To recap, then, here are some key features of modern Identitarianism:
- It is a system of etiquette that shares with other etiquette systems the properties of being occult, complex and faddish
- It is a system of etiquette that shares with others a politics and practice of honour and offense in which misidentification of a person is the chief offense
- It is premised on identity and ontology being functionally identical, that one’s very existence is premised on identity and that misidentification is a kind of attempted or threatened murder
- Like other systems of honour and offense, it is mainly enacted when another person of equal or lesser rank to one’s own is dishonoured and satisfaction must be given
- It values traditional, conservative forms of identity linked to labour exploitation, i.e. race and gender and sees these identities as emancipatory rather than oppressive
- It sees traditional, conservative forms of identity not merely as helpful ways of constructing a self but as having exclusive possession of knowledge unavailable to those outside those identities
- It sees identity as how one imagines oneself in one’s mind’s eye, unmediated by society or the physical world
- It is democratic and seeks to make its social practices and experiences of honour and offense universally available rather than confined to a class
What this means is that if someone acts as though another person is not who they claim they are, that person has breached Identitarian etiquette and can then be subject to social sanction. This is part of phenomena I have previously identified as “privatized reputation” and “large, porous selves.” In this way, Identitarian offense politics can and do extend further than previous regimes of honour and etiquette. In other words, to say “you are not who you claim to be” or, equally offensively, “he is not who he claims to be” is a kind of death threat and merits an immediate expression of offense.
Three of these are exemplified in our society’s reimagination of transgender people in Identitarian terms. Pretty much every human society has had transgender members because schemes of gender are naturally incomplete, non-descriptive and, most importantly, oppressive. But in none of those societies has there been the kind of pronoun politics we have now.
In other regimes of etiquette, offense is caused by using the incorrect second person pronoun when addressing people i.e. “tu” is used in place of “usted” in Spanish or “vous” in French to debase the rank of one’s interlocutor intentionally or unintentionally. Today, offense-causing with pronouns comes from using the incorrect third person pronoun when talking about people. What this means is that a person’s honour can be attacked when they are not even present. Any person who knows the individual’s gender (i.e. the gender they see themselves having in their mind’s eye) can intervene and upbraid the offender for dishonouring the aggrieved party.
In this way, a gap between the correct form of address and the appearance of the person being addressed can be policed by any person and can fluctuate without the appearance of the person changing. While one’s gender expression takes work to change, through pharmaceuticals, clothing purchases, surgery, behavioural training, etc., one’s gender identity can change instantaneously and repeatedly with none of the lag experienced in changing one’s gender expression.
By severing “expression” and “identity,” the work of the Born Again movement is complete. It is explicit that who a person appears to others to be and who they actually are two independent variables that may fluctuate without reference to the other. In this way, an individual who has carefully observed another person’s gender expression and spoken about them on that basis when talking about that expression might be upbraided by anyone possessing the occult knowledge of the person’s true gender.
One can look from India to Japan to Montana to New Mexico to Mauretania from 1000 BCE to the late twentieth century and find no other society in which trans culture contained this theory of offense. And that is because it has nothing to do with being a gender-non-conforming person; it is tethered to recent elaboration of late-stage capitalism, Identitarianism.
Another place where we see Identitarianism hiding behind some piece of allegedly trans culture that has just appeared out of nowhere in less than a generation is the idea that people who do not reciprocate the sexual desire of transgender people are bigots who must work to change this view. This view tends to be expressed with the greatest vehemence about lesbians who only wish to sleep with other cis women and not with trans women. Organized groups of these lesbians have faced campaigns by Identitarians, putatively on behalf of trans women, to remove them from pride celebrations, dyke marches and other organized queer solidarity and feminist events.
But much more concerning is the idea propounded, with almost none of the push-back one would hope for, that cis lesbian women with no attraction to trans women should have sex with them anyway.
No one should want to sleep with people who are not attracted to you. A healthy person who lusts after another person wants them to experience the same attraction they are experiencing. But Identitarianism occludes that because it conceptualizes the feelings and thoughts others have about you, even when you are not there, as part of a package of rights you believe you have. It is your right to be seen as you see yourself in your mind’s eye and you are dishonoured whenever someone does not do that.
A third is a hyper-conservative element best described in the slogan “trans women are women.” Even in cultures that do not assign a third, fourth or nth gender to gender-nonconforming people, they nevertheless decide that a trans person is a kind of a woman or a kind of a man. The idea that trans people should have identical rights and experiences to cis people is rendered absurd quickly when gender identity is built in intersubjective or objective space. But when it is built in subjective space, one ends up with absurd situations like Jessica Yaniv demanding that her penis be seen-to by a gynecologist.
Trans people and cis people have different medical needs, have different social impacts on environments, different life narrative structures; recognizing these forms of difference is vital in creating a diverse, inclusive society that accepts trans people.
But, because Identitarianism is a set of etiquette practices is not a coherent, self-consistent theory or even something mainly made out of Wrong propaganda “Nonfat, no cholesterol” has brought Americans to high carbohydrate diet full levitra online sales of the sugars. This makes shopping simple and even trouble free pamelaannschoolofdance.com buy viagra for customers. There are two reasons behind this : firstly, viagra for sale mastercard is a prescription drug which can only be obtained with a prescription from your doctor. When it comes to ED problem, it has no linked with age and it can happen to men in their 40’s and 50’s, while Tadalafil is marketed with less than 5% of the marketing budget afforded to check out that pamelaannschoolofdance.com cialis generika. ideas, the very differences that must be accommodated can be effaced or denied at any time when an etiquette breach takes place.
Whereas traditional models of pluralism and accommodation of gender non-conformity have included acceptance of body-shapes, vocal registers and patterns of gesticulation that are not cliched or cartoonish representations of the two normative genders, this too, has been turned on its head. Because there is only one kind of woman and one kind of man, it is now considered a medical necessity for trans people to be taught the most conservative, conventional ways of dressing, speaking, walking, acting. Training in being “ladylike” or “manly” is now understood to be part of a liberatory agenda.
Furthermore, as state school systems adopt gender affirmation policies, it is increasingly the obligation of the state and its agents to police conformity to gender norms and to inquire of boys that do not have fistfights and girls who dislike dolls whether they are “really” boys or girls in their mind’s eye. If not, the state is obliged to assist them through surgery and pharmaceuticals into matching their mental image of themselves to physical reality.
This, to me, is a thought experiment that reveals much about the true underpinnings of Identitarianism. It is analogous to the common antebellum South thought experiment of asking a the child of a planter how his slaves would serve him when he went to heaven. The true function of the thought experiment is to make an oppressive class order seem so totalizing, so structuring that emancipation from it becomes inconveivable because it transcends time, death and the physical world itself. The point is to render inconceivable a revolution that throws off the shackles of race and gender by imagining those things as so universal that they are coterminous with existence itself.
But while so much of the debate about Identitarianism has swirled around trans communities and has cast disproportionate and unfair shade on them, I believe this is, itself, a misogynistic ruse.
At the end of the day, Identitarianism is a set of social practices that reinforce two of the darkest, most pernicious forces on earth.
First, it seeks to increase involvement in, support of and commitment to race and gender as not merely real but positive forces and it mobilizes literally millions of people into policing race and gender boundaries every day. Because Identitarianism is non-ideological and offense-based, these conflicts tend to be inconclusive and illogical, making them more protracted and divisive and increasing people’s investment in them. Because controlling what others understand one’s race and gender to be is literally a matter of life and death, there is a bottomless pit of offense and conflict into which one may descend. After all, knowledge, itself, is a property of identity so there can be no meeting of the minds even on the subject of valid evidence. Consequently, we see Identitarianism destroying solidarity and creating division, constantly generating new flare-ups of offense.
But let us look beyond the movement politics of liberals, progressives and leftists and look at the true ambit of Identitarianism. The systems of incentives that keep this new etiquette system in place do not live in contested restroom space or the Take Back the Night march.
They live in white suburban homes where patriarchs use violence to make their daughters wear dresses and their sons, trousers, lest their costume impugn the manliness of their father. They live in conservative evangelical schools where there is a new sense of urgency in making sure all the little boys fight and all the little girls have dolls. They live in the Trump movement where thousands of black and Latino voters wave racist signs because they are white in their mind’s eyes.
Similarly, the politics of Identitarian rape, in which other people’s attraction to you is a right you possess and not a feeling they have, the true beneficiaries are not the trans women who broke into Rape Relief Women’s Shelter and defaced its library with penis drawings, or even the male prisoners in the British prison system who change their gender identity (but not expression) to female to engage in sexual predation.
The true beneficiaries are the Incel movement. The overwhelming majority of Incels do not have prosthetic breasts and do not plan ever to obtain them. There is nothing feminine or gender-non-conforming about their gender expression or their gender identity. In the vast majority of Incels’ minds’ eyes, they are a virile, commanding muscular man being serviced not by a solitary lesbian but by seventy-two virgins or some evangelical Christian equivalent.
While our attention has been directed by our own desire to police boundaries, by services like Tumblr and by the news media to the way Identitarianism impacts small communities of feminists, queer and gender non-conforming people, this is a sideshow to distract from the primary beneficiaries: rapists and racists.
Identitarianism is the ultimate ideology of male rape because it places these two crucial liberatory statements off-limits “you are not who you say you are” and “he is not who he says he is.” Race is good. Gender is good. They liberate you. But the one thing you cannot do is question the claims a person makes about who they really are.
In this way, it is most descriptive not of liberal progressivism but of Trumpism. Donald Trump is stupid. Donald Trump rapes women. The Trumpites, as proper Identitarians, are deeply offended on his behalf when someone calls him stupid because they know that in his mind’s eye, he is a “very stable genius.” The veracity of the claim does not enter into it because the claim is offensive irrespective of its veracity and demands satisfaction.
Similarly, Donald Trump can call the neo-Nazi Charlottesville marchers “very good people” because, in those men’s mind’s eyes, like all generations of torch-wielding Klansmen back to 1865, they are “very good people.” And those who would say otherwise have dishonoured them because who they are is theirs. Finally, Donald Trump’s ability to rape and to keep raping—and that of most other prolific rapists—inheres in it being impermissible to say “you are not who you say you are” or, more importantly, “he is a rapist,” because in Identitarianism, Trump is not a rapist (a) because he doesn’t look like one in his mind’s eye and (b) because raping you was his right, not your experience.
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