Are labels holding back the modern LGBTQ+ movement?

I have struggled all my life with labels. "Gay" is the easiest because it needs the least explaining, but it doesn't cover my occasional attraction to women and, indeed, all genders.

It's a privileged conundrum to have. Which of these multiple options now at our fingertips, online, fits me? More than 10 years into writing about queer sex and queer life, I still have no idea, and that still fills me, at odd hours, with a little impostor syndrome. Can I write for Out when I still, as a grown man, don't know exactly what I am?

"Pansexual" is probably closest, but that word wasn't around when I was coming up, at least not in the part of the U.S. — the Deep South — where I lived. So it always felt a little new and strange.

Though I've always been fine with "gay," lately, I mostly just say (or feel, even if I don't say it): I love sex, I love connecting with people of all genders, and I love myself. Do I have to put myself in a box for you to understand me?

Recently, I learned I'm not the only one asking these questions. Dr. Brandon Andrew Robinson (they/them), chair and associate professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of California, Riverside, published a book in February 2026 called Trans Pleasure: On Gender Liberation and Sexual Freedom. In it, they argue that we should abolish gay identity. And lesbian identity. And straight identity. All of it.

It sounds, at first, like the wrong argument for the wrong moment. Trans people are being legislated out of public life. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs are collapsing across corporate America. The community I love and call home, one that identifies principally and proudly through language, is under attack. In this current political climate, the language itself — queer, trans, LGBTQ+ — is being erased: The Advocate, this magazine’s sister publication, reported last month that former DOGE staffers admitted in sworn depositions to using ChatGPT to scan federal grant descriptions for words like "gay," "LGBTQ," and "gender," canceling more than 1,400 grants and over $100 million in funding on that basis alone. So this does not seem an obvious time to suggest the community lay down what is arguably our greatest power, our ability to name and say what we are.

Robinson is used to the discomfort their argument creates. Their book, published in February by University of California Press, makes the case that sexual identity categories ultimately do more harm than good. "Identities limit us," Robinson writes in the book. "And the fact that we keep creating new identities, such as gynosexual, finsexual, sapiosexual, asexual, or pansexual, shows how these categories fail to capture the full complexities of gender, sexuality, and desire."

The book draws on 48 qualitative interviews with trans women and femmes across the United States, along with hundreds of Reddit conversations, to examine what Robinson calls "sexual cissexism," a term they coined to describe how desire itself can be a mechanism of oppression.

"Sexual cissexism," Robinson explains, "is how our sexual desires often uphold and reinforce cisness as the norm and uphold cis bodies as the most desired type of body." Trans women, their research shows, are often caught in a particular bind: They are either hypersexualized as pornographic objects or desexualized and rejected outright. Either way, they're not seen as full people, Robinson argues, because of labels and categories of desire.

Robinson's book does not aim to dwell on trans and nonbinary victimhood but rather on trans pleasure and, in a broader sense, a philosophy of pleasure for everyone. "The book wanted to move beyond just focusing on discrimination and violence against trans women and femmes," they tell me, "and instead explore their dating, hookup, and sex lives." That shift from harm to desire, survival to pleasure, is central to Robinson's argument.

Robinson draws on the framework of writer and activist adrienne maree brown, whose concept of "pleasure activism" holds that all people deserve pleasure that is life-enriching, and that centering pleasure is itself a form of organizing against oppression.

"Feeling good is not frivolous," brown writes in Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, published in 2019 from AK Press. "It is freedom."

It seems a little heady. I recognize the power and insurgency of hedonism as an ethical philosophy, but I also see the value in labels. Why do Brown's and Robinson's theories suggest abolishing them?

"Sexual identities often limit most people's pleasure," Robinson tells me, "as they often confine pleasure to narrow ideas of desire, often over-focused on desiring gender and genitals."

The logic follows: If labels constrain what we allow ourselves to want, then expanding what we permit ourselves to experience requires either coming up with a new label or, echoing my own experience, abandoning them outright. Rejecting them, in Robinson's view, is a political and social act that can potentially mend the divide between queer and non-queer people by effectively pulling everyone into the same boat.

"Expanding pleasure for all can challenge dominant notions of sexual identities," Robinson tells me, "as it can show all of us that there are pleasures beyond just gender and genitals that we enjoy."

Still, the awkward timing of their argument is not lost on Robinson. According to a 2025 report from Advocates for Trans Equality, at least 58 trans people died in the United States between November 2024 and November 2025 due to violence or suicide, with Black trans women comprising the majority of victims. “Trans people — especially Black trans women — continue to bear the brunt of discriminatory policies, political scapegoating, and violence,” wrote Bahari Thomas, Advocates for Trans Equality’s director of Public Education, in that report.

According to GLAAD, 932 anti-LGBTQ+ incidents were tracked between May 2024 and May 2025, the equivalent of 2.5 per day, with more than half targeting trans and gender-nonconforming people specifically. So the notion that this is the moment to argue against identity feels, perhaps, like asking people to disarm, even to surrender to censorship and erasure.

Robinson pushes back. "To be honest, identity is limiting our politics," they tell me. "A stronger politics would be organizing around relations and power and issues, not around identity." They point to reproductive justice as a model. "Folks organizing around trans bodily autonomy can work together with folks organizing around reproductive justice. Note that these two groups are not mutually exclusive to begin with. One needs to entertain these ideas in order to think of a broader, more expansive coalitional politics than one that just focuses on identity."

The argument echoes political scientist Cathy Cohen's influential 1997 essay "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens," which Robinson still teaches and which argues that organizing around queer identity in opposition to straight identity can actually prevent the kind of coalition-building that produces real change.

The DEI question is more pointed. As Meta, Walmart, Ford, and dozens of other corporations have walked back diversity programs in response to Trump-era executive orders, and as the administration itself has moved to eliminate "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" from federal rules and regulations, Robinson's critique of identity language could be read as ideologically convenient for people who want those protections gone.

Robinson rejects the comparison. "The attack on identity and representation from the right is actually a deep investment in white, cishet Christian identity," they say. "While they try to mask that they aren't engaging in a type of identity politics, it is very much about an investment in white cishet Christian identity and the privileging of that identity over other identities, people, and experiences."

Abolishing all sexual identities, in Robinson's view, isn't the same project at all. "Abolishing sexual identities is actually part of the process of dismantling the white cishetero patriarchy, a system that has used the invention of the gender binary and the invention of sexual identities to justify colonialism, women's subjugation, and LGBTQ people's supposed deviance."

So what would it look like on the other side? What would a world be like where we all woke up tomorrow without labels and identities? I don't think that world will come anytime soon, and interestingly, I think the push to create it would have to come from queer people. Robinson answers simply: "I think we all would be freer to express our desires and experience our pleasures and bodies in ways that aren't so confined, and without shame."

That's Robinson's vision: not an absence but an opening. Less a world without identity than a world where identity no longer functions as a tool to police, attack, and marginalize entire groups of people.

Whether or not one agrees with Robinson's ideas, the diagnosis is hard to argue with. The labels we've used to build community have also been used to build platforms against us, and on a more personal, day-to-day level, they've been used, unintentionally or otherwise, to limit how and who we want and allow ourselves to want, based on the words we use around the people we spend our lives with.

I don't know. It seems ideal, and also dangerous. Maybe all big ideas are a little bit of both. But I know I am still struggling with what to call myself, and because of that struggle, I sometimes, late at night, imagine how cool a world would be where I could flirt with a man or a woman or a nonbinary person at a bar within the reality that it was all possible, that if there was a spark, anything could happen — that everyone was a possibility. In the world we live in now, whole large swatches of people are simply off-limits to me based on how I see them and how they see themselves, and that “seeing” is a facet of language, not truth. In Robinson’s imagined world, I could flirt with someone, anyone, and they’d be able to flirt back simply if they were interested, without all the shame and restrictions of language holding them back — there would indeed be no language breaking me from them, no need to explain labels before connection. Everyone would be a fair shot, a chance.

I love my queer family so much. I love gay men so much. I will defend forever their right to exist and to love and live as happily as they deserve. But that world I imagine, and that Robinson seems to imagine, is a world I, and I suspect many others, too, would finally belong in.

Alexander Cheves is a writer, sex educator, and author of My Love Is a Beast: Confessions from Unbound Edition Press. @badalexcheves

This article is part of Out’s May-June 2026 print issue, which hits newsstands May 26. Support queer media and subscribe — or download the issue through Apple News+, Zinio, Nook, or PressReader.