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Identity II: who identifies what?

  • Posted on September 13, 2015 at 3:02 pm

Just as I was about to get deeply philosophical and go through my list from last blog from the beginning, up popped a reminder about gender identity; legal gender identity. Ashley Reed set up a petition to the UK Parliament: ‘Allow transgender people to self-define their legal gender’. Within a few days the signatories numbered over 30,000, so a response was required. The Ministry of Justice posted their statement at 1 am on a Saturday morning. I hope it meant ‘please could you post our agreed statement before you go home, don’t worry about the overtime’, rather than: ‘could you do the usual before you go to bed?’. If 100,000 people sign before 22 January 2016, the petition goes on the list for possible debate.

Please do read the government response, because several phrases are very telling, revealing significant misunderstanding of what it is to be transgender. Obtaining legal recognition of one’s gender is, for example, ‘entirely a personal decision’ (like it does’t matter to have a correct legal status); gender is ‘acquired’ (like everyone chooses a lifestyle); ‘non-binary gender is not recognised in UK law’ (like it does not exist); and whilst there are ‘important legal and social consequences’ in one’s legal gender’, for non-binary people’s absence of a legal gender identity: ‘We are not aware that that results in any specific detriment’. It isn’t just out of touch, it is ignorant.

Our UK Ministry of Justice is exhibiting real lack of justice towards everyone who does not conform to a highly restrictive and fallacious definition of gender. The distress caused to intersex, transsexual, non-binary and any other non-conforming person is highly significant. It causes untold social harm, violence, mental illness, and suicide. It perpetuates a culture of false normality that has no basis in how things really are. The sole reason for having to assign a lifetime legal binary gender status to everyone, is so that discrimination can be made, so that people can be treated, not appropriately, but differently by definition.

The river

Which does bring me back to where I was. Things are things and are separable, by naming them, by giving them status. The more we break things down, the more we break them up. The less we break things down, the greater the integrity. Think. A river is an entity. It is a rivulet, or a stream, or a torrent, or an estuary. It is an inlet or an outlet, it is a place of safety and or of danger. It is also water, rocks, banks, weed, an ecosystem. It is minerals, hydrogen, oxygen, carbohydrates, it is flow, it is swirl, ripple, wave and wash. It is atoms, molecules and bonds, it is subatomic particles, it is quantum interaction, it is 100 per cent complex electromagnetic energy. We see it, hear it, smell it, are washed away by it. It is a river. And all those itemised aspects? They are nouns, not adjectives. Where does any one begin and another end? And yet we distinguish by naming, by giving identities to aspects that are, essentially, indivisible.

Are the identifications in the lists important? Of course. To the sailor, estuary and safety matter. To the environmental scientist the waterborne contents matter. To the hiker the size and flow are important. To the painter, the light matters. But the breakdown labels do not contain the river or constrain it. If I were to say that as a sailor, ‘clear blue water’ was irrelevant, and that ‘tidal / non-tidal’ was the only label that mattered, and that every river, entering open water or not, had to be legally registered that way, you would say it was OK in a nautical legal register, but that as an identity it was only one of many.

Identification has value to the identifier, but it doesn’t change the nature of anything. It separates out the relevance to one kind of observer, but it does not divide the world in itself. Identification is a convenience only. For a fish, a whirlpool in the river has no boundary; it is not a thing but a place where the indivisible river tends to move in a different pattern of flow. Naming the whirlpool does not make it extractable, even though there is value in describing the observation. Does the whirlpool have an identity? Only when it matters to an observer; otherwise no. When is the river a stream? Only when it matters; and language confers the meaning. We are tangled in semantics as quickly as in river-weed. Your meaning and mine may not be the same; the sailor, the walker, the environmental scientist, the fish, do not have to agree, but none has the right to say the others are wrong. What would the river say?

Legal status

This is a science teacher. You are a migrant. She is a refugee. One person, but labels that convey three significances and confer rigid opinions. That person and I are two equally real, indistinguishably human, beings.

Being human is not a legal status.

Being a refugee is.

Being a woman is.

Being of non-binary gender is not.

Who creates a legal status and why? Legal status is a form of identity that exerts authority of one human being over another. Two equally real, indistinguishably human, beings. One has the right to confer identity and give legal status, the other may not identify themselves. The first grants rights and privileges under their own authority, and in a democracy we assume this authority to be beneficial to society as a whole. In terms of behaviours this makes sense. A ‘harbour’ or ‘estuary’ on a chart means you won’t ground your ship and endanger others. Granting asylum is a good thing in a way that welcoming unrestrained economic migration may not. In all cases a judgement about distinguishing one thing from another is made. But when it comes to society, the better and more useful distinctions are around doing rather than being. You are a builder, please fix my house. You are a horticulturist, I want to check before you install my new shower. More importantly, you are a registered surgeon, you are a qualified electrician, you are an articled lawyer. These have a status that is important, because if you are not a registered surgeon, I do not want you near me with a knife! I cannot be a surgeon because in my heart of hearts I simply know that I am one. Being a surgeon is actually a doing thing, a practise.

I am human, not by someone’s authority but because it is what I am. There is a wide range of characteristics to accept this self-knowledge, but not just one. And tracing my ancestry will finally lead back to a parent whose human label you will begin to question more precisely. But there will not be just one thing by which you would grant a posthumous birth certificate as human, or not. Thankfully we don’t have to make these decisions.

I am a woman, not by someone’s authority but because it is what I am. There is a wide range of characteristics to accept this self-knowledge, but not just one. I have been granted a birth certificate that states I was born a girl, not because I am a woman, but because in my society there is a legal difference between a female human being and male one. They are not treated equally. To be myself, I do not need to belong to one or either camp, but I do not want to be called something I am not. I look at men who are clearly men and know I am not one of those. I look at women who are clearly women and I do not feel this. I look at ambiguous people and it simply does not matter how they self-identify.

A friend, or several, of mine is neither male nor female. Perhaps through ambiguous physiology, perhaps because of a complete lack of sense of gender-belonging as male or female. They are every bit themselves as I am myself, but my society says that they cannot be neither. Their own identity, though equally human, is not what they are allowed to be. Legally it is obligatory to confer one thing or another onto them, otherwise they cannot be treated in a sufficiently discriminatory way – for the good of society, as our Ministry of Justice would have it.

A whirlpool turns, but you cannot define its boundary other than very approximately; it is part of the river.

Male? Female? Neither? You cannot define the boundaries other than approximately; we are all human.

So identities of any kind are made in order to create controlled communication. Don’t sail here, don’t swim there, grant this kind privileges, give those something different. Fair enough if it’s about behaviour (tidal, danger, qualifications, criminal), but not if it’s about being.

I am not a woman by permission or certification.

Miscarriage of justice

  • Posted on May 20, 2012 at 9:42 am

If you read much of what I write here you may be getting fed up with my love of metaphor. I think in pictures, because they make more at-a-glance sense. But they do of course only show one aspect of a truth, and if I tell a story about a house I don’t expect to have to work out where the loo is and what it means! So don’t stretch it too far …

Some time last year I began thinking about this as a concept for a poem. I did eventually write one, but I think I want to revisit it a lot more before I let it go. It has a depth of feeling that is difficult to convey in any other way, and yesterday I was reminded of it.

A young man was released yesterday, after his conviction for murder was quashed in the courts. People believed in him, fought in places he could not, and despite previous refusal to appeal, today he is back home for the first time in eight years. It makes me think: what was I doing, where was I, how old were my kids, eight years ago. Scary.

There may not be thousands of these cases each year, but there are too many, and every one a tragedy. As usual, it was a mixture of police incompetence, processes not being followed, disadvantage feeding opinion. And my thoughts last year were about the courtroom, the trial and the intense, exclusive loneliness of being an innocent defendant. Place yourself there now, set the scene (ever done jury service? It helps.) and feel yourself in it. There is a prosecution that has just one task, to do their best to prove that you are guilty. They are being paid very handsomely to do so, on the premise that if the defence cannot succeed, you must be guilty. Yes, it’s the ducking stool again in some ways.

There is your defence. These are people, equally well paid, who do not act out of any belief or knowledge in who you are, in what you are, or in what you may or may not have done. These too are mechanics of the court, dealing only with what they have been given, using it to best advantage to demonstrate at least a lack of convincing evidence against you.

Convince and convict. Persuade, overcome, vanquish. It is a battle, and you yourself are not even a combatant. You are already a prisoner. You get your say, but a lot of the time it is felt the professionals can say it better and more safely than you. And what you do say allows for no trips and stumbles, and when you have said it, it is just another piece of evidence with equal weight to every other utterance in the court. Imagine them, as the trial proceeds, as strips of paper being scattered over the floor. Some are partially true. Some are ambiguous. Many are irrelevant and a few are misleading, almost to the point of perjury. And there are spaces waiting for pieces that will never arrive.

You, as an innocent defendant, are the only person in that court who knows that your little, few, strips of paper are the truth. Everyone else may doubt to some degree, and all must balance your presentation of truth against everything else that has been said. Even the imputations and accusations, the seeds of doubt, the persuasive argument against you: they carry equal weight in this court.

You are the only person who has nothing to decide. What intense loneliness. We can only try to imagine what it must be like then, to be an innocent person, convicted, sentenced and incarcerated.

My truth

We do, of course, also know that many people in court have decided they are innocent because it wasn’t their fault, and they are there through neglect of responsibility, not doing the right thing, and becoming involved where they should not. There are those genuinely deluded about their actions. Each of these has an idea of their truth too, and it may quite rightly not be that of a court of law. That is not what I am painting a picture of. I am just trying to place you in the mind of a truly innocent person whose life is changed forever and irrevocably because even though they possess the truth, there is no way they can donate that knowledge to any other person. The truth is subservient to opinion, informed well or otherwise.

Each of us has our idea of the truth. It is our truth, and it is not out there somewhere. It is what keeps us safe and sane, and it is our foundation for living honestly. It is the security on which we can direct and change our actions, habits and preferences, and it is where we can release our other prisoners, those things we would like to be part of the truth, but cannot in honesty hang onto.

The context in which I first explored this feeling of being the only one in the world who knows the truth (and may come to doubt it because for everyone else it is just a discussion so maybe I am wrong after all), was of course me. In a sense I feel that I have undergone a miscarriage of justice, in which I too have been complicit, for 55 years (or as an articulate participant, for at least 50 years). And now I feel my conviction has been quashed.

Somewhere today a young man is trying to understand what it means to celebrate after eight years in prison. I expect he has very mixed feelings, with an open door, with people around him accusing him of nothing, with no preconceptions, and perhaps most of all, knowing he is no longer ‘not one of them’, the innocent among the guilty, who all presume he also is one of them. As he steps back out into the world, seeks employment, somewhere to live his own life, he will forever encounter people who think he must have done something wrong. He is an ex-con, quashed, released, or not. No smoke without fire, not ‘innocent’ just the lucky recipient of an unsafe conviction.

This week, I received another statement of unsafe conviction: my passport, marked ‘Sex: F’

It arrived a day after an unfortunate conversation, in which I was being told I was just a man underneath (they’re women’s clothes, you understand), and that for my own safety I should behave differently. I didn’t inquire as to whether this meant I should dress up as a man, in disguise, or that I should cross my legs rather than use the ladies’ loos, or whether I should go armed with a pepper spray, a rape alarm, and stick close to my Royal Marines colleagues. The threat? Supposedly, since I was playing in a band alongside children who all had ‘normal᾿ parents, I may be subject to transphobia. And for the sake of my own safety, I had better pretend that I am not a woman. Well, I stated my truth to these folk, I played a very enjoyable concert, the kids were brilliant, I helped all through the reception and interval at the raffle table. And no-one seemed to even notice me. OK, I did look rather lovely anyway – at least that’s what other people said to me!

The parallel? My miscarriage of justice is over, the assignment of ‘male’ is formally considered unsafe, and I am no longer wrongly assumed to be ‘one of them’. But everywhere there will be someone who remembers where I used to be in prison, who remembers that people are there for a reason, and who will not wish to be associated with me lest it damage their social status or sense of self. After all, I might be harmful. And it only takes one of them to call me a (potential, of course) pervert to another person, and they feel safe while actually placing me in danger. They are saying ‘I am afraid of what you are, so you had better carry a pepper spray’.

My truth? I don’t want it to be compared with all those little bits of evidence people might use to ‘balance’ what I say about my gender. It is my truth. But only I know it.

My door is open, I have people around me who helped me get out of jail. But it can still be very lonely.