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Your comment looks confused to me, and not particularly related to what I wrote.
A person has what might be termed a "true identity." This is an objective list of that person's qualities, experiences, associations, everything. Examples are hard because objective accuracy is hard.
He also has a "self-conception." This is his own perspective of his true identity, and usually is flawed in various aspects--perfect self-knowledge isn't really a thing people do well, though some self-conceptions are closer to truth than others.
He also has a "social identity." This is an aggregate of what other people think his qualities, experiences, associations, etc. are--it is literally a social construct. It can and does vary by context--my family have a particular view of me derived from years of personal interaction, but the posters on The Motte likely have a different view of me derived from the posts that I've written.
Nothing that I've written here has anything to do with "how others must respond." I am not conflating anything; I am distinguishing various aspects of what someone might mean when he's talking about a person's "identity."
Edit to add: It only occurred to me after posting, but there's a local term for what I'm doing here--"tabooing your words." In this case, I'm tabooing "identity" in order to tease apart the various mottes and baileys people use around the word. I am trying to rigorously define terms. If you don't like my definitions, propose your own.
What? Is it part of your 'true identity', for instance, the value of the wavefunction (ik that's not really how that works) at each planck volume of your body - 65 liters times (planck's constant 1 / 1.616255×10⁻³⁵ m) ^ 3 (that's ... a lot of values, 10^100 float32s)! Except you specified 'assocations' - those have something to do with the outside world, so do we need to include, say, the volume of the earth, too? How do you distill all those atoms down into an 'objective list'? (the problem of knowledge-as-a-list-of-facts is extensively discussed by western philosophy, and is at any rate mostly nonsensical - which facts?). And - there isn't really anything else in the sense of 'qualities' or 'lists' ("materialism" is separate - if people have souls or experiences distinct from atoms somehow, it isn't a static list of associations and experiences). So I don't think this really means anything. Anyway, "true identity" here just seems to mean ... physically everything, every fact or idea that could possibly exist in the universe in total. If you're a physicist, and you're 20, and at age 40 you discover general relativity ... i guess that's part of your true identity? It's an association, after all.
Do they, though? Let's say you're about to eat a new kind of meat. You don't know, in one sense, that the meat is gonna taste good - yet in another sense, the potential to know it (i.e. the configuration of taste buds, experiences, etc to taste it) is already there. Is that part of your identity yet? And - does it even make sense to say that every association and quality is an 'identity'? I probably had some kind of cereal for breakfast 5723 days ago. Is that part of my identity? It is part of my 'experiences, associations'. This can't really be what we mean. Similarly, the fact that my 'perspective on' eating that cereal is 'flawed', in that I don't remember it - seems fine? And since an 'identity' covers ... every relation and association I have, is it an "imperfection in my self-conception" that I can't quite prove a particularly complicated theorem without looking in a textbook right now, despite doing it before? ... I don't think 'self-conception' or 'identity' really mean anything at all. Anything that are either of them are just complex relations people have to things that exist, that they're trying to understand or accomplish, and have precisely as much to do with a 'self' or 'identity' with what I had for breakfast today.
What exactly is aggregating them? If Joe thinks i'm an evil fascist nazi and Tom thinks i'm cute and valid, what precisely is my social identity?
In order to have any sort of productive conversation, it's important to have agreed-upon definitions of key terms. That was the point of what I wrote. You've stated repeatedly that you "don't think [various terms] really mean anything at all." In that case, we can't have a productive conversation.
That's ... not true at all.
How is a christian supposed to have a discussion with an atheist? One defines "God" to mean "The all-whole, loving being who created us and saves us from depravity." The other objects: "what? I don't agree with that".
So, I disagree that 'identity' and 'self' have any particular meaning or relevance in the first place, and am arguing for that. That has to be ... possible.
If the conversation is about "what is the nature of God?" then yes, there is no conversation to be had.
In this context, we are discussing the nuances of "identity." Breaking in on that conversation with the claim that "the central point of debate doesn't exist" is undermining conversation, not contributing.
Well, if I'm obviously wrong, or not making a coherent point, then it's not contributing, and that's plausible.
But ... there is no 'nature of god' in any literal sense, and any conversation about such would be greatly improved by such an interjection.
As an analogy: when I was younger I, like everyone else I knew, was against anti-black racism, prejudice, implicit bias, etc. In a conversation about how best to prevent police racism - an interjection that 'no, the police aren't racist' was useful!
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Well, then, I was referring more or less to what you call "self-identity," which others here seem to think does not exist. However, I don’t agree that it is helpful to say that people can be "wrong" about that. What group a given person identifies with is an empirical fact. How others should respond to that, including whether that identification is delusional, harmful, etc, is a different issue.
Best guess is you meant to say "self-conception"? Because "self-identity" is not one of the terms I laid out.
Got any links to support this? That's a pretty extreme claim.
"I think of myself as [x]" can be a true statement for any value of x. "I am [x]" may be true or false, in various cases. Generally speaking, when someone says, "I identify as [x]" they are playing motte and bailey between the two.
A comedian does not need to "identify as" funny. He's funny; it's his job; people give him money for it. A liar may be self-deceptive enough to think he's an honest man, but that doesn't change the underlying reality.
So, a person may think of himself as part of a particular group; that belief is an empirical fact. He may also be a part of that particular group; that is also an empirical fact. Those are two separate facts, however, no matter whether anyone thinks it is "helpful" to conflate them.
Yes, sorry I meant self-conception. Was rushing to movie.
I'm not sure I understand the comedian reference; "funny" is an adjective. I don't see how one can "identify" as an adjective; one identifies, in the sense that we have been discussing it, as a member of a group.
Moreover, unlike funniness, which can at least in theory be objectively measured by a laugh-o-meter, or lies, which can also be objectively measured, identities are in fact often self-defined. Eg., national identity is generally seen as an "imagined community" of people who "a body of people who feel that they are a nation." So, that is the conception of identity that I am coming from. Given that, the idea that one can tell someone "your identity is wrong" (as opposed to, "I refuse to recognize your identity") seems quite suspect.
This is incorrect. I specifically stated a definition of true identity that includes both qualities and associations. In fact, the whole sex/gender discussion that sparked this is about both, since that concerns membership in a group that is defined by a quality.
Is Rachel Dolezal black? If I assume charity, that she was being honest about her own perspective (as opposed to lying in order to enable a grift), her self-conception includes "I am black" (quality) and "I am part of 'the black community'" (group/association). And yet, I can say with confidence that her first belief is wrong, and to the extent that the second belief depends on the first, it is also wrong.
Ok, then your concept. "self-conception," is not the same as "identity." Yes, people can conceive of themselves as smart, or funny, or a good person. But that is different than the concept of identity in terms like "gender identity" or "ethnic identity", which refer to group membership.
First, I think that those two claims are actually two ways of saying the same thing, unless you mean "I am part of the black community" in the much different sense that a person can be part of any community if he or she lives among them, etc. But that of course is not what we are talking about.
Second, when you say "I can say with confidence that her first belief is wrong," what you are actually saying that there is a commonly accepted definition of "black" in the US (very roughly, that you have at least one ancestor who was living in sub-Saharan Africa at some time in the relatively recent past) and she does not meet that definition.
And that brings me back to the same point I have made over and over: The different meanings of "sex", "gender" and "gender identity." There is a difference between Rachel Dolezal saying "I am black [under the US definition thereof] and "I identify as black [despite not being genetically black]." The term "wigger," after all, has been around a good 30 years. Obviously, she was making the former claim, but that just points out the irrelevance of her as an example. People making claims about gender identity are doing just that: making claims about gender identity, not about sex. If Rachel Dolezal said, "I am of the male sex" you could prove her wrong by pulling down her pants. But if she said, "I identify as the male gender," you can't, because, again, an identity is an internal belief.
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I think your definition of identity is coherent within your worldview, I just don’t think that’s the definition of identity that most people use.
Moreover, it does still break at some stages (at least regarding social ideas of when identities are “wrong”), for example with transracial people who strongly identify as another race, or with otherkin as discussed elsewhere in this thread.
Do people merely not accept that an otherkin believes that they are a porcupine, and why do people not accept it? Or is there some degree of “wrongness” in a human being believing that they are in fact a porcupine?
Yes, but my point is that the definition that most people use is not the one that is being used when when people who claim to be transgender talk about gender identity. Similarly, in the vernacular, the term "nation" is used as a synonym for "country" or "state." But in the social sciences, and in the world of politics, it means something very different. If there were news articles about the demands of the "Basque nation" or the "Kurdish nation" or the "Uyghur nation" for X, Y, or Z, and someone here wrote a post saying, "these people are liars; there is obviously no such thing as the "Kurdish nation" because the Basques all live in different countries," would you not write to note that when used in that context, "nation" means something other than what he thinks it means.
As discussed in my response to another user above, that is a claim about race, not about racial identity. To use your porcupine example, if you tell me that you believe you are a porcupine, of course I can point out to you that you are not, in fact, a porcupine. But it is equally obvious that what I cannot do is tell the person, no, you do not believe you are a porcupine.
As I have said several times, the question of how others respond to someone's identity is a completely different question to whether that identity exists. If I tell you that I identify as a porcupine, you are able to accept it or not. You are able to let me use the porcupine-only bathroom, or not. You are able to tell me that my identity is immoral, or not. Those responses might or might not be moral, and might or might not be sound policy, but those issues are completely independent of the fact that identity is a subjective belief.
See, I don’t actually think that’s true, and I think that’s where the disagreement I have here lies. Gender theorists might use it in this sense, but this is certainly not what is heard by most when trans activists say “trans women are women”, or when trans activists assert that lesbians who aren’t attracted to be-penised peoples are transphobes. That, at best, sounds awfully like them trying very hard to conflate the motte of “identity”, as per your definition, and the bailey of “category”; or it is simply not understanding the difference between the two that trans activists should be more attuned to, not less.
Like, if gender identity is mere self-conception and could be anything from female to a binary star system, why are medical establishments bending over backwards to not refer to pregnant patients as “women” but as “people with uteruses”? That sort of usage has crossed the line from academic footnote to practical language a good while ago.
It could be that there is a principled stance of “we should just embrace the big lie to make them feel better” re: trans people, which can still maintain the distinction between identity and category, but that really isn’t what I hear when I listen to trans activists, or the new nonbinary/genderfluid/genderweird/etc people, and what they say would become much less internally coherent if we try to make the distinction.
That may even be true (trivially so given your definitions), but then why do we respect claims regarding gender identity but not racial identity? Society allows trans women to have the benefits and inconveniences of being a woman, why not trans-black or trans-white people? As above, I really think that the principled academic usage of “identity” spontaneously combusts when people, gender activists or otherwise, are faced with practical choices and policymaking.
If identity is such a thing that I can say to a porcupine otherkin that “clearly you are not a porcupine but I cannot deny that you identify as a porcupine”, that would actively convince me that “identity” is something pretty worthless to focus on, and that trans activism clearly has moved on from this definition (at least in a practical sense) for years, if not decades. I don’t think it would be wise, career-wise, for me to say to a trans patient that “clearly you are not a (woman/man) but I cannot deny that you identify as a (woman/man)”.
All of this is about how others do or should respond to claims about gender identity. The claim of some people that lesbians should be attracted to transwomen is also a claim about how others should respond. It is, at heart, an argument about whether and to what extent a person's gender identity should trump his or her sex when deciding how to treat them. Ditto the debates about bathrooms. As I have said repeatedly, I have not made a claim about that.
So when you say, "I really think that the principled academic usage of “identity” spontaneously combusts when people, gender activists or otherwise, are faced with practical choices and policymaking," that honestly makes no sense to me, because the practical choices and policymaking has nothing to do with what identity means. It is all about how to respond to those who claim to have an identity different from the sex assigned at birth.
As I noted earlier to someone else, ; Here is the definition of "gender identity" from the Open Education Sociology Dictionary:
Moreover, if you listen to what trans people actually say, you will see that in fact they use it in exactly that way: It is all about feelings: "I never felt comfortable in my body"; "I always felt that I was a girl inside,' etc, etc, etc, etc.
My point is that they can’t go “trans women are women” without conflating category and identity. “Trans women are women” is a categorical statement of whether “trans women” is a subset of “women”.
I appreciate that you draw the lines quite clearly and I think your position is fine in the abstract, if confusing when applied. I also think that under your definitions, you could plausibly provide a reading that trivially doesn’t conflict with any statement (e.g. the “makes no sense to [you]”). I do think you think you haven’t made a claim to how we should treat trans people, or otherkin, or the headmate people, or transracialists, or whatnot.
But I object to the idea that most other people use terms in that way. I really don’t think that people saying “trans women are women” are saying “trans women are men who have a self-conception of “woman” who we should treat as women” (e.g. your decoupling of “identity” with “how we should deal with divergent identity vs category”), they really mean “trans women are women”, even if the practice is identical.
My objection isn’t with your specific statements (when taken with your definitions in mind), it is with that I think most people - especially most activists - don’t use it this way in practice, except occasionally as a motte and bailey.
Edit: There is an alternate interpretation that makes sense of the trans activist viewpoint: that they are creating a new category “woman_2”, which but for a sleight of hand is different from “woman_1”, and “woman_2” refers to explicitly people who “identify as a woman”, all other categories be damned; and that we should migrate all our prejudices from woman_1 to woman_2 post haste. But I don’t think that is what they are doing, and if they are then I don’t have a disagreement with you. I think this makes much less sense than the other interpretation though.
This is increasingly not the case, what with the recent (few years) rhetoric about how transness doesn’t require dysphoria (which coincides with the increase of nonbinariness and all), and trans people who don’t agree with that as truscum. I don’t think truscum are the majority of the trans movement by far.
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