Identity is a relation
Jane Clare Jones explains to us about deconstruction and social construction and identity and trans doctrine.
The notion of identity, and what we mean by identity, is key to this whole story. And the infinite irony of the way mangled-post-structuralism is currently washing around in the background of this debate is that if I had to sum up the core of deconstruction in one line, I’d say ‘it’s the critique of identity.’ That is, deconstruction properly interpreted is actually a really useful tool for explaining what’s so wrong with trans rights claims that ‘I AM WHAT I SAY I AM,’ and ‘I am the determinant of my identity,’ and, equally, the idea that identity is ‘a simple case of individual rights.’ Because the core deconstructive insight, as I’ve laid out before, is not that nothing means anything, or that things are just what we randomly decide they are, or that everything is simply ‘discursively constituted.’ The key deconstructive insight is that the being of things – that is, their ‘identity’ – is not just something which exists only and exclusively inside those things. It is, rather, something that exists between one thing and other things. That is, the key deconstructive insight is that identity is, in fact, a relation.
Which of course is why there is any conflict at all. For the activist types it’s not just about being a woman, it’s about getting on Twitter and telling everyone else you’re a woman. With menaces.
That identity necessarily involves relation all becomes painfully, politically obvious in how this whole thing is playing out in practice. Someone can claim that trans people have an absolute right to determine their identity, but were that actually a simple ontological truth, then we wouldn’t be in an endless, fraught spiral about pronouns and misgendering and the world’s recalcitrant refusal to offer up the correct ‘validation.’ Being what you are is not merely a matter of a feeling, or of a ‘feeling of some fundamental essence.’ It’s a matter of being recognised by other human beings as the thing that you think you are.[2] It’s a matter of social relations. And this is why we’re in this whole fucking nightmare mess. Because we have a political movement claiming, on the one hand, that this is just a matter of identity, and it doesn’t affect anyone else, and anyone who thinks otherwise is just a nasty evil bigot, while, at the same time, because identity is all about social relations, they’re throwing a ton of their political weight into trying to control people’s speech, and behaviours, to enforce the validation of those identities.
I think one reason this gets on my nerves more than it does some people’s nerves is that I was such a little egomaniac as a kid. All kids are to some extent, because of theory of mind, but I think I was toward the worse end of the spectrum, maybe because I was such an awkward dork in school. I’ve been leaning hard in the other direction ever since I realized how bad and stupid egomania is, so a political movement that revolves entirely around Muh Identuhtee and what the entire world has to do to “validate” it makes my skin crawl, and seems to be to be the antithesis of progressive. This post of Jane’s puts it in less emotive terms along with clarifying it beautifully.
OB:
Or as old Heraclitus maintained, everything is becoming; nothing is being. Sorting out who and what you want to be and then getting there is IMHO what it’s about. As for ‘how bad and stupid egomania is’, I think that you could run for POTUS on that slogan next time around. Holding the present incumbent up as an example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtIqZr58Afs
I rest my case.
This was a great piece, and I got a lot out of it as well. Here’s another excerpt I saved:
‘As I’ve started to suggest, this is, in fact, the give-away, because the thing about being-in-the-world, and the way it usually works, is that we usually do a pretty bang-up job of identifying things, and no one has to compel us to do it right. The very fact that a political movement has had to initiate such baroque recognition procedures – and that it is attempting to enforce those recognition procedures by classing mistakes as an act of hatred – tells us something very important. And what it tells us is that they can’t just rely on us doing it right. And they can’t rely on us doing it right because, in some meaningful respect, trans-beings-in-the-world are not what they’re telling – indeed demanding – that we think they are.’
I can remember years ago when this issue first started getting a lot of public airplay, trying to make this distinction in conversation with some well-meaning undergraduates. One of the things I was trying to express is that there are things about me that I personally consider important, that matter a great deal to me, and that shape my concept of myself–e.g. that I’m a Jew–but although these things are vitally important to my own sense of ‘identity’ I don’t seem to have any compulsion to see other people reflect them back to me. I’m a Jew, and that matters to me–but only the few people who know me, who I happen to have mentioned it to, know it. You can’t tell (or guess) I’m a Jew by looking at me, or by my name or background. So is it possible that I have an ‘identity’ that matters to me, but isn’t reflected back to me by other people, that I don’t insist that other people recognise and validate?
Because I wasn’t ‘raised Jewish’, and one wouldn’t know I was a Jew unless I mentioned it, I don’t have the experience of direct anti-Semitism (though I obviously recognise it in the general culture). Because I don’t share this experience, and because (regretfully) I don’t have the religious and cultural experience that would have come from being ‘raised Jewish’, I don’t feel it appropriate for me to ‘claim’ Jewish spaces or cultural markers; I sometimes feel unfairly left out in situations where Jews express solidarity with each other–I feel like I should be participating, and ‘deserve’ to be recognised as part of the group–but I still stay back, because although I ‘really am’ a Jew don’t feel like I’ve ‘earned’ that recognition. So why is this kind of attitude/behaviour not possible for people who (objectively or not) ‘know’ they’re ‘actually’ the other sex? Can’t they just ‘know’ it, as an integral part of themselves, and leave it at that? Jane Clare Jones is helping me understand what’s going on here, and why.