Get rid of tags

Pink are for girls, Boys do not cry, Girls should not sit spreading their legs, Boys should love sports, Girls should play with dolls and so much of this and bit of that too. Tags are attached with the smallest of things and every person keeps living life with the tags. It’s high time that we start living untagged without getting judged.

Gay men are effeminate and vise versa. But I can show hundreds of examples in this world which says otherwise. Effeminacy doesn’t come with a tag called homosexuals. Effeminate homosexuals and heterosexuals do not need the tag.

Single child comes with a tag that you are a spoilt brat. However, the world has seen children with siblings getting spoilt so the whole tag of getting spoilt has nothing to do with the fact that you are a single child or the hundredth child.

Women should have the tag timid and vulnerable hanging from their neck (right in between their cleavage) and along with it a virgin tag makes them just ‘suitable’ for the ‘masculine’ men of our society. Then a man is tagged ‘marriage material’ only when he has a fat wallet and a big car besides other big things, so again that is equally derogatory. Tagging leads to materialising human beings. Unless one stops the other will not. 

As soon as a boy wears pink or shows interest in art instead of sports he is tagged as being ‘gay’ or not manly enough. A girl spilling abuses or going around in short hair is tagged as ‘lesbian’ and not ladylike. And this has got more and more with time. The worst part is our young generation too judges people this same way. Gender or sexuality cannot be defined by colour or haircut. If we look at it deeper we will know that the pole or hole too doesn’t determine gender. What determines is the way we think, the way we see, the way we react and not what lies under our pants. Moreover, the fact that gender can be beyond binary is so unacceptable for ‘normal’ people that they find it very necessary to tag everything either 0 or 1.

Women are fighting for equality. However, as long as women themselves will  tag a girl with short dress or flirty attitude as ‘whore’, most men will never try to get things better. The other way round when a saree or slawar clad woman is tagged as timid and meek or even unsmart it gives a very bad picture of the person who is tagging the woman. As long as women will keeping tagging other women, equality will never come and knock the doors. It has to be achieved, it’s not gifted. Women cannot expect equality if they tag themselves ‘weak’ and look for unnecessary advantages. Women are tagged as ‘gossipmongers’, men do the office politics better than women in many cases and it requires so much of gossiping and plotting.

   

The LGBT community is fighting for basic rights and then you find tags within the community based on effeminacy, based on sexual positions, based on age, based on tool sizes and much more. A community (which although huge in number is called minority in our incredible India) that’s looking for acceptance from the ‘majority’ cannot afford to tag themselves and create further divisions. That’s how harmful tagging can get.

It needs a lot of courage to turn around and say ‘I do not give a damn to the tags’. People keep attaching tags even based on the way we walk or the way we talk or even the length of our eyelashes or the pitch of our voice  so what can anyone do? Stop walking? Stop eating? Stop blinking? Stop talking? None is an option good enough. Languages earn you tags too for no reason such as Nationalists and anti-Nationals. The art of filtering comes handy in this case. And to all the people who are going around tagging, someone is tagging you too. You tag a person mad and don’t you think that person will do the same for you? Tag in some cases is a tad bit more than judgement because judgement do change but tags remain and can be very painful at times. Let the masculine girl and the feminine boy live an ‘untagged’ life.