Speaking Labels

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My Sustainable Encounter with Paras G Vats

by Albert Schiller

Our world is washed with labels. We use them to confuse ourselves, lose ourselves, understand ourselves in the hope of finding our communities, and navigate a complex social landscape. Yet, for every identity a label illuminates, it can cast a shadow, creating a box that embraces or confines us. In a world obsessed with categorization, what does it mean to live "beyond labels"? The life of Paras Vats, an entrepreneur and advocate whose book is titled Beyond Labels, is a devoted study in this complex negotiation. His journey is one of both needing and rejecting labels. From instinctively feeling one was wrong, to the life-changing discovery of the right one, to the pragmatic decision to part from it for survival. His story deconstructs the very function of labels. When are they tools of liberation and when are instruments of control?

The Intuition of Misfit

Paras’s story begins with a quiet but firm act of rejection. As a teenager, he was attracted to girls, and society offered its pre-written script, a convenient label for his experience: “lesbian”. The word was a container that, for outsiders, seemed to fit his observable behavior, but to him, this box felt wrong. It neither matched his internal experience nor his sense of self. He rejected it instinctively and stood up against a world of categorization. He had no words to explain why, but he knew. Our innate identity can exist and assert itself long before we have the vocabulary to communicate “it”. It is an original form of “implicit knowledge” that can resist the violence of miscategorization but lead to intense struggle to "feel normal". A struggle that led him to grow out his hair long in an attempt to silence his inner voice screaming back at him. This was an act of attempted self-betrayal, a painful effort to conform to a label he knew didn’t fit. His early life is a stand, unspoken but lived, that the self is not a blank slate, but a personal signature that demands to be read correctly.

48 Hours

In sharp contrast to Paras's confinement from the wrong label is the invigorating liberation he experienced upon finding the right one. His moment of revelation came from watching a video online titled "From Maya to Rajri". Here, he first encountered the concept of a transgender man, and the discovery was transformative. The label was a key to his cage. It was a piece of language that validated his entire life's experience, confirming that he was not alone and there were others who felt and shared a similar human reality. That single word, "transgender," gave his intuition a name and illuminated a clear path forward. The immense power of that label is evidenced by action. After years of confusion, he spent the next 48 hours in continuous, focused research, emerging “200% sure” of his path. Language became his ignition for action. It provided clarity, opened a community necessary for self-acceptance, and catalyzed his decision to begin the most significant journey of his life.

The Strategic Invisibility

The final chapter of Paras’s philosophy is the most visible one. Having found the label for his identity, he then makes the calculated choice not to use "transgender" on his official ID. He does this to navigate a broken, uneducated bureaucratic system that is ill-equipped to handle it. Recounting the dilemma of airport security, he explains his pragmatic decision to shave his beard, present as "female" per his old documents, and avoid the guaranteed "trauma and harassment" of a confrontation. This deliberate choice of "invisibility" is pragmatic and challenges the idea that we must publicly showcase our identity at all times. Paras demonstrates literacy in labels, using or discarding them to achieve a specific objective. For him, the beard was an "emotion," a hard-won part of his identity. To shave it came at a significant personal cost, but one he was willing to pay to avoid the trauma of a systemic battle he could not win at an airport. This leaves us with a final question: Is being confident in your own identity more potent than any doubt that a flawed society can instill?

So what can we take from his approach?

Questions for Audience

1. In a world that demands clear categorization, is "strategic invisibility", the conscious choice to hide one's true label for survival, a form of self-betrayal, or is it the highest form of self-preservation?

2. If our innate sense of self can exist without language, how much power should we give to labels in defining who we are, and at what point does a helpful label become a restrictive definition?