The Law of Identity is Rubbish

Not that law of identity. A is A is not rubbish. It's still good. I'm talking about a new law of identity: each of us has an inner "gendered" spirit that might or might not be changeable at will and might be at odds with one’s body or sex. It’s the law of gender identity that is rubbish, a myth. “Trans” ideology is a fraud because there is no “trans.”

When you hear a person say he (or she) "identifies as a woman (or man)," think how Yoda might respond, "No. Be or be not. There is no ‘identify as.’" Why wouldn’t the person just say, "I am a woman (or man)"? That question needs to be asked. It might be because a man who said, "I am a woman," couldn't help but realize that he is uttering a fiction. "Identify as" is a cushion between the speaker and the truth. "I am a woman" can be falsified (or verified). "I identify (or see myself) as a woman" cannot. That’s a clue to the con going on.

While it often seems that “trans” ideologues don’t wish to question the reality of sex, we might ask, then, why they insist that sex is “assigned” rather than identified at birth. At any rate, the ideologues treat sex as unimportant. It is not: consult any biology or evolution textbook.

Maybe it's all about feelings--then again, maybe it's not. When a man says he feels he's a woman, is he not actually expressing a preference rather than a feeling? (As a kid, if I said, "I feel like an apple," my father would quip, "But you don't look like an apple.") "I prefer to see myself as a woman" is not equivalent to "I feel like a woman." After all, what does it mean for someone to feel like a woman (or man, boy, or girl)? How would a person know? Do all women (etc.) feel the same? The person has never been anything but what he or she is. What’s the objective standard by which one identifies a feeling as manness or womanness?

This question applies to areas other than sex. (The vague word gender contributes nothing to the discussion.) What does it mean to feel like a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, or an atheist? How would a person know that a particular feeling corresponds to Christianness, Jewishness, Muslimness, or atheismness and not to something else? He may imagine that’s what a feeling means, but that's all it is: something imagined. He is not an infallible observer of the source of his feelings. He could be wrong, no matter how certain he claims he is. We’ve all felt, say, anxiety without being entirely sure why. Is it the upcoming dental appointment, the job interview, or a first date? That takes some sorting out. On the other hand, one’s interpretation of chest pain as a heart attack can be falsified or verified by a doctor and an EKG. The person might be experiencing indigestion and not a heart attack. The feeling itself does not contain its own explanation. All he knows is that he is in pain.

The same thing could be said of people who claim they feel like a man or a woman, a white or black person, a Christian, Jew, Muslim, or atheist,  etc.

Note what I am not saying. I am not saying that one cannot feel good or bad, content or uncomfortable about being one thing or another. I am saying that feeling good (or bad) about being, say, an atheist or a man is not the same thing as feeling that one is an atheist or man. (The song “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” from the 1958 musical Flower Drum Song, is about feeling joy not girlness.)

But isn’t there another problem when a man says that feeling like a woman means he prefers wearing dresses and makeup or doing any number of other things he associates with womanhood? Doesn’t the strict equation of womanhood with dresses and makeup revive unreasonable and passé rigid sexual stereotypes? Are women who prefer pants suits and no makeup lesser women? Of course not.

This is not to say that all sexual stereotyping is unreasonable. Males and females on average differ in all sorts of physical and psychological ways. Many cross-cultural studies confirm this. However, this does not justify legal disabilities for women. Enlightened thinkers have worked hard to loosen the connection between temperaments and preferences on the one hand and sex on the other. A girl who prefers toy trucks to dolls is still a girl, we used to be told--correctly. And a boy who prefers a toy kitchen set to toy soldiers is still a boy. Similarly, a competitive woman is nevertheless a woman, and a cooperative man is nevertheless a man even if the average for each sex differs. What is the case for regressing in this matter?

One tip-off that a man who says he sees himself as a woman  (or vice versa) may not really do so is his demand that others also see him that way. Why would a confident person need others to affirm his identity claim? The demand turns dark when it takes the form of insisting that other people believe what is demonstrably untrue: that men can become women and women can become men. It's as if respect and compassion require that we take on other people's fantasies in defiance of all that we have understood and observed all our lives. It does not. The demand involves gaslighting, that is, efforts to make people doubt what they know.

The demand goes darker still when the government is lobbied for measures designed to force others to behave and even use pronouns in certain ways. This includes laws that require that men who "identify as" women be allowed to enter women's hitherto safe spaces, such as bathrooms, shelters, locker rooms, and prisons. At that point, the quest for identity becomes intolerable identity politics and violates other people’s rights.

We all should be free to see ourselves in any way we please. Moreover, within the limits of objective reality we should strive to create the persons we want to be. People can genuinely say, “I know who I am,” only by deliberating about what is important to them individually and then acting to achieve their values. In a social context, this can mean pleasing others as well as oneself, such as providing goods and services in the marketplace. Note that the focus is primarily outward not inward. If you want to call the resulting emotional satisfaction a “sense of identity,” no problem. But there is no identity spirit, gender or otherwise, floating in and possibly mismatched with the body. We are not in our bodies (and so cannot be in the wrong bodies). We are our bodies, integrated conscious and self-conscious -- reasoning -- material beings.

Identity is a two-way street. We may see ourselves differently from how others see us. A person may think he is modest, while his acquaintances think he’s a braggart. While people have a right to see themselves in any way they wish, they have no right to have others see them that way. No one has the right to other people's eyes or minds.