We Are Not Ourselves
On the fallibility of identity and the loss of humanity in labels
[The conversation around gender] is dominated by those who can tolerate and thrive in it. It is conducted by the voices of those who are able to survive speech and its consequences. But it is a conversation that is, by necessity, reductive. … If we tried to hold 10 million unique experiences of gender in our mind they would sift through our fingers and roll away.” —Isabel Fall, interviewed by Emily VanDerWerff for “How Twitter can ruin a life” on Vox
I wrote a few weeks back on my experience of queerness, and how it’s been dictated by the terms of others—maybe even robbed by others of seeing its full realization. It was part of a larger line of thinking that I seek to expound on here, where I believe identity is inevitably co-opted and manipulated by others.
The above quote is from an incredibly emotional piece from Emily VanDerWerff—a writer who I’ve loved since her A.V. Club days reviewing TV episodes—covering the story of Isabel Fall, a trans woman who tried delving into science fiction writing as a way to explore her own gender transition and theory, only to be driven to near suicide by the paranoia of a trans community and its allies. It’s a gutting read from start to finish, at the very least for myself—every word Fall provided in her conversations with VanDerWerff rang true for my own experiences as a non-binary person who never changed their appearance. I recommend you read it entirely.
But spoiler alert—it is a tragic story through and through. Isabel Fall (which is a pseudonym) has long ceased her transition, accepting that she is not a woman of which the world will accept, let alone a trans woman. She has even given up the potential of writing further fiction. VanDerWerff describes it as such: “Yet I’m emailing with a ghost who exists only in this one email chain. The person who might have been Isabel has given up on actually building a life and career as Isabel Fall. And that is a kind of death.”
Identity-based communities as a whole have fallen into a spiral of orthodoxy, subconsciously serving up sorts of purity tests—what I called "a fucked-up, social means-testing to make sure you’re marginalized enough to reap the benefits of community and solidarity” in “Queerness is Not a Self-Love Exercise.” It comes from an honest position of defense, as such identity-based groups are often marginalized and violently attacked, as trans communities and Black communities so often are. But eventually it becomes paradoxical—such groups position themselves to seem like an umbrella to serve the goals of all corresponding peoples, but end up whittling down their membership to a select few who fit a certain image of that identity label.
We’ll start with queer communities: in the above example of Isabel Fall’s story, trans sci-fi readers became paranoid that a culturally-subversive work that reclaimed a transphobic trope was written by a pseudonymous writer with no details to her identity. Based upon a very “making-up-a-person-and-getting-mad-at-them” fear that this short story may have been written by a covert transphobic troll, a large, natural consensus became that Fall should have revealed herself to be a trans woman if she was to write about transness without scaring the community at large.
Queer activists have long forgotten about the experience of transition and coming out. I remember watching Happiest Season, a Christmas movie about a lesbian couple struggling with one of them not being out to her family, and—again, spoiler alert—being satisfied with the general happy ending of the two main characters ending up together. I mean, if I’m gonna watch a holiday rom-com about gay women for the first time, I think I’d want them to have a happy ending rather than some needlessly truthful and complex love story. But I noticed an unending social media discussion after its release on how the secret-girlfriend character should have ended up with the proud-and-out gay character instead of her partner, who clearly struggles throughout the movie with the idea of coming out to her family at such a late age. The co-writer and director, Clea DuVall, touched upon it afterwards in an interview with Variety:
Maybe you haven’t seen, but there are entire posts about how clearly Abby should run off with Riley. Is that a surprise?
I think that has less to do with the movie and more to do with your philosophy on growth and forgiveness. Writing this movie from the perspective of a 43-year-old woman who has not always been my best self — it was a long, windy, messy road to get to the person I am now. I’m very proud of the person I am now, but I haven’t always been that person. It’s understanding that sometimes you have to go low so you can figure out your way back up. And I understand the impulse to just cut and run, and be like, to hell with this. But I also really believe that people can get better, people can grow, and people can change. They can recognize that maybe their behavior is not as good as they know it can be, and that they make a conscious effort to change it.
I also believe that being closeted is really painful. It’s not an easy place to be. And I think having compassion for someone in that situation is really important. The character of Harper is someone who I think feels a lot of shame about it — she feels bad. None of this is, like, easy for her, you know?
There is a terror in coming out that becomes only an inspiring story for proud-and-out people. It is a grim idea that the memory of that fear and madness often fades away for queer people with the benefit of an “unconditionally” loving and supportive community.
It happens in the everyday of closeted gay or bisexual people: I see such friends be “jokingly” accosted for not leaning into being gay entirely and out in the open. For gay men, it’s often with the added sting from other men that he is “fake gay” or “lying to himself” because he won’t accept the advances of that other man. And there is not a whiff of trying to call out these men who sexually harass questioning or bisexual men for their own benefit.
Race-based communities fall into the same destructive cycles. Black and brown discourse often falls upon the topic of colorism and the light-skin/dark-skin dichotomy. In the Heights was recently criticized for largely casting lighter-skinned actors for Afro-Latino characters. These conversations are, again, based on a good and defensible point on how mass media continues to exclude darker skin tones. But there is never any nuanced conversation on how these discussions psychologically add to the burden of lighter-skinned Black and brown people, who, sure, tend to benefit in receiving opportunities and gaining trust from the powerful because of their lighter skin. They also are destined to ruminate endlessly on whether they can fully claim the culture they were born into and grew up in, all because of the result of a genetic lottery and a systemic injustice they inadvertently benefit from. This is another form of a purity test: Black and brown people are often told by their “own” people that they are an other, that they are not truly something that white people and institutions will categorize them as anyway, that they cannot do or say things that they grew up with all their lives. This sort of internal paradoxical thinking only drives us all to madness.
Asian-Americans face the same ordeal. There is a constant policing of shared experience that people must endure and carry with them—the foods you eat, how you interact with your family, how you carry yourself in the world. This would be enough of a burden from non-Asian people, but Asian-Americans particularly like to do this amongst themselves. The problem arises when, for instance, an election happens where three Korean women are historically appointed to Congress, and Asian-Americans cannot wrap their minds around how the joyous occasion can be sullied by two of the women being corporate-friendly conservatives from Orange County. In so many people’s minds, the Asian-American experience is a single monolith shared by all, and naturally would result in the same worldview. It’s no wonder there’s no urgency in trying to do away with such a broad term that consolidates a diverse array of countries and cultures into one continental descriptor.
The continuing discussion on the use of the term “Latinx” is maybe the most egregious, embarrassing result of this narrow identity politick. As the 2010s brought identity to the forefront and brought a motivation to bring a name for every shade of every spectrum, for every point in the three-dimensional axis of personhood, Latinos with potent access to the Internet (still a luxury for much of the world), Latinos engaging in a fast-changing queer theory, and Latinos of the elite media culture who can affirm these identity monoliths into the zeitgeist all settled on the English-based “fix” for the gendered Spanish language: “Latinx.” Spanish-speaking people kept responding with a “Huh?” ever since. And quickly, the very-online Latinos switched their tune, calling it as yet another colonialist move engendered upon brown people. The conversation stops there though—there is no further discussion on what it means to be outside the gender binary and Latino, either back in an ethnic homeland or in the U.S. Online, it seems to constantly be leftist Latinos patting themselves on the back online for rejecting the term and media Latinos just using the term anyway because they’d be criticized regardless. Meanwhile, similar to Asian-Americans, there is an increasing base of conservative Latinos that is left unchallenged while the left argues about how to discuss their own people.
We are not ourselves. Our identities, something society has ensured us is wholly our own, often ends up in the hands and control of others. It is easily weaponized and used against us. It is what often becomes the internal conflict we carry at odds with the external world. It is, at the end of the day, just a label that others can use to describe who you are, lacking all the nuance that makes you you. To be crass, it is like what L.A. people love to hate: introducing people to each other with what they do for work. In a great irony, identity taken too far removes our humanity and agency.
It is all fallible. It all inevitably becomes a push-and-pull between people who find solace in knowing themselves and being able to speak about themselves with easy labels, and people who don’t wish to be labeled or may find twisted joy in railing against the established mass-mindset of what it means to be [insert identity here]. The people of the former, though admirable in seeking a fuller image of themselves, often only end up scratching the surface; they may find a connection with the definitions of terms like “asexual” or “Korean-American,” but never end up examining why they connect with those experiences and how they influence them as an individual. And every push to one end of a political spectrum will naturally birth an opposing force—and so, in a sad cycle of affairs, more mindfulness of a group of people will be met with the hostility of some alt-right or trolly actors, then the paranoia of the group increases and expands, and then young and new members are shut out and left to figure out the world for themselves.
It is what happened to Isabel Fall, who did not succumb the most to the bad-faith behavior of online trolls ironically seeking to co-opt her short story. No—she was hurt the most by a trans community and her own friends that inadvertently told her, in good faith, that she was not a real trans woman, that she only caused pain to trans women, and abandoned her in the aftermath to pick up the pieces of herself on her own. This is how she ends up in the lonely place in the recesses of her own mind, where she can confidently say to her own detriment:
I don’t know what I meant to do as Isabel. I know [that publishing “Attack Helicopter”] was an important test for myself, sort of a peer review of my own womanness. I think I tried to open a door and it was closed from the other side because I did not look the right shape to pass through it.
… Isabel was somebody I often wanted to be, but not someone I succeeded at being. I think the reaction to the story proves that I can’t be her, or shouldn’t be her, or at least won’t ever be her. Everyone knew I was a fraud, right away.
People are constantly growing, learning, changing, and adapting. That’s what consciousness is about. To be human for each other is to be patient, understanding, forgiving; to grow with each other is to be honest, to engage even in disagreement, to start from a place of trust. That’s what makes the experience of coming out so beautiful—a person admits to themselves and the world that they are not what they seemed to be, declares that they are not what everyone else told them they were, and hopes out loud that they can learn and grow into a new chapter of their life with the support and confidence of the people around them. And, hopefully, the people around them give them that. Yet, even with the wonder of all that love, the process is still painful. That is what we lose in providing to others when we choose to remember the joy and none of the pain.
It’s time for us to be ourselves again, whoever we find ourselves to be along the way.