You can acknowledge your preferences without making them your identity, though. E.g. you can admit to yourself that you are attracted to a variety of genders without thinking of yourself as being queer.
No, I can’t. Thinking I could and trying to caused me a lot of pain. I am queer. It’s as much an immutable facet of who and what I am as my neurodivergence, or my right-handedness. It shapes me beyond preference in similar ways to those. Why shouldn’t it? If it makes my life better to recognize who I am, why discourage that? Is it harming you or anyone?
> If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.
I can respect that "all other things being equal" does not hold here. There are always tradeoffs. But there are real benefits to not identifying with things (as the essay discusses).
I think what makes me really uncomfortable about this whole discussion, the article and the interaction in the comments, is it’s being discussed like my identity is some dispassionate academic subject, rather than my living experience that isn’t up for debate.
I’m not asking you to respect whether something in some article addresses my identity. I’m telling you I know what it is.
It’s not a balance of tradeoffs. It’s not available for scrutiny by an essay by Paul, or comments from you or anyone.
My contention with the article was that giving myself permission to let my identity expand to include things I hadn’t helped me begin to reckon with the pain of keeping my identity minimal, denying really important things about myself and hurting in the process.
The majority of the responses I’ve gotten have suggested that I should not let those be a part of my identity or have minimized their importance.
I cannot understand why. Why is it in your interest or anyone’s to tell me whether being queer, or non-binary, or autistic should not factor into who I am? Why do you or anyone get to decide whether any of those things should be important parts of me?
Why is it anyone’s business but my own? The only “conflict” here has been people scrutinizing the validity of my identity as I express it.
Because a society where we can have less partisan opinions and more fruitful discussions is a better one.
But I'm not attacking you, and I don't think most of the other commenters are, either. You expressed a disagreement with its thesis and explained how identity has been useful to you. I just pointed out that perhaps there is a way to achieve the same goals without expanding your identity. I was trying to have a discussion about the essay. But it appears I misunderstood, and you did not actually wish to engage in a discussion, so I will stop here :)
I was absolutely engaging in a discussion. I just kept being told that my identity doesn’t count in some way. It’s not a discussion if I have to concede the points of the article to engage.
> Because a society where we can have less partisan opinions and more fruitful discussions is a better one.
Okay. What is partisan about me being queer or non-binary or autistic, other than those are immutable facets of me that either people hate or callously disregard?
We'd much rather live in a world where gender/sexual/health identities are as significant as being left/right handed. Can't jump to that stage without first going through what we are now, which is recognising those identities exist as part of who we are. Other commenters like myself have the pleasure of being able to talk about the ideal future scenario, you've got the problem of dealing with the present.
Right now having a group with commonality and a sense of belonging is very important and a huge improvement on where we were before leaving people isolated and alone. But don't lose sight of the end goal, which is for those problems that having a group identity protects against not existing at all. Those two things aren't in conflict, other comments here really are trying to be helpful, but in a theoretical physics sort of way that isn't going to help anyone directly in the next decade and ignores some practical hurdles we need to get over first.
The article or discussion in comments isn't about you. It is about human experience. The given advice is in good faith, as far as I can read into it. It is up to you to decide its worth. I don't think _your_ identity is under scrutiny.
The core of advice is to keep the identity _small_. That way I can pick my battles. The more labels I put on myself the more I will alienate other people. Each of those labels also means I'm not honest with myself. Label is just a single word for describing complex world views, preferences and emotions. If I attach this label to my personality, then over time I will also change myself to better fit it. It can also be source of frustration when I don't meet expectations that are set by any given label. For example, before I considered myself a bookworm and it was painful to discard this label from my identity as I found less and less time for reading.
Labels are still useful. They provide decent defaults for social interactions, and a sense of belonging. Birds of a feather flock together. It is too many labels that can be problematic, in a sense of crippling social interactions and turning them into ego duels. Again, this is just how my experience aligns with the article, and not at all scrutinizing _your_ identity.
> you can admit to yourself that you are attracted to a variety of genders without thinking of yourself as being queer.
Sure, I can think of myself as bisexual instead, which I do. (tongue in cheek)
I can't speak for anyone else, but for me, bisexuality can't not be part of my identity. Like @eyelidlessness, it took a long time to come to the conclusion. It affects how others see me, how they treat me, if they'll date me, etc. It caused heartbreak, depression, and so on. These are all experiences that set me apart from most other people, whether I want them to or not. If that's not identity, I don't know what is. As one ages and settles down, these things can become less central to your identity, but they're still there and important. Stoicism is one thing, but dismissing the difficulties experienced when going against the grain in any area of life is wishful thinking.
I think Paul Graham could have gone one step further in his analysis. Identity is the combination of labels, community and emotion. Labels are very valuable tools as shortcuts in discussions. They can also lead to dissonance, when definitions don't align or context is missing.
The community aspect, especially in rainbow or mental health issues (not an exhaustive list), can be critical to well-being and survival. Could you find the same support network somewhere else? Yes, and plenty of people do, but that doesn't discount the value of the Pride movement or the Trevor project, for instance. The downside of community is it can evoke tribalistic tendencies.
What Graham seems to take issue with most is the emotional component of one's identity. What's relevant here is not whether you have emotions about your identity, but whether you can set them aside long enough to have a dispassionate discussion. It does require that participants have a healthy emotional baseline, are mature enough not to take everything personally and retain an open mind.
I feel it's also important to point out that there is a difference between having an identity and being an identitarian. You can be bisexual without being an activist. You can be an activist without going full woke and thinking of every interaction as power balances and oppression dynamics.
We can choose whether it becomes a central part of our lives, whether we need to surround ourselves with only like-minded people or whether we enter into discussions looking to be offended, be right or exchange ideas. In that sense, it's no different from having a political opinion, a profession, musical tastes, a hobby or anything else.
No, it's a very real difference. Do I think this is an important part of who I am, or a random happenstance? If I were attracted to different people, would that make me a different person, in an important way?
Realising/deciding that it wasn't actually important to me what sexuality people perceived me as eliminated a lot of stress and conflict, personally.
This term is totally nebulous. What it means to be the "same person but with different features" or a "different person" is just pure meaningless semantics.
Meaning is what we make it. If anything is meaningful then one must start with one's own experiences (and if they only mean something to oneself, well, that's fine too).
People recommend practices that worked for them. If other people have actually tried (rather than theorising) and found this didn't work for them then of course I'd be interested in hearing about that as well.
This specific “practice” was expressed in response to someone (me) who expressed having tried it, and found it unhelpful and hurtful. It’s not like hiding one’s queerness is a new revelation, it’s commonly associated with being closeted (often out of fear and/or self repression) and with abuse (conversion therapy).
I can’t speak for you and wouldn’t dare. I can only say that when I said verbatim these exact words what I was describing was “passing”. And in similar terms with neurodivergence, “masking”. I wasn’t accepting myself, I was accepting that I had a certain access and aptitude to be someone else for some social purposes. And even then, not really. Just kinda sorta.
