Guest post: A heavily overloaded word
Originally a comment by latsot on You conflate identity and reality.
One of the issues here is that ‘identity’ is such a heavily overloaded word. I mean ‘overloaded’ in the technical, computer science sense: it has lots of different meanings which can be used only somewhat interchangeably. The overall semantics might be broadly the same, but you’ll quickly run into trouble if you use the wrong one.
I think two different senses of ‘identity’ that are relevant here are:
1. Stuff I make up in my head. How I feel. What I want to be seen as. Let’s call this ‘idenniny’.
2. Assertions made about me by the proper official bodies, documents etc. Let’s call this ‘identity’.
So on the one hand, we have documents like my birth certificate which assert various facts about me and on the other, we have unverified things I assert about myself. The clue here is in the word ‘certificate’: the authority is certifying things like my date and time of birth, the name I was registered with at birth, my sex and my parents. If anyone ever needs to know any of those things, the government will certify the facts.
Now, I can change my birth name any time I like. I can suddenly start doing so right this minute without taking a single action other than making that decision. In fact, I have: my birth certificate records my name as Robert, but I absolutely never use that name; it’s always been Rob. That, you’ll have to take my word for because the government doesn’t care what I call myself.
(In fact, that’s not quite true in my case: my driving licence and passport both say “Rob” but since my birth certificate was used to apply for both, there’s a clear chain of evidence that all those documents refer to the same person. But this just illustrates my point even better: the relevant authorities are certifying my identity even though I have two different names.)
It seems to me that the problem in the above exchange is the common one of slipping between identity and idenniny without due care and attention. It’s a very common Motte and Bailey tactic. The problem is not just that a fact such as my sex is material reality when my ‘gender identity’ might be whatever I want it to be, it’s that the legal and social consequences of the two are not the same. That’s why one needs to be certified and the other does not.
Honestly, we should just put computer scientists in charge of everything, we’d soon have it all sorted out.
[In case it is not clear, absolutely do not do this.
It would be the worst disaster you could possibly imagine.]
latsot, for most of my life, my birth certificate read “Baby Girl” in spot for first name. It now has my actual first name; I suppose that may have been noticed when I requested a copy of it to do something official with it, or my mother may have called and complained. She complained about it a lot. “You were named before you were born!” She never understood why they didn’t just put my name on it.
For the record, I have never once gone by the name “Baby Girl”. Now that I am 61, it seems particularly inappropriate.
Indeed, a codeocracy is likely one of the less pleasant forms of government — the religious wars between object-oriented and functional programming cults alone would put the Thirty Years’ War to shame, I imagine. Not to mention that some of the most loathsome snakes I’ve encountered professionally are among those who’ve dabbled in programming on their way to middle management and beyond.
Identity itself is infecting more and more topical space. Just today I watched a video discussing one of the ancient Norse sagas, specifically the one where Thor dressed up as a woman and Loki shapeshifting into one. According to the presenter, the language remains masculine when referencing Thor, but is consistently feminine when referencing Loki after he shapeshifts into a female form. The presenter, who claims to be a modern-day pagan (and who thus reveres these stories as something approaching holy writ, and claims to believe in their characters at least as forces of nature), also refers to Loki as ‘she’ while discussing this, and insists that Loki has a ‘non-binary identity’, regardless of what other presumably-less-enlightened heathens think about him.
I have read other woke-ish neopagans insisting that this aspect of Loki’s character not only makes the modern genderist religion compatible with Norse paganism, but implied that pre-Christian Scandinavia was a much more enlightened society that would have accepted non-binary and transgender people even more readily than we do today.
But that is nonsense in several respects. Firstly, this notion of “identity” was utterly foreign to the Germanic peoples whose oral myths developed into the proto-Norse pantheon, as it was unthinkable to the Christians who wrote these stories down in Iceland hundreds of years after they were first spoken in a recogniseable form. Attempting to say that Loki was or is “non-binary” in the same way your local heavyset young woman with a half-shaved head dyed a funny colour is “non-binary” makes precisely as much sense as claiming that Odin was or is a cryogenics specialist and a dog trainer because he collects the fresh corpses of dead warriors to one day revive and fight for him against Fenrir.
Secondly, these characters are literal gods, evolved from the same Indo-European tradition which gave us the Greek and Roman and Celtic and Slavic pantheons, the first two of which at least have very well-preserved myths along with reasonably thorough accounts of regular life, at least among the literate classes. Many Roman and Greek gods and goddesses had powers and fulfilled social roles that no Roman or Greek person could have hoped to have achieved; indeed, if a Greek woman during the Classical period attempted to use Athena or Demeter as an excuse for why she refused to marry, attempted to practice philosophy, and fought openly alongside men in battle, she would have been ridiculed at best and executed for impiety at worst.
Thirdly, we have some records of Icelandic and Norwegian law codes from around the time of Iceland’s conversion to Christianity, when many of Iceland’s laws were still heavily influenced by the past. The society we reconstruct from it had very strictly-proscribed gender roles; notably, women had the freedom to divorce their husbands for a limited number of reasons, one of which was for him dressing “like a woman” (and vice-versa, though men had more reasons to divorce women). Cross-dressing was also considered a crime in general. This hardly sounds like a gendertopian paradise.
Using the stories of the past in this way to lend credence to a modern cult is shameful and deeply offensive to anyone who cares about the past and those who lived in it. It is one thing to take inspiration from the stories we’ve inherited, but we should not impose our own understanding of the world backward onto those that came before us; such a thing serves no useful purpose.
[In case it is not clear, absolutely do not do this.
It would be the worst disaster you could possibly imagine}
As a data scientist and AI systems designer I take umbrage at this dispersion. ;)
You all should practice saying this each day: “I, for one, welcome our machine overlords.”
@Der Durchwanderer. We’ve already seen modern assumptions that even those women who stood out with some masculine roles in nordic/Viking societies have been posthumously transed. I mean, specifically the shield-maidens who were declared to be transwomen after all. Or perhaps transmen. It gets confusing.
Because? Because the idea of a woman warrior is non-conforming to our expectations of what gender roles should be applied to them.
It’s not progressive, then, is it? It’s regressive.
I think the codeocracy might succeed in delivering a good answer to the Who takes whose surname? issue by regarding surnames as a hashing function and optimizing it by assigning each newborn whichever of his/her parent’s surnames was rarer in the most recent census, but even as an IT professional I think that would be a small compensation for all the downsides!
Mike,
Yes, it is interesting observing so-called “progressives” arguing that the females fighting couldn’t have been women, because women weren’t warriors. But women have always fought, and it does them a disservice to insist that they were secretly modern trans men in disguise.
It would actually be surprising if *no* women fought in the Viking period. For one thing, Vikings brought their families with them almost everywhere they went, and they fought to settle already-inhabited lands all around the Baltic and the British Isles. These settlements would have seen frequent attack, and the women would have at the very least participated in defending themselves and their children and their homesteads.
The question of the shield-maiden is rather fraught, with modern agendas on all sides. We only have a few examples of female skeletons with soldierly accoutrements buried with them, and still fewer of these skeletons show the kinds of wounds and wear a warrior might be expected to receive. It is possible that many of these were well-respected women whose grave goods were signs of esteem that did not imply their active participation in combat, as swords and shields and longships were some of the most respected symbols of Scandinavian society during the Viking Age.
At least one of the most famous examples of a difficult-to-classify skeleton with such goods that does show signs of violence may have been honest-to-god intersex, likely having Klinefelter Syndrome, a condition in which males are born with an extra X chromosome and which can lead to the expression of more female-seeming physical traits. Though there is now a flurry of articles saying that this man must have had a “non-binary gender identity”, this is nonsense; he would have been regarded as a man, if perhaps an odd one, and he likely lived at least part of the time as a fighting man.
There have been a few female skeletons discovered both with some warrior regalia and some wounds suggesting a violent life (or at least a violent death), and there have likely been some finds in previous decades that were misidentified as male simply because of these regalia, but these are exceedingly rare in proportion to the male warriors we have identified. The very best we can say is that if shield-maidens existed outside of the exigencies of hearth-and-home-defence, they formed a miniscule proportion of Viking raiding parties, for the same reason that women have always formed a miniscule proportion of any armed band throughout history.
The AI reference is more than just a joke actually since the degradation of meaning in a term can wreak havoc on the utility of output that uses it as an input. In medical AI applications, for example, the classifier ‘woman’ (female phenotype) historically has been used as a major branch in linear logic systems and to reframe assessments by nonlinear ones. Why? Obvious to all but the self-defined is the fact that sexual phenotype has an enormous effect on diagnosis. Yes, there are XY individuals with female phenotype but that is extremely rare and there are still exam findings that can point to that without formal testing. Take the example of RLQ abdominal pain assessments. In a young male, the number of etiologies is fairly limited. In a female, the same issues that can affect a male can occur plus a host of other GYN-related ones that must be considered. These aren’t culturally derived differences – they are structural and innate. As more is learned about the presentation of disease it’s become apparent that there are substantial differences in symptomatology of many diseases between the sexes. For somatic illness, gender has less to add unless it is associated with either surgery or medications.