Selfie Schtick

Warning: this is another long read – all of 8 minutes of your life.

 I’ve been seeing a lot of tweets in which people describe the body as a shell  inhabited by a gender identity that may be different from the sex of the shell the person is born in. 

Some people even refer to their body as a meat sack or a flesh suit, which is driven or piloted by this disembodied identity - the gender element of which is deemed to be as, if not more, legally and socially important than the sexed body. 

To me, this is a form of extreme alienation and essentially no different from the belief in an eternal (superior) soul that will survive the death of the (inferior) body – the harming of which may be seen or even required as proof of belief in, and submission to, an ideology.

Phallocratic, and especially monotheist religion privileges some humans above other humans, and all humans above all other animals to justify exploiting them and, by so doing, it gets in the way of understanding ourselves as animals.  

In zoological terms we are bi-pedal, big brained, omnivorous hominids that create complex (and often highly destructive to other species) living arrangements. We are sexually dimorphic but moderately so. We have relatively weak instinctual drives. We learn most of what it means to be human, including much of what it means to be a female or a male human.

In subsistence conditions – ie for the overwhelming bulk of our existence as a discrete species – female reproductive capacity has been critically important to group and species survival. (1)  We produce mainly single offspring that are born helpless and are slow to mature, a biological fact that was a critically important foundation of our ineluctably social nature. High sociability combined with high adaptability was our best survival strategy. 

In societies which atomise us and alienate us from our essentially animal and highly social natures, the sense of an inner, eternal spirit or soul, always was an illusion – created initially by, and as a salve to powerful egos that could not countenance the finality of death. But it was, and still is, also a compensatory promise to the oppressed and exploited of something better after a lifetime of misery – a promise always accompanied by the threat of something far worse if they don't behave as required in the here and now.

The notion that this sense of self or identity is separate from, and superior to the body has been called into question by the very science that some people use to try to prove that the metaphor - a woman born in a man’s body (or vice versa) – is literally true. 

The fact is we are our body. The human mind is an extraordinary phenomenon but, unless you believe in some sort of supernatural force that infuses each new human with a disembodied essence at conception or some point in the development into a discrete person, the human mind has to be seen as a product of the interaction between the wonderfully complex and, as yet not fully understood, bio-chemical processes of the body and the wider cultural and natural worlds it inhabits. 

We learn what it means to be human and what it means to be female and male humans – and we do not learn this in either a biological or a social vacuum. 

The distinction between biological sex and social gender emerged with Simone De Beauvoir in the 1940s, was elaborated in the hugely influential work of psychologist and sexologist John Money that began in the 50s, and was picked up by other sex theorists like Alex Comfort in the “swinging 60s”. The idea of socially constructed, imposed and internalised gender roles as key elements in the oppression of women, formed a central strand of feminist theory and praxis in the 1960s-80s.

Trans theorists and activists have built on bits and pieces from all of this and from queer theory to construct the argument that persons are born with either a fully developed sense of gender identity that is partially or fully congruent or incongruent with their biological sex, or with an innate predisposition to develop a partially or fully congruent or incongruent identity at some point in their life; and that this is a naturally occurring phenomenon of human existence.

In support of the claim for the universality of this phenomenon, all manner of existing and reconstructed cultural traditions are harnessed to the identity plough that will turn over the soil of patriarchy and allow new forms of individual expression to flourish and shade out capitalism and by so doing, rid the world of all that is oppressive. A  'yeah right' moment if there ever was one.

Money based his original ideas on the existence of an irreducible, binary sex difference and a range of sex-derivative differences- gender – largely from observations of what are now called Intersex conditions or disorders of sex differentiation (DSD).

Some people build on this with the assertions that: 

• there is a spectrum of biological sex (intersex conditions);
• gender identity is innate and fluid, to the point of being completely individualised; and, 
• when someone has a sense of gender identity that is incongruent with their sexed body, it is the body that should change, or society should accept the unchanged body as being of the sex that matches the person's stated gender identity

This separation of body and mind is also at the root of trans-humanism in which the body is seen as almost infinitely modifiable - even disposable - such that science could: 

• enable the mind to be uploaded to the cloud (immortality); 
• allow the body to be enhanced by robotic parts (super powers); 
• design perfect humans at conception (playing god); 
• relieve women of their 'reproductive burden' (perpetuating misogyny by obscuring the millennia of oppressive and exploitative ways in which men have turned a foundational human reality into a burden).

I don’t see how it’s possible to look at the intricate thing that is a person’s sense of self and tease out the strands which make up a discrete, coherent gender identity. For me, identity is a complex weave of multiple strands in which the sense of oneself as a sexed being is central but is so intertwined with a multitude of other major elements, it’s almost impossible to separate it out.

Think about all the myriad complex, interacting, changing processes that go into creating and maintaining a sense of self: our genetic blueprint – a critically important element of which, in terms of species survival, is dimorphic sex differentiation; hormonal, nutritional influences in utero; the era, the society and the family into which we’re born; who (or indeed what) we come to be sexually attracted to; our social class, ethnicity, age, physical characteristics, physical and mental state of health, particular talents and how socially valued these are, etc.

All of these things are genetically and socially conditioned and combine to create a sense of self or identity that grows and changes. Some things are more important at some points – even of the day – than others. Consider how easy it is for such a complex sense of self to become fractured, dislocated, harmed– for the fabric of the sense of self to start to unravel. 

Some people's identity fabric is tightly woven, forms coherent patterns and all the strands remain tightly bound together; others may always be, or become, looser, more haphazard and more easily unravelled.

All humans – psychopaths aside – are driven to congregate; even a virtual congregation is better than no congregation at all. It may be that the stronger the wider social bonds are, the more tightly woven and stable the sense of self is.  

There may always be tensions between the person and the social setting in which that person comes into biological-social-psychological being. In some cultures, some eras or some sets of circumstances, the individual is subordinated to the collective.  In our modern capitalist society, the individual appears to be elevated to poll position.

But, like many things in the capitalist order, appearances can be deceptive and the rights of the individual for many people are an illusion - a clever trompe l’oeil of choices and possibilities painted on the wall that’s been erected around the sites of real power and privilege.

The idea of self, of a discrete, individual and individualising identity, is amplified in the modern world. Capitalist, and specifically neo-liberal individualist doctrine, is summed up in the famous Thatcher quote - there is no such thing as society, there is only the individual and the family. (2)

Within capitalism, the creation of the individual was key.  At the base this was because the sale of one’s labour in an ostensibly free market required the person to own that labour, ie to be free of older feudal ties of place, and of duties and obligations to social superiors, and to religion. 

Initially those new freedoms were at worst, an illusion, at best, heavily conditional but that need for the free movement and sale of labour also created the conditions in which, those whose only means of making a living was to sell their labour, were able to combine to demand greater social and economic freedoms.

The processes involved in creating and promulgating the idea of the absolute primacy of the individual have many benefits for those who rule, not the least of which is breaking down combinations that might threaten the economic and social status quo.

What became known as interest group, and latterly identity politics, was a response to the oppressive and exploitative processes of capitalism as they specifically or especially affect women, people of colour, and lesbians and gay men, and which were seen as not being addressed by traditional working class collectives.

But, by becoming divorced from those working class collectives – which were under attack by emerging global corporate capitalism, with its drive to commodify literally everything – and, by continuing the focus on essentially accommodative demands within an increasingly inequitable and unstable socio-economic system, identity politics became a player in the destruction of those bigger collectives, and of class based theories of history and political economy.

The promoters of identity politics divorced from class have helped lay the track to the latest station on the line to post-modern individualisation –  gender identity – which, in essence, is just part of the same old ideological drive to divide and divert in order to retain or tighten control. 

Notes:

1.    If the incidence of DNA damage and endocrine disruption increases, as it very likely will given the scale of chemical pollution, that may become the case again.

2.    Family was tacked on as a sop to the socially conservative and religious but for corporate capitalism there is only the individual – a tiny minority of whom see themselves as being chosen to rule over all others.