisexual and starting identifying as queer, for reasons I couldn't place at the time.

After meeting my boyfriend, I realized I was genderfluid, some days I identifying as agender, simply meaning having no gender, and some days identifying as male, making me trans.

Now that I'm in a relationship with a man, some days identifying as a man myself, I'm in a gay relationship. In five years, I have been, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and a lesbian, and I'm honestly tired of trying to put myself into a box.

It's obvious I have trouble making up my mind.

But over the past 48 years since the Stonewall Riots, the beginning of the LGBTQ+ movement, the queer community has been on the rise.

In 2014, Facebook added 50 new gender options, while I understand they're trying to be inclusive and helpful, they're a bit excessive.

There are currently nine options for saying you're cisgender, and about 15 options for just saying you're a woman. This shows how pushy society is to put yourself into a box.

We've reached a point of no return, forcing young kids interested in the queer community to put themselves into a box. Doesn't that just put us back to square one?

I identify as queer, the most generic umbrella term there could be for "not straight" simply because that's how I feel. I'm not picky about what gender I fall in love with, and technically that would put me under the label of pansexual, yet I personally don't want to identify as that.

Straight people have never had to label who they fall in love with, it was simply just the person who caught their heart, so why can't the queer community be the same?

Since I'm agender, also meaning nonbinary, there really is no way for me to be attracted to the "same or opposite" gender. My preferences for who I love don't matter to me, and society shouldn't expect me to put myself into a box.

If you feel like loving who you want, go right ahead. It's not up to you to fill society's box, because there is no box. The only box is the one straight people created to try and make queer people seem odd and out of ordinary, and it's about time we break out.