Labels! Labels! Labels!

Did you know?? We label everything? Believe it or not, we are always categorizing. Always. What keeps us sane every moment of the day is being able to cassify people, things, anything! into categories. Is this a problem? Of course it is. When we put a label on someone, it means that other factors or attributes come along with this label. For example, there are children born with ambiguous genitals. Doctors and parents get really confused because the child does not have one or the other if you know what I mean. Therefore, doctors think they are Gods and try to fix the problem. If it looks more like one, then that's what the child will grow up to be. The problem with this? The child ends up getting confuses about who or what they are? They've been mutilated into this other sex that they don't feel comfortable with. That's the problem with labels. it kind of makes people look at things in black or white, but really, everything is gray! I learnt this in a sociology class, it was great and extremely interesting. This website has an article that explains it better. http://www.isna.org/articles/ambivalent_medicine Thus, as health communicators, we need to really think about how we target our audience and what labels we choose, if we choose to use labels at all...