Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Well ask yourself.

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: out the subject in a situation where he must reconcile incompatible ways to interpret his own actions and motivations.