The Abstract of Identity

Humans have been categorising and identifying things since the very beginning of our existence. Whether it be which berries are safe to forage or which animals are appropriate to be tamed and trained, our species relies on the ability to perceive the world in a way that will allow us to thrive and survive. To give ourselves a sense of control and understanding, we put our little universe into carefully, and sometimes arbitrarily, produced boxes. As an unfortunate byproduct of our insistence to tuck everything into its respective label, we have limited ourselves and our ability to fully connect with our sense of self and explore what identity truly means to the individual.

One of the first identifications society makes upon greeting a stranger is gender. Gender is, in and of itself, a very complex and abstract concept that we have attempted to push into a little box of binary code. To many people, there is simply man, and there is woman: a zero and a one. But how do we define these numbers when they can look so drastically different among people?

One way in which society tries to justify this limited system is through the lens of ‘scientific categorisation’. One might argue that you either have two ‘X’ chromosomes and are thus female, or you have ‘XY’ chromosomes, which must be male. However, this argument is flawed, as there are a vast number of chromosome codes that fall under the umbrella category of ‘intersex people’. Likely, this huge chunk of the population goes unaccounted for due to their perceived insignificance; only an estimated 1.7% of people in the world are intersex, ‘that’s barely anything, right?’. Yet in a population of nearly eight billion people, the amount of people who break the ‘scientific gender binary’ comes to over one hundred and thirty million.

Even with science to determine your ‘biological gender’, how society views you is highly subjective and incredibly fluid. Gender is such an arbitrary identifier, as every person can perceive it vastly differently. All we have to build upon are the stereotypes and expectations created by society, so any individual could act as any gender.

If a biological man is observed as a woman by whomever they interact with, why should that mean they cannot truly be such?

This idea of gender performativity was first introduced by Judith Butler in their book “Gender Trouble” in 1990. Butler argues that gender is not determined at birth but by how you act and behave to fit into society.

One of the most significant flaws in gender as an identifier is the fact that the few stereotypes we have to base our perception upon are wildly, and often misogynistically, outdated. A simple Google search for synonyms of ‘manliness’ will yield results such as ‘heroic’, ‘brave’, and ‘courageous’. On the other hand, synonyms for ‘womanliness’ yield results such as ‘dainty’, ‘mature’, and ‘gentle’.

Of course, identity spans far beyond merely gender, yet this concept is so difficult to draw a concrete box around, that it must be acknowledged how futile it is to try. When society is limited to overgeneralisation, we are robbed of the ability to realise our true selves. Why waste time on such fruitless causes when we can spend the time building happiness in our own, unique sense of the word? Identity is such an abstract thing that it is impossible to tell any one person they are wrong for who they see themselves as.

August Bent