“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own.”

Number 6

Be seeing you...

Honestly, I really don't want to fit any mold. Or mildew either. They're both pretty icky.

In general, humans have problems dealing with continuous data. We prefer discrete data - preferably in as few groups as possible. Hence, for example, with length, we prefer measuring small lengths in centimetres or inches, rooms / humans / furniture in feet (possibly centimetres, but almost never millimetres!), outside spaces in either yards, metres or possibly even multiples of 6 feet (in the UK at least, the standard size of a fence panel) and distances between settlements in miles or kilometres, often rounding to the nearest 10/100/1,000.

Things get more complicated with biology. Hair, while having a spectrum of hundreds of colours, is almost universally characterised as 'blonde', 'brown', 'black', 'ginger' or 'grey', although occasionally you hear slightly more descriptive terms like 'strawberry blonde' (although often with the more descriptive terms, the same name can be given to significantly different shades!) The only place you're likely to see a wider description of hair colours is on a shelf of hair dyes, where you're likely to encounter names such as "light ash blonde 01."

Then there's gender and sexuality. In reality, imagine a graph with numerous axes (not just 2 or 3) representing different aspects of gender: genotype/karotype [what your genes say], biochemistry [what hormones etc. are roaming around you], phenotype [what you look like naked], identity, presentation, behaviour/mannerisms [mainly in relation to cultural stereotypes] and so on. It's quite likely rather than occupying a single defined spot, you occupy a cloud of points. Then do a similar thing with the kind of person you're attracted to (which may be different for romantic love and sexual relationships).

Society is still fixated on the concept of the gender binary, so people that don't appear within the range of variation usually associated with one category or the other may be perceived as odd / weird / freaks. This gets worse among those who take certain texts written thousands of years ago as literal truth and to be preferred if science disagrees, and isn't helped by the English language (and probably several others) having no commonly accepted gender-neutral pronouns plus bureaucracies only having two gender tickboxes. It's not much better for sexuality - strongly and exclusively heterosexual with a single life partner is often seen as the 'norm', anything else (not just LGB, but for example those who have multiple partners or have one romantic and one sexual partner [even if both are aware and supportive of the arrangements!], or multiple other variations) may be perceived as odd / weird / freakish.

Even those who fit outside the traditional categories may be prone to categorisation - while "LGBT" is the most common acronymic descriptor, Q (questioning) and I (intersexed) are sometimes tacked on the end, and sometimes up to half a dozen or so other acronyms for various other categories (e.g. pansexual, polysexual, genderqueer [itself a container for several categories e.g. bi-gender, tri-gender, pangender, third gender]).

You probably know yourself roughly where you sit in the 'cloud', but trying to express it accurately yet concisely if likely to be difficult, open to misinterpretation or even downright impossible. Just be yourself.