Labels: for Them or for Us?
Frankenstein's [a] monster!
Labels help us find each other. They help us get care, build community, make sense of experience. A diagnosis gives someone access to treatment. A word like “trans” or “autistic” or “runner” creates a tribe, a shared language, a way to stop feeling alone. Categories aren’t the enemy. We need them.
So when does labelling someone stop being about recognition and start being about our own comfort?
Last week in the discussion around the podcast, Alanna and I found ourselves unpicking the language people use without thinking – “lad” and “lass” are two words I’ve thrown around my whole life in the north of England without questioning them. Friendly, casual, warm even. But they aren’t neutral. They’re tiny acts of sorting, of putting people into boxes that make the world comprehensible to me. And when Alanna pointed out how easily we could just say “champ” or “pal” instead – or better yet, nothing at all – I had to sit with the fact that I’d been labelling people in a way that made me feel like I was more friendly or approachable or whatever without considering how it might make them feel.
It wasn’t malicious. It wasn’t even conscious. But that’s the point.
On the podcast proper, Alanna described their experience of non-binariness and what struck me was how it wasn’t exclusive or exclusionary to me as someone who’s fine with the label “man” and, for the most part, “straight man”. It was just them explaining how they move through the world. The only times I’ve felt uncomfortable being labelled “man” is when straight white women have used it at me – there is one hundred percent a difference between recognition and weaponisation.
We also spent time with Tom Rasmussen’s album Bodybuilding, and one track in particular stood out for Alanna: the spoken word piece, “Glass.”
Broken glass here serves as a metaphor for trans people. It’s something we see as less beautiful for being “broken”. We pushed further: you don’t touch broken glass for fear of being cut, and when you look into broken glass, you see yourself fragmented. The reflection isn’t clean or linear. It shows you back to yourself in pieces, and that non-linearity is unsettling.
The discomfort then isn’t with the glass itself but the state it’s in: broken, deformed, unusable. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if it was whole, shiny, easy to use and look at?
We’re all made up of people
I watched Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein last week, and one line from the creature keeps replaying: “I am simply what I am.” He’s not asking to be fixed or reassembled differently. He’s asking to be accepted as constructed – stitched together from hanged criminals, seams visible, nothing hidden. The horror of the story isn’t the creature. It’s Victor Frankenstein’s revulsion at what he made, his inability to see past the fact that his creation doesn’t look like it should. The creature is labeled “monster” not because of what he does initially, but because of what he is. And that label – monster – is Victor’s comfort, not the creature’s reality.
Mary Shelley knew something we’re still learning: we call things monstrous when they don’t perform the seamlessness we expect. When the stitching shows. When someone exists in a way that makes us work harder to understand them.
And here’s the thing – we’re all stitched together. From fragments of experience, influence, language, bodies that change, identities that shift. None of us are as smooth or linear as we sometimes try to present. But we’ve learned that performing wholeness is what makes other people comfortable. So when someone doesn’t – when they show up visibly constructed, seams and all – we feel something. And instead of sitting with that feeling, we reach for a label. Not to see them more clearly, but to manage our own discomfort.
This isn’t about being a bad person. It’s about recognising a pattern. Labels are useful when they help someone access care, find their people, articulate something about themselves they couldn’t before. But they slide into something else when we use them to make someone legible to us on our terms. When “lad” or “lass”, “prick” or “fascist”, sorts the world into boxes that make me feel oriented. When calling someone “broken” is easier than sitting with the discomfort of a reflection that doesn’t give me back a clean image of myself. When “monster” is shorthand for “I don’t know how to hold this.”
The question isn’t whether we use language to describe each other. We have to. The question is whether we’re doing it to see someone more clearly, or to make them easier to look at.
I don’t have an answer to that. I catch myself all the time reaching for words that smooth things over, that make the world feel more manageable. But I’m trying to notice the gap between labelling for recognition and labelling for comfort. Trying to ask: is this word helping them, or helping me?
Maybe that’s the work. Not to stop using language, but to keep asking who it’s for.
Next time you label someone – in your head, out loud, in passing – pause for a second. Is this helping them find care, community, understanding? Or is this helping you sort them into a box that makes your world feel more stable?
We’re all stitched together from fragments. The least we can do is let each other exist with the seams, scars, warts and all.
And that’s it from me, sort of…
There was a break last week as I chose the biggest edit yet of a podcast (multiple cameras and fluidity of conversation) over too rough a draft of the article you’ve just read.
You see, I’d really appreciate your help.
Whether it’s in production, research or promotion, Fitness & Thinking can sometimes feel like a huge undertaking alongside my coaching. It feels necessary, worthwhile, vital. But it’s tough when people pull out last minute or episodes are recorded the day before they go live. Look, we’re over 100 newsletters in over 104 weeks or so, and this week’s episode is number 28 (representing six straight months of recording, editing and promoting in a row), so we’re obviously grooving.
But I’d love to make music with a band, you know?
If you or someone you know could play a role, I’d love to hear from ya/s.
Until then, love as always, and I’ll see ya in the next one
J x