Stop "Identifying As" and Learn to Exist
Stop "Identifying As" and Learn to Exist
One of the hallmarks of our time is an obsession with identity. Rather than simply existing and naturally carrying out the roles of life, many seek to identify with or identify as in an effort to truly know who they are. To a certain extent, this is natural. We all want to belong. Humans are no doubt tribal. But so many of us no longer find this identity in where we actually belong but rather where we wish we belonged.
There is hardly a better example of this than the trans movement—or, more accurately, the gender identity movement. With the idea of gender identity came the idea that identity is not something lived but something imagined.
An identity, if we want to use the idea in a sane way, should be made up of what you actually do in the world, like your job, your hobbies, or your place in the family (being a partner, child, parent, sibling, and so forth). You may even define yourself as something you aspire to be and are working towards. But, through gender identity, people identify as something they literally are not and can never become.
Nothing erases the existence and lived experience of trans-identifying people like the concept of gender identity. Identifying as something obscures what you actually are, not only from others but from yourself. To maintain a “gender identity,” people have to constantly fret about their clothes, makeup, mannerisms, speech, and even the very shape and development of their bodies. This is the antithesis of simply existing in the world and being yourself.
Of course, trans-identified people are not the only people who worry about how they present themselves to others. We all do it, to an extent. But gender identity takes normal human anxieties and considerations about how we appear to one another and ratchets them up to the level of constant performance. There is nothing authentic about this. It is not existence, it is projection.
Modern calls for authenticity fall flat when gender identity is championed by so many who extoll people to be their true selves. It creates a schizophrenic culture where people are constantly told to accept themselves but which exorbitantly celebrates people who deny something as basic as their sex.
While the more immediate dangers of gender identity—like men in women’s spaces and the physical transition of children—require our attention and vigilant pushback, I think we can’t ignore these psychological components. Just like I don’t think you can extricate the gender movement from wider problems like woke ideology and postmodernism, I don’t think you can isolate it from our broader ways of thinking about ourselves.
As I said, gender identity might be the starkest example of placing identity over actual existence, but this is something that we do in other ways as well. Many who reject gender identity are nevertheless fully immersed in identity politics, they just don’t think the trans movement does identity politics right.
I think trying to isolate the trans movement and the idea of gender identity as one bad branch of an otherwise perfectly fine system of thought is a mistake. It is propped up and supported everywhere by others who also live in an imagination where identity is everything and where warring identities are always in conflict with one another.
Don’t get so wrapped up in identity that you forget to just be and that you forget to offer everyone else the same grace.
Good reminder.
Identity as an a la carte process is the opposite of authentic.
Sometimes I wonder if gaming and social media opened up people's minds to a type of repatterning based on the ability to create your character.
Ratchet up the boobs, change the hair colour, you can be anything on the screen and the screen is real life.
In a different Substack, I came across a comment by a straight man (in his lingo, "cis het") who was suggesting that cognitive dissonance and the fear of being considered a "poseur" keeps gay men from becoming heterosexual:
"I also suspect this is true of a lot of gay men and lesbians as well. That having gone through with coming out, being in a hetero relationship would make you somewhat of a poser."
"I also heard a reasonable argument that people who identify as gay are more likely to fully grasp their sexuality because they have put more thought into it than straight people who are essentially straight by default. On the other hand, people are really good at justifying their past decisions, especially costly decisions, especially decisions that you've announced to different people, so that may weigh in the other direction."
First, I asked him to cite reputable authority for his notion that what keeps gay men gay is the heavy burden of changing a central aspect of one's life after having made a huge personal and social investment in it.
Then I wrote:
"I don't know what circles you travel in, but the gay men I know don't get their wires crossed and talk about 'identifying' as gay. That terminology is a symptom of the gender identity fantasy that is infecting our society. I don't 'identify' as gay any more than I 'identify' as human."
"Many gay men, and I'm one of them, reject gender identity ideology. Furthermore, we want nothing to do with queer as an ideology, and we reject the involuntary affinity and allyship that's implicit in the monolithic 'LGBTQ' or the hegemonic use of the term 'queer' as a synonym for 'gay.' There are several reasons why it is not, but I won't go into that here."
"You're welcome to use any terminology you please, but bear in mind that in saying that people 'identify' as gay and using the term 'queer' when referring to gay men, you'll be causing offense, particularly to people who are members of my generation and older." [I'm in my late 60s.]
The foregoing is not intended as a criticism of the author. All he did was provide a clear and concise example of the attitudes and beliefs held by so many who see society in general and sex and sex roles through the lens of gender identity ideology.
This exemplifies the reality-distorting language and the distorted thinking of trans allyship. These are my views; I am not putting words in the mouth of the anonymous commenter. I believe it is safe to say that few if any gay men obey queer theory's mandate to queer themselves out of each and every identity they may embrace momentarily in their quest to destroy all norms involving sex and sex roles. That's what queers are said to do, at least the true believers. The gay men I met in the 80s are still gay today because they are gay, not because switching identities would be met with universal eye rolls by their college friends.