trigger warning: discourse (obviously), discussions of identity invalidation and exclusionism, slight mentions of depression
as a closeted queer teenager with access to the internet and with a quite crippling social media addiction, it was very easy to slip into the pitfall of identity discourse. on pretty much every social media network i was active on at the time, there were posts about it. it was quite impossible to avoid it. as someone early on into their journey, i felt quite confused, insecure, and lost about my identity. sure, i knew a general idea of what i was (not cis, not straight), but labels were overwhelming and confusing. this isn't to say that labels don't still sometimes trip me up, because they do, but over time i've figured out more about myself and have learned to care far less about what others think of me and see me as.
anyway, reader, i'm assuming you're thinking one of two things: 1, what the hell are you talking about, 2, i know exactly what you mean. if you're lucky enough to have not experienced the endless debates over identities, i'll try to explain it the best i can. the queer community is oppressed, so you would think that they would stick together and stand up for each other, but it's not always that way. especially with younger queer people, arguments can arise about what labels are "valid", what labels are considered "queer enough", and what labels are contradictory. some examples of this that particularly stand out to me are bisexual lesbians, xenogenders, neopronouns, and asexual discourse, but of course there's countless more. your initial thoughts (if you're uninformed) about the term bixesual lesbian might be that those labels can't go together, because lesbians cannot be attracted to men. if it's your first time hearing about xenogenders and neopronouns, you might think it's absurd that someone could classify their gender as something that doesn't seem like a gender at all (like catgender), or that they're using strange pronouns you've never heard of before (like xe/xem, it/its, or pix/pixs). you might not even think that asexuals are queer, because, you know, what if that asexual person is heteromantic, and what if they're dating the opposite gender, and...
all of these are valid concerns. however, by trying to view queer identities as something entirely logical or rigid, you're doing yourself and others a disservice. it's impossible to have the perfect words to describe every identity, it's impossible to put someone's experiences into a box. there are countless, endless reasons why someone may describe themselves in a way you don't understand. i think a big part of maturing is realizing that not everything can cater to you, that not everything has to make sense to you. you might feel like by invalidating others, you're in a way making yourself more palatable to outsiders. however, it's very important to understand that other queer people are not the enemy, they are not the reason for your opression. you need to be mad at your opressors, at bigots, the ones taking your rights away, the ones who don't want you to live. that's the enemy.
another effect of all of this fighting is stress on yourself. i spent countless hours trying to research what flags are the "correct" flags to use, because some flags had creators who were okay with kink at pride or were okay with lesbians being bisexual. i literally could not stop debating with myself in my head over and over again about if it's okay to use the blue and green gay flag, because lesbians on twitter were saying it was phobic to use it since it was a color shifted version of the lesbian flag (literally wtf lmao). i would fight for my life in comment sections, trying to prove why my neopronouns and xenogenders were valid. i would debate people about why asexuals are queer, why pansexual is a valid label, and i spent hours crafting intricate dni pages of people i didn't want to be around because they had different opinions than me. this wasted my time, i could have been doing something productive with my life. this made me feel like i was doing something wrong, even if i wasn't meaning to, and it made me feel like i could never be perfect enough for the queer community. if i had any thoughts that were different from the norm, i would shove them away because i knew i would be ridiculed. it sounds ridiculous because it is. please don't do this to yourself.
one day, something inside me shifted. i felt so, so free. i just stopped caring about any of it. why should i care if someone has a fluid or complex identity? why does it matter if the creator of a flag is problematic? as long as someone was labeling themselves within good faith (like. not paraphiliacs or something.) it literally is none of my business. hell, there are still things i really don't understand, but i don't need to understand them to respect them. if someone wants to consider themselves queer, they can be queer, i'm not the queer labeling enforcement. polyamorous? asexual? demiromantic? great, you can be queer! don't want to label yourself as queer? you don't have to! it's amazing how much this literally flipped my life upside down for the better. the answer to this blog's title is a resounding no, please don't care about any of it. if you've been struggling with this, please take this post as a sign to view it from a different light. if you're still in the dark about whatever the hell i've been talking about, that's completly fine too. maybe i'm the only one who has really cared this much about something so meaningless in the long run. but i've really wanted to get my feelings out about it and let my voice be heard about how much i love queer expression. be yourself, don't let someone else define you, rock that flag that people told you not to use, wear your contradictory labels with pride!