Speaking of Identity

Last updated on: August 27, 2015 at 3:47 pm by D. G. Hart

Speaking of Identity 2015-08-27T15:47:15-04:00 D. G. Hart

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Do we need a Federal Department of Personal Identity to determine which aspects of ourselves define us. For instance, some people applauded Bruce Jenner’s decision to come out as Caitlyn. Some of those applauders were not so pleased with Rachel Dolezal’s reclassification of herself as black. If identities are malleable, why is race any less changeable than gender?

Damon Linker posed the question this way:

Overnight Dolezal has gone from living in a context that recognized her as black to one that recognizes her as white. At first that made her a con artist. But then she appeared on the Today show and doubled down, declaring, “I identify as black.” Now she’s apparently crazy. Just like me with my unusually literal Napoleon complex.

That’s the way it works with Hegel. It doesn’t matter how intensely Dolezal identifies as black. If the rest of us refuse to accept that identification, she’s out of luck. She might feel black, but she is white, and her refusal to accept it is at best a form of self-deception and at worst an outright (and perhaps even clinical) delusion.

But wait a minute, I’m a little confused. Didn’t we just live through a cultural event that cut in the opposite direction? Bruce Jenner was not, in fact, a woman. Yet he said that he felt like a woman. So he underwent a surgical and hormonal transformation, turning himself physically into Caitlyn, thereby bringing his self-image and reality into closer alignment.

This is something we’re supposed to respect and applaud. We’re certainly not supposed to dismiss it as a form of mental illness. And in Hegelian terms, this makes a kind of sense. Thanks to the efforts of advocates for the transgendered, our intersubjective context has come to accept that on matters of gender the individual gets to define what is true. So if I have facial hair, a deep voice, and a penis, I’m a man — unless I feel like I’m not a man, in which case I could be any number of other genders, and you should recognize the validity of whichever gender I settle on (for now). And if I choose to use medical technology to transform myself physically into a woman, then I most certainly am a woman. I’m the one who gets to decide. . . .

I confess that this distinction would make more sense to me if the people attacking Dolezal appealed to something like nature. “A person is white or black by nature,” they might say, “and so claiming to be black when one is naturally white, or vice versa, is deranged.” But in addition to reading Hegel, I learned in graduate school that race, like gender, is a social construct. Meaning that race, like gender, is whatever we make it out to be and not something grounded in anything innately permanent or fixed.

Which means that Jenner is free to become a woman simply because we say so and for no other reason.

And Dolezal is not free to become black simply because we say so and for no other reason.

Curious how we have a National Department of Personal Identity even without having one.

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My Caitlyn Jenner Problem

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