Just Human

Over Pride weekend in Bristol some of the young journalists from Rife Magazine work with a youth LGBT group to make a film about what people want from a relationship. There’s a rather lovely twist at the end that I don’t want to spoil, but the main message of the film is that we are, all of us, just human.

The thing I love about this film is the way it explodes boxes. The more I see about how we monkeys use labels such as “lesbian” or “trans”; how those labels get redefined by each new generation; how labels are defined with a view to exclusion; and in particular how people in non-oppressed groups seek to re-define labels to make it seem like they are more oppressed than anyone else; the less useful I think labels are.

Of course we’ll still need labels, because how else can we identify groups that are oppressed. But the more that we can define variations in human characteristics as all “normal” the fewer excuses we have for creating division.