We are story-telling creatures and often identity labels are shorthand
for a much longer story. Inevitably these highly truncated act of
speech can get away from us and are used to accuse us of political or
ideological “sin.” Sticking with what is for me at the heart of
“identity,” I’m just going to tell a micro-story instead of
giving you a bunch of politically loaded terms: I often am perceived
by humans as gender-non-conforming. I sometimes feel “genderqueer”
or “androgynous,” especially when around humans, because guess
what—a majority of humans appear sexually dimorphic. Non-human
animals (both domesticated and wild), the landscape, naturalist
studies, and relating to my ancestry have been a big part of my
experience of affirmation and belonging in my creature-ness,
human-ness, body, and gender,* which you can supplement with some
other word like “soul” if you want. I’m Greek-American and
socialist/collectivist thought and critique of hyper-individualism
resonates with me. How this relates to gender/sex is that I see those
things in ecological/relational terms, and not just in terms of
personal identity. In a fragmented, hyper-capitalist,
hyper-individualist society, when we have no village, we have no
collective body (ecology) to reflect us to ourselves, and this has
appeared to cause a lot of cultural trauma and wounding, especially
around gender. I don’t pretend to find the asnwer, because I don’t
believe that I alone, or that any one person, holds the answer. The
answer lies in between you and I, it lies in the discourse. I find
that I care about a lot of the same things as people who would purport
to other me based on my “identity,” therefore “identity” does
not seem currently very useful to me.
