Essence by Accident

New York Times opinion columnist Lydia Polgreen recently wrote about the backlash against the growing acceptance of diverse gender identities, and about abetting children’s wishes to transition away from the gender assigned them at birth. (Here is a gift link.) At the center of these conflicts is the question of what is real and what we know about our own gender identities. How can a child justify their claim that their real or true gender identity does not conform to that assigned to them? Indeed, how can anyone?

Polgreen generalizes the question, and it is her answer that I want to dwell on.

How do we know who we are? This may seem like a profound, philosophical question. The exhortation to know yourself is, after all, one of the most famous and ancient utterances in Western civilization. But it is also an interesting question to ask yourself in a more literal sense. Because what we discover, if we are really honest with ourselves, is that most of the time we know who we are because someone told us.

Polgreen, whose mother was born in Ethiopia and whose father is white, illustrates her point by recounting how she learned at around the age of 10 of the American Black/white racial binary, and that she was assigned to the Black side. Having lived her early childhood in Kenya, she had not experienced this social assignment—had not yet learned that her racial identity was Black.

Race is not an exact parallel for gender identity, but as categories, we experience them in large part through the perceptions that others have of us, based largely on our outward appearances.

Polgreen does not discuss the degree to which people are free to question or reject their assignment under the American racial binary. Her point is that we can make sense of the idea that people experience their racial identity as a socially assigned and sustained attribute—and that gender may not really be so different.

The objection to thinking of our “essential,” identity-defining attributes in this way runs up against the objection that there are innately given factors that determine those attributes. We have sex chromosomes that determine our place in the gender binary (waving away the existence of intersex people). Maybe we can accept the idea that racial classifications are social classifications precisely because there is no bright genetic line dividing Black people from white people. One conclusion to draw is that race, lacking “objective” determinants, is therefore not an “essential,” identity-defining attribute. But the gender binary is written directly into our genetic scripts.

I said that Polgreen does not discuss the freedom to reject one’s racial classification. The very persistence of race as an identity-defining category, despite its “social constructedness,” is a challenge to the idea that identity-defining categories require some “objective” biological correlate. We experience racial categories as immutable to varying degrees. For some of us, they are firmly fixed. I do not regard myself as free to disavow my whiteness. People with complex racial lineages experience the mutability of racial categories differently. Immutability, identity-definingness, biological determination: these are distinct and to some extent independent characteristics of the categories by which we understand who we are.

Polgreen’s aim is to free up our imagination about gender identity: to help us to see own gender identities not only as not biologically determined but as mutable. All of us, in whatever gender identification we make—whether as assigned or not—answer to a sense of who we “really” are that can change over time, and that is no less “real” for that. Gender is essence-by-accident.

I began thinking about my own identity as an adoptee before gender-affirming care for minors had exploded into a major front in the culture war. In the ten years since I reunited with my birth mother, I have adopted a radical position about what I will call my kinship identity: my conception of my place in kinship networks and genealogical webs. I have come to realize that I now experience my kinship identity as constantly shifting. I have little use for the idea that either my adoptive family or my biological family is the “real” one—or even for the idea that I have two “equally real” families. There are two women I call my mother. I verbally distinguish them when I need to for the sake of clarity: my adoptive mother, my birth or biological mother. Neither is my “actual” mother. Nor does it sound natural to me to talk of “my two mothers,” in the way that a child of a lesbian couple might do so. I need a term to describe my experience of kinship that corresponds to “genderqueer” for the experience of falling outside the traditional gender binary.

Neither my socially and legally sanctioned and historical connection to my adoptive family, nor my biological and historical connection to my biological family, provides the objective ground for my identity-defining conception of my kinship. It is mutable, a “put-up job” with the involvement of many hands: my biological parents, my adoptive family, the agency functionaries who designated them as eligible to adopt me, and—ultimately—myself. I fashion a kinship identity for myself that feels not so much optional as the best expression of who I am and what happened to me. This comes out in the way I choose to tell my story. To say I was separated from my mother at birth is already to make a claim in conformity with my kinship identity—one that it is difficult for my adoptive relatives to acknowledge. I also say, in conformity with my kinship identity, that my mother died during my junior year in college. I disambiguate only when I need to. There is no hidden meaning of the word “mother,” no Platonic motherly essence, that determines who the “real” mother is. As with gender, so with kinship: essence by accident.

With racial identity, with gender identity, and with kinship identity, there is a seeming paradox: these are in varying degrees “put-up jobs” that are nevertheless essential to who we are. And so one’s racial or gender or kinship identity places moral demands on other people. Whatever your gender identity, no matter how fluid or mutable, I use the pronouns you choose for yourself. However I use kinship terms—whoever I call “mom” or “uncle”—you respect those choices. If you choose to change your gender expression or your identity documents to conform with your gender identity, I respect that. If, all of a sudden after forty years, I start calling people you (and I) had never heard of before “uncle” and “grandmother,” you respect it.

Polgreen writes:

Maybe we should all learn to wear our genders, indeed, all of our identities, a bit more lightly. I have come to think of the institution of gender as something a bit like an arranged marriage. It is something your family does for you, usually with loving intention and in the interest of your community, that may or may not work out, or may work for a time but then break down. For most of human history, all marriages were arranged marriages, but in much of the world we’ve come to accept that most people want to choose their own life partners, even at the price of family and community cohesion. Why should gender be any different?

Her point is that although at first we are handed our identities, we remain sovereign over them. All of us. To accept and affirm those aspects of our identities as originally given: that is the choice that millions make. But when my child rejects the gender identity they were given, or when I reject the traditionally normative kinship identity my adoptive family claimed for me, we differ from those millions not in trying to change in ourselves what is immutable in them, but in choosing differently from them.

As a friend summed it up:

So much of life we’d thought was discovery turns out to be decision.

Essence by accident.