Identity: the hysteria of both the left and the right

Identity has become a contentious topic on both sides of the political and social divide in Western societies. Much of the contention arises from completely irrational, hysterical straw-manning of the other side's positions and intentions, giving rise to a situation in which both sides are, by and large, fighting self-invented ghosts. And although there surely are a few toxic people on both sides, who truly take extreme and unacceptable positions, they are just that: a few individuals who aren't representative of any significant social group.

In this essay, I'll try to address the topic of identity in a way that, to me, seems to be balanced and informed by calm reason, as opposed to hysterical emotions and prejudices. In the process of doing so, I'll deliberately give voice to both sides of the divide, alternately, so to illustrate how I think both incur in irrational straw-manning. I believe doing this is important, because our societies are eating themselves alive due to the bellicose psychological energy constantly mobilised by straw-manning. We are dehumanising one another, in a process that poses more danger to Western societies than even the deranged barking of that loser called Vladimir Putin. This essay is my personal attempt to contribute something to resolving this dangerous and unnecessary internal conflict.

The key tenet of the Western social value-system is this: you are entitled to be who you are, love who you love, and live the way you want to live, as long as you don't interfere with my right to be and do the same. This is the Golden Rule of Western social life. Admittedly, there are nuanced situations in which this rule doesn't lead to immediate and unambiguous solutions to social conflicts, but it goes much farther than those indulging in hysterical straw-manning believe it to go.

Take the question of LGBTIQ+ rights, for instance: even Christian fundamentalists will grant that God has given people free will, otherwise the concept of 'sin' would have no meaning. In other words, God—although He could—did not make it impossible for us to sin. There is thus a very important sense, even under fundamentalist Christianity, in which we have been given the freedom to sin by the Divinity Itself. Therefore, if being an LGBTIQ+ person is a sin, who are we to take away their freedom to sin, given that God Himself didn't? Even under the premises of fundamentalist Christianity, the Golden Rule of Western societies still applies: LGBTIQ+ people must have the right to be who they are, love who they love, and live as they wish to live, as long as they don't interfere with the freedom of others to be and do the same.

However, the right often straw-mans the issue to ludicrous extents, insofar as they think that LGBTIQ+ rights—which, frankly, are just human rights—infringe on the personal liberties of non-LGBTIQ+ people. Take the following fragment of a comment recently posted on this blog (which I, of course, deleted), referring to LGBTIQ+ rights as "the rights of sexual deviants to force us to jump through whatever hoops their sick minds can come up" with. The vast, vast majority of LGBTIQ+ people don't want to force anybody to do anything, let alone jump through hoops; they just want the basic human right to be who they are and love who they love. It is a completely hysterical straw-man to portray them as essentially fascists. It dehumanises a vast, vast majority of decent, good people who stand to contribute perhaps disproportionate amounts of creativity and valiance to our culture. And that there may be some truly toxic people among them, who do constitute a danger to society, isn't surprising either: toxicity is a general human potential present in all social groups, and thus it stands to reason that the LGBTIQ+ community will also have their statistical fair share. That only makes them as human as the rest of us. To portray them—the oppressed—as oppressors borders on the criminal.

Which is not to say that hysteria doesn't plague the pro-LGBTIQ+ left also. In the well-justified drive to protect the basic human rights of all members of our society, some overlook very concrete, practical and important issues, such as how well-meaning laws can be abused.

In my country, a new law is being debated in parliament this week. It is meant to protect the right of transgender people to be treated for who they truly are from within: all Dutch citizens may soon be allowed to change the sex assignment in their identity cards, as well as all official registration records, simply by going to the city hall and saying whether they identify as male or female. No sex reassignment surgery is required; no psychiatric evaluation is required; no hormonal treatment is required; the person doesn't even need to dress according to the chosen sex. I—facial hair and all—would be able go to the city hall and change all my records to 'female,' if I so wished.

Before I point out the problems with this, let me first acknowledge the most important thing: for the vast majority of people who would use this potential new law, the law would be a good and fair thing. Non-transgender people don't need sex reassignment surgery, hormone treatment or psychiatric evaluations to have their registration records reflect who they are from within; why should it be different for transgender people? In an ideal world, I would support this law. That I might feel confused and uncomfortable about what pronoun to use when talking to a transgender person is my problem, not theirs.

But we don't live in an ideal world. As discussed above, transgender people are a normal demographic in any society (even those that pretend it doesn't exist). And any demographic has its statistical share of toxic, dangerous individuals; as humans, transgender people are no exception. In this context, the problem of a law that allows sex assignment to be changed based purely on subjective feeling—important as the latter is—is that it conflates gender with sex, thereby rendering objective identification more difficult. And that does infringe the Golden Rule, in that it can affect all of us, not just transgender people.

To make my point clear, I will exaggerate: imagine that the law allowed me to change not only my sex, but other identification parameters related to my biology, such as age and height. Both age and height also have inner, subjective counterparts that may not agree with biological externalities: some small people feel tall (I bet Volodymyr Zelenskyy is one of them), some old people feel young, and so on. How they feel is very important, and I, for one, am perfectly willing to treat them for how they feel from within, not their outer biology. But if every small person who feels tall, and every old person who feels young, could legally change their records to reflect their subjective age and height, we would have a serious social problem, in that the records would become meaningless for being disconnected from recognisable outer appearances.

Imagine that a crime were committed and the criminal were described by witnesses as a small old man. Imagine also that the actual criminal had legally changed their official records to say that they are, in fact, a tall young girl. How would police find the culprit? Yes, this is an exaggerated and implausible hypothetical, but it does illustrate the problem of conflating subjective inner reality with objective, biological, recognisable outer characteristics.

Problems can still occur even if we take the exaggeration out of the picture. Once one's sex is legally changed, everything has to legally unfold consistently with that. So all government statistics pertaining to, say, heart disease prevalence in males and females, would be skewed; and so would insurance costs based on such statistics. And since the sex change is legally binding, public bathrooms in Dutch swimming pools, gyms, clubs, etc., may soon have biologically male individuals, who didn't undergo hormone treatment or sex reassignment surgery, showering naked next to my naked female partner. I don't think that's a good idea. Insofar as my partner is directly affected by this, allowing it does violate the Golden Rule. I could go further and discuss how similar situations could bring children under risk from pedophiles, who could cynically regard this law as a fantastic opportunity to do harm under the cover of the fair sex. But I am sure you understand the point already.

A well-meaning attempt to cater to the rights of all of us becomes a problem the moment it overlooks the practicalities and implications of its implementation. It gives those who were already opposed to transgender rights, due to hysterical straw-manning, a legitimate reason to become entrenched in their position. It feeds polarisation. The person who wrote that deleted comment on this blog would now gain some legitimacy in stating that transgender people "force us to jump through hoops." Everybody looses with this, particularly transgender people. Even the best intentions can constitute a form of hysteria when they careen out of control, ignoring reason and level-headed judgment. And it's difficult to absolve the left of this offence.

Unfortunately, the situation is yet more nuanced and complicated than it may appear from the above. What our culture needs to do is to disassociate gender from sex. The former is a psychological inner fact, while the latter is a biological outer fact. But such a disassociation will take decades, even generations, to fully happen. In the meantime, honest and good transgender people will effectively be discriminated against, for the sex assignment in their documents will still be taken, by the culture, as their gender. Is this fair? Clearly not. What is clear is that the problem is a very difficult one, and that hysteria and straw-manning only make the situation even more difficult than it already is by nature.

Gender identity is not the only identity issue that is plagued by hysteria and straw-manning. Another one is cultural identity. Peculiarly, the left and the right swap roles here: as I've just discussed, while insisting on their own cultural identity, the right denies the LGBTIQ+ community their right to gender identity. However, not to be outdone, while the left goes out of its way to defend LGBTIQ+ and immigrant identity, it seems to completely disregard—even actively attack—our own cultural identity. Here is a comment recently published on my Facebook page, in the context of a discussion about the European Union: "National identities have no future." Really?

A salient characteristic of the left's ethos is the pretence that we are born in a kind of vacuum, without a past, without a history, without traditions, merely as fully mouldable creatures—tabula rasa—which somehow pop out of nowhere, as if by magic. Not only is this factually untrue, it raises the question: Why? Why try to deny the obvious fact that we do have a history, a past, ancestors, traditions, roots, all of which give context and meaning to our lives? It is our roots and traditions that allow us to understand our role in the development of human civilisation (in the Hegelian sense), provide us with contextual references, and anchor us in a form of temporal transcendence that seems to be entirely lost in the left. What makes the left insist on gender identity on the one hand while, strangely, denying cultural identity on the other? Why this flagrant inconsistency?

I think the answer is not maliciousness—in my experience, very little human nonsense is malicious—but a fear that cultural identity may be misused to curtail the rights of minorities, such as the LGBTIQ+ community, ethnic groups and immigrants. After all, it is also a fact that some of what we inherit from the past is toxic, obnoxious, dangerous and even criminal. For instance, insofar as racism is a cultural inheritance in some parts of the world, it isn't an acceptable one.

But to recognise that we must revise some of our inheritance—for, after all, we do learn a thing or two over time—doesn't entail or imply that we have to get rid of all of it. Doing so cuts the anchors that keep us rooted in meaning and significance; it imbues life with the "unbearable lightness of being" that Milan Kundera wrote about: a ghostly weightlessness that renders life insignificant and pointless, like a fallen leaf in the wind; a situation we desperately seek to alleviate through addictive patterns of consumerist behaviour (this, in turn, may be a clue to why the liberal media seems to foment uprootedness).

Even in the European Project, national identity—as long as not driven to nationalist extremes—is what gives colour and life to Europe. Entities can only meaningfully contribute to a collective project when they bring something of their own—their particular character—to that project. So national identity is not only not antithetical to Europe, but in fact crucial to the success of the European Project. Europe is a rainbow only when each country brings its own colour to it. Otherwise, we would turn the glorious cultural richness of Europe into a drab, uniform, unremarkable and ultimately lifeless sea of grey. How dull. How undesirable.

I love Europe, with all my heart. Born a son of European emigrants in a far away tropical land, I never took it for granted. But what I love most about Europe is precisely its cultural diversity. Going from country to country, experiencing the various local traditions, festivals, values, foods, music, etc., is beyond enriching to me. I want Austria to remain Austria; Italy to remain Italy; Germany to remain Germany; Denmark and Portugal to remain Denmark and Portugal; and, above all, The Netherlands to remain The Netherlands. Otherwise, I would feel literally robbed of something very dear to me.

Although there are many things I don't like about my biology—such as my pale skin and big head—I delight in knowing that Iberian and Northern European colours flow through me, and are culturally reflected in my active presence in the world. Surely enough, out of all the national diversity that constitutes the European nations, we can still distill what is common to all of us Europeans. But as this commonality is the glue that binds the European Project together, so what distinguishes us from one another are its colours.

As long as not driven to nationalist extremes, cultural identity is no threat to anyone or anything. On the contrary: it is the lifeblood of civilised humanity; it's our anchor, our root, our life-giving context, our compass. To acknowledge and nurture our roots precisely reduces the threat we may pose to minorities and guests among us, for when a culture feels strong in its roots and traditions, it doesn't perceive other cultures in its midst as threatening.

Moreover, as a child of immigrants born in a distant land, I know one thing very well: immigrants hold on to, and nurture, their own cultural identity more than those who stay behind in their original countries (I can still fondly remember a cousin of mine sweating buckets while dressed in a full Scandinavian Santa Claus suit, in a 42-degree Celsius December 24th evening in Rio de Janeiro's tropical summer). So why shouldn't the host culture also hold on to, and nurture, its own cultural inheritance? Why should we drift away from our roots and references, into the sterile vacuum of no-identity, like a fallen leaf in the wind, just to see our insecurities increase as a result, to the point that we begin to regard our guests as threats?

Instead of thinking through the issues of identity in a rational, clear-headed way, both the left and the right now fall prey to Hallucinated Implications Creep and replace reality with straw-men. We give our worst prejudices free rein and not only marginalise, but also dehumanise one another. Our societies fill up with imagined ghosts and enemies, projections of our own hysteria onto other human beings just like us. And as a result, we forget the Golden Rule that holds the fabric of Western societies together. What a tragedy. What an immense existential risk.