Now, this is a third rail in society, so let me place my metrical feet carefully here.

I think everyone has a right to experiment and poke and prod themselves and change their genders and do whatever they want to their bodies. Every person is free to experiment in order to learn what is and isn’t possible. It’s nobody else’s business.

But the inquiry into Identity is my business, since I’m a human being in the stanchions of various constricting identities like everyone else. By “identity” I’m not referring to the true nature or substance of you and I. That true nature exists beyond the reach of both conceptual certainty or social constructs, and therefore also beyond the reach of negotiation. I am not a man because I identity with manliness in some culturally defined image, but simply because it’s a description of the body — of its actual forms and functions. Self-identification has nothing to do with the body’s actual gender. Gender identity is the social construct; the body’s actual gender is not a social construct.

Identification is a constructed imagination of a body (and the imagination of a “Self” viewing the body as if from above), which has been given cultural permission to supersede the importance of the actual body. Everywhere in this culture, the Self and its waking dreams have been given permission to supersede the reality of earthly life (biology and planet). It’s a general permission slip to discount reality in favor of a pretense of soul.

And this Self is not a soul but only the body’s imaginations of itself as if from the outside. It is a secular conception of soul, minus the traditional soul’s connection to a nested hierarchy. The soul was not conceived as the atomic essence of a separate self, but as an idiosyncratic expression of a universal being that can’t be identified in any positive sense, except through metaphor and myth. This humbling sense of a soul is lost when it’s converted into a separate Self, who doesn’t have to answer to anything, including the reality of its own biology.

This capacity to imagine ourselves outside our bodies is less real than the body, because imagination is only a derivation of the body and is in no position to tell the body who or what it is. This isn’t a moral issue. people are free to experiment as they wish. And I think the people who experiment in such ways feel genuinely compelled to are courageous people. But I can’t help wondering if it’s a mistake, if we’re not, somehow disparaging the body and placing a false self in charge.

The imagination of a Self (or conceptual identity) who is distinct enough from the body to alter its biology seems like an overreach to me. It’s a reversal of a nested hierarchy. It’s a playful imagination pretending to be in charge of its own material source. Thoughts (and the feelings that derive from thoughts) are not reality itself, just as dreams are not reality itself. So, the alteration of gender to conform to a socially-constructed dream of oneself (socially constructed even if it’s a rebellion from other social constructs) seems to place the cart before the horse.

Is an altered gender a soul being freed from a socially constricted definition (as if biology had no reality)? Or, is a far more real biology being told what to be by its own derivative, socially-prejudiced thought of who it “should be”? I can’t help wondering if gender identity is negotiable, but biological gender is not.

Even if it’s not my business to intrude on another’s manner of handling this confusion, I am free to wonder about all this. Because identity makes everyone a little crazy, as far as I can see.

And I’d say that a too-strong conviction of identity is the root of all war. And there are obsessions that develop, which can even lead to a psychosis where people insist on removing their own healthy arms and legs, because it doesn’t conform to an obsessive picture they hold of themselves. So even the most intense feeling of conviction isn’t proof of a necessity.

And there’s a lot of conflict in our unsettled relationship between mind and body. To me, it feels like a violence or hatred of myself, whenever I force this body to conform to an image or story of who I am; rather than allowing the disjointed image, story and body to accept their unique and contradictory realities and reunite as they are in genuine self-acceptance.

I think human fluidity in its creative forms of “identity” is normal and irrepressible. Hence, I claim we are like octopi or squid.

As I said in the main essay, the sense of Self is very convincing, but it’s not true individuality. It is a thought about ourselves raised to believe it is greater than its bodily source. The “I” is merely a rehearsal of how others should see me. It’s chained to others’ opinions. So, this “I” is always a social construct, and is not “who we really are.” We always exceed our own expectations if given half a chance.

But in trying to pin down our identities, all we end up doing is shifting from one combination of socially imposed definitions to another, and then calling that shift from the old prison to the new prison, freedom. I don’t see those shifts as fluidity, but as efforts to cage ourselves for the sake of a false security and fake, conditional love.

Maybe we’re all simply afraid of the loneliness of being truly unique.

If this culture loved its children, it wouldn’t make a problem out of natural human creativity and autonomy. Indigenous cultures have no problem with any of this — they don’t tell others how to live. But our supposedly advanced society prefers human beings made in the images of machines, forced to conform to the rigid 1’s and 0’s of an autocratic morality, with simple, categorical, machine-readable identities. We don’t trust our children to unfold as they will. The society wants consistent shapes that can serve as cogs in the inorganic machine. We are trained to serve the machine, not vice versa.

We don’t trust the unique human form we already are. But the honest human being is beautiful, rebellious and good, no matter how disjointed and out of place this unloving society makes us feel.

Now is the time for this powerful being to overthrow the machine.

Love to you.