When I was younger I was gay (back when someone coming out was an earth-shattering deal), and the biggest reason I didn’t come out was because that label seemed to come with a script. A handful of people in my K-12 experience came out, and without fail each time they’d start dressing differently, adopt a lispy accent, and generally change their mannerisms & friends to fit a stereotypical gay label. This scared young, confused me. I liked who I was, but I feared that people would see “gay” instead of me, and that adopting the label would somehow unconsciously transform me too. I didn’t come out.
I’ve always thought about that experience, and watching the women in tech stuff exploding over the last decade I’ve similarly interpreted through that lens. All of the women I know who code have unique experiences when it comes to being involved in this hobby. All of the men I know have had their own unique experiences as well. It’s all felt more like a rainbow than a binary population split. I never understood, and still don’t understand, the obsession with projecting arbitrary labels on people and treating them differently based on those labels. It just seems to produce people warped to fit in rather than stand together. We should lose the labels, and instead just focus on finding a set of sustainable, normative behaviors that get us to equitable future I think all of us wanted all along.
Labels, especially involuntary ones, just seem to build walls & resentment between otherwise kind people. Fuck them.