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Minority report

  • Posted on January 17, 2016 at 9:28 pm

2016 turned around with reviews of what a good year it had been for trans awareness. Films, soaps, celebrities, parliamentary inquiries, public debates all made it seem like a breakthrough in awareness. Most of us would say that hatred and exclusion are the result of ignorance, sometimes wilful. As more is said and seen about what it means to have (what is currently termed) gender dysphoria, surely ignorance will decline?

One can understand that when someone prominent transitions, they are snapped up by the media and made a spokesperson. That gives rise to backlash from more ordinary and struggling trans people, who don’t feel represented by someone more privileged and earlier on in the issues to be faced. So we accept that the celebrities make very public mistakes, which can damage as much as help the rest of us. But when the UK parliamentary Women and Equalities Committee presented its formal report on transgender services and equality to the UK Parliament, informed by 260 witnesses, it was criticised in just the same way as being a waste of resources for responding to such a minority interest.

It seems most people still prefer to regard being transgender as a curable psychological disorder, and that because only one per cent of the population experience it, it should be ignored rather than understood. Certainly, treatment on the NHS should be excluded, because it’s just pandering to a lifestyle choice. Fix my leg, broken by skiiing, but don’t fix this person’s hormones or body. Well, to that I say: you too are in a minority because you can afford to have ski holidays, whereas we are called a ‘lobby group’ with an agenda, though we cannot choose. You are free to join a minority, we just happen to share a minority condition, however non-minority the rest of our lives are. And we can choose to go skiing too, so we can be in the same minority together … so long as only our legs get fixed.

Where ignorance and closed minds lead

I don’t think we are a lot nearer social acceptance just because there is greater awareness. It isn’t about minorities really, it’s about a particular kind of minority. In all this growing awareness, there remains a lot of fear and intolerance. This week, I am as equally sickened by Richard Littlejohn writing in the Daily Mail (whose 2013 writing contributed to the suicide of Lucy Meadows), as by The Archbishop of Canturbury’s crocodile tears over LGBT attitudes among his African prelates. It was Christian missionary colonialism that imported homophobia into Africa in the first place, and protecting those who support or condone imprisonment or execution of people on grounds of sexuality, on the self-defined assertion that it is a sinful lifestyle choice, diminishes this powerful presence in the world to a weak and self-serving institution. I am as sickened by The Channel 4 interview (hardly a debate) between Jack Monroe and Dr Julia Long. It was like placing one scientist representing consensus over anthropogenic climate change against a single prominent denialist, as if the argument were balanced. The view by Dr Julia Long, that every transgender person represents a rape threat to ‘real’ women wherever they go, espoused and promoted repeatedly by Germaine Greer, is also rehearsed in The Conservative Woman (TCW) by Emily Watson, who writes: ‘it opens the door to potential sex offences. By opening single sex facilities up to the opposite sex, women are put at risk. Women have a real fear of being sexually assaulted or raped by men, and the sensible ones avoid places or occasions where they could be in danger. Women feel able to let their guard down with other women.’ She supports her case by a single criminal case of a rapist and an incident in a novel. (TCW is a right-wing conservative, Christian fundamentalist ‘family’ group.)

It is the classic statement: being transgender does not exist; some men like to dress up and pretend, and all of them are predatory. Trans women aren’t women; they are men, because god makes only men and women. We are dangerous. I am dangerous. We threaten civilisation and its norms. We challenge ideas of gender, but by identifying as male or as female, we support the patriarchy. And even acceptance of gender dysphoria is dangerous to children, so stop it!

Are we a million miles from anti-gay laws and condoned homophobia? I sometimes don’t think we’ve moved anywhere at all except in circles, the central anchor-point of which is Judeo-Christian religious.

It’s all about sex

Those of us disadvantaged by a birth condition have become regarded as a dangerous lobby of rapists. It’s all about sex. Innit? Just because a man could, if he wished, put women’s clothes and make-up on, with the sole intent of invading ‘women’s spaces in order to molest or rape, transgender women are all placed under suspicion of being sexual predators. So every woman in a burkha or niqab could similarly be a male rapist in disguise. This all echoes the idiocy in the USA of all those who would almost insist on examining the genitals of anyone ambiguous (child or adult) before entering gendered lavatory facilities. Cis women have been thrown out of female facilities for looking too male, and it escapes attention that bearded and testosterone-fuelled trans men having to enter female facilities would be absurd. (Testosterone-fuelled does not mean potential rapist any more than oestrogen-fuelled trans women, but it does highlight the absurdity.) Especially when everyone goes home to share a common toilet with all genders of their family and friends. And because more sexual violence occurs in familiar domestic circumstances than in public faciltities and venues. And because rape by transgender women is almost unknown.

Being transgender has nothing to do with sex, let alone coercive sex.

Becoming undangerous

There are many things about me that are minority. I play the trumpet. I write poetry. I own a flat. I have three university degrees. None of these places me in the category of lobby group or having an agenda, though each confers certain rights and marks me out as different. But these things are safe. (Well, the decibel rating of a trumpet may not be, and should I be writing politically sensitive poetry in China, that would not be.) They are also personal choices based on innate abilities. None causes me distress, and I am sensitive about the trumpet in the flat. Life is peaceful, you are safe, I am safe.

But any day I can read people online who go out of their way to make untrue assertions against my condition, that may lead others to fear me, disadvantage me or attack me. Living in Brighton, I am lucky. I can choose not to read hate, and I know it will always exist, and I live inconspicuously in a tolerant place. But many others are not so safe. How do we become undangerous, when we are treated as we are, so obviously, in social and broadcast media? When we transition and return from that traumatic passage in life back to ordinariness, we don’t all want to be labelled forever as trans. Only this week one person I know through social media said ‘Now that I am a year post-surgery, I am no longer trans’. Another said ‘I’m fed up with this; I don’t want any labels.’ A government minister came out as gay this week, and the point was raised: ’why does anyone need to come out any more?’ Being trans makes coming out unavoidable, but after that, many of us are done with it. We become able simply to live as we feel right. I have struggled with ‘being out’ in order to be an encouragement, when I feel I’ve said all there is to say, and just want to live inconspicuously. But then I feel hurt to read another person deny my experience, and add a reply to another Guardian comment trail …

One per cent of the population is quite a lot of people, and if we were all completely visible and getting on with our lives, perhaps we would seem less dangerous. But why should we be visible? It isn’t our lives’ mission to educate the world. Against us, is the propensity to cite the extreme, the singular. Whether quoting a celebrity transitioner, or a long-discredited piece of research, a criminal case, or a prominent ‘detransitioner’, the negative (like consumer dissatisfaction) is re-quoted many times more than the positive. I would like to see a headline like this instead:

NHS spends £17m per annum on gender care, including £4.5m on surgery, and saves £80m in social costs of mental health, impact on emergency services, loss of employment productivity and welfare benefits!

(I’m not sure about the £80m, because no-one has measured it, but if half of young people and a third of older trans people are suicidal, the on-costs for all of us must be surely in this order.) But I don’t think one is coming any time soon.

What really will make a difference, is when everyone who knows someone like me actively stands up for us, and refuses to accept the misguided hatred, the subtle discrimination, the careful sidelining, the nudge and the ‘understanding’ wink. If there really are about 650,000 of us in the UK, and we each have fifteen people willing to actively diffuse ignorant comments and jokes, that’s nearly ten million people making our lives safer.

So, dear Anglican Church, dear Pope, dear politicians, academics and experts. Dear journalists, panellists, and public debaters. Dear comedians, writers and critics. Dear family, friends and colleagues. When you hear or read someone declaiming people like me as potential sexual predator, rapist, subversive and moral disaster, speak up, speak out – not to me in my safe spaces, but where it may also cost you that cocked eyebrow, mild shock and surprise. Because every time you play safe and self-protective, you make it harder for us to lively safely and normally.

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It’s not what you remember, but how

  • Posted on December 1, 2015 at 10:35 pm

A friend of mine has been writing what we hope to be a book, with some contributions from me, interleaving experience and reflection with research. It’s not about being anything, but the meaning there is in it, as it is. In some ways it’s a challenge. ‘How about a chapter on your experience of gender dysphoria?’ Sounds innocent enough; we both know that it isn’t a generalisation but a personal experience, just my narrative and my interpretation of it.

I had a go. By the end of a day of hard writing and thinking, I wasn’t particularly satisfied. How many different ways could I have told the story as a chapter (not a whole big boring book)? Rather a lot of trans people have written their own books, and some are really good, and helped me. I have also seen some that are not so good, and are a reflection that many of us want just to tell our story, though we are not all writers. I guess if I were asked to tell my story to several people with very different backgrounds, I would tell it differently each time. So what matters most to me?

The more I think back, the more my story connects up, as I remember little things, the circumstances of the times, the pressures not to speak of certain things, the need to conform, and even the lack of sufficient understanding to think that I might not have been what everyone told me I was. On one level my story is a happy life. On another it is life characterised by a constant fear. On one reading it is very singularly my own, on another terribly familiar. But the reason that I have this story at all has an absolutely common thread, understood by every transgender person.

I am looking forward to seeing the file ‘The Danish Girl’, and have seen the trailer, and a few interviews with the key actor playing Lili Elbe, Eddie Redmayne. If the trailer made me cry, I’m sure I won’t make it through the film. The big trigger, I expect, will be that first unavoidable confession of knowing your gender is different. The way I phrased the feeling of falling into that realisation, was ‘it just feels perfect’.

The trouble with revisiting the story after several years, is that having settled very perfectly, you can still remember that there was real happiness in your life before too. I don’t want to lose that, but neither is it easy to embrace. If I look at photos of my daughter’s wedding a few months ago, or of my ex-wife looking really happy, giving the wedding speech, her being there and not me … or remember too vividly past Christmases … or holidays, or at pictures of happy homes we made and shared … and … and … Then I remember that but for one thing about me, everything was good.

The story of Lili Elbe, and of many other people who have transitioned, is one of devotion. Love somehow survives the hurt and carries on. Here, there will be pain and loss too, but something mattered too much to let it go. And this is where too much reflection and retelling the story doesn’t help. I was one of the majority who lost their marriage and family, and my deepest regret is that it was for no other reason than my gender. I still recall saying: ‘I can’t walk away from this. You can. Please don’t.’

Rage spoils memories

I was trying to remember something I said when writing the chapter, and from searching around, came across a few pages I wrote at the beginning of transition, when I knew it was all over with my wife and family. It was rage in black and white. Rage that I was not allowed to be angry, that I had to be the one who must understand how difficult this all was for everyone else. It was rage that this one thing that made me feel perfect at last made everything else fall apart. That I could come to a clear understanding, and that in doing so I was no longer wanted as a partner, companion, parent, even though I was still me, crawling out from under a blanket of fear where I had stayed for the sake of everyone else.

And behind that rage was a whole lifetime of tender loving memories that felt completely betrayed. Yes, I had to understand how difficult this was, how impossible for those closest to me to sustain. So every time I hear of love enduring through transition, I remember. Memories of rage? Memories of betrayal? Memories of happiness? Memories of love?

Just as I could think after writing my chapter, of all the ways I could have told the story, so there are many ways of remembering. And it is hard to remember how I had to walk away, not from my own love but from a door closed by others. I think it takes a lot longer than I had thought, to wipe the soot and dust off good memories, so that they don’t simply hurt, but become treasures. I struggle sometimes with talking about a good life that I had, as if by confessing their goodness I want them back. I don’t, because they are long past, and they were all a shared possession, not just mine. And I don’t ever want to live with fear again, least of all fear of my authentic self being a reason not to be loved or wanted. So somehow I need to become able to see photographs, read things and remember, in a different way, where the ending isn’t part of every moment. I will get there, but it has been a reminder to me that just as you can tell your story to other people in many ways, so you can to yourself. Mine is not a sad story, just a brilliant chapter with a very sad ending.

I really don’t want to live with any resentment or anger, and largely it has gone. I simply want to feel gratitude for everything good that has happened in my life. Right now it is good, I am grateful for the love that I share, for the life my partner and I are building together, and for all the new experiences we bring to each other. Life is all about learning, all the way, beginning to end, and after so much telling over the past few years, now I still need to learn how to remember well and safely, because the story continues.

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Identity III: the language of things

  • Posted on October 4, 2015 at 7:41 pm

I have gone back to school. Last week I was in college for adult language learning, my first German class. I jumped in mid-way, because I have some ability, a small vocabulary and not enough for much meaningful conversation. And so I tend to work out different ways of saying things, using the words I do know. It must sound very odd. I also find that in German, the words for transgender, transvestite and transsexual are not used or available in the same way as in English. Maybe as I learn, joining online German trans groups could help me understand better. The trans people will be very much like me, but with a language and vocabulary to express and describe themselves, somewhat different. Language is a big barrier to clear self-description across language boundaries.

Is my identity limited by language, given that language follows concept? I can’t find words for a concept that does not yet exist. I can invent them, as new concepts arise, and this happens all the time. Language in turn creates an environment of meaning. It doesn’t describe facts, it expresses interpretation. Snow is snow, but in the Scots language there are 421 words for it. The reason? To give more meaning to the experience so it can be shared more accurately. It is still crystalline water, white, pretty, and blocks roads. I am not Scottish, so I wouldn’t understand many of the words, and would be unable to communicate the state of the day’s snow clearly. If I was belligerently English I could insist that snow was snow and that was enough: stop confusing things!

I find the same with gender language. Male/man/boy, female/woman/girl are like snow. Sometimes I speak with another (cis) woman I know, and we arrive at me saying: ‘but I wasn’t born a boy!’ Their response reveals a lack of vocabulary. Of course I was born a boy and I changed. But changed what? Sex or gender, neither or both? All I know is that I was born with male reproductive physiology and a female sense of self, reflected in my behaviour and sense of belonging. The difficulty of naming ‘what’ I was/am then becomes a difficulty of accepting my authentic identity. I changed a physical part of myself, but I didn’t change myself. I need not even have done that, had I been happy to continue as I was. So what do we call a man with a vagina or a woman with a penis? We can refuse the identity, block it out, and insist that man and woman are defined by external genitalia, stay blind to intersex conditions and variety, and continue with the difficulties. In this way we steal anyone’s identity and agency for no better reason than that our words have failed to keep pace with concepts. And a large proportion of people and cultures and governments and ministries indeed are stuck right here.

Language divides everything

Look at the surface of a river, watch the spray, get in close to the spray, the surface of a droplet, the evaporation of water molecules from it, zoom right in on the molecules and see the subatomic particles in their statistical clouds among those of the atoms and molecules of various gases comprising the air, work out where the oxygen atoms or ions really belong, zoom out and see the moist air currents, as part of the gaseous mass through which you are looking at the water and tell me: where does the ‘river’ become the ‘air’, or the air the river? Perhaps the air without the river wouldn’t be the same, and the river in a vacuum would simply have evaporated away. By all means swim in the river, breathe the air, paddle your kayak, or photograph or paint it – but be careful that your idea of identity isn’t a definition of reality that you insist on imposing on others, instead of observing with a readiness for surprise.

When does she become he? As I was thinking about my arguments on identity, an article came up, which played the same mind game as the river. Testosterone and oestrogen, cholesterol and progesterone are similar molecules, but make significant changes to our bodies, especially before birth and consequently again at puberty. We may or may not be chromosomaly sensitive to them, or produce the ‘right’ quantities. There is no way of telling gender by looking at any one of us, any more than you can decide where the river and the air meet or divide. With such complexity, why do we confer identity on people, for the convenience of our language? The article says very well what I was going to write, so I won’t repeat it, other than to encourage you to read it. Like the river picture above, it simply picks apart each characteristic that gets used to define male or female, and shows it to be insufficient through variety. The conclusion is that the organ that best defines gender is the brain.

Brain, or mind?

The implication for the anatomists might still be that instead of examining a baby’s genitals, we routinely scan its brain. Surely the brain structures give a better hint, if the argument is right? Maybe; maybe not. Suppose you scan the infant brain, and compare the result (probably ambiguous for many or most) with chromosomes from various and several parts of the body (in case of mosaicism) for Xs and Ys, and add an SRY gene test for androgen insensitivity? Would that help? The consequence could be babies with penises being declared ‘probably female’, those with vaginas ‘probably male’, a lot of question marks, and perhaps still a majority being quite conclusive. But for what purpose?

The elusive element remains the mind. The mind we still think of as being centred in the brain, and this may be right or wrong, but however mechanistically we think of mind-as-consequence, we are a long way from scanning a brain to find the mind. Thoughts and intentions, yes, but the origins of these, no. Is sense of identity a brain thing or a mind thing, or, as the river and air, not clearly divisible and dependent on both, and on culture, society, philosophy, and therefore ultimately, available language?

Identity, definition, what you are as distinct from where you are, may not be a thing, a word, but you still know what you are you in the midst of whatever everything else is (including that you are neither, or not solely, male nor female).

Be careful. You might not be right!

So be very careful not to limit another person’s identity by your own language limitations. And if I say I was born a girl, fight the instinct to say: ‘but you did have a …’.

Something I wrote quite a while ago says it nicely in far fewer words:

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Identity II: who identifies what?

  • Posted on September 13, 2015 at 3:02 pm

Just as I was about to get deeply philosophical and go through my list from last blog from the beginning, up popped a reminder about gender identity; legal gender identity. Ashley Reed set up a petition to the UK Parliament: ‘Allow transgender people to self-define their legal gender’. Within a few days the signatories numbered over 30,000, so a response was required. The Ministry of Justice posted their statement at 1 am on a Saturday morning. I hope it meant ‘please could you post our agreed statement before you go home, don’t worry about the overtime’, rather than: ‘could you do the usual before you go to bed?’. If 100,000 people sign before 22 January 2016, the petition goes on the list for possible debate.

Please do read the government response, because several phrases are very telling, revealing significant misunderstanding of what it is to be transgender. Obtaining legal recognition of one’s gender is, for example, ‘entirely a personal decision’ (like it does’t matter to have a correct legal status); gender is ‘acquired’ (like everyone chooses a lifestyle); ‘non-binary gender is not recognised in UK law’ (like it does not exist); and whilst there are ‘important legal and social consequences’ in one’s legal gender’, for non-binary people’s absence of a legal gender identity: ‘We are not aware that that results in any specific detriment’. It isn’t just out of touch, it is ignorant.

Our UK Ministry of Justice is exhibiting real lack of justice towards everyone who does not conform to a highly restrictive and fallacious definition of gender. The distress caused to intersex, transsexual, non-binary and any other non-conforming person is highly significant. It causes untold social harm, violence, mental illness, and suicide. It perpetuates a culture of false normality that has no basis in how things really are. The sole reason for having to assign a lifetime legal binary gender status to everyone, is so that discrimination can be made, so that people can be treated, not appropriately, but differently by definition.

The river

Which does bring me back to where I was. Things are things and are separable, by naming them, by giving them status. The more we break things down, the more we break them up. The less we break things down, the greater the integrity. Think. A river is an entity. It is a rivulet, or a stream, or a torrent, or an estuary. It is an inlet or an outlet, it is a place of safety and or of danger. It is also water, rocks, banks, weed, an ecosystem. It is minerals, hydrogen, oxygen, carbohydrates, it is flow, it is swirl, ripple, wave and wash. It is atoms, molecules and bonds, it is subatomic particles, it is quantum interaction, it is 100 per cent complex electromagnetic energy. We see it, hear it, smell it, are washed away by it. It is a river. And all those itemised aspects? They are nouns, not adjectives. Where does any one begin and another end? And yet we distinguish by naming, by giving identities to aspects that are, essentially, indivisible.

Are the identifications in the lists important? Of course. To the sailor, estuary and safety matter. To the environmental scientist the waterborne contents matter. To the hiker the size and flow are important. To the painter, the light matters. But the breakdown labels do not contain the river or constrain it. If I were to say that as a sailor, ‘clear blue water’ was irrelevant, and that ‘tidal / non-tidal’ was the only label that mattered, and that every river, entering open water or not, had to be legally registered that way, you would say it was OK in a nautical legal register, but that as an identity it was only one of many.

Identification has value to the identifier, but it doesn’t change the nature of anything. It separates out the relevance to one kind of observer, but it does not divide the world in itself. Identification is a convenience only. For a fish, a whirlpool in the river has no boundary; it is not a thing but a place where the indivisible river tends to move in a different pattern of flow. Naming the whirlpool does not make it extractable, even though there is value in describing the observation. Does the whirlpool have an identity? Only when it matters to an observer; otherwise no. When is the river a stream? Only when it matters; and language confers the meaning. We are tangled in semantics as quickly as in river-weed. Your meaning and mine may not be the same; the sailor, the walker, the environmental scientist, the fish, do not have to agree, but none has the right to say the others are wrong. What would the river say?

Legal status

This is a science teacher. You are a migrant. She is a refugee. One person, but labels that convey three significances and confer rigid opinions. That person and I are two equally real, indistinguishably human, beings.

Being human is not a legal status.

Being a refugee is.

Being a woman is.

Being of non-binary gender is not.

Who creates a legal status and why? Legal status is a form of identity that exerts authority of one human being over another. Two equally real, indistinguishably human, beings. One has the right to confer identity and give legal status, the other may not identify themselves. The first grants rights and privileges under their own authority, and in a democracy we assume this authority to be beneficial to society as a whole. In terms of behaviours this makes sense. A ‘harbour’ or ‘estuary’ on a chart means you won’t ground your ship and endanger others. Granting asylum is a good thing in a way that welcoming unrestrained economic migration may not. In all cases a judgement about distinguishing one thing from another is made. But when it comes to society, the better and more useful distinctions are around doing rather than being. You are a builder, please fix my house. You are a horticulturist, I want to check before you install my new shower. More importantly, you are a registered surgeon, you are a qualified electrician, you are an articled lawyer. These have a status that is important, because if you are not a registered surgeon, I do not want you near me with a knife! I cannot be a surgeon because in my heart of hearts I simply know that I am one. Being a surgeon is actually a doing thing, a practise.

I am human, not by someone’s authority but because it is what I am. There is a wide range of characteristics to accept this self-knowledge, but not just one. And tracing my ancestry will finally lead back to a parent whose human label you will begin to question more precisely. But there will not be just one thing by which you would grant a posthumous birth certificate as human, or not. Thankfully we don’t have to make these decisions.

I am a woman, not by someone’s authority but because it is what I am. There is a wide range of characteristics to accept this self-knowledge, but not just one. I have been granted a birth certificate that states I was born a girl, not because I am a woman, but because in my society there is a legal difference between a female human being and male one. They are not treated equally. To be myself, I do not need to belong to one or either camp, but I do not want to be called something I am not. I look at men who are clearly men and know I am not one of those. I look at women who are clearly women and I do not feel this. I look at ambiguous people and it simply does not matter how they self-identify.

A friend, or several, of mine is neither male nor female. Perhaps through ambiguous physiology, perhaps because of a complete lack of sense of gender-belonging as male or female. They are every bit themselves as I am myself, but my society says that they cannot be neither. Their own identity, though equally human, is not what they are allowed to be. Legally it is obligatory to confer one thing or another onto them, otherwise they cannot be treated in a sufficiently discriminatory way – for the good of society, as our Ministry of Justice would have it.

A whirlpool turns, but you cannot define its boundary other than very approximately; it is part of the river.

Male? Female? Neither? You cannot define the boundaries other than approximately; we are all human.

So identities of any kind are made in order to create controlled communication. Don’t sail here, don’t swim there, grant this kind privileges, give those something different. Fair enough if it’s about behaviour (tidal, danger, qualifications, criminal), but not if it’s about being.

I am not a woman by permission or certification.

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Identity and I-dentity

  • Posted on August 31, 2015 at 8:05 pm

Show me your ID.

It is hugely important these days to have your ID. Maybe you look younger than you are and you can’t be served alcohol. Perhaps you can’t get into a building without it. Or you are stopped for any reason and someone in authority demands your ID. It isn’t just your passport anymore, it instead has become something more important than your word, or your name. You have become an entity, you have become a thing. A thing that has more substance than you, where it matters. Without it you are not what you say. You have become a singularity that cannot exist, nor cease to exist, separately from your ID.

It was Descartes who declared: ‘I think, therefore I am’ (cogito ergo sum). This is the Western philosophy of individualism, by which we are separated, even isolated from each other in the ultimate loneliness of the spirit creature answerable only to some god. Most world religions are based around the individual as one accountable to a deity for every action or inaction. We sense that loneliness in facing life and in facing death, and this feeling is exacerbated by beliefs about good acts deserving future reward and bad acts deserving future punishment. Accountability amongst ourselves and agreeing rules in one thing, but the urge to have absolute rules and absolute authority to decide what is good and what is bad brings more guilt than it brings inner peace. And yet, surely, we all have a sense of self long before we are troubled by whether we have a sense of a deity or supreme invisible being, let alone one that is concerned with our daily thoughts and doings.

I am interested in this sense of self, and whether or how it relates to a sense of identity, and then whether this sense has meaning in our personal philosophy (and most of us at least adopt some convenient philosophy to get us by in life, even if we don’t bother to develop and grow one for ourselves). In recent years I have been confronted by many different ideas about gender identity: what it is, whether it is essential (unchanging) or fluid, innate or socialised. And gender identity is but one aspect of how we feel about ourselves, and perhaps not even the most important. Nevertheless, our bodies substantiate some sense of identity, because our bodies move around freely and separately from other bodies (if we can simply agree to the exceptions, you understand what I mean). So it is reasonable to describe ourselves as individuals. Consequently, we create narratives, files and records that identify these distinctive lives. Only now we can wrap each up in a code for easy access, and thus our identities have become externalised and mechanised. Even our DNA, and possibly our entire genome, can be attached as a file to this code, giving a more permanent and definitive identity than we have ever had before. Is the individual still a person, or an entity, a thing? And who creates identity: the ‘administration’, or the individual – and who has precedence?

It sounds like I rub roughly against this aspect of society and against religion? Well, I do. I can see how they develop and why; everything seems quite reasonable – except for the outcome. Ultimately, I think religion has done us more harm as a species with ‘civilisation’ at its heart, than it has done us good. It has created absolute systems out of nothing, that differ and disagree, and thus as absolutes cause lasting conflicts. Further, our philosophies have been developed out of religion as much as from anything else. To survive religious authorities, the past great philosophers have in the main had to frame their thoughts within accepted religious dictat. Descartes, not least, spent much time and effort in proving the existence of (a) god. How can a philosophical development have meaning when it is constrained by prior beliefs that maintain an independent absolute authority? Scientific method (itself a philosophy) struggles to this day against fundamentalist (or simply conservative) religious belief, as if the latter was as reasoned and reasonable. We must be free to observe, and remain open to consideration of from where our interpretations derive, if we are to be enquiring and intelligent creatures. We also can only observe with limited senses and scope, and must always keep that in mind. We do not, and cannot, see the whole, when the whole is not in ‘sight’ and ‘sight’ is our only, limited, sense.

For this reason, I want to think aloud in this blog about what identity is, and what it means to say ‘I’.

Aspects I would like to cover include:

  • the identity (separability) of anything, including subatomic particles, or even electromagnetic vibration, since that is the nature, the sole content, of everything we express as ‘existing’.
  • the identity of a living cell, its possible evolution, stem cells, regeneration, and why identity and DNA seem so important.
  • the concept of identity within mosaicism and chimerism, and why this may matter to any of us, and phenomena such as personality changes following transplant, and concepts such as the fluid genome.
  • so far as I can begin to understand it, the idea of implicate and explicate order, as descriptions of how things are (David Bohm).
  • how separate anything is when we do not name anything, and thus, whether it is we who create this individualistic identity by which we increasingly live.

These are big ideas, and all I can do is poke a stick at them and see what stirs. But given the importance of ‘identity’ in the history of this blog, I think it’s worth a go over coming weeks.

Continue reading Identity and I-dentity »

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