Well ask yourself
I’m finding this “identity” discussion Colin Wight is curating quite frustrating, because I can’t figure out what he means by “identity” and he keeps elaborating on it without saying what he means by it. I gather we’re all supposed to know, but I’m kind of allergic to things we’re all supposed to know (and act on, and respect, and so on) that can’t be defined.
Well ask yourself what a class identity is, or a National identity? It’s the same thing with gender. It can only mean you identify with/as the word proceeding it. So it would mean they identify with gender not sex. And gender is; the norms, values, expectations, roles, practices, and beliefs a society places on the sexes. So gender identity would be to identify with the norms, values, expectations, practices, and beliefs a society has placed on the sexes. Some people identify intensely with gender; some not at all. And that’s exactly what we observe; trans people adopt the gender norms associated with the opposite sex. They identify with an image of the opposite sex they’ve constructed in their heads on the basis of their understanding of those gender norms. Re your questions, we tend to see. 1; some do actually believe they are the sex they identify with, some don’t. 2. Some do want to become the opposite sex and undergo surgery etc, some just dress and act as if they’re the opposite sex. 3. Most, I would suspect do want to be seen and recognised “as if” they were the opposite sex. The way this is mostly attempted is through gender expression and performance. 4. Since it’s gender identity, the way they mostly achieve this (3) can only be by adopting the gender norms (stereotypes) of the society they’re in. As with any identity to express it to the world we have to signal it. Punks wear particular clothes. Nationalists fly flags. Women (according to the gender norms)…wear make-up, dresses, act feminine, can’t drive, dance around, are ditz. See Dylan Mulvaney, he’s a perfect example of someone who thinks being a girl is to conform with the gender norms we associate with the female sex. He can’t demonstrate how he’s a girl by acting like a large gamete (that would be sex identity), he can only signal it using signs that society will understand. That’s gender.
Like that. “Well ask yourself what a class identity is, or a National identity.” I have no idea! That’s my point! I do not know what you’re talking about. I don’t see what “identity” adds to “National” there. Nationality is a crisp, official, simple fact.
I don’t have a “class identity” or a “National identity.” I don’t normally capitalize “national,” either. I have a nationality: it’s just a fact. My class is less factual, more complicated, more open to debate, as is the case with many people, so using the two together as examples is unhelpful.
I’ve written about this puzzle of what people mean when they blather about “identity” before. One of my columns for Free Inquiry was about it. As we all know, trans “identity” is a very big and obtrusive subject – but that’s because it’s so ridiculous and counter-factual.
Maybe this bit will help clarify?
As with any identity to express it to the world we have to signal it.
So identity is something we want to express to the world?
But what if we don’t? What if we don’t want to express it to the world? What if we wouldn’t dream of flouncing around in the world expressing our idenninies all the time?
I’m stumped. I cannot figure out what he’s talking about.
It almost sounds as if he’s on our side. That “identity” isn’t a real thing. Or all that important. Earlier he mentioned friends who “identify” as BMW drivers.
I sense that most people here, while thinking that Dylan Mulvaney’s performance is offensive and not above criticism, would agree that he has the right to behave like an imbecile in his personal life. And, furthermore, if large numbers of people find his shtick entertaining, that’s their right.
But if Colin Wright is saying that these “identities” are actually important and so vital to an individual’s mental health that everyone must be compelled to respect them, then I disagree. Male rapists go to men’s prisons, regardless of how they identify. Lesbians are not bigots if they are unattracted to male bodies. And telling children that “gender identity” points to something real and that four-year olds’ announcing that they’re “TRANS” must be instantly affirmed and life-altering chemicals and surgeries applied to the matter, is cray stuff.
Yebbut the first thing he said yesterday is that identity is real. I can’t even tell what he means by “real.”
And it’s Wight, not Wright – confusingly they are both active on gc twitter.
“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.
Well, Wight says “as real as.” Now, what he MEANS by that, I don’t know.
For the record, in an attempt to point out the strangeness of the fact that a large proportion of transwomen (the AGP ones) said they were not just women but, also, lesbians, I looked up some numbers from online studies and government polls.
I didn’t want to confidently state that “The percentage of women who are lesbians is X” because I really didn’t know. I thought: “How do I describe women responding to studies and polls?” and then I wrote “The percentage of women who identify as lesbians is [whatever it was, 2-4%].” And then a lesbian commenter angrily responded by saying that she didn’t “identify” as a lesbian. She WAS a lesbian.
Richard Dawkins disagrees with labelling infants born into religious communities as “Christian babies” or “Muslim babies” or “Hindu babies.” And I get that. But for some purposes there ARE such things as “Christian” children, or “Muslim” families, or “Hindu” communities.
This all gets to the inguistic turn in philosophy I guess.
[…] a comment by Papito on Well ask […]
Exactly! Sex doesn’t enter into it. Therefore, in any realm having to do with sex, everything should remain status quo. Single sex locker rooms stay single sex. Single sex prisons, hospital wards, bathrooms, short-lists, literary prizes, sports teams, sororities, etc., etc., etc., remain for a single sex (not “gender” or “gender identity”). Argument over. In any arena where sex is what matters — e.g., vital government documents, medical records — then the fact of a person’s sex is not to be tampered with. No falsified birth certificates or IDs, no false and misleading medical records. You’ve just admitted that TWAW is a lie.
A spectacular own goal. That’s exactly what gender critics have been saying since day one. Males who “identify with” the stereotypes of femininity foisted upon women are superficial cosplayers in womanface. It’s wholly performative, it’s mimicry of harmful rules of oppression, it’s not sex, and it doesn’t change anyone’s sex.
Game, set, and match to the people who know that sex is real, and that playacting doesn’t change anyone’s sex.
Here’s the problem, though: the common claim made by people who insist that Gender Identity is more significant than sex is that GI has no direct relation to the norms, values, expectations, practices, and beliefs a society has placed on the sexes. It’s pure. Its existence is not influenced by culture, but culture will influence a trans girl to behave in a feminine manner in the same way a cis girl is influenced by her environment. Trans people are no longer said to identify with or as a gender, but to be that gender. And by “gender” they mean “sex, but without all that stuff specific to reproduction.” Or it could be something else by now.
It’s hard to pin down the meaning of “identity” in a system which keeps creeping into what it’s being contrasted with. They used to allow “male” and “female” to be sex words. Now a transwoman is female, who doesn’t identify as female, but is as a matter of fact. It says so on the official certificate.
The meaning of “gender identity” I find the least problematic is the one which has been used for decades in the study of early childhood development. How does an infant boy gradually come to recognize that he’s a boy and figure out what that means? When does a young girl understand the distinction between following the shifting rules about being feminine and the implacable truths about being female?
If we start from scratch, at some point there’s a series of moments where our growing understanding of self jostles around our sex. Babies start out needing to learn the distinction between self and other. I’m okay calling that “identity formation” partly because I can’t think of what else to call it.
A gentle reminder: TRANS BMW DRIVERS ARE BMW DRIVERS!
I am a BMW driver. My BMW has the BMW insignia.
Those who cruelly claim that they are just glued on a Subaru are TEAFs (Trans Exclusionary Automotive Fascists) and deserve to die in a fiery crash.
Sastra @ 6 – One word for it is theory of mind. Other people have minds that are theirs so they are not having my thoughts but their own thoughts.
[…] a comment by Sastra on Well ask […]
Um, he’s misusing the term “national identity”. A national identity isn’t something possessed by a person. It’s the sum total of values and culture that are core to a particular nation, such that one can say, “This is English,” or, “That’s not Spanish.” It’s how we identify whether a particular policy is consistent with the ethos undergirding a nation’s jurisprudence. When we talk about the American project, we’re talking about the national identity. We’re talking about the good and bad aspects of our culture and history that make Americans distinct from Britons, even though many of us descend directly from English stock.
This is not the same thing as saying, “I am an American.” It’s not the same thing as saying, “I feel a strong affinity for Japanese culture.”
This misuse of the term is just yet more of the mindless habit of using “identity” to refer to any and every possible way to describe someone. Are you white? Identity. Are you straight? Identity. Are you short, curly-haired, confused by sports, fond of trashy romance novels, likely to sneeze at the sun, a dog owner, a cat fancier, a hunter, a vegan, a partisan, college educated, in need of an aspirin, or utterly flummoxed by all this nonsense? Identities all. Of course, calling everything an identity elevates the trivial and inconsequential to the integral, confusing the accidental with the necessary.
And one more thing. The identity in body identity integrity disorder is identity in the philosophical sense: that which makes this and that the same entity. For example, recognizing that the you reading this right now is the same entity in some meaningful way as the you who took the dog for a walk this morning is identity over time; i.e., temporal identity. If you came to doubt that continuity, thinking that the earlier you was someone else, as though you’d been given false memories like in Blade Runner, that would be temporal identity integrity disorder. Recognizing that this hand and that wrist are but parts of one body would be body identity. If you came to believe that your hand were actually not yours, that would be body identity integrity disorder.
This is where things get confused, because the most intelligible interpretation of gender identity would be just a type of body identity focused on the sexed aspects of one’s body. Everything else, all the talk of social constructs and gendered norms and whatnot, is just a subset of reasons one’s sexed body identity might lose coherence. For example, one might begin to doubt that one’s male anatomy is actually one’s own, because of preferences that don’t conform to the social expectations for males. Maybe you like musical theater and flower arranging, and you can’t quite square that with being male, which causes an identity crisis as you attempt to integrate these two parts of yourself. It’s literally the same psychological phenomenon exploited by Maoist thought reform: put the subject in a situation where he must reconcile incompatible ways to interpret his own actions and motivations.
Yes, he is on our side. Based on his earlier post, I think he’s trying to say that some people identify with (feel an affinity for) the gender norms attached to the sex they’re not, and THAT’S OK, as long as we don’t confuse the gender norm with womanhood/manhood itself. Personally I think that’s what being gender critical IS–we shouldn’t have to conform to such norms if we don’t want to–but I think he thinks too many people who call themselves “gender critical” aren’t making the distinction. To be fair, some don’t.
It is confusing. I’ve done a fair amount of thinking about this, and find “identity” a bear to define. But I think there’s something there. Our nationality is part of our–well, our social sense of ourselves. I notice it if I’m chatting (online or off) with friends from other countries–the little differences in humor, the references another Yank is likely to get that someone from elsewhere wouldn’t, a feeling I have for the landscape and culture of my country. It’s not a big deal to me, but for some people it is–the type who carry miniature American flags around. (And I admit to an atavistic feeling of pride when I hear the national anthem.)
Yes, exactly. As usual, Sastra, you hit the proverbial nail on its head.
NiV @ 10 – In “If you came to doubt that continuity, thinking that the earlier you was not someone else” the “not” is an error, right?
“our social sense of ourselves” seems like a good definition, Lady M. But “identity” has become so over-used and broadly-applied and fetishised and god knows what else that I’m still not sure “identity” is a useful word for our social sense of ourselves. That could be just me though. If I try to use the word about myself in a sentence I cringe before I can come up with anything. It’s a word used to much by too many people who like to talk about themselves WAY TOO MUCH – doubly way too much: talking about themselves too much, and liking to talk about themselves too much. It’s all just TOO MUCH.
But, yes, that’s probably what Colin Wight was getting at – having a sense of oneself.
[…] a comment by Nullius in Verba on Well ask […]
Gawd yes. That level of self-absorption is developmentally appropriate for a young adolescent, maybe, but. And it’s infested politics as well.
Ophelia @12: Yes, that’s an error. As was “out” in the final sentence. Should have been “put”. Somehow negations and off-by-one errors tend to slip past my proofreading.
Fixed!
Thank you much.
I wrote a comment to this thread earlier today.
When I pressed “submit comment,” it did not appear.
I backpaged to my previous screen and hit “submit comment” again, I got a notification about duplicate posting. However, my comment has not yet posted. Am I hung up in moderation or something? Not sure what glitched.
Sorry maddog! It went to spam for some reason, and I didn’t see it. It’s now # 6.
Thank you.
That’s the trick, though: they think of the expectations and beliefs about men and women as including all measurable components of sex. In this way, they get to say that “women don’t have penises” is just a gendered stereotype. Hence the “assignment” of sex. This trick only works as long as they can make sex vague.
Hi, all
Just a quick note of appreciation for Ophelia for creating and maintaining this blog and for all of the individuals who frequently add comments here. I feel like this is one of the few “places” I can easily access in the world where my brain actually fits in. The open discussions, honest disagreements, and intellectual rigor upheld here are quite refreshing!
Cheers to all!
Well cheers back atcha!