Guest post: Signaling identity
Originally a comment by Papito on Well ask yourself.
“As with any identity…”
It’s like this Wight is speaking backwards and inside out. He’s reifying a peculiar and uncommon interpretation of “identity.” Most of the other features he wants to conflate with gender identity lack this characteristic of having to be expressed and therefore signaled. Nobody has to express and signal their nationality unless they happen to be passing through immigration and customs at the airport, and we have passports for that. Likewise, nobody has to express and signal their actual sex – it’s still there whether they want to swing it around or not.
Wight’s concept that the trans-identifying male expresses himself through female gender stereotypes because that’s the language people use to communicate the fact that they’re really women inside is precisely backwards. They’re never women inside, but they’re infatuated with the symbolic language of normative gender stereotypes itself – from the outside in, not from the inside out. Maybe the key difference is between the words “identity” and “identification.” The latter is an action, not a quality, and the action is the entire process, a (hopeless) attempt to secure or claim the quality.
Let’s bring class back into it. With apologies to the English – for whom I understand there is a difference between class and wealth – if one is very wealthy one doesn’t run around trying to prove it to people. The very wealthy (and I know my share) don’t act like caricatures of the wealthy (e.g. Trump), covering themselves in gold and always driven about in limousines. That is identification as wealthy. Those who have the actual identity of wealth strive not to be identifiable as wealthy, because it would crimp their lifestyle. They drive modest cars, and I meet them at our local tavern dressed like everybody else.
You don’t become wealthy by expressing and signaling that you’re wealthy – in fact, quite the opposite, you can go broke doing that. Likewise, nobody becomes a woman by expressing and signaling that they are a woman – that just produces caricatures like Dylan Mulvaney.
This is the kind of insightful comment that keeps me coming back to B&W. I’m going to be noodling on that first paragraph for a while, I think.
Isn’t it though?
It’s got me thinking about how being around people may make people more self-conscious rather than less. Maybe I don’t grok the obsession with idenniny because I’m not around people much so I’m not always having to think about my presentation of self. Very freeing, that.
Great point about signaling wealth. The truly wealthy people in our town could be seen having dinner in the local Chinese restaurant with the rest of us, and a favorite spot for them was the burger place. I can’t speak about Maine yet, since I’ve lived here for all of three days and have yet to sort the wealthy from the rest of the population, but I suspect it’s the same.
There is a class of wealth that seems to need to signal it…the Trumps of the world. Same with tough. If you are truly tough, you don’t act like John Wayne or Clint Eastwood. You just are tough.
The TiMs, because they aren’t women (and know it) have to signal being women because no one would know they were women unless they were over the top. They have to post Photo-shopped selfies to assure themselves of their femininity. I, as a woman, do not need the over the top style of a man in his 50s pretending to be a woman. I just go out in the world and am recognized as a woman, even though I rarely wear pink, almost never wear dresses, and am as likely to be seen in t-shirts and jeans as anything else. I do not require some overblown flamboyant “expression” of my “identity”. I just am.
Spot on, ikn @3. Conspicuous consumption is for shallow egotists. Elon Musk manufactures and sells cars to these types of people. It’s his target demographic, and unfortunately it’s a sizable one.
I did my post-doctoral work at Berkeley with one of the wealthiest men in the USA, but you would never guess that from his behaviour. One estimate of his personal fortune that I heard was 700 million dollars, but that was 20 years ago. It was probably more when he died.