I can respect that "all other things being equal" does not hold here. There are always tradeoffs. But there are real benefits to not identifying with things (as the essay discusses).
I’m not asking you to respect whether something in some article addresses my identity. I’m telling you I know what it is.
It’s not a balance of tradeoffs. It’s not available for scrutiny by an essay by Paul, or comments from you or anyone.
My contention with the article was that giving myself permission to let my identity expand to include things I hadn’t helped me begin to reckon with the pain of keeping my identity minimal, denying really important things about myself and hurting in the process.
The majority of the responses I’ve gotten have suggested that I should not let those be a part of my identity or have minimized their importance.
I cannot understand why. Why is it in your interest or anyone’s to tell me whether being queer, or non-binary, or autistic should not factor into who I am? Why do you or anyone get to decide whether any of those things should be important parts of me?
Why is it anyone’s business but my own? The only “conflict” here has been people scrutinizing the validity of my identity as I express it.
Because a society where we can have less partisan opinions and more fruitful discussions is a better one.
But I'm not attacking you, and I don't think most of the other commenters are, either. You expressed a disagreement with its thesis and explained how identity has been useful to you. I just pointed out that perhaps there is a way to achieve the same goals without expanding your identity. I was trying to have a discussion about the essay. But it appears I misunderstood, and you did not actually wish to engage in a discussion, so I will stop here :)
> Because a society where we can have less partisan opinions and more fruitful discussions is a better one.
Okay. What is partisan about me being queer or non-binary or autistic, other than those are immutable facets of me that either people hate or callously disregard?
Right now having a group with commonality and a sense of belonging is very important and a huge improvement on where we were before leaving people isolated and alone. But don't lose sight of the end goal, which is for those problems that having a group identity protects against not existing at all. Those two things aren't in conflict, other comments here really are trying to be helpful, but in a theoretical physics sort of way that isn't going to help anyone directly in the next decade and ignores some practical hurdles we need to get over first.
The core of advice is to keep the identity _small_. That way I can pick my battles. The more labels I put on myself the more I will alienate other people. Each of those labels also means I'm not honest with myself. Label is just a single word for describing complex world views, preferences and emotions. If I attach this label to my personality, then over time I will also change myself to better fit it. It can also be source of frustration when I don't meet expectations that are set by any given label. For example, before I considered myself a bookworm and it was painful to discard this label from my identity as I found less and less time for reading.
Labels are still useful. They provide decent defaults for social interactions, and a sense of belonging. Birds of a feather flock together. It is too many labels that can be problematic, in a sense of crippling social interactions and turning them into ego duels. Again, this is just how my experience aligns with the article, and not at all scrutinizing _your_ identity.
It’s about identity. And specifically about rejecting expansion thereof. How could I not have personal feelings about it?