If you’ve read about Caitlyn Jenner, Rachel Dolzelal, or just about any story of social importance lately, you have heard a lot about identity. Caitlyn identifies and is a woman. Rachel identifies as black and may or may not be. As a white cismale I’m not particularly qualified to offer insight or much more than speculation or reflection of what I hear on either of those specific discussions, but I do have an identity and I think it’s important identify what identity actually is.
Identity in the dictionary is “the fact of being who or what a person or thing is.” It includes how you identify yourself, and how others identify you as well, to a much more limited extent. It includes both ascribed traits, which we have no control over, achieved traits which we do, and some that appear a combination of the two.
It’s pretty broad. In the sociological sense, identity is extremely complicated and nuanced. When I list some potential identity pieces below as ascribed or achieved, keep in mind that they may be more a combination and I may list them as purely ascribed or achieved in error.
Ascribed traits are outside your control and can include who your biological parents are, where you were born, your age/date of birth, what you look like without modification, your biological sex, parts of your health, and slightly more fluid characteristics like gender and automatic thoughts and feelings when exposed to certain situations and triggers. It can include the socioeconomic status of your family as you grow up, because bootstraps are not provided until a certain age, what with our child labor laws and all.
Achieved traits are up to you and can include your perception of who you are and others’ perceptions, as they related to things you do. It includes your beliefs and paradigms of how things work and how you interact with them. Sometimes it includes your choice of education, fashion, activities, literally everything you do and your behavior in general, how you vote, where you volunteer, and where you work, if you have the resources and awareness of options to be so picky.
Your identity includes your environment too. You can not separate your environment from your identity, whether it’s chosen (like where you go to work) or not (if you’re a child, you’re in prison, or economic factors prevent you from leaving a place you don’t want to be).
Like I said before, some identity traits are a combination of ascribed and achieved. It includes some characteristics that some feel are ascribed and others think they’re not. These have included many characteristics that are clearly not chosen even when conventional and later fringe wisdom said they were, such as sexuality, gender status when one’s gender and biological sex are not the same or transgender, and race. Race, is now apparently up for debate, under the guise of being “just a social construct” which tends to ignore that it was and is a social construct connected directly to phenotype, which is an ascribed trait. The fact that we made it up doesn’t mean it’s not connected to other identity characteristics we can’t change at will. And even this is a dramatic oversimplification of race, as it does not take into account individuals of mixed race who don’t clearly fit into one phenotype or the other.
Regarding sexuality and transgender status: it seems sexuality and your internal gender are ascribed, and how you act on them could be described as achieved, but it seems far more appropriate to me to consider them ascribed, with resulting achieved traits.
The idea of sexuality as a choice or achieved status has already been appropriately eviscerated in other forums. The fact that how one expresses it is a choice while technically accurate, is similarly hollow. It’s ridiculous to expect anyone to not make choices to express their relationship to such a deeply ascribed trait as sexuality.
The same as a cisgender people can choose a variety of ways to represent themselves, can decide on a variety of ways to identify or not identify as their gender, transgender people can too. And the same way it’s not okay for you to judge the way a cisgender person interprets their identity as it relates to their gender without directly harming others, it’s not okay to assign expectations and judgements to how a transgender person expresses their transgender identity, whether that be through surgery or any of the other number of ways everyone else expresses their gender.identity.
In the cases in the news, it includes what we choose to highlight about all of the above when we represent ourselves to others. Sometimes I’m insecure, sometimes I’m confident. I prefer to highlight the latter and conceal the former when possible. It’s possible that others consider that a more prevalent part of my identity. Is also possible they read my nonverbals and only encounter me in times I feel insecure, and identify me that way instead.
Identity as it relates to others: One of the most challenging thing about identity is that our truest, most accurate sense of our identity is our own, but the way others perceive our identity still impacts our lives and functioning. We also can’t decide that the intractable, ascribed pieces don’t exist, but we can choose to not focus on them when we think of who we are, or minimize their importance compared to other parts of ourselves. We can choose to focus on whatever we want to focus on when we describe ourselves or in how we act around others, and that is likely to impact their perception of our identity. It’s not a solid guarantee that this will impact how others’ identify us though, or necessarily should. To say “my identity should be only decided by me”, while appearing to be the most moral and reasonable determination, is not practically achievable because we can’t divorce ourselves from all social interactions. All social interactions are reflections of the views of the people interacting in them.
So identity is as broad as “the fact of being who or what a person or thing is” but with lots of details, facets, and nuances.
Identity is a combination of things: Things you can control, things you can’t. It’s a combination of how you view yourself most importantly, but still includes, in very specific ways, how others view you. It includes your environment, your beliefs, your thoughts, your feelings, and your actions. Parts of it are concrete, and parts are fluid. Identity is as complex as all of the possible things that can make up what you are.
So who are you? And when analyzing the identities of those in the news, and those around you, which parts are up to your interpretation, which parts are up to theirs, and which parts just are whether the two of you agree or not?
