#id pol

identity shouldn’t be something that can be invalidated by other people not believing in it; your identity cannot require other’s participation in order to exist.

a healthy identity formation goes like this:

you live your life and the facts of your life construct your identity.

unhealthy identity formation goes like this:

you construct your identity and that dictates how you live your life.

i often get charged with “invalidating” people’s gender identities, which always gives me pause, because a healthy identity should not be able to be “invalidated” by my non-participation.

for example, being a runner is part of my “identity” because i run. if someone tells me i’m not a “real runner” or i don’t “look like a runner” or refuses to call me a runner—none of that changes the material fact that i run almost every day, i run 35-40 miles a week; i DO that. so someone else “denying” that i’m a runner changes nothing about the fact that i am a runner by virtue of the fact that i run.

let’s say i did not run, but i wore running gear around. i dressed the part. someone might mistake me for a runner, but that doesn’t suddenly translate into miles run. i could insist people refer to me AS a runner, but unless i actually RUN, it makes no difference.

gender is the same premise.

i AM female, and that’s why i’m a woman. getting called “he” or “sir” doesn’t change that, dressing in “masculine” clothing doesn’t change that, and transitioning didn’t change that either. someone can “deny” that i’m a woman but i know i am because i’m female! which is such a relief and very liberating, tbh. i don’t identify AS, i AM.

on the flip, a male person can “dress like a woman,” and “look the part,” he can even insist people refer to him as “she,” or “woman,” or even “female,” but he never will be, because he is male.

when TRAs accuse me of “invalidating” gender (identity), they’re really telling on themselves; if your identity CAN be denied and that actually affects it, it’s not real. it’s constructed. it’s a fantasy that’s been miscast as an identity. and it’s unhealthy to organize your life around an identity that isn’t rooted in reality. it’s unhealthy to organize your life around an identity.

identity —> life = not healthy

White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo has a racket to rival that of the Catholic Church. Instead of penance, there is workplace diversity training. Begging priests for forgiveness in the confessional has been replaced by meet-ups with hapless Black acquaintances to deconstruct week-old micro-aggressions. The collection plate has also evolved considerably. But the unending, and of course ultimately futile, struggle for personal salvation at the heart of the operation is the same.

It is incongruous that this original sin model of racism continues – if book sales are any guide – to be so popular at a time when the most multiracial, far-reaching and radical struggles against racism and police brutality in more than half a century are shaking the foundations of the world’s most powerful state. People marching together in their hundreds of thousands and showing collective disdain for everything they are taught to respect – from historical monuments to police cars and flashy shops – are electrifying a new generation that has come of age in a world of endemic inequality and murderous racism. The movement is bringing together people with vastly different life experiences in pursuit of a common objective, and in so doing is lifting political consciousness out of the mire of individual moral virtue and onto the terrain of mass struggle and solidarity.

The destructive and divisive atmosphere often found in today’s privilege-checking culture reflects both the toxic sectarian factionalism of the theory’s originators, and the light years we have travelled from the civil rights and Black Power movements. Then, white radicals in this country routinely participated in and helped organise demonstrations and activities in support of anti-racist causes and campaigns – the victorious “Free Huey [Newton]” campaign (involving the Black Panther’s shoot-out with the police), an international cause célèbre, being one example. Then, Black and white militants joined forces in the interests of necessity and revolutionary unity. In today’s left, by contrast, white activists may “excuse” themselves, or be discouraged, from joining and organising anti-racist protests, on the “privilege” basis that they cannot possibly understand the Black experience of oppression and should not act like they do.

Whereas in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the raised fist – Black and white – expressed political, anti-racist, class solidarity for a generation, today’s popular symbols of anti-racist resistance (hands raised in the “Don’t Shoot” stance, hoodies, and “I am Trayvon Martin” signs) are sometimes argued by privilege advocates to be inappropriate for whites. In what would have been anathema to anti-racist movements of the past, some privilege advocates call upon whites to identify as whites – as part of a community with racists – instead of identifying themselves as anti-racist fighters.