The I-word
I don’t get this. I don’t think “identity” is real, and I don’t really get why other people do.
I don’t think I can describe myself as gender critical anymore (if I ever did). Gender identity is real. It’s as real as national identity, class identity, ethnic identity; any group identity you can think of. People identify with all sorts of things; their careers, their families, their football clubs, types of music, even their cars (yes, I have friends who identity with being only BMW drivers; sad I know). And the things they identify with are important to them. The thing is, though, saying gender identity is real, doesn’t mean everyone has a little gender man/woman/NB inside their head before they’re born. You can only identify “with/as” something once you become conscious of it. Identity is an on-going process of human development and it’s not something innate. And some of our identities are quite fixed, others are constantly changing. If I was born in Liverpool I’d probably be a Liverpool supporter (what a thought).
But how is national identity “real”? There are facts (real facts, if you like) about people’s nationality; what is added by labeling that “national identity”? There is the clear, factual sense of “identity” as in “identity card,” but that’s a different thing from this abstract idea of having a national or class “identity.” You just are whatever nationality you are. You just have the history you have, and it may be clear what class you are or it may not. You just have a sex; what a “gender identity” is is shrouded in mystery.
And is “identifying with” things “real”? What does it mean? It doesn’t mean you are the things – it seems to mean you are someone who likes the things, or spends time doing the things, or paid a lot of money for the things. Why bring “identity” into it?
I, for one, don’t think I do “identify with” things that way. I have likes and passions, yes, but when I need to talk about them I just say that, I don’t bother with identifying with them.
I don’t think we need to take this idea with such seriousness. Leave it to the sociologists.
I agree. It seems to me an unnecessary, self indulgent layer of explanation that serves no purpose. It’s like people who say something “defines” them. Why pigeonhole yourself?
They must lead sad, dull lives if they have to insist that we find them interesting. If this is the focus of their life, they have a very limited life. There is nothing that ‘defines’ me, unless you want to define me as human, which I am, or woman, which I am, or any number of other things. But any of those are just part of ‘who I am’ and I could change tomorrow on whether I prefer broccoli or mud for dinner. Broccoli doesn’t define me any more than anything else.
I’ve probably mentioned this before here, but:
I remember reading “What Color Is Your Parachute” at a time when I was struggling with figuring out a career direction. The impetus for the book was when a bunch of electrical engineers lost their jobs for various business reasons, and they were having trouble figuring out how to proceed if they didn’t do electrical engineering. One of the insights of the book was how people attach themselves to a job (and other things): “I’m an electrical engineer” rather than “I’m a human being with various skills who does electrical engineering as a job”. The author was encouraging not to attach themselves to a job description, but instead to knowledge and skills and experiences, which may fit a job they used to have, sure, but may also be suitable for many other jobs.
To me this was profound. I myself was prone to choosing a label for myself first and figuring out what that meant about me second. I might label myself as a fan of some musician, for instance, and then I told myself I was required to like everything this musician produced. I might label myself in a particular career direction, and that meant I was required to like the things needed to pursue that career. I might give myself a political label, and that meant I was supposed to hold all the positions associated with that label. Looking back, it’s obvious to me how utterly backwards this thought process was, but that’s how it worked for me, and that’s how I think it works for a lot people. Labels were not descriptive in this process, they were aspirational.
I stopped this kind of behavior in regard to careers pretty quickly, and some other things more gradually, but it was only in recent years, after learning a lot via the criticisms of genderism and other things, that I’ve dropped the rest of it; at least I think I have. I used to muse over whether it’s appropriate for me to identify as Black, or as Native American, for instance, and now I think that’s entirely the wrong question.
I do think that identities are real in the sense that personalities are real and people actually do motivate their reasoning. But no, people are not their identities, and we really don’t need to cater to identities. People do have ethnic backgrounds, sexes, residencies, and citizenships, and those things might be relevant, but how they think of themselves is generally not. That people are of Lithuanian background or have Lithuanian citizenship is more important than whether they think of themselves as Lithuanian. Gender identity, being pure feeling and no facts behind it, is in the same league as people who claim past lives; neither should be relevant.
I identify as an expatriate African ape.
Sackbut @3 Excellent post, I can relate to that. I don’t care to be referred to as a ________ (fill in job description), and similarly came to the conclusion many years ago that this is something I do, amidst many other things, and not who I am. I know it sounds good if you’re a rocket scientist or a neurosurgeon, but these people are also people, not solely defined by what they have done in their lives. It’s very limiting and myopic. So I agree with iknklast as being human with all the potential that it entails, whether I’ve lived up to anyone’s expectations or not.
OK Colin…but how would you parse one of your BMW-driver-identifying friends who’s actually never owned a BMW, has never driven one, whose only motor vehicle is a Vespa? How do you (and why would you) conceptually separate the ‘identity’ of these people you’re observing/listening to from their actual demographics/life history/personal circumstances/behaviour, and why would the former actually matter, to them or to you, more than the latter?
I’m wondering if it’s the culture encouraging male people from an early age to think of themselves that way. Well, I’ve been wondering that for half a century.
Adults tend to ask boys “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and then recite a list of careers such as pilot, firefighter, doctor, etc. Boys are encouraged to think about themselves in relation to a job. Hell, huge numbers of surnames are jobs.
Girls, on the other hand, are encouraged to think about ourselves in relation to other people. To look forward to being wives, mothers, grandmothers. We’re not encouraged to consider our work as identity, because it’s not supposed to be anything more than a temporary pursuit before (or as a sideline to) motherhood.
Listen to the way people introduce themselves: “Hi, I’m John. I’m a carpenter.” “Hi, I’m Jane. I’m John’s wife and Jim’s mother. You probably know my parents, Jack and Jill. I work in the hairdresser’s.” Men do tend to stick with a career, even if they don’t enjoy it, whereas most women I’ve met have done a wide variety of jobs, often with little or nothing in common. Perhaps it’s because many men don’t know that they can look at work in a different way than as who they are.
It might also explain why the ‘trans’ movement is driven by men; with a few notable narcissistic exceptions, women who claim to be ‘trans’ either stay under the radar, or quietly desist, (which is another reason why I’m so upset about the abuse of children who have been enveigled into the cult). Men who believe from the earliest age that someone simply is what they do, are going to get a crisis of identity when someone tells them “Of course you aren’t!”
Identities are real in the same sense that ideas or values are real. But the fact that they are real in the sense that there are people who hold them, doesn’t imply that the ideas are correct or the values are worth pursueing.
It might be important to you. You might think it’s part of your identity. But if you were “AMAB” then you’re a man. And if you’ve been convicted of rape, well, tough titties, you’re going to the men’s prison.
Seems like a category error. How many kids does Colin Wight know who woke up one day and discovered they had been raised as one nationality but inside they were always really another? If a little pommie says to his mother one day, “Mum, I have to tell you I’m really Korean,” she’ll not race him off to the hospital for eye surgery and melanin injections. How many hospitals have centers to help kids with ethnic transition? I guess some say universities help with class transition, but they don’t really much.
Those things aren’t identity feelings like gender identity, which is in a class by itself. They’re just observations of one’s place in the world and in the group definitions that predate one. They don’t well up spontaneously from inside in a way that everyone around you must accept or be shunned. Everybody else already knows them just looking at you… sort of like your sex.
Do I “identify” as Irish? No, I don’t, and never have. Nonetheless, I could get an Irish passport if I asked, as my mother was Irish, born in Dublin. I’m thus a lot more Irish than most of the so-called Irish Americans who subsidized terrorism by giving money to Noraid.
I am a bit of a japanophile. That’s not me ‘identifying’ as one, that is me recognising that I have a particular interest in Japanese culture and, especially, music.
I am also a musician. Again I don’t ‘identify as such. I am one because I play some instruments.
I find it incredible that this whole sorry state we are in is founded on a misunderstanding of simple language. Hence the ridiculous “assigned male/female at birth”. No, doctor’s do not have a sorting hat that assigns your sex. They have a set of very clear criteria for identifying signs of your actual sex.
The bible has a nice phrase “you will know them by their fruit”. It is talking about true believers in that context but it can apply to anything and anyone. Lesbians don’t identify as such, they are women who have romantic and/or sexual relationships with other women – if a women is in a relationship with another woman then she is a lesbian, regardless of how she ‘identifies’. Saying you are something does not automatically make you that thing (as Ophelia has repeated ad nauseam and to humorous effect), you have to actually BE that thing.
A C-B, I call such “Irish” Americans “I-Wish.” But not to their faces, of course.
I got my Irish citizenship last year. If anyone needs to know, I tell them that I am an Irish citizen. But I’m still not Irish. Yes, I have a lot of recent Irish ancestors, and a lot of Irish descendants. But I was born in London and raised in Kent. I’m still English, not Irish. A piece of paper, even with government backing and legal force, can’t change basic reality.
Your penultimate sentence is pretty much exactly me, if you change London and Kent to Devon.
I never thought seriously about acquiring another nationality before Brexit. Even then I did nothing about it for a couple of years. If I’d realized how much bureaucracy would be involved in becoming French (the whole process took more than two years and involved endless documents they wanted to see) I might have chosen Irish at the outset, but I didn’t. However, my wife had the same rights as me for France, but she wouldn’t have been eligible for Ireland.
What’s most amazing is that so many people fail to understand that “identifying with” is mostly a projection for one’s best expectation, a mere self-absorbed narrative, a social pretend game. There may be some truth in it, but mostly that’s a place where you could pretend nearly anything and still, it doesn’t mean you are what you say you are. Ultimately, it’s other people to have the last word about it, if you actually care (and you should probably not unless having quite a narcissist obsession).
“Identifying with” as congruent with “being defined as” entails different properties that people will assess, like ‘Lithuanian citizenship’ is most probably associated with fluency in Lithuanian, or languages spoken in the region, sometimes a place of birth or a line of ascent, actual knowledge of Lithuanian culture. Some of these properties are possibly loose (you can meet exceptions to the citizenship example, like people who wouldn’t speak the language they would be supposed to do for whatever reason), some of them are very strong (e.g., biological sex) and nobody can actually depart from that, it just is.
One can always play a pretend game and deceive the fool or the ignorant, but what’s the aim?
There is something quite clear that if you’re playing a pretend game to such a strong level as those defined by the gender game, i.e., as a defining part of how you want people to understand and interact with you, either you’re deeply deluded about yourself for whatever reason (and that’s probably not good for you), or you’re possibly toxic and willing-fully centering your life around deceiving, manipulating and abusing others. Not good either.
I’m glad I’m not the only one baffled by Colin Wight’s claim.
I am Australian as a matter of pure fact, I like the place, and I think the Australian countryside with its ragged and crooked eucalypts is the way countryside ought to be. If I was in another nation and was meeting new people, I would probably identify my self as Australian. But Australian as identity? I don’t even know what that is supposed to mean.
I identify as seems to mean nothing more than I feel an affinity for or I like. It’s worthless.
I think I agree with Colin Wright because of the way he seems to be using the term “gender identity.” Until recently the concept of “identity” was most often used to indicate the qualities or features we consider characteristic of us. It supervenes on facts. If the fact is salient enough to impact our image of ourself, then it’s an aspect of our identity or character. This is a relatively uncontroversial concept in itself. The problem occurs when our image of ourself becomes more significant than the fact, or controls the facts.
Wright seems to be guilty of equivocation, though.
Gender Identity #1: What sex you think you are.
Gender Identity #2: Where you belong on the scale of masculinity/femininity
Gender Identity #4: A little gender man/woman/NB inside our heads before we are born
The Gender Critical position rejects the last two — as does Wright — but doesn’t have any real quarrel with the first one, in and of itself. If I sincerely believe X, then my belief is real. If I value X, my value for X is real. That’s all the lifting being done by the word “real.” So he would still be Gender Critical in my book.
[It’s actually Colin Wight – Colin Wright is a different fella.]
Holms –
By which you mean you would say “I’m Australian,” right? You wouldn’t say “I identify as Australian”? Because that would be weird, and do nothing but complicate the subject.
I understand that meaning of the word with no trouble. The other meaning, the one Wight is talking about, seems to be maddeningly elusive. He’s still confidently talking about it today but NOTHING IS ANY CLEARER.
Re: Nationality
The musician Healey Willan allegedly said he was
“English by birth; Canadian by adoption; Irish by extraction; Scotch by absorption”
#21 OB
Yes, the first one.
Got it. That’s such a refreshingly simple, useful meaning and use of the word.
Papito, there is “ethnic” plastic surgery, although it is mostly about people trying to erase their non-caucasian features. But there have been high profile people like Oli London who did try to become other races/ethnicities through plastic surgery, he wanted to be Korean.
I have a friend whose then 1st grader decided that she was French, despite being biracial Asian/White with zero French ancestry. It may have had something to do with crepes and chocolate croissants, or maybe being picked on for being part Asian, but she wanted to learn French, eat French food, and act the way she thought French people act. Her parents humored her, they didn’t affirm her French identity.