Labels and "The Other"

Greg responded to my ire and explains his reasoning over here. It is an interesting post and I recommend checking it out (along with the Athletes are more likely to be gay post). I am not really going to dive into that post. Instead I want to address the underlying theme of "The Other." Mainly I want to address the absolute absurdity of the concept of "The Other." The absurdity of the notion that because someone is a little different than myself, they are somehow subhuman. I want to be clear from the start, that this is not a sentiment that makes those who feel it special. It really isn't all that complicated - to prove that, I am going to keep this post very short.

We all - every single human being on the planet - wear a lot of labels that define us. While some of those labels are assuredly more important than others, we all have a whole hell of a lot of them. If you really sit down and think about it, you can begin to see that it would be flat out impossible to list them all. Son or daughter, sibling, friend, lover, writer, student, educator - the list is virtually endless. We all attach varying degrees of importance to our various labels, but in the end we are all defined by thousands of factors that contribute to who and what we ultimately are.

Given these remarkably long lists, who the fuck am I to feel superior to anybody, simply because they happen to have a few labels I disapprove of?