I have started to hate the term “identify as”

[TheletterZ]

“Identify as” is completely meaningless and is starting to really annoy me.

i don’t identify as a a white middle-aged straight woman with brown (ok greyish) hair and eyes. I simply AM those things. They are facts that are real and unchangable. (Well apart from the age thing and that only changes in 1 direction)

I can dye my hair but as I have to keep doing it, it just underlines the fact my hair is brown/grey.

“Identify as”implies choice. I didn’t choose my sexuality, it just is. No one does. My sister didn’t claim to be a lesbian (with all the prejudice that goes with that) she simply is one. No choice is involved.

There is a clip on twitter from Elliot Page saying ‘30% of young people identify as LGBTQ+’ which shows how ridiculous the statement is. From my limited understanding LGB is around 5-10% of a population. So who are the other 20%? People who just claim to be part of the ‘community’ to feel special.

Sorry for the rant, I use my name on twitter and as a teacher I have to keep my views quiet and bite my tongue.

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.

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

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.

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.

@JustSpeculation That’s terrifying

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.

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

positionalities

Sorry but this is so ridiculous I laughed reading it!

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!

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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 tend to switch off completely/ stop reading.

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 don’t identify as a a white middle-aged straight woman with brown (ok greyish) hair and eyes. I simply AM those things.

This is when it becomes offensive. It’s similar to the concept of gender identity, when believers stop using it to express something they feel and start applying it to everyone else.

Their “definition” of the word woman relies on it as a false concept, for example. A woman is anyone who identifies as a woman. As well as being circular it actually excludes women.

The thing is with something like ADHD, no one is going to diagnose you with it unless you (or your parents) seek a diagnosis. Essentially everyone who is officially diagnosed with ADHD wants to be diagnosed with it because they see a positive diagnosis as something which provides an explanation for the difficulties they believe they have faced.

So I would assume that someone who says they identify as having ADHD has not been officially diagnosed with it.

Essentially, that's what "identify as" means, isn't it?

You want to be something but you don't meet the fundamental criteria to be able to say you are that thing.

To identify as something now just means “I am not this thing, but I insist I am recognised as it.”

Deluded narcissistic thinking. A consumer mentality to identity.

Definitely. As far as I'm concerned, 'Identifies as x' inherently means 'Is not x'. If you actually are something, you have no need to identify as it, do you?

I think (and I may be wrong here as I am not a sociologist) that it is an example of reification. That is, it's a concept (positionality, which is not unrelated to the term "standpoint" of yore) which is being treated as a thing. You become a positionality, and your existence becomes defined by this. It may be that I'm wrong, and it only exists in the abstract and it's meant to be purely illustrative. But if this is the case, how are you supposed to derive real people's rights from it? More to the point, how are you to decide who has which positionality? The whole thing seems to lend itself to the kind of subjective waffle which underlies this whole ideology.

Maybe, if I'm wrong and there's some kind sociologist on FWR, they could come along and disabuse me?

Danni Minogue recently said in an interview that she “identifies as queer” even though she’s been in a relationship with a man for 10 year 🙄. I’m obviously missing something . . .

This. I mentally substitute with 'isn't, but wishes they were'.

Or worse, 'wants to compel everyone to pretend they are'.

It's 'what is going on in my feelings is more important than external, observed, measurable reality.' Fiction, in other words.