Chris Donaghue

“The new cultures and terms like “neuroqueer” and “neuroatypical”—terms from autistics and other psychologically stigmatized groups who are now challenging the concept that they are “disordered”—allow what was once a designated minority community to declassify themselves from the social stigma that disempowered and dehumanized them.”
― Chris Donaghue, Sex Outside the Lines: Authentic Sexuality in a Sexually Dysfunctional Culture

“Labels police individuals and are intended to exert power and control over their behavior and lifestyle. Determining someone to be hetero, female, kinky, or cisgendered is to reduce them to a container, allowing no room for evolution and defining their behaviors as caused by that identity…. Any label creates a border, which causes oppression via privilege and hierarchy. The boundaries of sexual-gender categories (stereotypes) require criteria for belonging, which inherently allows for discrimination and ambivalence… The extension of one’s identity to their entire life is reductionist and oppressive…

There is little commonality between the experiences of a white, lower-income, neuroatypical, disabled, forty-something, lesbian, transsexual woman and a multiracial, high-income, thirty-something, able-bodied, neurotypical, heterosexual, cisgendered woman. They may have intersecting points of shared identity or experience, but no common culture, heritage, or social field. The erasure of all the other important and meaningful traits outside of their womanhood reduces them to one common theme. This is both oppressive and naïve. Apply this same issue to “gay,” “man,” or any other identity. There is a severe reduction of many components of the self outside the limits of identity.”
― Chris Donaghue, Sex Outside the Lines: Authentic Sexuality in a Sexually Dysfunctional Culture