The building blocks of identity

Author: Inna Iryskina,
Transgender program coordinator of Insight NGO

In lieu of an introduction

The concept of gender identity is unquestionably central to understanding the phenomenon of being transgender as such. At the same time, a great deal of ambiguity and fog still surrounds this concept, which gives rise to all kinds of speculation. 

Some insist that one’s inner sense of gender is an innate quality, predetermined and unchanging throughout life. Others, on the contrary, claim that it is formed exclusively through interaction with society and can later be transformed under its influence. 

Both positions rest on arguments of varying degrees of soundness. Yet none of these arguments is convincing enough to be accepted as a final account rather than merely a working hypothesis.

This text, for its part, does not claim to be final either – it is rather my attempt to generalize and organize my own thinking on the subject. And also, to some extent, to find a position in which the different points of view would logically fit together.

“Mine” and “alien”

At some point I became curious about what people actually feel when they say, “I feel like a man / a woman / something else”? I asked this question in several online communities, where it was answered mostly by transgender people, but also by a certain number of cisgender ones.

At first glance, the answers revealed no common pattern. Some viewed their gender and sex-related feelings solely through the prism of their actual or desired body or appearance. Others – through patterns of behavior and character traits. Still others – through the specifics of their interactions and relationships with other people. Some found no such feeling in themselves at all. On the other hand, that was precisely the main conclusion: different people put different content and different meanings into the concepts of “man” and “woman” – and, accordingly, into the concept of their own gender identity.

Eventually I began to wonder what identity is in general – no matter whether it is gender, national, religious, professional or any other kind. In effect, it is identifying oneself with a certain subset of people, with a social group, a sense of belonging to that group. You could say that it is the feeling that such a group is “mine.” Other groups in the same category will therefore be “alien.” Let me stress that “alien” here does not mean “enemies” or anything else bad. These are simply people with whom you feel far less in common.

So it turns out that identity is the basis of a certain “mine–alien” recognition system. From this angle, for example, “I feel like a woman” actually means: “I feel women to be mine, and men (as well as people of some other genders) to be alien.” Of course, since besides gender we have a whole host of other social characteristics, this recognition will work differently depending on the context. For instance, a man who is “alien” to a woman in terms of gender may at the same time be “mine” to her in the context of family, if he is her father, her son or, indeed, her husband. Thus, the multitude of different social contexts defines the diverse set of identities that forms the foundation of any given personality. That, however, is getting slightly ahead of ourselves.

To get a better grasp of identity and how it is formed, it is worth starting with the very concepts of “mine” and “alien.” These are characteristics with which, as if with markers, a person can label everything that enters their field of attention – both people and any objects, or particular properties, qualities and manifestations of them. Often this happens automatically, at a subconscious level. The essence of such labels is most easily described through a vector of movement: “mine” pulls you toward it, “alien” pushes you away.

When it comes to things external to the person, “mine” is what you want to keep closer to, to be in contact with more often, to own or to belong to. “Alien,” on the contrary, is what you want to keep away from, to avoid crossing paths with where possible, to get rid of. When it comes to the person’s own inner qualities, “mine” is what they mention most often when describing themselves, what they want to preserve, develop and multiply in themselves. Mentions of the “alien,” by contrast, they will avoid, and will try to reduce its manifestations to nothing.

It is, of course, more accurate to speak of this not as a binary opposition but as a spectrum with various gradations of “mine” and “alien.” At one pole of this spectrum is what evokes in a person an immediate, unconditional response: “this is mine,” “this is about me,” “this is me.” At the other is an equally unconditional response, but a negative one: “this is not about me,” “this is in no way me.” In the middle, at the zero point of reference, are the things that evoke no noticeable reaction at all. That is, a person may not mind such a quality being associated with them, yet is unlikely to mention it when describing themselves. In the same way, encountering such qualities in others will evoke no response in them.

At the same time, in the middle part of the spectrum it is often possible to say of certain X and Y that “X is more mine to me than Y.” Here, however, it is important to distinguish neutrality from an unformed position. The latter means that certain things have no clear position on the spectrum because they have not yet come into the person’s focus of attention. Once they do, the person will pass them through themselves and make sense of them – and their position could potentially turn out to be anything at all.

Here is a simple example to illustrate the points above. Most of us have favorite films that really resonated with us, that “clicked,” and that we are ready to rewatch again and again. That is close to the extreme position of the “mine” part of the spectrum. And there are films we watched and could only scoff at, or read the synopsis of and already felt no desire whatsoever to watch. That is the extreme “alien” position. If we watched something and nothing would really have changed had we not watched it, that is “neutral.” Finally, if we have heard a few opinions about a film but not enough to form our own, it is too early to speak of a position at all.

Let me note separately that “mine” and “alien” are determined solely by our subjective perception and have nothing to do with objective, measurable qualities. That is, we often label “mine” as “good” and “alien” as “bad” – because it is natural to want to associate oneself with the good and to be drawn to the good rather than to the bad. But when we start building some basis under this, one that would explain why it is precisely “objectively” good or bad, that is rather the mechanism psychology calls rationalization. In other words, it is an attempt to supply rational arguments for something we are already certain of even without any argument at all. That certainty rests on the foundation of how exactly our personal reference points for “mine” and “alien” came together. And any configuration of them poses no problem, as long as we do not start passing off our personal perception as objective and universal and expecting everyone else to share it. For example, expecting that everyone will like the same films we consider brilliant.

Another point, already implied, which I now want to emphasize. “Mine” and “alien” are not necessarily about the actual state of affairs – that is, about what a person currently owns or belongs to, or the qualities they possess. Often they are about what the person merely aspires to, what they are moving toward. Accordingly, the “alien” may also be something they have but want to get rid of. Applied to the film example: one may want to have the “mine” films in one’s collection so as to be able to watch them at any moment. And if it is, say, some rare festival picture, considerable effort may go into tracking it down. The “alien” ones, even if they end up in the collection through some coincidence, certainly will not stay there long.

For other people, however, as long as aspirations do not coincide with the facts, those aspirations may not be obvious enough for them to identify the “mine” and the “alien” in a given person symmetrically to the way that person does. But we will come back to this a little later.

Building an identity

The “mine” and the “alien” attached to individual objects or their properties can play the role of “bricks” out of which more complex structures are assembled. If a person discovers that a critical mass of bricks marked “mine” belongs to objects from a certain category, then quantity turns into quality, and that entire category becomes “mine” for them. Of course, in fact individual objects within it may also have other properties that are not “mine,” but from this angle these are usually ignored or perceived as insignificant.

Back to the film example: suppose our person once realized that what is “mine” to her often turns up in the science fiction genre. As a result, the genre itself became “mine” for her, and now she can say not merely that she likes such-and-such films, but that she is a fan of science fiction cinema specifically. Not every science fiction film she watches will necessarily resonate as “mine.” But it is in science fiction that she will primarily expect to find the “mine,” it is such films that she will notice first, read about, seek out and, of course, watch.

Now let us transfer this mechanism onto people and society. So a person discovers in some people certain qualities that they feel to be “mine” – ones they possess themselves, or ones they aspire to possess. In time they find that such qualities are often characteristic of a particular social group – and they then mark that entire group as “mine.” Or, as we call it, they identify with it.

We can rarely recall the initial moment of identification itself, since it usually happens subconsciously and we become aware of it only after the fact. After the fact we may also explain it to ourselves in one way or another, but such explanations are often that same rationalization.

Ultimately, the last “brick of the mine” that triggered the mechanism of identification may not in itself be anything substantial. Its role is merely to bring the mass up to critical, whereas the core of that mass may consist of entirely different bricks. Some of which, in turn, may be not very conscious, hard to put into words, or even disapproved of by internal censorship. And the reasons why they were once marked “mine” may be nothing like the arguments a person comes up with many years later. Yet even if those reasons cease to be relevant, this will not automatically change the identity. Because once it has taken shape, it is already a whole entity that exists in its own right.

Given this, it is in fact very easy to arrive at the idea that identity is innate: if the origin of something is unclear and non-obvious, and that “something” is not easy to change, then maybe it has actually always been that way? As for individual “mine” and “alien” labels, they certainly may be, if not directly innate, then formed under the influence of neurological and psychological features that are genetically conditioned. However, on the path from those features to the final social identities there are far too many steps and influencing factors to speak with the same confidence about the latter being conditioned as well.

Once self-identification has occurred, at least two parties take part in what follows. For if a person has recognized a particular social group as “mine,” they count on reciprocity – they want society to likewise recognize them as belonging to that group. And above all, they want the group itself to recognize this and to accept them. Here, however, obstacles may arise.

• As already mentioned, a person may see as “mine” not so much the qualities they possess as those they merely aspire to possess.
• The set of “bricks” by which a person defined a group as “mine” may not match the set that the group itself considers definitive of its identity.
• The larger a group, the more heterogeneous it is. And accordingly its various subgroups, like different strata of society in general, may have different ideas about the set of “mine” qualities by which belonging to the group is determined.

Again, let me explain this using the example of the person who loves science fiction films. Having realized this, she wants to join a community of fellow fans, and finds a suitable science fiction film club. And here one possible turn of events is this: she learns that by that club’s standards she has seen rather little, and that she first needs to watch a whole list of classics before she is accepted as one of their own. A second option: she names the films that impressed her, and hears in reply, “But that’s fantasy, you’re in the wrong place, we’re more about science fiction.” A third option: one club turns her away, but she finds another one whose reference list of films matches her own tastes far better, and she joins that one.

So defining your identity is only half the job. The other half is having it recognized by society.

And here I finally want to return to what this text was written for in the first place – namely, gender identity.

Let us now look more closely at the process of its formation and recognition.

Gender cloudlets

Our entire society is saturated with gender, perhaps as with nothing else. The gendering of a child often begins even before birth, according to the sex it has been assigned. So by the time a child develops any self-awareness at all, gender “bricks” already surround them on all sides. Some of these will probably be labeled “mine” and “alien” before the child is even capable of grasping it.

In the past there was a popular theory of upbringing which held that whatever gender a child is raised in is the gender they will adopt for themselves. But it has long been clear that this view is greatly oversimplified. The gender attitudes instilled directly through upbringing make up only a fraction of all those a child absorbs from their environment and from society at large.

It is worth noting here that the sets of such attitudes about the “feminine” and the “masculine,” despite more or less shared general notions, can differ greatly in their details across different strata of society and even across different families.

For clarity, imagine two large tag clouds: one gathering everything that has ever, anywhere been labeled “feminine,” and the other everything labeled “masculine.” It will inevitably turn out that the clouds overlap – a certain number of tags will be present in both.

In real life, however, a person never deals with the whole of these large clouds. Instead, each specific context contains only a subset, a small cloud of tags drawn from the general sets of the “masculine” and the “feminine.” A particular person, in turn, ends up with their own cloudlets, usually formed on the basis of the contexts they have encountered in their life experience. These considerations bring us back to where this text began: that different people, defining themselves as a “woman” or a “man,” may mean very different things by it.

So a child, guided by what draws them in and what, conversely, repels them, unconsciously labels various things and qualities as “mine” and “alien.” This happens under the influence of a host of factors – from their innate features to those they absorb, as already mentioned, from the surrounding social environment.

In particular, at their disposal are the cloudlets from the large tag clouds of the “feminine” and the “masculine” that have taken shape in their immediate surroundings. Some of these are more explicit – when the child is told directly: “Do this, don’t do that, because you’re a girl/boy.” Some are less explicit – when the child sees how other girls and boys behave, whether real people or fictional characters, and tries it on. Some are situational – when in specific circumstances someone emphasizes certain masculine or feminine qualities, and again the child can measure them against themselves. And some form “by contrast” – when, because of some conflict, it is not the direct message that is absorbed but its opposite. All such things, even when not consciously processed, find their place in consciousness and in the subconscious. At a certain moment their sum produces a critical mass that is both “mine” and “feminine” or “masculine” (or neither). Which is, in effect, gender identity.

Let me note that this scheme is the same for cisgender and transgender identities. At the risk of repeating myself: being transgender may follow from it not because “a boy was raised as a girl” or vice versa. Rather, precisely because the indirect routes by which the “mine–alien” distinction forms – the ones that leave a deep imprint, bypassing consciousness – can have a stronger effect than direct instructions. All the more so when it comes to things connected with the body and appearance – because it is in this area that the overlap between the general gender tag clouds is smallest, while the overlap between different individual cloudlets of the same gender is, at the same time, largest. After all, it is by outward signs that we usually first recognize a person as a man or a woman. That is why it is harder to remain in a neutral position with regard to them, one that could more or less fit both the “feminine” and the “masculine”; more often, consciously or not, a line has to be drawn between the “mine” and the “alien.”

I want to emphasize here two aspects that seem to me very important. Not least because they often drop out of discussions about recognizing the gender identity of transgender people – probably precisely because their importance within the concept of identity as such is not sufficiently understood.

• At the moment when a critical mass of bricks marked “mine” comes together into an identity, the change that occurs is not merely quantitative but qualitative. That is, as long as those bricks exist separately, various scenarios of how and into what they will assemble are potentially possible. But once a whole identity exists, you cannot simply take it apart back into bricks. It is not that it is necessarily formed once and for all. But usually, once a person’s notions of “mine” and “alien” are clearly outlined, reformatting them is possible only in the event of a radical change of worldview or severe life upheavals. Attempts at persuasion along the lines of “come on, what kind of man/woman would you make?” or “you’re doing just fine as you are, why change anything?” produce no result. Think about how much you enjoy it when things that matter to you are called into question and devalued. In that situation, do you listen to the other person, or do you tell them exactly where to go? Well, quite.
• An identity, as a qualitatively new entity, also generates new needs that go beyond the needs associated with individual bricks marked “mine.” Above all, as I have already noted, these are the needs for recognition and acceptance by one’s social environment in accordance with that identity. This is exactly why the arguments of some (as a rule, trans-exclusionary) feminists do not work – arguments like: “Why don’t they just wear dresses and makeup if they want to, while remaining men?” The main difference between men who dress in conventionally women’s clothing – crossdressers – and transgender women is not that the former, unlike the latter, do not undergo medical interventions to change their sex characteristics. It lies precisely in identity: in everyday life the former continue to define themselves as men and to refer to themselves by a male name and in masculine grammatical forms. For the latter, it is important to present themselves as women under any circumstances and to receive reciprocity in this from those around them; the absence of it causes considerable discomfort.

In this context I want to return to the obstacles already mentioned that a person may encounter on the way to having their identity recognized.

Say there is a trans girl who says exactly that: “I feel like a girl.” Until she has begun her transition, what is “mine” to her – a certain appearance and body configuration – is more what she aspires to than what she already has. So instead of recognition of her identity, she risks getting all sorts of comments from various people into whose tag cloudlets of the “masculine” and the “feminine” she does not fit. Comments like: “If you’re a girl, then I’m the Paton Bridge,” “you’re just a f****t, go kill yourself,” “go see a psychiatrist and have your brain fixed,” “transition first, then we’ll see.” Which is hardly going to add to her psychological comfort and self-confidence.

Further, if she does transition, she may still find that her gender-specific “mine” does not coincide with that of the group she treats as her reference point. For example, if she ends up in a community of “real transsexual women,” where it is held that as a girl you absolutely must have surgery to construct female genitalia, otherwise you don’t count. Whereas our protagonist herself feels no need for such surgery: on her “mine–alien” spectrum, genitals occupy a rather neutral position.

This situation creates a conflict that can be resolved in different ways. If in the girl’s eyes this community is not an unquestionable authority, she may look for another one that better matches her own notion of the “mine.” To do that, of course, she has to know, or at least suspect, that such communities exist. Alternatively, she may accept the community’s position that she does after all need surgery in order to become a “real woman.”

In general, the tendency here is that a person searching for “their own kind” wants to share as many bricks marked “mine” with them as possible. So when there is a choice, they will go to the group where that is the case. If the choice is limited – and all the more so if there is also social pressure nudging them toward a particular option – they may give up their own position and accept the group’s terms in order to be accepted after all.

This, again, applies not only to trans women but equally to cisgender ones. When they agree to play certain women’s roles that are alien to them in a patriarchal society, because the alternative is to end up on its margins, branded a “wrong” woman. So in a society where gender standards are not rigidly imposed, both trans and cis people have more room to express their identity in the full diversity of its “bricks.”

Expanding the boundaries

Let me dwell separately on a pattern that could be called “identification by contrast.” It is possible in cases where a person’s bricks marked “alien” have formed more explicitly and distinctly than those marked “mine,” and the “mine” does not accumulate enough critical mass for the person to link it to one group or another. Then the person tries to determine their group rather by a process of elimination.

Say a person perceives themselves as “not X,” that is, group X is alien to them. If, besides X, there are many other groups, they may circle around them for a long time trying to settle on their own. But if there are two main groups, X and Y, then “I am not X” automatically pushes them toward the conclusion “it seems I am Y.” Thus, in a binary gender system, “I am not a woman” entails “I am a man.”

Perhaps over time such a person will indeed find plenty of “Y bricks” in themselves, and then their self-identification as Y will in the end differ little from what it would have been had they arrived at it directly. If those bricks turn out to be insufficient, however, they may – especially under pressure to finally make up their mind – try to “draw in” the missing ones. That is, to count as “mine” those that actually feel rather “neutral.” It is quite possible that some of them will in time become “mine” after all – but possibly not. In that latter case the person will be torn by contradictions: they will doubt their identity and waver between defining themselves as X or as Y. Neither will be accepted definitively, unless events of great significance occur in their life that change their basic notions of “mine” and “alien.”

In my view, this pattern accounts for a share of the cases of “detransition.” Above all, those in which a person to whom many of the things a patriarchal environment considers “mine” for a woman feel alien concludes: “All right, I’m probably not a woman – so I must be a man.” But in the end the masculine also turns out not to be very “mine,” and the person returns to a female identity.

If this involves rethinking what counts as “mine” and “alien” in terms of gender, then it is not so much a detransition as another transition. After all, the person does not return to the very same point from which they set out.

Another, less obvious way such a situation can develop is when a person decides that they are neither X nor Y but, apparently, some Z that is missing from the generally accepted classification altogether. And then they construct their identity as Z on their own, and sometimes a corresponding “virtual” group as well. This may not be construction from scratch but the use of images from fairy tales and literature – such as elves or vampires. Or it may be the creation of something entirely their own.

The most interesting thing happens when “Z people” with more or less similar sets of the “mine” meet and get the chance to compare their perceptions. Their virtual group thereby becomes real, and can then expand as others who recognize their own kind in them start joining. Before long such a group will need a place in the classification on a par with X and Y, or a revision of that classification altogether.

In fact, this is exactly what happened with people of non-binary gender identities. Once they were isolated one-offs; now, when the conversation turns to gender and being transgender, failing to mention their existence is simply impossible and incorrect.

The category of non-binarity, in turn, contains various subsets of identities and specific expressions, among which people who do not perceive themselves as women but do not feel like men either now find it far easier to find their own “mine.”

There is another topic I consider important to mention here. In recent years there has been more and more discussion of correlations between being transgender and being autistic. A growing number of studies point to their existence, to the fact that there are several times more autistic people among transgender people than in the population on average (and likewise more transgender people among autistic people), and this cannot be explained by mere coincidence. How does this relate to identity?

As already mentioned, the formation of the “bricks” of the “mine” and the “alien” is influenced by society. That influence depends on how a person perceives society in general and their own social environment, and on how they interact with it. Obviously, in a person who is asocial or has difficulties with socialization these processes unfold differently than in a prosocial one. In such people – among whom we can count people on the autistic spectrum and people with a schizoid personality type (the two often overlap) – first, mastering social interaction skills is difficult. Second, their life motivations are in principle less social in character: they are less often connected with social relationships, with taking up a particular place in society or achieving something within it. All this means, in particular, that such people absorb society’s gender standards and stereotypes far less, and are guided by them far less in their lives and activities.

Accordingly, autistic and schizoid people form their own notions of the “feminine” and the “masculine,” which may differ substantially from the widespread ones. And in assembling gender “bricks” together, they may do so along more varied paths and arrive at results that more often fall outside the statistical norm. Which means, among other things, more frequent cases of being transgender. And in those expressions of it, including non-binary ones, that less often fit the traditional model of “true transsexuality.”

And to my mind, if researchers looked more closely at people with mental differences and neurodivergence specifically in a gender context, and without demoting their traits to the level of “disorders,” they could learn a great deal that is new about the phenomenon of gender identity in general.

As I approach the end, I want to address a question that has probably already occurred to some readers. Throughout this text it has been stressed more than once that identity is formed largely at a subconscious level. So does that mean a person cannot simply go and consciously choose it?

In fact, they can.

What is more: an element of choice is in any case present at least in how exactly a person presents their identity to the world and embodies it. That is why, looking at it from the outside, we cannot always tell where the line between the “conscious” and the “unconscious” actually runs.

Subconscious processes are those that unfold on their own, automatically, and most people simply take them “as is.” Yet a person is perfectly capable of forcing them along or going against them, and of choosing for themselves, for one reason or another, the set of bricks marked “mine” out of which they consider it appropriate to assemble their identity.

Of course, this choice is in no case made “out of thin air.” There are certain reasons and arguments behind it. The difference is that whereas earlier I was writing about rationalization – pulling arguments in to fit a choice that has in fact already been made – here, on the contrary, the argument really does correspond to what determines that choice.

Political convictions, in particular, can be such a determinant. For example, when a person chooses which nationality or country they want to identify with, taking into account the sociopolitical situation and their own attitude toward it. There are known cases of women consciously choosing a lesbian identity for themselves. In the same way, a queer or genderqueer identity very often has a political foundation as well. It emerges as a challenge that a person deliberately throws at dominant cisheteronormativity. And does the fact that they arrived at it not by an intuitive, “natural” route but by reflecting on social processes and their place in them make their identity any less real? My answer: no.

And one last remark, no less important for being last.

“Can choose” somehow turns, for many people, into “must choose.”

Can choose a nationality – must choose the titular one. Can choose a sexual orientation – must choose the heterosexual one. Can choose a gender identity – must choose the cisgender one. But a conscious choice is conscious precisely because it is made by the person themselves and not by someone else on their behalf. Not by those who say: “You just need to be normal,” or “There is only biological sex,” or “You’re not true anyway,” or “People like you only reinforce gender stereotypes.” In saying this they are effectively saying: make the choice that will be more correct, more comfortable for us. Perhaps even “objectively good” from their point of view. But, as I have already noted, there is no objectivity here at all. There is subjectivity instead – and the agency of the person making the choice.

So, once again: a person can consciously choose an identity, and not according to anyone else’s notions, wishes, instructions and so on. They choose it themselves – whether or not anyone likes it.

In lieu of conclusions

What is set out in this text does not claim to be a full-fledged scientific theory. It is rather a hypothesis, open to further testing and research. In my view, on the one hand it strips the concept of gender identity of its somewhat mystical aura by taking it apart into “bricks.” On the other hand, this approach also makes it possible to avoid devaluing the concept into something secondary that can be disregarded.

And as I said at the beginning, the set of our identities is an essential part of our personality as such. That is why respect for a person is impossible without respect for their identities. Let us always remember this when we interact with people in all their diversity.