What do people mean by “identify as”?

[StillHappy]

The phrase is used a lot, but I can’t find any common definition of it.

It seems to be used to mean “I’d like to be”, or “I’d like to be treated as though I was”, but then some people also seem to use it to mean “all objective measures show I am not, but I really am, as I say I am.”

Is it any of these, none, or some mixture?

I’m a woman, but don’t think I identify as one. I can just see that I am from historic events (namely the children that I gave birth to.)

What is someone who appears not to be a woman asserting it claiming when they say they identify as one?

Is it a different class of claim to, let’s say, someone claiming to be a sensitive caring lover, who isn’t, or a woman identifying as the missing Russian princess, daughter of the last Tsar?

Is anyone who uses this language willing to flesh it out?

I think 'I identify as' (in the case of gender id) is going around saying you are something. You may not be what you claim, and in that case it also seems to mean you are expecting/demanding others (including the apparently only too willing state) go along with your claim. Irrespective of the coach and four you may put through the rights of others in society. For some reason, governments etc, have decided they would enforce these claims with legislation. They didn't do that for that lady in the US (Dolezal), or people who identify as a different age. Or, in the case of disability for disability allowance purposes. etc. etc.

Nothing changes your sex; not even a good cosmetic approximation. Even Prof Winston felt that needed to be said out loud, and he used a more forthright term than cosmetic approximation.

My personal opinion in that situation is that it is duplicitous for the state and organisations to sanction this. Billy Connolly had a joke about people who say/think they are Jesus. People go around saying many things, but society doesn't have to be complicit when it comes to upholding 'identity' claims which are problematic, and stomp on the rights of others.

When people use the term 'identity' in the context of gender, I interpret it as 'playing at' or 'dressing up as', in the same way a toddler 'identifies' a superhero by putting on a mask and a cape.
And, tbh, if that's what floats your boat, then crack on, fill your boots, knock yourself out!
But, you are not that thing and I will not validate you.
And men do not get to enter women's spaces or seek to erase women or trample on our rights.

Thanks, Pickled. You put this very well and it resonates with me. I have a choice about 'identifying as' a particular ethnic identity because it is part of my DNA and background but I don't 'identify as' it in most public contexts because it's not relevant (I don't speak the languages, it wasn't a part of my culture as a child and it is not readily discernable from looking at me). I do feel for a parent (now deceased) who was forced to identify as 'white British' even though this parent wasn't - they were forced to keep their ethnic and cultural identity silent for fear of racism and also because of the family's internal racism. When dementia hit they forgot all about that and 'identified' as their 'real' and very complex identity. Sometimes I feel like saying 'sod it' and identifying as that publicly in their memory but it isn't accurate and so I don't. When asked to explain my background and family in less official contexts though I do weave this identity as part of the story.

Pickled's post was on page two. I thought I'd linked it but obviously not.

[Got a bit long. Tldr: for identity wrt persons, read John Locke and Derek Parfit. Many trans ideologues just make mistakes. ]

It may be of interest to try to track some of the history of 'identity' in something like the way people try to use it now. Why 'identity', and what has its use for persons to do with its other (major?) use to mean the relation of being the same?

Two things are identical if they are the same. Cue lots of philosophical musings, one particular set of which is to do with so-called 'personal' identity.

A good place to start with this might be John Locke, who added a chapter in his book An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Book 2 Chapter 27, 1694) on what people describe as the "persistence conditions" (or "conditions of diachronic identity") for persons.

This sounds terribly technical, but really it isn't at all. The question Locke and others want to try and answer is just this: "What makes me (or any person for that matter) the same person as I was yesterday ... or last week, or sixty years ago when I got married, or ... well, just what is it that makes me be the same ('identical') person as I always was in the past and will be in the future, even as I change various aspects of my body and personality, grow old and so on?"

This question - what makes me the same person over time - might be glossed as, 'What is it that makes me who I am? - What is it that makes me, me?"

This is the philosophical problem of personal identity. Of course it has practical aspects as well as sheer intellectual curiosity driving it. Is that old person, Fritz, the same person as that young man who was a concentration camp guard in 1944? How do we decide? And so what? ... Am I really the same person as when I was a religious believer, all those years ago? ... Is this person, Claudette, the same person as Claude, who you say attacked you that evening? ... and so on.

These are questions of personal identity. Interesting, important questions, with ethical and moral import as well as metaphysical (and logico-semantic and so on, perhaps depending on your philosophical bent).

OK, now the idea of 'identity' in this sense has undergone a bit of slippage. So we talk about ID ('Identity') cards, for instance - cards we can use to identify ourselves, to say who we are, forgetting the origin of the term in the sense of 'what makes me the same over time'. And so on.

And 'identity politics'? Sometimes consciously, other times not, people having no real answer to Locke's question encourage this slippage into talk of what makes a person be the person he or she is, independently of any reference to the kind of diachronous identity (of what makes one be the same over time) Locke was talking about.

What is it that makes me the person I am? Lots of answers can be offered. But, anyway, that is what my identity is, in this sense.

Of course what many people (amongst which almost all trans people and their apologists) mistake about this is the possibility of error in self-ascription of this sense of identity. For most X, the claim "I identify as X," as it turns out, is no guarantee, even if sincerely offered, that I am even X at all, much less that X is a persistence condition for my personhood.

[Oh, and that spinning sound you hear? That comes from John Locke's grave.]

[More seriously, if you want some more recent material about personal identity, try Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons (1984). I don't say Parfit gets everything right, but he's always worth reading. Dead now, of course. But not as long ago as Locke.]

It really means "I identify with set x of stereotypes".

What they think it means "I am x".