I have started to hate the term “identify as”

It concerns me that the assumption is that the audience cares about how the speaker identifies. It aligns with the concept of broadcasting the most banal aspects of one's life on social media and getting upset when people don't 'react' to their posts.

We used to aim to support people not to need or seek external validation for personal aspects of self. It was common to be told 'not everyone is interested or cares about that aspect of your life but that doesn't mean they don't care about you', or, 'not everyone will agree with or like you, just like you don't like everyone. That's OK'. The idea that people should be resilient was widely accepted.

It should be a wake up call to everybody how far the intended shift went - whereby the intended norm was for individual to curate their self image based on how they want themselves and others to view them and for others to affirm this without question. I didn't think it would every permeate all social groups. Middle class, leftie liberals (my demographic) were always going to be susceptible, but I am surprised how many outside this group followed along.

I remember reading an article in the 90s about the danger of relegating battles for hard won freedoms to the past and how it shouldn't be taken for granted that another fight will be needed. It was a feminist article but made reference to the holocaust too.

I tend to switch off completely/ stop reading.

In itself its okay, just means 'describes oneself as'. The trouble is it seems to imply that others must/ought/should agree and observe that identity over and above the evidence of their lying eyes.

I had to produce a piece of work the other day which included a description of a woman who "identified" as a man. I just couldn't bring myself to use the phrase so I wrote "female but living as a transman". It was the best I could think of.

I filled in a survey and one of the questions was 'do you identify as disabled?'
I was horrified by that and made sure that I fed back to the survey writer how inappropriate that wording was.
I have a disability but it is part of me. I don't identify as having one.
Maybe if the phrase is creeping like this it will take less time for everyone to realise what a meaningless phrase'identify is' actually is.

Isn't that just another way of saying that identity is co-created between who you are (your individual personality & characteristics) and when/where you're living in terms of what society values? Because that doesn't seem terrifying to me, it seems bloody obvious.

An example would be that in today's knowledge economy, education-focussed society, people who find it hard to sit and focus on knowledge work are diagnosed as being "neurodiverse," whereas 150 years ago they would likely have been in work that wasn't so dependent on knowledge skill sets and not seen as particularly deficient.

I attended a neuro diversity webinar recently and one of the speakers introduced themselves by saying they identified as having ADHD.

Got me wondering whether they are saying that because they don't have an official diagnosis. Or maybe they have a diagnosis and because they agree with it, they are ok to identify as it too.

It annoyed me because you either have it or you don't. And if you don't have an official diagnosis you could say you have ADHD traits.

The phrase annoys me too OP and just makes everything unclear.

OP, when I hear ‘identify as’ my brain does start interpreting the conversation differently from then on.

So does that mean that someone’s positionality changes and adapts with additional information… rather than set like a personality? Or if someone has a contrarian personality, does that mean their positionality is similar?

off to Google!

positionalities

Sorry but this is so ridiculous I laughed reading it!

It's a particular view of sociology which is enabled by the language games Arabella speaks of.

I replace (in my head and increasingly out loud) with plainer language:

"He identifies as..." => he says he is...

"Living as..." => pretending to be...

"Transitioning" => taking steps to appear more like the opposite sex.

@JustSpeculation That’s terrifying

The more they make fun of it the better. The Ku Klux Klan got laughed into irrelevance, and I hope this will, too. Where I work, we are always talking about people as "positionalities" (yes, it's higher education) which is horrendous. You exist as an identity defined by social and political context - a rather Mussolini-like view of society. The idea that "you" identify as something is out. Society and politics identifies you for you so that you don't have to.

You and just about everyone else, OP.

It seems to shift importance and focus away from material reality and onto perception and language. Moves away from collective understanding/co-operation and towards individual choice.

At root it moves from an attempt at an agreed objective definition towards a fetishised (in more than one sense) insistence on the individual's subjective perception.

I suppose its an attempt to respect self-determination and self perception because there was so much emphasis on language and subjectivity in post modern thought. Attempts to use linguistics to break down hierarchies mean the only person with the authority and power to describe themself is the individual.

it's a fallacy imo because many of those descriptors only exist in our relation to others and some are objectively true and unfalsifiable - sex being an obvious example of the latter. Language is powerful but that doesn't mean magic spells work.

The end result is that power shifts away from the community consensus and towards the individual, but because its superimposed on human societies with very deeply entrenched power structures that can't just be fixed by superficial language changes, some people's subjective judgements end up being more respected than others', funnily enough.

Tedious beyond belief but teenagers are starting to take the piss out of it so hopefully we’ll see the end of it soon 🤞

It's become a bit of a joke with the kids, hasn't it? Mine have snarked about "identifying as" fairly regularly, though they always defer to politeness when it comes to people who seem to be "identifying as" unironically. The snarking certainly indicates they're aware of how useful it is for attention and manipulation, though.