Gatekeeping – When someone takes it upon themselves to either allow or deny someone else the access to a community or identity.
If you were to ask me what my pet peeves are, one thing at the top of that list is gatekeeping. It sits right alongside treating people without dignity and respect.
I’ll be discussing this in terms of my identity and the labels that I use to describe myself. Yours may differ and that’s ok because we’re all different.
When you’re one of those people that sit outside what society tells us is the norm, things become a little tricky. We need labels to help us describe who we are, to ourselves just as much as to others and yet labels can also put us into boxes.
I was in my 20s when I realised I identified as bisexual, or at least thought I did because I had no real experience with anyone other than cishet men.
However, I have lost track of the number of times I’ve been told that because I use the term bi I’m transphobic, that I should use the term pan instead. But, I was probably in my mid to late 30s before I’d even heard the term pansexual. As a label it has no meaning to me personally. I was being pushed into using a term that I didn’t feel a connection to. To me, bi has always been an umbrella term for attraction to more than one gender.
Likewise, I heard the term bi lesbian in the past couple of years. For me personally, that’s two conflicting identities so not something I would use. That said, if that term works for you, then great. Someone using those labels doesn’t erase who I am.
But there is another side to this too. The side where the gatekeeping is internalised. Where I won’t allow myself to use labels that may actually be what I am.
Let me explain what I mean by that. I identify as genderqueer, I’m neither male nor female and I’m a combination of both of those and also none of those. Confusing huh! There’s a reason it’s taken me so long to work it out!
Someone recently referred to me as trans. And whilst it didn’t bother me that they did so, it also made me stop and think. Technically someone that is trans is someone who doesn’t identify as their sex at birth. Seeing as I don’t identify as female even though that’s my birth sex that means I must be trans. Except I feel that trans people have to deal with far more shit than I do, so it’s not right to erase their experiences by using that label myself.
See what I mean, internalised gatekeeping! My experiences and labels don’t erase someone else’s, just like their experiences and labels don’t erase mine. And yet that’s exactly what my overthinking brain does.
So there we have it, my rant about how pointless gatekeeping is. We are all perfectly unique and that means the labels and identities we use are unique to us and have absolutely no impact on anyone else, so people need to keep their opinions to themselves!