The Problem with IDENTITY

“Words, words, words, I am so sick of words.” —Liza Doolittle in My Fair Lady.

“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'”—Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

What is in a word? Gender identity, sexual identity, identity groups, identity disorders, gender identity development, social identity, ego identity, identity achievement, identity documents, personal identity, racial identity, ethnic identity, and identity politics. They are all thrown around these days. It is time to tell why I believe that “identity” is not a good word to use and suggest some useful substitutes. Can one even do that these days? Can someone write a book about transgender science and not even use the word identity. Well, I did. Almost. I had to warn my readers that the term was out there and why it was not a word that should be used in scientific contexts. The seemingly innocuous word has multiple meanings most of which are unscientific and some of which are disingenuous and pernicious.

Issues like this call for a philosopher to help organize and understand what is going on. To help me wade through all these words and organize my thoughts I read a book by Steven Hicks, to give me some organization. Hicks is a professor of philosophy at Rockford University in Illinois and is the author of Explaining Postmodernism but nearly all of this book can be found in various YouTube videos.

Bear with me while I lay a little philosophy on you, I promise that it will be worth it. Hicks explains that humans have gone through three philosophical periods.

• Age of Religion or Premodernism; man’s history until the Enlightenment in the 1600s
• Age of Reason or Modernism, defined by realism, individualism, objectivism and capitalism; starting at The Enlightenment
• Age of Post Modernism, defined by anti-realism, social subjectivism, collectivism

I will use his categorization to describe the history of the word in question.

Premodernism thought had little room for concepts of “identity.” Premodern thought was heavily influenced by religion, mysticism, introspection and feudal collectivism. Churches and religions dictated what people were to think about themselves so most notions of individual “identity” were suppressed. There were tribes, groups, alliances and occasionally countries but feudal collectivism determined expected behavior. The key transition figure here was Emanuel Kant, German philosopher, who used logic to support religious ideas. While he may have contributed to Modernism by using reason, his legacy would ultimately be seen in Post Modernism as his arguments would be used to undermine the ability of humans to understand the world.

John Locke

Modernism features the idea that people are sovereign individuals who are capable of sensing the world and making their own enlightened decisions. For this reason, the period beginning in the 1600s was called The Enlightenment. Enlightened reason allowed people to hold differing views that might be resolved by rational debate and recursive science. The key figures here were Rene Decartes, Francis Bacon and John Locke. Decartes championed the use of logic and reason in mathematics. Decartes is responsible for the Cartesian (x, y) coordinate system that you hated to learn about in school. But as a holdover from the Pre Modern period, even he held on to the idea that the brain communicated with an ethereal soul. We have been looking for the interface connection since then, but none has been found. Francis Bacon developed early ideas about the scientific method which ultimately resulted in engineering and modern medicine. John Locke championed individualism, political democracy, liberalism and capitalism. There was plenty of room here for thoughts about “identity.” Decartes said “I think therefore I am.”

Psychological science developed in the late 1800s, first relying on introspection but later rejecting it in favor of objective observation of behavior and trying to figure out how the brain worked through neuroscience. Meanwhile psychological pseudoscience took over the popular imagination.

Sigmund Freud

Psychological pseudoscience was at work during the 1800s. Freud’s Theory of Identity included mental functions of id, ego, and superego which were not directly observable and therefore was not provable as Karl Popper, a Modernist saw it. It’s not worth the print to describe these mental functions and the various psychodynamics. Psychodynamic theory was based on incidental impression and not scientific observation or experiment. It served to bring those with mental problems under the protection of modern medicine as it emerged during this period by replacing categorizations of such folks as being possessed by demons or immorality. But the price paid was that it pathologized and sexualized the problems of people who were having real problems — including transgender people. It did not constitute a scientific theory because it predicted all possible outcomes of behavior retrospectively. The theory was highly sexualized which made it sensational to the public and Freud had great influence on popular culture. He helped to start psychoanalysis as a treatment for certain mental problems by dredging up repressed memories of trauma. Note that the American Medical Association determined in 1972 that psychoanalysis is ineffective in curing transgender people. Freud popularized the word identity along with it some of the identity terms: personal identity and ego identity.

Erik Erikson in the 1950s, building on the Freudian idea of identity, coined the terms gender identity and gender identity development. Although he was more widely known for his term identity crisis. His pseudoscientific theories of identity indicated that development occurred in teenage years and was then fixed throughout life. But humans change and we are not at all the same as we were a few years ago, we hold onto some memories and procedural behavior traces but some disappear and new ones are formed.

And just in time for the DSM-III in 1980, Richard Green, a psychiatrist, coined the pathological term gender identity disorder which stigmatized transgender people until 2011. The DSM is the psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders which is used for classification and billing insurance. This pathological term was dropped in the DSM-5 revision and the news clippings said that this was an end to transgender pathologization. (The APA has not been consistent about whether to use Roman or Arabic numerals). But in another section of the DSM, the term gender dysphoria appeared. Because this term is in the DSM which is a manual of mental disorders, and is used as a substitute for gender identity disorder for billing and classification, transgender pathologization continues, just under another name.

Although this term is hopefully on its way out, given the trend in the ICD11 (International Classification of Diseases manual) which only includes a billing code for transgender transition. The ICD is actually the governing document and DSM codes are mapped to it by computers.

Transgender people, like other people, do have social issues which usually can best be addressed by counseling so that is a proper role of psychiatry and clinical psychology. If these providers want to pursue pseudoscience ideas for the mind, that is their business as long as it does not adversely affect their patients. As neuroscience develops, we may see actual isolation of functions such as they imagine but that is for the future.

Note that during the pseudoscience period, starting in the 20^th Century, Modernist neuroscientists and pharmacologists were revolutionizing psychiatric practice using actual science. It is now showing up in the DSM and ICD in the trend to “evidence based” practice. New and more sophisticated drugs and treatments are now available which psychiatrists can prescribe and direct. These scientific advances have emptied out the inhumane lunatic asylums and given people hope to lead their lives as they wish.

Post Modernism continued the pseudoscience through its handmaiden, sociology. Basically, postmodernists do not believe that humans can accurately sense reality and act rationality, but that is really a cover story for pursuing political power. If nothing is real, then such things as gender and any other behavior have no basis in biology. (Readers will recall that I have detailed the biological basis for genetic gender predisposition.) Post Modernists conceive of gender identity and other categories as being social constructed. They therefore can be whatever the proponents want them to be because they have no scientific basis. They can invent terms such as identity groups, sexual identity, gender identity, gender identity disorder, gender identity development because they have no basis in reality except in their own heads. Some use this approach to support collectivism and malicious egalitarianism.

So how did Post Modernism come about? Contributions came from several sources including Kant, Freud, and believers in psychodynamics. Kant contributed the idea that humans were incapable of accurate sensation and Freud contributed the idea of repression. This was used to explain why workers in capitalistic countries repressed their motives in wanting to overthrow their governments. The main reason why Post Modernism developed was because collectivist countries had failed morally and economically in the first half of the 20^th Century while capitalist countries improved their standards of living in all classes. So, the overthrow of capitalism did not occur. The moral failures of collectivism tried in Russia, China, Germany, Cambodia, Vietnam and other places was that it resulted in the killings of at least 100 million people by their own governments aside from the casualties of war that they incurred. This systematic killing began in most cases with minority groups. Today, government policies in Russia and China continue to be directed at making minorities disappear. In the collectivist countries during the 20^th Century, failures of central economic planning were common.

Herbert Marcuse

The upshot was that collectivist philosophers, decided that they needed to change their strategy and planned a struggle to destabilize the culture and reduce psychological repression in order to facilitate collectivism. These collectivist philosophers included Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida in France and Herbert Marcuse, Richard Rorty in the U.S. This philosophy has now have taken hold in some university campuses which are attempting to be politically correct, suppress open discussion and to use minority issues as leverage. But their ultimate goal is naked political power and they, like the collectivists of old upon gaining power, will first turn to actions against minorities. Transgender issues are seen by the Post Modernists as a means for cultural destabilization of the society, not a moral goal. Post Modernism leaks out of universities in the form of identity politics.

To sum up, the term identity was originated by pseudoscientists who used it to pathologized transgender people. It was then passed on to Post Modern collectivists whose ultimate goal is political power in order to destroy Modernism along with destroying individualism, democracy, science, a free economy, engineering and modern medicine. As in the 20^th Century, collectivist countries will be the first ones to sacrifice minority groups such as transgender people because we are individuals who are outlawed in Western culture.

So, what words can we use instead of gender identity. I use the term being transgender instead of transgender identity because it refers to ongoing behavior which can be observed. I use masculine or feminine gender behavior categories instead of having a feminine or masculine identity. I use sexual orientation instead of sexual identity which implies orienting behavior. And I use interest groups instead of identity groups. In general, to convert an “identity” word, use observable behavior terms.

Go ahead and use the word “identity” as you wish but remember that it has multiple contextual meanings, many of which are tainted in the area of mental health and politics. Everyone should be able to use the words that they want, it is the basis for free speech. Of course, one does bear responsibility to communicate precisely and accurately by defining ones terms. But those terms do not have to conform to authoritarian or Post-Modernist definitions. As we have seen in transgender science, terms are constantly changing, so definitions are crucial and “standardized terms” are fleeting.

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Tags: featured, Identity, Transgender

Category: Transgender History