Identifying: The Act of Saying "We"
The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn't there a difficulty of saying 'we'? You cannot speak for me. I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say 'I'; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.
- Adrienne Rich
One of the publishers that was recommended to me by people on an LGBTQIA web discussion group is a press that publishes books "written by and written about lesbians". My initial reaction was to assume they would not be interested in my book. I don't tend to think of myself as part of that identity.
Meanwhile, as I have sought to describe this whole gender invert thing, I've run into a lot of pushback from people saying, on the one hand, "Why don't you just say you're Allan and leave it at that? Why can't you accept yourself for who you are, why do you need to label yourself?", and on the other hand, "You are saying that any male who varies from the quaint rigid notions of how a man ought to be, any male who isn't the Marlboro man cowboy caricature, doesn't qualify as a man because he's a 'male girl' instead. Because those differences made you a 'male girl', or so you say. So you're the one who has the outdated inflexible notion of gender differences!"
What does it mean when someone says "I am a part of this plural group?" What does it mean for you to identify with a group and say that that category includes you?
Attributions: When a person says that they are a part of a group, it shifts some of their attributes, their characteristics as an individual, to being characteristics of the aggregate. We don't necessarily know which characteristics those are (until and unless the person goes on and says so). I can say I am a musician, that I am a singer in the choir, and that I sing baritone. (Those are three identities, plural groups I have just affiliated or identified with, in those three statements). As an individual, I can read music tolerably well, I can sing a low F# and a high B, I have freckles on my forearm, and I know the bass part in the Verdi Requiem. Which of those are true because I am Allan and which are true because I am a musician and which are because I am a baritone?
There's a sense in which those are the wrong questions: maybe it is as much true that I am Allan because I have freckles as it is true that I have freckles because I am Allan, and my ability to sing in the range between low F# and high B may be fully a characteristic of me being Allan even if it is also tied up with me being a baritone. But in asserting that my identity is, in part, plural, that I have an identity-component that I share with other people, I'm shifting the perception. The characteristics may not actually exist "because" of any component of identity but the implication of a shared identity is that I share some characteristics in common.
Relevance: When a person identifies as part of a plurality, the words being used tend to be phrased differently than if that person were to speak of a characteristic or set of characteristics that they, personally, have, even if the plurality is defined as the possession of that characteristic. I can say that I have freckles on my arm (mention of characteristic) and one could, in the mathematical sense, therefore categorize me as belonging to the Set of Freckled People. But if I express it as "I am one of the Enfreckled People", even jokingly, I'm conjuring up the notion of an aggregate group and inviting you to consider us as such. Notice that I just said "us".
Enfreckled People aren't a social "thing"; the possession or absence of freckles doesn't distinguish the experience of people in a particularly significant way. Lefhanded People aren't a strong social thing either, even given the shared experience of trying to cope with a world of right-handed scissors and pens attached to the wrong side of checkout-register credit-card signature screens and so on. So if I speak of the plight of the Enfreckled People or shout "Left On!" when another lefty complains about the righthanded-chauvinism of the desk design, people smile precisely because they know it isn't a prominent identity factor and they know I know it too.
When I do it for real, when I identify with a group in a manner so as to assert that our experience as a group is socially significant, I'm attributing relevance to the category, and in doing so I am making an inherently political statement. I'm drawing attention to that common experience and saying it matters.
Generality: When I say I am a baritone, it has significant in the setting of the choir; I am telling people the approximate range of notes in which I can sing, and in doing so I am putting more emphasis on what I have in common with other people who identify as baritones, and less emphasis on my specific singing range which may differ somewhat from that of other baritones.
When I say I am a gender invert, I am doing a similar thing: I am stating that there are things I have in common with other people who are also gender inverts, and I am emphasizing what we have in common and deemphasizing any individual differences that would still exist between gender inverts, and in doing so I am proclaiming it to be significant. By choosing to momentarily neglect my individuality in that way and make a generalization that emphasizes shared characteristics, I am again engaging in a political act. I'm saying that the resulting clustering of individual experiences into a group is socially relevant.
Specificity: At any given time, of all the collective plural groups I could bring up in identifying myself, I choose one to mention, and although any and all group identities works as a generalization (as I just said), emphasizing the commonality and erasing, to an extent, the individual variations (as I also just said), I am making a specific statement in my choice of which plural group to identify with. A baritone is a particular subtype of bass singer, which in turn is a type of chorister, and that is a variety of musician. There are things that all choral singers are likely to have in common; as I file in to the rehearsal room where there are orchestra people as well as singers, I may say "I'm in the choir" but in sorting out where to sit, so as to sit with others singing the same part, it may be more useful to say "bass", or even "baritone".
I am a gender variant person, a nonbinary person, a part of the LGBTQIA+ spectrum; I am genderqueer. More specifically, I am a gender invert, specifically one who is male bodied who is a femme or girl or womanly person.
Using "genderqueer" in a generic social context, where people are mostly cognizant of gay and lesbian people and of transgender people like Caitlin Jenner or Chaz Bono, is yet another political act. It's a political act of specificity. I have chosen to use a category that emphasizes the difference between me and Caitlin Jenner (or RuPaul, or Adrienne Rich for that matter) in order to draw attention to the specific situation and experience of genderqueer people.
Being Uppity: Using "gender invert" is also a political act. "Gender invert" is a term I myself have chosen; it's not (yet) in common use.
To say "we" in this fashion, to be the pioneer and become the first person to identify that plurality as well as identifying with it personally, is an especially aggressive and audacious political act.
There is always a first time, a first person, a first use. (In some cases there may have been several firsts, with each person who formulated the group identity being unaware of anyone else who had also done so along the same lines). This was once a culture where the phenomenon of males with a sexual interest in other males was understood only in terms of being oversexed to the point of being unpicky, understood only as a behavior, and perceived entirely as an immoral perversion. I don't know who first reformulated this as "gay man" and explained it as a different identity, a different sexual orientation rather than a behavior; I'm not sure anyone knows, and it may have been several people at several different times, but I do know, intuitively, that at some point there had to have been someone saying it who had never heard it put into words that way before.
The people who have given me pushback on the issue are also engaging in a political act. They are rejecting my formulation. They've often specifically said that they find me pretentious and arrogant. That makes sense. I'm virtually demanding that they create new mental head-space in how they think of people's gender and sexual orientation and stick in this new category, "gender invert". Aggressive, audacious, pretentious, arrogant... yes. (Stubborn, too).
Seeking Acceptance: In the communities where I use it the most, I am saying`to people who are already familiar with this kind of political act, the act of identifying, that here is a new identity I want to draw attention to. I'm expecting them to recognize the pattern and say "Aha, he's saying this is another one like being 'transgender' or 'bisexual', and that if we take him seriously we need to give serious consideration to the category he's defining. He's declaring this 'gender invert' identity to be a new social 'thing'".
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