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By Rebecca, September 16, 2010 1:49 pm

Women Born Transsexual had a post a few weeks ago titled A Matter of Semantics: The Difference Between “Identifying as” and “Identifying with.” The post was prompted by a question seen on Facebook asking if readers identified as male, female, or transgender.

The post is interesting to me for a few reasons. First, Suzan begins by saying…

I’m an old fashioned lefty.  I’m not something because I identify as that thing.  Claiming to identify as without being seems to me to be an odd construct that doesn’t fall much in line with my existentialist line of thinking.

I am not a woman because I identify as a woman. I am a woman even though I was assigned male at birth because of having been born with something that the best term for still seems to be “transsexualism”.  I had sex reassignment surgery that made me female.

It’s an interesting question, to be sure. Perhaps the interesting question, when it comes to identity politics: when does someone become part of a certain group? (Race, religion, gender, ethnicity, whatever.) Is it a declarative process? “I identify as X, therefor I am X.” Or is it a tautological of identity? “I am X because I am X.”

Continue reading 'Identity and Perspective'»

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By Rebecca, May 25, 2010 9:21 pm

Hi all! This guest post is from Violet, a regular commenter at The Thang Blog and all-around awesome gal. Enjoy!

Hi. I’m Violet. Rebecca has been kind enough to let me have some of her blog space for a guest post, and let me dip my toe carefully into the world of writing for a wider internet audience. Identity-wise, I am a twenty-something white currently-abled trans-female-spectrum genderqueer and sexuality-queer tomboy geek engineer. Except to the extent I’m not. But this post is about identity labels, so bear with me. Rebecca has previously posted about identity labels as keywords here, which I think is awesome, and I wanted to add another different (and geeky) way of looking at them to the discussion. This post is adapted from something I wrote more personally last year.

By “identity labels”, what I mean are nouns and adjectives that you use to describe people — “woman”, “man”, “goth”, “punk”, “masculine”, “feminine”, “trans”, “queer”. These things are useful for communication. Labels can function as a shorthand to tell people about what your life is like. They allow people with attributes in common to find each other and compare notes. I use them a lot.

The problem is that they’re wrong. Or, rather, not quite right. Any time you have an identity, it comes with a pile of stereotyped behaviors that any given claimant of the identity might or might not share, and it tends to reduce the perception of the claimant down to those stereotypes. Oops. (Rebecca, in her keyword post, also got into the possible confining nature of labels imposed by others.)

Now for the geeking out. Don’t worry — if you don’t speak math, I’ll give an example in pictures below.

I often view labels as vectors in some huge or infinite-dimensional vector space. Given a set of labels — say, {male, female} or {straight, queer} or {gay, lesbian, bi, trans, queer, questioning, ally} or whatever — finding out how you identify is a process akin to estimating the projection of your personal self-vector onto the subspace covered by the basis of labels in the set. Of course, that basis is never orthonormal; that would be too clean. It’s not orthogonal or normal at all. It’s just a mess of huge-dimensional vectors that you have to try to match yourself up against, throwing away all those components of yourself that aren’t in directions available to you in that basis. Worse, the self-vector is a function of time. The way you project on to a certain set of labels changes over the course of your life, sometimes even non-continuously. Even the identity labels change over time. Does being a goth mean the same thing now as it did fifteen years ago?

For an example of how my thinking about labels works, people sometimes ask me “are you male or female?” What they mean is usually something like this:

Continue reading 'Vector Identity Theory'»

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By Rebecca, April 24, 2010 2:13 pm

What is the difference between a label and a keyword?

Recently, I spoke with some other trans women about the pros and cons of labels. I was saying that labels can be a very powerful force for personal identification: by labeling myself, and choosing what labels to apply and how, I can forge my own identity out of its many disparate parts. I choose the labels ‘woman,’ ‘trans,’ ‘Chicagoan,’ ‘Jewish,’ ‘geek,’ and so on, and I get to decide what those labels mean for me.

Another woman in the group countered, “But what about when someone else places a label on you?” She said part of her problem identifying as ‘trans’ is all of the negative baggage associated with the word. Her feelings of discomfort were exacerbated by a generational gap: I was probably half her age, and the labels ‘trans’ and ‘queer’ meant very different things to her than they do for me.

Our different ideas of the emotional weight of those labels got me thinking about the semantics of the word label, and what other words might better describe how we create our identities.

Continue reading 'The Labels and Keywords of our Identities'»