Something I’m wary of: Identity comes into this for everybody. Where you land on gender identity is about what kind of person you are. So, if you’re a “good progressive,” there’s a lens you’re supposed to apply and the same goes if you’re a skeptic (the real kind, not the Atheism+ kind) or a contrarian or a heterodox thinker.
I think a lot about certain friends and how our paths that traveled long distances side-by-side diverged so sharply. Questions of identity seem to me to be at the very root of that divergence. Take a friend of mine who defined herself as an activist and ally. She had years of experience checking her privilege and walking a mile in somebody else’s shoes and setting her (inevitably suspect) judgment to one side and not applying white settler-colonial cisheteronormative standards. I’d say she was easy to hack—needless to say, she’d put it rather differently. But for someone who is an activist above all else, your role on trans is clear and it’s one you’ve been well-prepared to take up.
This friend and I shared the same job for many years, a job that mixed research and activism. We often landed on the same side of arguments. But she was an activist and I was a researcher. When a new issue arose, she asked: “What can I do to support this?” and I asked “What’s going on here?” It turns out those questions and orientations toward the world lead to quite different places.
When transgender ideology started to insinuate itself in our social and professional universe, we went in opposite directions. I had a lot of questions and I thought: I’m just going to pull this loose thread and see what happens. There were a lot of loose threads to pull. At the end of the process, that beautiful tapestry—the same one my friend had wrapped herself in—lay in tatters. In the pursuit of knowledge, I’d acquired a lot of terribly inconvenient information for a young liberal who ran in progressive circles and worked for a progressive nonprofit, in a social and professional context where deference to orthodoxy was increasingly expected of me. I couldn’t submit to it.
But my dissent on this issue also gave me an identity that I treasured—(experience says watch out!)—every bit as much as my friend clung to her identity as an activist and ally. Take a girl who grew up on Havel, who thrilled to heretics and open flames, and give her a chance to play the dissident. See what happens. My identity can lead and mislead me, too. How does identity come into it for you?
Trans is an identity issue for everybody
This really rings true.
Especially: “This friend and I shared the same job for many years, a job that mixed research and activism. We often landed on the same side of arguments. But she was an activist and I was a researcher. When a new issue arose, she asked: “What can I do to support this?” and I asked “What’s going on here?”
We can easily be fooled into thinking we share the same approach as someone else, purely by the fact we often ‘land on the same side’.
I have come to realise this in the last few years.
For example, to me an interest in politics is an interest in exploring political ideas. From a non-biased base. What is the best tax rate? What happens when you raise tax? What happens when you lower it? What do other countries do? What works best?
However, to some of my friends and relatives, an ‘interest in politics’ is in pursuing an ideal, or being part of a tribe, not in genuinely questioning ideas.
I may land in the same place as them, but only after really exploring the ideas. Perhaps I had naively assumed everyone else did the same.
But for some, the position comes first, and they never really explore the underlying assumptions.
The difference in the two approaches is laid bare when a new idea comes on the block.
Trans ideology is the perfect example of this.
What is your instinctive response? Do you ask ‘which side fits with my general identity?’ Or do you ask ‘What’s this all about?’
I treasure my identity as someone who will (at least try to) question everything.
I love this. So interesting, the insight that you and your colleague started with these different questions that led to such a divergence of paths. I also ponder my own yearning for identity, even as (like you and many of your readers here) I have left the identity of the good progressive behind. I realized this yesterday when a neighbor complained that a new neighbor was a "Trump voter." I didn't have the same shared and comfortable tribal response I would have had a few years ago. That old response of being in smug agreement with her seemed not only lacking in nuance and compassion, but also really boring to me. But--do I have a new identity? Is my new identity a "recommitted feminist?" Is it a "heterodox x-lefty"? Do I have to hang on to that "progressive" thing in some ways that still matter to me? Nothing really fits, and that is both destabilizing/scary and also bracing/freeing. I can't seem to help TRYING to re-define my identity though! I think it is part of being human. Maybe identity is more about others than truly a self-definition. We are social animals, tribal animals, and personal "identity" is inextricably linked to our social identity. We must find community because it is part of who we are.