The Stickers We Wear, the Stories We Tell, and the Cat in the Box
Ever have one of those days where you suddenly realise that we are all just walking, talking collections of preferences—and we’ve turned that simple fact into an elaborate, confusing, emotionally charged game of sticker books? 🏷️
You like something.
You dislike something.
You feel drawn toward something.
And almost instantly, we feel the urge to name it, define it, categorise it, defend it, or argue about it.
As if experience itself isn’t complete until it has been labelled.
Let’s start small.
You like chocolate. You just do. You don’t need a philosophical framework or a childhood backstory to justify it. It tastes good to you. That experience is real. If you like it a lot, someone might call you a chocoholic—a word we invented to save time. It’s more efficient than saying,
“Ah yes, Steve, the human who experiences disproportionate joy in the presence of cacao.”
The label is useful.
But it isn’t Steve.
That distinction matters more than we often realise.
Because once we get comfortable turning preferences into identities, we start doing it everywhere.
You like dogs? Dog lover.
You like running? Runner.
You like books? Reader.
You meditate? Spiritual.
You lift weights? Disciplined.
You don’t drink? Suspicious, apparently.
Each label captures a sliver of truth and then quietly pretends it’s the whole picture.
Most of the time, that’s harmless. It becomes an issue when we forget that the sticker is a convenience—not a verdict.
And then we move into deeper territory.
Preferences, Identity, and the Point Where Things Get Serious
If you like men, you like men.
If you like women, you like women.
If you like both, neither, or something harder to describe—you like what you like.
At the level of experience, this is straightforward. Desire arises. Attraction happens. Meaning forms.
Where it gets complicated is when we assume that describing an experience is the same as explaining a person.
Someone says, “I’m attracted to men,” and we quietly—or loudly—decide what that means about them. Their politics. Their morality. Their psychology. Their future. Their community. Their role in the story we’re telling about the world.
The same thing happens with gender identity.
Someone says, “I don’t experience myself as the gender I was assigned at birth.”
That sentence contains an experience. A real one. A felt one. Often, it’s a difficult one. Sometimes, a lifelong one.
But almost immediately, we rush to turn that experience into something else entirely.
A diagnosis.
An ideology.
A threat.
A trend.
A belief system.
A social contagion.
A sacred truth.
A dangerous lie.
Depending on who’s holding the label-maker.
This is where our collective confusion deepens.
Because gender identity, like so much of human inner life, lives in a strange space between the measurable and the meaningful.
Which brings us neatly to Schrödinger’s cat.
Schrödinger’s Cat and the Inner World
In quantum mechanics, Schrödinger’s cat exists in a superposition: both alive and dead until the box is opened and observed.
Human experience works in a surprisingly similar way.
You can think anything you like.
You can believe something deeply.
You can feel something intensely.
You can build meaning around something invisible, unprovable, or unverifiable.
And that experience is real—for you.
At the same time, science may have no way to confirm it as an objective fact about the universe.
Both things can be true.
Your experience exists.
Its explanation remains contested.
Take anxiety.
A person feels certain that something terrible is about to happen. Their heart races. Their stomach tightens. Their body prepares for impact.
Is the threat real? Often, no.
Is the fear real? Absolutely.
The nervous system does not wait for peer review.
Or grief.
Someone feels the presence of a loved one who has died. Not metaphorically. Viscerally. They sense them in a room, hear them in memory, and feel them nearby.
Neurology can explain this as memory persistence and emotional imprinting.
That explanation does not make the experience disappear.
It simply reframes it.
Gender identity often occupies this same space.
For the person experiencing it, the feeling is not abstract. It’s embodied. It shows up in discomfort, relief, dysphoria, alignment, peace, or distress.
Science can study hormones, brain structures, developmental pathways, and social conditioning. It can tell us many interesting things.
What it can’t do is tell someone whether their experience counts.
That’s not a scientific question. It’s a human one.
Real People, Real Examples
Consider a teenager who grows up feeling persistently uncomfortable being referred to as a girl. She can’t articulate it at first. There’s no manifesto. No politics. Just a sense that the reflection doesn’t match the internal map.
Years later, she says, “I think I’m trans.”
For her, that label isn’t a theory. It’s a shorthand for something she’s been carrying silently for years.
For her parents, it may feel sudden, confusing, frightening, or ideological. They might ask, “But is this real?”
And the honest answer is:
The experience is real. The interpretation is debatable.
Those two truths are often mistaken for enemies.
Or take a middle-aged man who has lived comfortably as male his entire life, but who now hears conversations about gender and feels an unexpected resonance. Not certainty. Just curiosity. Questions he didn’t know he was allowed to ask.
Is that a discovery?
A phase?
A story his mind is trying on?
There’s no immediate answer. The cat stays in the box for a while.
And that’s okay.
Or consider someone who firmly believes that gender is entirely biological and fixed. That belief may be grounded in their understanding of science, their upbringing, their faith, or their lived experience.
That belief is also real—for them.
The problem doesn’t arise because people experience reality differently. It arises when we demand that one person’s inner reality must be binding on everyone else.
Where We Go Wrong
We struggle because we want clarity where life offers ambiguity.
We want firm categories because uncertainty feels unsafe.
So we reach for stickers.
“This person is trans.”
“This person is confused.”
“This person is denying biology.”
“This person is attacking truth.”
“This person is brave.”
“This person is dangerous.”
Once the sticker is applied, curiosity shuts down. The galaxy collapses into a drawer.
But people are not drawers.
They are contradictory, evolving systems—capable of holding experiences that don’t fit neatly into language yet still shape their lives profoundly.
Science is excellent at describing what is measurable.
It is not designed to adjudicate meaning.
That doesn’t make science cold.
It makes it precise.
Problems arise when we expect it to answer questions it was never built to answer—or when we dismiss human experience because it resists measurement.
Holding Two Truths at Once
You can acknowledge someone’s lived experience without needing to adopt their metaphysical conclusions.
You can respect a person without needing to fully understand them.
You can say, “This is real for you,” without saying, “This must be real for everyone.”
That middle ground is where most adult thinking lives. It’s also the place we seem least comfortable standing.
Gender identity debates often collapse because we treat them as zero-sum games: either everything is subjective or nothing is. Either biology explains everything or experience overrides it entirely.
Reality, inconveniently, refuses to cooperate.
Human beings are biological organisms and meaning-making creatures.
We experience the world through bodies, hormones, culture, memory, language, trauma, imagination, and story—often all at once.
No single sticker can capture that.
The Invitation
So maybe the task isn’t to resolve every debate or collapse every box.
Maybe it’s to slow down.
To notice when we’re arguing about labels instead of listening to people.
To recognise when we’re trying to kill the cat just so the uncertainty will stop.
To accept that many of the most important things in life exist in a superposition—real enough to shape a life – elusive enough to resist proof.
Hold your beliefs with humility.
Hold other people with care.
Let science do what it does best.
Let humans tell you what it feels like to be them.
And resist the urge—just for today—to slap a sticker on the box.
Some things are allowed to remain both true and unprovable.
And somehow, that’s where most of the meaning lives.
