Do I self-classify, or do others, sometimes more importantly, label me ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

24 November

@theagentapsley I struggle with the idea of man-flu. There are the genuinely ill, the walking wounded (as I currently am) and drama queens.
— Sarah Parkin (@SarahParkin1) November 23, 2012

@sarahparkin1 That may be true, but who can rightly allocate anyone else to any such category ? And is that the root of -isms... ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) November 23, 2012

@theagentapsley surely more true of some -isms than others? I trust people to self-classify as a rule- though maybe not the drama queens.
— Sarah Parkin (@SarahParkin1) November 24, 2012

So, taking up that idea of self-classification, what about where someone else doesn't let me be what I choose or am ? :

1. I am descended from a couple who immigrated from Trinidad and Tobago at a time when the UK encouraged them to come here (albeit to drive buses or collect fares on them), but they were my grandparents, my parents were born here, and so was I. Yet those who stir up hatred and talk about 'repatriation' try to deny me two things: being - whatever that is - as British as they are, and relatedly the fact that this is my home country and culture, too.

2. I have a mental-health condition. Let's say that it's unipolar depression, and so I am prone to my mood going low, or that I have other conditions that fluctuate and which, when they are at their worst, mean that, if I can function at all, I can barely do so. If I have, before I learnt by experience, shared that I have such a condition, people may not actually say 'But there's nothing wrong with you', but you can see it in their face, in their eyes, because they see you when you are functioning. Worse, they are people with power to see you when you cannot function, and who think that you aren't trying, are pretending. And the same can be the experience of those with Multiple Sclerosis (MS), who can be taken for being drunk (so hurtfully) when there is lack of balance or control.

3. I identify as being female, and dress accordingly, but do not want to change my physical gender. Often enough, without reference to me, I'd be called a man in a dress, and people would make all sorts of assumptions.

4. In my local supermarket, in the throng around the reduced items, a female member of staff is talking loudly to her colleagues, saying 'All men always...'. By being a man, I am included in her extreme generalization, because:

All men always do X
I am a man

Therefore I always do X


And that is the pattern for much of this - lumping people into together because of one characteristic that they may (or are assumed) to share, and ascribing to them all (or most of them) some behaviour or other characteristic, ignoring who they are, or what they have to say about it: all benefit claimants are scroungers, for example...


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