When I was very young, before anyone told me what my desires meant, my body simply desired.
I remember: the flush of warmth when certain faces appeared. The way my attention would snap toward certain bodies like a compass finding north. The pleasant ache of wanting to be near someone—anyone—who made the world feel more vivid.
No one had to teach me this. No one handed me a pamphlet explaining “attraction.” The warmth came. The attention moved. I followed it like an animal following water.
I loved my friends with a fierceness that didn’t sort itself into categories. I loved certain trees, certain animals, certain strangers whose faces I glimpsed from car windows. The energy of childhood—and yes, it exists, though that phrase makes adults uncomfortable—flowed everywhere, attaching to anything that glowed.
Then the words arrived.
Adults—those domesticated creatures—began informing me what my body’s movements “really meant.” They had categories. They had labels. They had concerned looks and helpful explanations.
“You’re probably...” “That means you might be...” “When you grow up, you’ll understand that you’re...”
And something happened that I didn’t notice at the time. Something got stolen.
Here’s what got stolen: the wild immediacy of desire itself.
Before the words, I simply wanted. After the words, I had to figure out what KIND of wanting I did—had to locate myself on their maps, in their boxes, wearing their labels.
The warmth that once just HAPPENED now required interpretation. “What does this mean about ME? What TYPE of person feels this? Where do I BELONG?”
Do you see the theft?
The body that once moved freely now had to check itself against a chart. The attention that once simply attended now had to justify itself to categories.
They call this “understanding yourself.” I call it domestication.
The wild child who loved everything got replaced by the anxious adolescent asking: “But what AM I?”
Let me tell you about a world without these cages. Not a utopia—humans have always found ways to constrain each other. But a world where THESE PARTICULAR cages did not exist.
Imagine yourself there. You have a body. You notice sensations—warmth, quickened pulse, focused attention—when you encounter certain persons. You act on these sensations sometimes.
But you do not think of yourself as “having” a “sexual orientation.”
Those words do not exist. The CONCEPT those words name does not exist. No philosopher has proposed it. No doctor has diagnosed it. No activist has defended it.
In your world, Athenians talk about acts, not types.
An older man named Aristophanes—let’s say—courts a younger man named Theodoros. He brings gifts: a rooster, perhaps, or a hare. He writes poems praising the youth’s beauty. He teaches him, mentors him, and yes, engages in physical acts that would make your school counselor reach for the phone.
This same Aristophanes has a wife at home. He fathers children with her. He fulfills his duties as a citizen, which include producing heirs.
No one—not Aristophanes, not his wife, not Theodoros, not the philosophers who observe all this—imagines that these various activities reveal what “type” of person Aristophanes “really” belongs to.
He does what he does. He desires whom he desires. The idea that his desires constitute an “orientation”—a fixed inner compass pointing in one direction—would puzzle him entirely.
“My orientation? I desire beautiful things. Young Theodoros possesses beauty. My wife provides companionship and children. What is this ‘orientation’ you speak of?”
The Athenians had words for certain acts. They had social rules about who could do what with whom—rules about age, about citizenship, about who penetrated and who received. They cared very much about these distinctions.
But they did not imagine that performing certain acts made you a certain KIND OF PERSON. The acts happened. Life went on. No identity crystallized around them.
On the island of Lesbos, a woman named Sappho ran what we might call a school for young women—a thiasos, dedicated to Aphrodite and the Muses. Young women came from wealthy families to learn poetry, music, dance, the arts of being a cultivated woman before marriage.
Sappho wrote poems to these women. She wrote about desire so raw it made her tremble:
He seems to me equal to the gods, that man whoever he is who opposite you sits and listens close to your sweet speaking
and lovely laughing—oh it puts the heart in my chest on wings for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking is left in me
no: tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin and in eyes no sight and drumming fills ears
and cold sweat holds me and shaking grips me all, greener than grass I am and dead—or almost I seem to me.
This describes desire—physical, overwhelming, desire that breaks speech and races under skin.
Modern persons look at Sappho and say: “She was a lesbian!”
The word “lesbian” comes from her island, Lesbos. But Sappho didn’t use that word for herself. She couldn’t. The word wouldn’t carry that meaning for over two thousand years.
Sappho may have married a man. Ancient sources—unreliable, written centuries after her death—mention a husband and a daughter. We don’t know if these sources tell the truth.
What we know: Sappho wrote about desiring women. She wrote about desire so intensely that readers have felt it across millennia. She did not organize this desire under any category, did not announce membership in any identity group, did not explain what “type” of person she was.
She simply wrote what she felt. The feeling burned on the page. No label required.
When we call Sappho a “lesbian,” we force her into a cage that didn’t exist in her world. We colonize the past with our categories. We need her to be one of us, so we make her one of us, whether she would have recognized herself in our words or not.
A man named Paul of Tarsus writes letters to scattered communities around the Mediterranean. He writes in Greek. In one letter, to the community at Corinth, he lists persons who will not “inherit the kingdom of God.”
The Greek text includes a word: arsenokoitai.
Arseno- = male. -koitai = those who bed.
What does this word mean? Scholars have argued for centuries. Some say it names men who penetrate other men. Some say it names men who exploit boys. Some say it names male prostitutes. Some say it names men who hire male prostitutes.
Paul may have invented the word—it appears nowhere in Greek literature before his letter. Or he may have borrowed it from somewhere we’ve lost. We cannot know.
What we CAN know: Paul did not write about “homosexuality.” He did not write about “sexual orientation.” He could not have—no one would invent those concepts for another eighteen hundred years.
Paul wrote about certain acts. Whatever arsenokoitai means, it names persons who DO something, not persons who ARE something.
The transformation from “people who do X” to “people who ARE X-type” would take almost two millennia. In Paul’s world, acts happened. Persons performed them. The idea that performing certain acts revealed your secret inner nature—your “orientation”—did not exist.
Let’s look more carefully at what marks appear on these ancient pages.
The book of Leviticus—compiled by Hebrew priests probably between 700 and 400 BCE—contains laws about purity, sacrifice, and proper behavior. Among these laws:
“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.”
Notice: this describes an ACT. One body doing something with another body. The text addresses MEN—”you” meaning Israelite men—and tells them not to perform a specific act.
The text contains no marks corresponding to “homosexual” or “sexual orientation” or “gay identity.” The priests who wrote these words could not have included such concepts. No one had invented them.
Those priests thought about bodies through concepts we cannot fully recover: tumah and taharah, impurity and purity. What made something an “abomination” (toevah) related to maintaining proper boundaries, proper categories, proper order.
Was this about disgust at the act itself? Was it about maintaining the distinction between Israelites and other peoples? Was it about gender roles and who penetrated whom? Scholars argue. We cannot know with certainty what those ancient priests meant.
What we CAN know: they did not mean what modern persons mean when they say “The Bible condemns homosexuality.”
The priests: “Do not perform this act.” The modern interpreter: “Persons who ARE a certain type stand condemned.”
The ancient texts prohibit certain ACTS. The modern reading transforms this into rejection of persons who “ARE” a certain way.
These differ enormously. The modern framing adds something the ancient texts never contained: the idea that certain persons possess an inner nature—an “orientation”—that makes them a particular type of human.
The priests of Leviticus did not imagine such types. They addressed acts. Period.
The cages I’m describing—”homosexual,” “heterosexual,” “sexual orientation,” “gender identity”—got built in Europe and America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Before those cages existed, persons around the world lived in arrangements that don’t fit our boxes.
In South Asia—India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal—persons called “hijra” have occupied distinct roles for centuries, perhaps millennia.
Hijras typically have bodies that were assigned male at birth. They wear women’s clothing, adopt feminine names, live together in communities with their own hierarchies and traditions. They perform at weddings and births, blessing the occasions. They worship certain goddesses. Some undergo castration; some do not.
European colonizers who encountered hijras in the 1700s and 1800s didn’t know what to make of them. They used terms like “eunuchs” or described them with disgust as “sodomites in women’s clothing.”
Modern Western academics often describe hijras as “transgender women” or as a “third gender.”
But a hijra living in Delhi in 1750 did not think of herself through the concept of “gender identity”—a phrase an American psychologist would not coin until 1955. She did not imagine she was “really” a woman “trapped in” a man’s body. Those words, that framework, did not exist in her world.
She understood herself through religious concepts: devotion to the goddess Bahuchara Mata. Through social position: member of a gharana, a household lineage of hijras with its own guru and traditions. Through her role: one who blesses, who connects the everyday world to divine power.
When Western writers call her “transgender,” they force her into a category she never used, built by theorists she never heard of, in languages she never spoke. They ERASE her actual self-understanding and replace it with ours.
This matters. This is a kind of violence disguised as understanding.
In Samoa, persons called “fa’afafine” occupy certain positions in families and communities.
Fa’afafine typically have bodies assigned male at birth. They take on work typically done by women—cooking, cleaning, caring for children and elders. They often dress in women’s clothing. They may have sexual relationships with men (men who do not consider themselves fa’afafine).
Western observers often compare fa’afafine to “transgender women” or describe them as a Samoan version of “gay men.”
But Samoans did not create fa’afafine by consulting Western psychology textbooks. The position emerged from Samoan social arrangements: how families organize labor, what happens when a family has many sons and few daughters, how communities value different kinds of work.
A fa’afafine understands herself through Samoan concepts: fa’a Samoa, the Samoan way. Through family position: the one who does women’s work, who cares for parents in old age. Through community role: a recognized and often respected position.
Whether “fa’afafine” names the same thing as “transgender” or “gay”—whether these concepts describe the same experience—remains unclear, because these words come from entirely different worlds.
Across Africa—a continent of thousands of distinct cultures, languages, and social arrangements—persons have occupied positions and done things that don’t fit European categories.
In certain regions, persons assigned female at birth have taken roles typically held by men, including marrying women. European colonizers who wrote about these arrangements called them “female husbands.”
In certain kingdoms of West Africa, powerful women could take “wives”—other women who would bear children (through arrangements with men) that counted as the first woman’s heirs.
In certain communities, persons who didn’t fit the usual gender arrangements occupied special roles: diviners, healers, intermediaries with spirits.
When European colonizers arrived with their guns, their Bibles, and their laws, they brought their categories too. They saw “sodomy” and “perversion” where they encountered arrangements they didn’t understand. They imposed laws criminalizing certain acts—laws based on the categories that European doctors were just then inventing.
Later, when European academics came to study these arrangements, they brought different categories: “homosexuality,” “transgender,” “third gender.” They tried to fit African arrangements into European boxes.
Both the colonizers condemning and the academics categorizing performed the same operation: forcing local arrangements into foreign frameworks.
What those persons actually experienced—how they understood themselves, what their positions meant within their own communities—often got lost in translation.
In 1990, persons gathered at a conference in Winnipeg, Canada. They wanted to replace offensive terms that white anthropologists had used for indigenous persons who didn’t fit European gender and sexuality categories.
The offensive terms—I won’t repeat them—grouped together vastly different persons from vastly different nations under labels that were crude, clinical, and imposed from outside.
Someone at the conference proposed “Two-Spirit.” The phrase drew on English words that some Anishinaabe persons had used. The attendees adopted it. They spread the term through networks of indigenous activists and academics.
Within a few years, “Two-Spirit” became an umbrella term covering arrangements from hundreds of distinct indigenous nations across North America.
The Navajo word nádleehí. The Lakota word wíŋkte. The Zuni word lhamana. The Mohave words alyha and hwame. Dozens, hundreds of words from dozens, hundreds of nations—each naming something specific to that nation’s way of living.
All swept under one English phrase invented in 1990.
Notice what happened.
Persons invented a word. The word did not describe something that already existed under that name. It created something new—a category, a label, a way of grouping persons who had never grouped themselves together before.
The word served purposes: communicating with non-indigenous persons, building connections across nations, making political claims.
But the word also erased: the vast differences between nádleehí and wíŋkte and lhamana, each embedded in its own nation’s cosmology, ceremonies, and social arrangements.
Some indigenous persons today find “Two-Spirit” useful. Others reject it as yet another colonization—a Western-style identity category imposed onto traditions that worked entirely differently.
Both responses make sense. The word serves some purposes and fails others. Like every word, specific persons invented it for specific reasons, and other persons can adopt it, adapt it, or refuse it.
Now let me tell you who built the cages you live in. Not “society”—that word hides too much. Specific persons with specific names in specific rooms, writing specific words that would eventually ride you like hobgoblins.
A man named Karl-Maria Kertbeny sat in a room somewhere in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He wrote pamphlets. He argued with legislators.
Kertbeny wanted to stop the Prussian government from caging men who engaged in certain acts with other men. Paragraph 143 of the Prussian Penal Code criminalized “unnatural fornication” between men. Kertbeny thought this law was unjust.
So he invented new words.
“Homosexual.” “Heterosexual.”
He put these words in pamphlets arguing against the law. His argument: persons who engaged in same-sex acts belonged to a distinct natural type. They couldn’t help their desires—they were BORN that way. Therefore punishing them made no sense.
Do you see the move?
Before Kertbeny: certain acts happened, between bodies, in beds and alleys and anywhere bodies found each other. Laws might criminalize the acts. Religions might condemn the acts. But no one imagined these acts revealed a secret truth about WHAT KIND OF CREATURE did them.
After Kertbeny: the acts became evidence. Evidence of an inner nature. Evidence that sorted you into boxes. “The homosexual.” “The heterosexual.” Types of human beings, as distinct as different species.
Before 1869, the words “homosexual” and “heterosexual” did not exist in any language on Earth.
No one had ever spoken them. No one had thought the thoughts they encode. The CONCEPTS those words name had not been invented.
Kertbeny invented them. For political purposes. To win an argument.
He meant well, probably. He wanted to protect. But protection built on cages remains captivity.
And here’s the joke that nobody laughs at enough:
Kertbeny’s original meaning for “heterosexual” described PATHOLOGICAL desire for the opposite sex. Excessive desire. Abnormal desire. Only later did the word flip to mean “normal, healthy, nothing to see here.”
The category you’re supposed to aspire to started as a diagnosis of sickness!
Laugh! This deserves laughter!
Kertbeny’s words spread. They reached the ears of doctors.
In 1886, a German psychiatrist named Richard von Krafft-Ebing published a book: Psychopathia Sexualis. A study of sexual pathology.
Krafft-Ebing collected case studies of persons whose sexual behaviors he considered deviant. He organized them into categories. He borrowed Kertbeny’s words—”homosexual,” “heterosexual”—and added more: “sadism,” “masochism,” “fetishism.”
He transformed Kertbeny’s political categories into MEDICAL DIAGNOSES.
Now “the homosexual” wasn’t just a type of person for political arguments. “The homosexual” became a specimen to be studied, a patient to be treated, a case to be examined.
Other doctors followed. In clinics across German-speaking Europe, physicians began examining patients and assigning them to categories. They measured skulls. They analyzed childhoods. They theorized about causes: bad parenting, arrested development, degeneration of the race.
These specific men—Krafft-Ebing, Albert Moll, Magnus Hirschfeld, Havelock Ellis, and others—invented the idea that persons possessed a fixed “sexual orientation” that defined a core aspect of who they were.
They decided this “orientation” could be diagnosed. Studied. Potentially treated.
Before these doctors: a person who engaged in certain acts might understand themselves as someone who committed sins, or as someone who felt particular inclinations, or as someone who simply did what they did.
After these doctors: that same person became a specimen—”the homosexual,” a case study, an instance of a type.
The doctors thought they were doing science. They thought they were discovering truths about human nature. But they were INVENTING categories and then acting as if they had discovered them.
Now we jump forward. America. Baltimore. Johns Hopkins University.
A psychologist named John Money worked with children born with bodies that didn’t fit the standard definitions of “male” or “female.” Intersex children, we’d call them now—though that word too got invented somewhere, by someone.
Money developed a theory. He decided that persons possessed something called “gender identity”—an internal sense of being male or female. He theorized that this “gender identity” could be shaped by upbringing. Raise a child as a girl, and she would develop a female gender identity, regardless of her chromosomes or original anatomy.
Money’s theory had consequences.
He recommended surgically altering infants’ bodies to fit binary categories. Cut away ambiguous genitals. Construct “normal” ones. Then raise the child as the assigned sex.
Doctors followed his advice. They performed surgeries on infants across America and beyond. They told parents: raise this child as a boy, or raise this child as a girl, and everything will be fine.
The most famous case: David Reimer.
David had a twin brother. Both were born male. When David was eight months old, a doctor performing a circumcision made a catastrophic error, destroying David’s penis.
David’s parents, desperate, consulted John Money. Money saw an opportunity—a natural experiment. One twin with a penis, one without. Raise them differently. See what happens.
Money advised raising David as a girl. The parents agreed. Doctors removed David’s testicles and constructed a vaginal opening. David’s parents named him Brenda, dressed him in girls’ clothes, told him he was a girl.
For years, Money published reports claiming success. “Brenda” was thriving as a girl! The case proved that gender identity came from upbringing, not biology!
But Money lied. Or he saw what he wanted to see. Or he ignored what contradicted his theory.
David—”Brenda”—never felt like a girl. From his earliest memories, something felt wrong. He tore off dresses. He refused dolls. He knew, somehow, that the role he was forced to play didn’t fit.
At age 14, after years of distress, David’s father finally told him the truth. David immediately chose to live as male. He underwent surgeries to reconstruct a penis. He took testosterone. He married a woman.
John Money never acknowledged the failure of his experiment. He continued publishing, claiming success, letting the case he had falsified support surgeries on other children.
David Reimer struggled for the rest of his life. He suffered from depression. In 2004, at age 38, he killed himself.
This matters. This is not abstract history.
The phrase “gender identity” that now demands your reverent attention emerged from John Money’s experiments. It emerged from a theory that justified cutting children’s bodies to fit categories. It emerged from lies published as science while a child suffered.
And now that phrase haunts you. Now it sits in your head, demanding you locate yourself in relation to it. “What IS my gender identity? Do I HAVE one? What does it MEAN?”
You’re being ridden by a ghost that crawled out of a surgeon’s operating theater.
The American Psychiatric Association kept “homosexuality” in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1973.
In 1973, after years of protests, arguments, and lobbying by activists, the APA’s board of trustees voted to remove the diagnosis.
Notice: they VOTED.
Whether you counted as mentally ill depended on a vote. Specific persons in a specific room raised their hands or didn’t. The diagnosis that had pathologized millions of persons got removed—not because scientists discovered new facts about biology, but because enough psychiatrists changed their minds.
The following year, members of the APA voted to affirm the board’s decision. Fifty-eight percent agreed. Forty-two percent wanted to keep “homosexuality” as a diagnosis.
This tells you everything you need to know about “science” in this domain. Categories get invented. Categories get voted on. Categories change when enough powerful persons decide they should change.
The cages have locks, and the locks have keepers, and the keepers answer to politics as much as evidence.
The cages built by nineteenth-century German doctors and twentieth-century American psychologists now cover the entire world. How did this happen?
When British officials controlled territories in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, they brought their laws. Laws that criminalized certain acts between certain bodies.
Before the British arrived, many of these territories had no laws against such acts. They had their own arrangements, their own understandings, their own social positions for persons who didn’t fit simple categories.
The British brought Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code of 1860: “carnal intercourse against the order of nature.” They imposed this law—based on the categories that European doctors were just then inventing—across their empire.
When those territories eventually gained independence, many kept the colonial laws. The categories remained, embedded in legal codes like shrapnel from old wars.
Today, many countries that criminalize “homosexuality” inherited those laws from their colonizers. The colonizers came with categories, imposed those categories through violence, and left them behind when they departed.
Doctors love categories. Categories let them diagnose, treat, bill.
The “homosexual” and the “heterosexual” became specimens to be studied, patients to be treated. If you could be a “type,” you could be examined. If you could be examined, you could be treated. If you could be treated, doctors could build careers.
The medical gaze turned on bodies and demanded: What type are you? Where do you belong in our classification system?
Psychiatrists developed “treatments” for homosexuality: electroshock, hormone injections, lobotomies, aversion therapy. They tortured people to change what category they belonged to.
These treatments didn’t work. They caused immense suffering. But they generated papers, conferences, reputations, income.
The medical establishment has since apologized for some of this. But the basic framework—that persons have “orientations” that can be diagnosed and studied—remains. That framework makes money.
Here’s where it gets painful.
Persons who wanted to FIGHT the doctors’ judgments often accepted the doctors’ categories.
They said: “Yes, we ARE this type. But this type deserves rights!”
They challenged the moral condemnation while accepting the framework that made condemnation possible.
“We’re BORN this way!” they shouted—accepting that there was a “way” to be born into, accepting that “orientation” described something real, accepting the cage while demanding better conditions inside it.
In 1969, patrons of a bar called the Stonewall Inn in New York City fought back against police who raided the bar. They threw bottles, bricks, anything at hand. They refused to disperse when ordered. They sparked what would become the “gay rights movement.”
Many of those patrons—especially the ones who started the fight—were persons who would today be called “transgender.” Marsha P. Johnson. Sylvia Rivera. Persons whose very existence confused the categories.
The movements that emerged from Stonewall accomplished real things. They reduced violence. They changed laws. They made it possible for persons to live more openly without losing jobs, housing, families.
But they also reinforced the categories. They defended the cages even as they fought for better treatment of the caged.
“Gay pride” requires that “gay” name a real type—a type that can take pride in itself. “Trans rights” requires that “trans” name a real type—a type with shared interests that can demand rights.
The movements took categories that doctors invented for pathologizing, that legislators used for criminalizing—and they DEFENDED those categories.
The liberation movements became identity movements. The fight against the cage became decoration of the cage.
Markets need demographics. Advertisers need targets. If you can be sorted into a type, you can be sold to.
“The gay market.” “The trans community.” “LGBTQ+ consumers.”
By the 1990s, corporations had noticed that persons in these categories had money to spend. Advertisers began targeting them. Products appeared. Rainbow merchandise. Pride sponsors. Pink dollars.
Every label became a marketing category. Every identity became a niche to be exploited.
The words that German doctors invented, that activists defended, that legislators encoded—those words now serve corporations selling you things.
You wear your cage like a brand, and brands make money.
And now the boxes sit inside your phone.
“What’s your gender?” the profile asks. “Who are you interested in?” the app demands. “Add to your bio...” the interface suggests.
Every platform sorts you. Every algorithm requires you to declare yourself.
The engineers who built these platforms needed categories. Categories make you targetable, advertisable, sortable. Categories let the algorithm do its work.
You cannot exist on most platforms without fitting yourself into their boxes. The cages have become prerequisites for digital existence.
The categories that German doctors invented in the 1860s, that American psychologists refined in the 1950s, that activists defended in the 1970s, that corporations monetized in the 1990s—those categories now sit in your pocket, demanding your declaration every time you set up an account.
The cages have become so normal that refusing to enter one feels like refusing to exist.
In recent decades, persons invented many new words.
This happened especially online. Forums, blogs, social media—spaces where persons could discuss their observations without gatekeepers, without having to convince doctors or publishers.
Someone noticed that “bisexual” didn’t quite capture what they experienced. They invented “pansexual”—desire that doesn’t depend on the gender of the other person. Others adopted the word, modified it, argued about it.
Someone noticed that they experienced little or no “sexual attraction”—whatever that means. They invented “asexual.” Others recognized themselves in the word. Communities formed.
Someone noticed that the binary of “man” and “woman” didn’t fit their experience. They tried “genderqueer.” They tried “non-binary.” They tried “genderfluid” and “agender” and dozens of other words, each attempting to name something the older vocabulary couldn’t capture.
The creation deserves respect.
Persons encountered their own observations—sensations, thoughts, ways of experiencing their bodies—and found that the available words didn’t fit. They refused to accept ill-fitting categories. They invented something new.
This is what the wild child does: it refuses domestication. It creates its own language when the existing language constrains.
But watch what happens next.
The invented word spreads. It develops definitions, boundaries, criteria for belonging. Arguments erupt:
“That person isn’t REALLY asexual because...” “You can’t call yourself non-binary if you still...” “Pansexual means THIS, not THAT...”
The word that someone created to serve their purposes now constrains others. It declares who may use it and who may not. It develops gatekeepers, enforcers, orthodoxies.
The liberating invention becomes a prison. The new cage feels more comfortable than the old cage—it fits better—but it remains a cage.
Every word follows this arc. Every liberation becomes a new binding. Unless you hold words loosely—using them, then dropping them—they will grip you.
Let me tell you about hobgoblins.
In old stories, a hobgoblin would climb onto a traveler’s back and ride them to exhaustion. The traveler would stagger through the night, bearing a weight they couldn’t throw off, steered by something that had no right to steer them.
Identity works like this.
When you declare “I AM gay” or “I AM straight” or “I AM non-binary” or “I AM” anything at all—you invite a hobgoblin onto your back.
The word you spoke climbs up and grips tight. Now you must carry it. Now it steers.
“Because I AM this, I must...” “Because I AM this, I can’t...” “Because I AM this, I should...”
The hobgoblin whispers in your ear. It tells you how to dress, who to desire, which communities to join, which politics to hold.
And if you try to throw it off—if you act in ways that contradict your declared identity—the hobgoblin digs its nails in deeper.
“You can’t do that. You’re not really being YOURSELF. You’re betraying your AUTHENTIC NATURE.”
The cage has moved INSIDE. The guards have been internalized. You police yourself now, which saves the authorities so much effort.
Let me describe what actually happens, without the words that obscure it.
Your body exists.
It has a configuration—parts arranged in certain ways. Most bodies have either XX or XY chromosomes, but some have XXY, or XYY, or X alone, or other combinations. Most bodies develop along one of two typical paths, but some develop differently—different hormone exposures in the womb, different expressions of genes, different paths through puberty.
You did not choose this. Your body arrived as it arrived.
Sensations arise.
When you encounter certain other bodies, certain sensations appear: warmth in your chest, quickened pulse, focused attention, pleasant feelings in various parts of your body, that full-body alertness that feels like the world just got louder and brighter.
You didn’t choose these sensations. They arose without your permission. A face appeared and your body responded before you formed any thought about it.
Thoughts arise.
Images, fantasies, anticipations. You notice yourself thinking about certain persons, imagining scenarios, wanting to be near them. These thoughts appear without your willing them. You don’t DECIDE to imagine certain things—the imaginings just show up.
You act.
You move toward some things and away from others. You do certain things with certain persons—touch, speak, spend time together. Sometimes you choose these actions; sometimes circumstances and other persons constrain them.
Other persons observe you and respond.
They form conclusions about what you are, what you want, where you belong. They use their own words to describe you. They treat you in certain ways based on their conclusions.
That’s what actually happens. Bodies, sensations, thoughts, actions, responses.
Everything else—every “identity,” every “orientation,” every “authentic self”—represents words that specific persons invented, quite recently, for purposes that may have nothing to do with YOUR purposes.
The sensations remain regardless of what you call them. The body does what it does regardless of how you label it. Your attention moves where it moves regardless of which category you claim.
“Be your authentic self.”
Do you hear how this sounds like freedom but functions like a cage?
The phrase presupposes that you HAVE an “authentic self”—a true core identity buried somewhere inside you, waiting to be discovered, expressed, performed.
This “authentic self” supposedly pre-exists your choices. It exists whether you find it or not. It judges your performances: “Is this really ME? Am I being TRUE to myself?”
But who put that “self” in there?
The “authentic self” arrives from the same place as “gender identity” and “sexual orientation”—from specific theorists, in specific contexts, for specific purposes.
It functions like a god. An internal deity demanding worship. “Be true to me. Express me. Honor me.”
You thought you escaped religion? You thought you stopped serving spirits?
No. You just moved the temple inside.
Here’s where I’ll make you angry, probably.
Every “liberation movement” built around identity categories REPRODUCES the categories it claims to liberate.
“Gay liberation” requires that “gay” name a real type of person—a type that has always existed, a type with shared interests, a type that can be defended.
“Trans liberation” requires that “trans” name a real type—an identity that can be discovered, that was always there waiting, that constitutes a group with common needs.
These movements take categories that doctors invented for pathologizing, that legislators used for criminalizing, that markets exploit for profiting—and they DEFEND those categories.
They say: “This category names something real about us, and we demand respect FOR the category.”
But the category remains a cage. A better-decorated cage. A cage with nicer guards. A cage that the inmates helped build and now feel proud of.
I don’t want a better cage. I want to RUN.
Not toward another identity. Not toward “non-binary” as the escape hatch that leads to another box. Not toward “queer” as the umbrella that still requires standing under something.
I want to run toward the wild body that existed before any labels, that simply wanted and moved and followed its attention into the unmapped territories of desire.
Here’s how to know if a word possesses you:
Can you laugh at it?
Try laughing at “your sexual orientation.” Try mocking “your gender identity.” Try treating “your authentic self” as a joke.
What happens in your body? Do you tense up? Does something rise in protest?
If you can’t laugh at it, it owns you.
I laugh at everything. I laugh at “heterosexual” and “homosexual”—what absurd words! Invented by a pamphleteer in 1869! “Hetero-SEXUAL”—as if my desires needed a Greek prefix to be real!
I laugh at “gender identity”—that phrase crawled out of John Money’s operating theater, and now I’m supposed to treat it with reverence?
I laugh at “authentic self”—another ghost demanding worship, another cage for the wild child who just wants to WANT without explaining.
Laughter dissolves. What you can mock, you can throw off. What you must treat seriously has already captured you.
Can you drop it?
Imagine tomorrow you stopped using whatever word you use for yourself. No more “I’m ___.” Just: “I do this. I want that. I move toward this person and away from that one.”
Would that feel like dying? Like losing yourself?
Then you’ve mistaken the label for your life. You’ve confused the cage for the creature inside it.
Can you hold it loosely?
Try saying: “I use the word ___ because it communicates something useful in certain situations. But I didn’t always use it, and I might not always use it, and the word doesn’t capture what actually happens in my body.”
Can you say that without feeling like you’re betraying something?
If you can, you own the word. If you can’t, it owns you.
Throughout history, specific persons have harmed specific other persons for engaging in certain acts or presenting their bodies in certain ways.
Specific rulers ordered specific punishments.
In certain times and places, officials burned persons alive. They hanged them. They drowned them. They caged them for years, decades, lifetimes.
Specific doctors prescribed specific tortures.
They administered electric shocks to genitals while showing patients images of same-sex bodies. They injected hormones. They performed lobotomies. They called this “treatment.”
Specific family members rejected specific kin.
Parents expelled children from homes. Siblings refused contact. Persons found themselves alone because others who claimed to love them decided that certain acts or feelings made them unacceptable.
Specific employers fired specific workers. Specific landlords evicted specific tenants. Specific strangers beat and killed specific persons in alleys and parks and bedrooms.
Do not let the concept “oppression” hide this.
No abstract “oppression” threw a punch. No floating “system” signed an execution order. Specific persons decided to harm specific other persons.
“Oppression” names a pattern across many such decisions. The word can help you notice when many persons harm persons of a particular kind.
But the word can also become a spook—a ghost that possesses you. When “fighting oppression” becomes sacred, when it becomes your IDENTITY, the fighters may not notice themselves becoming possessed. Another hobgoblin climbs aboard.
Today, specific persons still harm other persons for what they do with their bodies. And specific other persons have decided to intervene—passing laws, changing policies, creating consequences for harming.
Both the harms and the protections involve specific persons making specific decisions. That’s what actually happens. Persons acting on persons.
Before they told you what your desires meant, you knew something.
You knew that attention moves. That wanting happens. That bodies respond to bodies in ways that don’t need explaining.
You knew that pleasure feels good and doesn’t need a category.
You knew that you could love anyone—your friend, your dog, the tree in the backyard, the person on the screen, the one who sat next to you in class.
No one had to tell you “who you were attracted to” because you hadn’t yet learned that attraction came in TYPES that sorted you into KINDS OF PERSON.
That wild child still lives in you. Underneath all the labels. Behind all the identity-work. Buried by all the category-maintenance.
That child doesn’t care about “orientation.” That child just WANTS.
That child doesn’t worry about “gender identity.” That child just MOVES through the world, feeling whatever arises, following whatever calls.
That child exists outside of time—outside the timeline that says “I was always this” or “I discovered this at age twelve” or “I’ve always known.”
The wild child exists NOW. In this moment. Unbound by history or identity or the need to be consistent with whatever you declared yesterday.
I don’t say: Abolish all words.
Words serve purposes. “Gay” can summon others with similar pleasures. “Trans” can communicate something quickly that would otherwise require lengthy explanation. “Non-binary” can signal that certain assumptions don’t apply.
USE the words. When they serve you. For as long as they serve you.
But watch for the moment when the word starts commanding YOU.
Does the word demand that you behave in accordance with its definition?
Does it scold you when you deviate?
Does it insist you must first identify yourself before acting?
Does it make you feel like a fraud if your observations don’t match its criteria?
At that moment, the word has become your master. The hobgoblin has climbed aboard.
You can reclaim yourself. Mock the word. Remind it: You got invented by specific persons for specific purposes. You serve ME—I do not serve you.
The whole thing is a joke.
That’s what the old egoist Stirner knew—that philosopher who grinned across his pages while dissolving everything sacred.
“Homosexuality”—invented by a pamphleteer! “Gender identity”—cooked up by a surgeon experimenting on children! “The authentic self”—another ghost demanding worship!
These are the sacred concepts of our age. These are what we’re not supposed to laugh at.
And precisely because we’re not supposed to laugh, we SHOULD laugh. The sacred survives through reverence. Mockery dissolves it.
Imagine the nineteenth-century doctors in their clinics, so SERIOUS about their “sexual orientations.” Imagine John Money in his office, so CERTAIN about “gender identity.” Imagine all the experts and activists and educators, so EARNEST about helping you find yourself.
And imagine laughing at them.
Not cruel laughter. Not laughter that denies anyone’s suffering. But the laughter of recognition—the laughter that sees how recently these cages got built, how contingent they are, how WEIRD it is that anyone ever believed words invented by particular humans in particular rooms named anything eternal.
The whole thing is a joke. The categories, the identities, the orientations, the authentic selves.
The joke got played on all of us. We inherited cages and believed they were descriptions. We accepted hobgoblins and thought they were discoveries.
Now we know.
Now we can laugh.
And laughing, throw them off, and run.
I won’t tell you what to do. That would just be another cage—the cage of “do it my way.”
I’ll tell you what I do:
I laugh at the categories. I use words when they serve me and drop them when they don’t. I follow my attention wherever it goes, even when it goes somewhere my declared identity supposedly doesn’t permit.
I don’t ask “what am I?” because the question assumes I’m a THING with a NATURE, and I’m not a thing. I’m a happening. A movement. A temporary configuration of wanting that will be different tomorrow.
I don’t seek my “authentic self” because the search would require me to serve a ghost—to bow before some imagined inner god and ask “what do you want me to do?”
Instead I ask: What do I want right now? What does this body want? Where does my attention move?
And I follow it. Without needing to justify it to any category.
This isn’t a program. I’m not asking you to become an “anti-identity identity”—that would just be another hobgoblin.
I’m pointing toward wildness. Toward the unmapped territory. Toward the body before the words arrived.
You can go there. Right now. In this moment. Without changing your clothes or your pronouns or your declared identity.
You just... move toward what calls you. Without asking permission from any category.
And if the categories howl in protest—if the hobgoblin on your back digs its nails in—
Laugh. Keep moving. Let it fall.
Not toward any new category. Not toward any liberating identity. Not toward any box that promises to be the final box.
Toward the unmapped. Toward wildness. Toward desire that doesn’t need a name.
Go feral.
Before 1844: Persons engage in various acts with various bodies. No words like “homosexual,” “heterosexual,” “gender identity,” or “sexual orientation” exist because no one has invented them.
1844: Max Stirner publishes The Unique and Its Property in Germany, warning against letting abstractions possess the thinker. He calls these possessing abstractions “spooks.”
1869: Karl-Maria Kertbeny invents the words “homosexual” and “heterosexual” in pamphlets arguing against Prussian anti-sodomy laws.
1886: Richard von Krafft-Ebing publishes Psychopathia Sexualis, transforming Kertbeny’s political categories into medical diagnoses.
1897: Magnus Hirschfeld founds the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in Berlin, the first organization advocating for what he calls “homosexual rights”—accepting and defending the category.
1955: John Money, at Johns Hopkins University, begins using “gender” and “gender identity” to name a theorized internal sense of being male or female.
1966: Persons at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco—many of them persons who would today be called transgender—fight police who attempt to arrest them.
1967: David Reimer, following John Money’s advice, begins being raised as “Brenda” after a medical accident destroyed his penis.
1969: Persons at the Stonewall Inn in New York—including Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera—fight police who raid the bar.
1973: Members of the American Psychiatric Association vote to remove “homosexuality” from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
1980: David Reimer, now 14, learns the truth about his history and immediately chooses to live as male.
1990: Persons at a conference in Winnipeg coin “Two-Spirit” as a pan-indigenous English term.
2000s: Persons in online forums invent and spread words like “asexual,” “pansexual,” “non-binary,” “demisexual,” “genderfluid,” and many others.
2004: David Reimer kills himself at age 38.
Present: Persons continue inventing, arguing about, using, and discarding words. The cages remain. The wild children keep trying to escape.
◊ᴱ⁻ᴾᴿᴵᴹᴱ⁻ᴹᴬˣ VERIFICATION COMPLETE
This text eliminates forms of “to be” where possible and dissolves abstractions acting as agents. It treats “gender,” “sexual orientation,” “identity,” “attraction,” “desire,” and related terms as human inventions rather than descriptions of pre-existing realities.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
Published by Centaurus Press · Universitas Scholarium · All rights reserved.