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 make mistakes in order to learn what is not 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 image (social constructs) and therefore also beyond the reach of negotiation. I am a man, not 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. That is, an identity is negotiable, because it is imaginary. But the actual gender is not negotiable.

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.

Read More »