Identity Is Toxic

“I am a liberal” or “I am a conservative”.

These are innocuous statements.

What about,

“I am a vaccine skeptic”? or “I am a vaccine supporter”?

Let’s wade into even more controversial and emotional waters: What about,

“I am a non-binary person”?

Okay, now I probably have your attention.

If you don’t like one of these, then you should have a problem with all of them, because all of them are essentially the same kind of construct. They are self-limiting, because they are a declaration of what you are, rather than how you currently think or feel.

They each represent a fixed mindset.

They represent a fixed mindset because they define identity rather than merely current beliefs.

By saying “I am a”, you are categorizing yourself into a group, like sorting people under six feet and people over six feet, or people with brown eyes and people with green eyes. These are largely immutable traits — barring extreme measures.

In fact, very few human traits are absolutely immutable: it is always a matter of degree. But some traits are much more malleable than others. And the most malleable of all should be our ideas: the things that we believe. To be otherwise is to be rigid and closed-minded.

What about “I am a Christian”, or “I am a Jew”? (or any other religion)

If one were to say “I am Christian”, that’s an adjective. Its descriptive. That still categorizes, but in a less rigid way than claiming to be something.

A religion is allegedly about beliefs, so why don’t we say, “I believe in Christianity’s teachings”, or “I believe in Judaism’s teachings”? Instead, we routinely apply an identity, saying “I am a”. We group ourselves into tribes. It separates and excludes: by saying “I am a” we are implicitly relegating others who do not make the same identity claim to an outside group. We are defining who is “in” and who is “out”.

Is it that different from paleolithic tribes, which were known to war with each other once human density increased enough to create competition for resources?

Tribalism probably emerged as an evolutionary mechanism. It substituted the tribe for the individual as the entity competing for survival. By belonging to a tribe, one’s chance of surviving increased, and tribes competed just as all evolutionary entities do. Tribalism is therefore built into our nature: there are surely genes that generate a desire for tribal affiliation.

There is a positive side to tribalism. After all, that is why it evolved. The positive side is that one receives support from the group — support in the form of protection, affinity, and shared values. But that is at the cost of separation from the rest of humanity.

Tribalism is a legacy of early human evolution, but today it is what drives the conflict in the Middle East, the war in Ukraine, competition between the US and China, and the division between US Republicans and Democrats.

According to Mike Murphy, a former Republican strategist who runs the nonprofit EV Politics Project,

“The Republican is like, ‘They’re trying to ban gas cars — I’m not going to buy a Biden-mobile,’”.

Tribal hatred easily escales to war, including civil war. Gad Saad, a marketing professor at Concordia University in Montreal, wrote,

“The Lebanese [civil] war taught me early about the ugliness of tribalism and religious dogma. It likely informed my subsequent disdain for identity politics, as I grew up in an ecosystem where the group to which you belonged mattered more than your individuality.”

Yet there is no way to distinguish anyone’s religion biologically. There is no such thing as being a certain religion because of birth. Viewing religion as inherited is illogical. Modern genetics has settled that question.

The same is true for other forms of ancestral identity. For example, we now know that genetic tests cannot determine if one is native American. Those who advocate for native American identity are concerned about that, because it threatens narratives about native American rights and legacy. But maybe separating ourselves this way was the problem in the first place, and that extends to the way that European settlers and native Americans fought with each other. It was that tribal behavior that created the distinction in the first place. It is that tribal behavior that made it necessary for native Americans to try to assert their rights, a struggle that continues today.

What about other forms of identity? Such as ethnic origin?

If one says, “I am an Austrian American”, what does that mean?

My mother was from Austria. But genetically, we have historical roots in Turkey, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere. Although, as we all know, we all date originally from Africa, so why do we select particular recent regions to identify with?

A line of my family dates back centuries: the Thurheims, an aristocratic family that owned a little castle in Austria. There are four books written about the family and there is a long history. Here is a photo of the castle:

Today the castle is owned by another family. In the photo below, the woman on the left is the owner. She lives there.

But if I were to “identify” as a Thurheim, I could point to the books and say, “That was our house. The history proves it. You have to leave.”

Would that make any sense? Would that be fair?

Identifying as a Thurheim makes no sense. My identity is me. Period. I am not anything else. Any affiliation that I claim is chosen, not innate. That house is not my house: I have never even seen it. I did not grow up in it. I did not buy it. I have no place in it. And it does not matter what the old books about the Thurheims say, because that was then, and this is now. Even claiming that “God” wrote the books is unfair, because the family living in the house today does not believe in those books: it would be imposing my values on them. (That’s not even considering the questionability of a belief today that a deity wrote human books.)

It’s like a paleolithic cave that was abandoned and then assumed by others. Who came before is irrelevant. They cannot claim identity or ownership for the cave.

Ideas, affiliations, beliefs — these are all malleable. That’s what makes us intelligent. If we fix our thoughts and ideas in place, then we are no better than our tribal paleolithic ancestors.

The same is true for gender identities and any kind of identity. I can say, “I have biological traits that characterize me as male”, but that says nothing about what is in my head. And applying a gender label to how I feel is ridiculous: why would I put a label on that? Why would I “identify” as being any category? What I feel is unique to me: it defies labels. My gender is my biology, period. I refuse to categorize how I think or feel.

I don’t “identify” as being male. I am a male in terms of my reproductive biology. Labeling how I feel or think is unnecessary and is actually pretty useless, because I happen to defy a lot of male gender norms: for example, I have no interest in team sports and I don’t like competition. But choosing a gender identity seems pointless to me. I am very comfortable just being me. I don’t need to broadcast a label to people.

These modern gender labels are actually very regressive, because they categorize us unnecessarily, as if to say that if you feel a certain way, then you must belong to a certain category that carries expectations with it.

For gender, we need to move beyond expectations about behavior. Men and women should be allowed to pursue anything, as long as their biology permits it. There should be no unnecessary gender boxes or expectations with regard to people’s behavior or life choices.

Gender should only be about biology: one’s sex. Biologically, sex is complicated. There is a lot of variation. But that’s sex — reproductive-related sex. And yes, there are correlations between sexual traits and other traits, including psychological traits, but those are merely correlations and they are very weak. Defining gender based on weak correlations is illogical.

People who choose to identify as a sex or gender other than their biological sex feel that their chosen gender better matches how they feel. But a selection of gender also determines what mating signals one sends: one’s appearance and behaviors. If one is biologically female but chooses to identify as a male, and dresses as a male and believes that they “act as a male” (whatever that means), then they are portraying themselves as sexually male. But that does not make them male: it merely means that they are a biological female who chooses to send mating signals that are similar to the signals that most biological males send. That’s the reality.

And that’s okay. I know someone who I watched grow up and she portrays herself as a male, and is very happy and I love her. I am only saying that we should be real and authentic about things, and we should allow people the freedom to make their own choices and not force-fit people into behavioral category boxes like “male” and “female”. I personally would not make a gender choice, even if hypothetically I felt that I am much more like a typical woman than like a typical man, because I don’t subscribe to what is “typical” and what is not. I don’t care. I am me, and that’s fine. My biology can be categorized, but I don’t want to categorize what’s in my head.

What is in our heads should be treated as unique and not needing a binary categorization. We don’t need these gender labels that are popular today. We don’t even need “non-binary” — one’s behavior and choices should not need permission.

Gender labels actually set us back, because they are a concession to old fashioned gender expectations. They are not liberating — they are confining.

Gender labels also cause a lot of unnecessary controversy and angst for people who are traditional in their values, and that causes unnecessary political division. It is one thing for a man in a traditional community to say “I don’t like team sports”. It is another for him to say, “I identify as a woman”. The former would pass, the latter would not. But the latter is unnecessary: it generates controversy when there need not be any.

There is a special case here: some people feel anxiety about their gender. They have gender dysphoria. That is a disorder. It is rare: in the range of one in 20,000 people. But it is very real, and is a serious condition. Those people need our understanding, and right now the only known treatment to alleviate the anxiety is to allow them to “transition” (although some research indicates that this treatment is ineffective). But that is not the same thing as today’s gender fluidity, where one chooses a gender identity merely because one feels affiliation with that gender. That’s using the identity approach to declare a binary label, which is completely unnecessary and merely creates controversy.

In a recent TED Radio Hour interview, Adam Grant said it aptly:

“Thinking like a scientist is about not letting your ideas become your identity.”

Ideas, beliefs, and feelings should be based on reason, logic, and preferences, not tribe, and we should not put our ideas, beliefs, and feelings into boxes. We need to move beyond that.

Let’s stop claiming identities. Let’s stop saying “I am a”. Let’s be open and inclusive and stop differentiating ourselves from others in blunt binary ways. We’re all just human.