Imagine you wake up one morning to a notification that your identity has been stolen. Hours later, you scroll through social media and pass a post about identity politics. At lunch, you have a deep and intimate conversation with a friend about his ongoing identity crisis. And at dinner, you attempt to facilitate a discussion with your kids about their identity in Christ. In each case, identity means something different. At times, the difference is a matter of nuance. At others, the linguistic referent belongs to another category entirely.
In day-to-day life, these differences are manageable and largely intuitive. You know that someone can steal your identity without impacting who you are in Christ or the political category into which you fit. And while your identity’s theft may be a crisis, it’s not an identity crisis. We know all this intuitively, because we are fluent in the language of identity. But when we step outside the day-to-day, and especially when we engage with those who diverge from our vision of good and right forms of self-identification, the matter becomes significantly more complicated.
In Understanding Transgender Identities: Four Views, five authors, all identifying as Christians, engage in respectful, mostly irenic dialog about transgender identities and how they relate to Christians and Christianity. The book is a window into the many areas of dissent among believers and nonbelievers alike regarding identity, gender, sex, and sexuality. It is well worth your time.
While most of the authors’ differences make it onto the table, it seemed to me that the issue of unsynchronized definitions never became fully conscious. There are instances in which one author presents an argument about identity with identity-definition-A in mind, and another responds thinking of identity-definition-B. This dynamic doesn’t derail the book entirely, but when it does crop up, it seems to me that the contributors talk past each other, quite in spite of themselves. What this means is the authors not only disagree about what your identity is; they diverge on the question of what identity is in the first place. This is instructive for us, because we will never agree on the former until we align on the latter.
I would argue there are at least three distinct definitions of identity at work in Understanding Transgender Identities, and they are a subset of the larger collection of options on offer in our current cultural moment. Not all of these concepts conflict, but most are sufficiently dissimilar to suggest the risk of misunderstanding is high, and the need for clarification is great. Before we dig into how the definitions operative in this book impact the authors’ discussion, it will benefit us to lay out what seem to be the most frequent options to which participants in these conversations make reference.
Here are five definitions of identity I suggest are in use today:
As illustrated above, terms such as “identity theft” and “student ID” capture the notion that each of us is a unit within a larger infrastructure of institutions, systems, and processes. My social security number and credit card tell banks, merchants, and the government who I am with respect to certain transactions I make with each. If someone steals one of these forms of “ID,” they can impersonate me in certain contexts. Moreover, my employer recognizes me as an employee and ascribes to me an employee ID, a job title, a place in the corporate hierarchy, and so on. These convey explicit recognition of the validity of my identity with respect to these institutions and the systems in which they are networked (I am a citizen, a customer, an employee, etc.), and they illustrate the more transactional side of our Social-Transactional referent.
But we also use the term, identity, to refer to a more social, less formal set of social-transactional relations. Each of us negotiates a place, a set of shared experiences, norms, and practices, and even a distinctive vocabulary with the individuals and groups with whom we “do life.” We are a particular “somebody” in these contexts, whether or not and to whatever extent this role matches the inner thoughts, desires, emotions, and otherwise typical forms of expression that we generally think of as our personality or “inner self.” For instance, among family, I am, “Alexander”; among most friends, I’m, “Alex”; among former coworkers, I was, “A.T.”; during a church internship, I was, “Therm”; and to my wife, I am, “My love.”
Each of these designations taps into the fact that I am or have been a member of a different social unit. Each name summarizes who I am to each person or group, the role I play, the place where I belong, and so on. And each identification requires the give-and-take of both sides of the social transaction—whether two sides of a dyad or the individual and the group. The individual must inhabit the identification, and the other or others must recognize the identity as valid (imagine if I considered myself married but my wife did not!). In any case, we also refer to this coalescence of individual participation and collective recognition as an individual’s identity. It is more social than transactional, but it is nonetheless both. We might codify these referents as a Social-Transactional understanding of Identity (Note: I’m distinguishing this from social identity, which fits in the next category).
“Self and identity theories converge in asserting that self and identity are mental constructs, that is, something represented in memory” (Handbook on Self and Identity, 75). For the academic psychologist, an identity is generally something like the in-the-moment operative sense of who one is that drives behavior. Your sense of who you are will vary somewhat from situation to situation, because it is context-sensitive (Handbook on Self and Identity, 93). We’re not talking about a full-fledged identity crisis because you’ve shifted from the office for work to the in-laws’ for dinner. Rather, consider how much of an outsider you might feel yourself to be at your in-laws’ house versus how integrated and crucially important you may feel from 9-5. Moreover, consider how different your behavior may be from your professional context to your familial.
Your in-the-moment sense of self, or identity, contributes to these alterations such that your behavior is likely to follow the contours of your in-the-moment, operative identity. Nevertheless, this identity is also stable and consistent, seemingly because one does not reshuffle one’s psychological deck with each new situation and because new situations tend not to be so new as to have no continuity with events gone by. The greater the discontinuity, the greater the potential impact to one’s sense of self.1
This conception of identity aims to be an empirical observation of someone’s psychological functioning. Under this rubric, psychologists see people as possessing multiple identities: self-identity, social identity, gender identity, etc. Much more could be (and has been!) said of this, but this gloss is sufficient to guide us in our assessment of the book and should clue us in to what some of our print and online interlocutors mean when they speak and write about identity. We might abbreviate this as a Psychological conception of Identity.
This is the preeminent definition of identity in our culture today. It is the notion of the real you, buried deep within, which no one but you can directly access, which only you can know. It is necessarily pre-cultural, pre-perceptual, and psychologically primordial, because it is understood to be who you are apart from the influence of others. In line with this, it is often experienced as a discovery, as we will see below with Dr. Sabia-Tanis. This conception of identity does not necessarily involve or correspond to any empirically observable facts about a person. Indeed, an individual’s identity—conceived of as an authentic inner self—may exist in conflict with such facts.
However, that inner self is considered to be truer, more real, more binding on how one should live than empirical data to the contrary (See here, here, and here). Because this is cast in terms of authentic/inauthentic, true/false, real/fake, this conception of identity is restricted to only those traits, characteristics, proclivities, etc. that originate in or constitute this authentic self. Anything else is not the real you. Consequently, it seems fitting to characterize this as a kind of psychological essentialism2, and we may dub this an Interior Essentialist conception of Identity. It’s important to note two crucial differences between this and the Psychological notion of Identity described above:
First, where an academic psychologist would regard an individual’s identity as something constructed and, therefore, necessarily distinct from the facts of who one is, an Interior Essentialist reckoning considers this sense of self to be identical with the most fundamental and defining fact there is to know about a person. Indeed, it may be more accurate to construe this notion of identity as your self rather than your sense of self.
Second, while an academic psychologist recognizes that one’s (psychologically conceived) identity guides behavior, that guidance is not considered ethically authoritative, only personally motivating. The authentic inner self, on the other hand, is clearly an ethical north star. If one does not express it, one is not being true to oneself. It is a betrayal; it is often experienced as living a lie. You can see an apologetic attempt to reposition this authentic inner self as a mental construct built from sociocultural contributions stored in memory in many of Tim Keller’s talks on the subject.
This essentializing of the human interior leads to the notion of Identity as Self-Designation. I’m including this as a subset of the Interior Essentialist position rather than as a separate option, because this is more an adjacent concept than another definition of identity. It seems, however, to be an unavoidable consequence of our culture’s current way of conceiving of and discussing identity, and it is sufficiently prominent in identity-related discussions that it merits separate treatment. When we say people “self-identify” as x, y, or z, we are referring not to the fact that such self-designations place them in some Social-Transactional category, but to the speaker’s agentic selection of identification. We seem to largely regard such self-designations as unassailable, almost sacred. I suspect this is because, by and large, we regard this more as an act of disclosure than of affiliation.
We see its connection to an Interior Essentialist conception of identity when, for example, individuals identify as transgender. We take people to mean they are informing us not merely of a selection they have made with regard to gender pronouns (or whatever other category) but also a discovery they have made within themselves and a revelation they are making to those around them. However, we also consider it the individual’s prerogative to determine what designations others are permitted to use. This selection expresses the individual’s agency, sovereign choice, and—perhaps—infallible insight into self, and is, therefore, unquestionable. Nevertheless, there are exceptions.
We may still speak of “self-styled” philosophers, artists, public intellectuals, and the like. Individuals take to themselves titles by which they wish to be recognized, sometimes in spite of the lack of fit. The emphasis can sometimes land on affiliation rather than disclosure, though the two at this stage appear inseparable. For example, to identify as transgender is not merely to say something about yourself as an individual, but to connect yourself to a collective—the so-called transgender community. In any case, this self-identification communicates one’s self-perception, one’s selected affiliations, and/or one’s aspirational future on the one hand and how one wishes to be recognized by those around them on the other. We can summarize this as a Self-Designation conception of Identity.
This constitutes what I would suggest is the premier popular Christian definition of identity, and it serves as the foundation of many if not most Christian critiques of and alternatives to other definitions of identity (Exemplified here and here). Identity is here understood to correspond to an individual’s metaphysical being on the one hand and one’s soteriological state on the other. Ontologically, humans are humans at a metaphysical level, because God has so made them. Humans cannot cease to be humans, because their essential humanness cannot be removed. Certain qualities or attributes fall under this heading, such as maleness and femaleness, bearing God’s image, and the various layers that make up what we might think of as “human nature.” Soteriologically, Christians typically include one’s being in Adam or in Christ (and all the entailments thereof) in their notion of what constitutes a person’s identity, though, as noted, this shifts from mere ontology to soteriology. Consequently, we may think of this as an Onto-soteriological notion of Identity.
This is the idea that, say, “Mark’s identity is everything that makes Mark, Mark.” Though this necessarily includes everything listed in the Social-Transactional, Onto-soteriological, and even Psychological categories above, it is far broader. For instance, Mark’s brown hair and freckles do not identify him to Amazon when he purchases his bottle of Just for Men® to ensure his graying hair stays brown. Yet, Mark’s hair—indeed, his every hair—is part of who he is: it is part of what it means for God to know him (e.g., Luke 12:7). Moreover, it’s distinct from the Onto-soteriological conception of Identity, because some who advocate for that view explicitly deny that anything other than ontology and soteriology constitute a person’s identity (e.g., here, p5-6). You might think of this as “who you are as known by an omniscient 3rd party” (for Christians, God). Such an identity is a comprehensive composite of all that is true of a person. We can summarize this as an Epistemic Composite definition of Identity (Discussion of this conception vis a vis others available here).
The interactions among each of these categories are rich and, indeed, they constitute much of the substance of daily life. However, we must make only two final points before we return to our book.
First, I hope it’s clear I’m not trying to suggest an individual possesses all these “identities.” Rather, I’m attempting to describe our linguistic behavior. We are liable to refer to each of these as a person’s identity. And this variety of referents adds complexity to already-addled conversations.
Second, and related to the first, not all of these definitions are mutually exclusive. Indeed, an Epistemic Composite conception of identity can include all the other categories one is willing to recognize as valid. And we need not pit an Onto-soteriological understanding of identity against the idea that a person has an identity in the Psychological sense or refrain from referring to one’s social security number as one’s identity. Quite the contrary, so long as we take the time to explain ourselves and understand each other, we can achieve conceptual alignment rather than lose each other in translation. We may not agree at the end of the conversation, but at least it won’t be the result of (preventable) misunderstanding.
Getting back to our book, how do the various authors use the terminology in question, and how does the schema I outlined above help us interpret each? To make my process transparent, I’ll note that I’m basing my analysis on instances in which the authors either explicitly define a term or else the context makes their meaning clear. Each author uses identity and gender identity in more than just the pages I cite, but their meaning is not always defined. Generally, I assume consistency: what an author indicates she means in one case is usually what she means when she does not provide a definition.
To begin, it is entirely unsurprising that Drs. Mark Yarhouse and Julia Sadusky, both Christian psychologists, use identity in the Psychological sense of the term. They write, “Gender identity conveys one’s psychological and emotional experience of oneself as male or female or another gender identity other than male/female and may at times be related to how masculine or feminine a person feels” (102, 105, 109).3
Dr. Megan DeFranza, an academic researcher, largely follows suit (153, 154, 177), though she sometimes appears to straddle the line between Psychological and Interior Essentialist4 conceptions (176-7), and I believe she at least once uses it in a somewhat Onto-soteriological sense and once in an Epistemic Composite sense (175 & 177).5
Dr. Owen Strachan, a seminary professor, uses identity in ways that align with our Onto-soteriological category (132-2, 180, 226). For instance, on page 180 he writes, “Our identity cannot be separated from our body...we may not feel as though we are a man or a woman, but if we base our conception of our identity on our feelings, we are left in theological and existential chaos” (emph. orig.). And on p 81 and elsewhere, he equates identity with “nature” (as in, fallen sinful nature or our new redeemed nature in Christ). Note his distinction between “identity” on the one hand, and “conception of…identity” and “feel as though”/”feelings” on the other. His use of identity refers to who one is regardless of one’s sense of self (Psychological conception) and leaves no room for an Interior Essentialist conception of identity or a variety of authoritative Self-Designations.
Finally, Dr. Justin Sabia-Tanis, also a seminary professor and a transsexual male (I.e., a biological female who has undergone medical transition to present as male. See p243 for this definition), uses identity and identity-adjacent language primarily in ways that align with or come very close to our Interior Essentialist and Self-Designation categories (exceptions here: 191-2, 193).6 Responding on page 96 to Strachan’s statement that “transgender people are confused…” Sabia-Tanis writes, “I would argue that it is not confusion but our certainty that our identity does not match aspects of our physical bodies that is challenging” (emph. orig.) And on page 207, we read that “those who identify outside the gender binary…simply seek to be respected for who they are, as they are.” In this case, “who they are” is what I’m considering identity-adjacent language. Sabia-Tanis clearly falls out with Strachan’s Onto-soteriological conception of identity, but also moves beyond Psychological Identity to an Interior Essentialist view. Who a person is consists in who one is on the inside. It’s not merely that one feels or experiences oneself to be this or that; it’s that one’s self-experience provides direct access to truth: the truth about who one actually is. It’s important to note Sabia-Tanis also experiences “[b]eing transgender” as “God’s calling.” Thus, for Sabia-Tanis, “discovery” of one’s gender identity—at least, in some cases—means coming into contact not only with one’s self but with God (204).
Finally, in keeping with a Self-Designation understanding of identity, others are asked to share the person’s self-perception and treat the person accordingly, because “that is who they are” (emph. mine). This is clearest on p. 222 where Sabia-Tanis asserts, “Medical treatments that affirm [transgender persons’] identity and support their well-being are ethical and necessary” (222). Because Sabia-Tanis and Strachan have a different notion of what a person’s identity is, their arguments rebound rather than land. For Strachan, one’s self-experience is distinct from one’s identity. For Sabia-Tanis, who one experiences oneself to be is one’s identity.
We see a similar dynamic between Strachan and DeFranza. For example, DeFranza describes individuals “who are not strictly male or female in body or gender identity” (152). In response, Strachan writes that “our identity cannot be separated from our body…if we base our conception of our identity on our feelings, we are left in theological and existential chaos”(180). Note again, that for Strachan, a person’s identity is what it is, regardless of “feelings” or “conception of…identity.” For Strachan, identity is here Onto-soteriologically conceived. For DeFranza, it is Psychologically conceived. They are not talking about the same thing. Consequently, they make different allowances for what can be labeled an identity. In fact, Strachan and DeFranza both agree that one’s “conception of [one’s] identity” might not be “strictly male or female.” Strachan just thinks this is a state of “existential chaos.” And he thinks an attempt to reconstruct Christian doctrine to affirm such conceptions of identity is “theological…chaos.”
A potentially more fruitful conversation would have been 1) engagement with DeFranza’s reasons for thinking it is accurate to regard individuals with intersex conditions as “not strictly male or female in body,” (Strahan states his position on p 70-1 but doesn’t engage DeFranza’s argument) and 2) engagement with DeFranza’s reasons for thinking it is accurate and beneficial to describe some individuals’ (psychologically conceived) gender identity as “not strictly male or female.” Instead, these authors use the same terminology in the same volume to refer to different concepts and different phenomena and, I would suggest, miss each other a bit here. And they do this in spite of the fact that the book itself supplies a glossary of terms—a glossary that includes gender identity (241, aligns with our Psychological conception above).
Perhaps the most explicit example of this dynamic is on page 158 where DeFranza engages with the Nashville Statement, a conservative Christian document attempting to outline a biblical view of sex, gender, and sexuality drafted by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood of whom Strachan is a former president. She writes, “it is unclear why the authors [of the Nashville Statement] avoid the term ‘gender identity’ and replace it with the cumbersome ‘self-conception as male or female’”(158). This unclarity is precisely what I’m addressing in this article.
Employing the categories I proposed above, I would suggest the logic of the Nashville Statement’s terminology goes something like this: First, for the drafters of the Statement, identity is nearly always an ontological or Onto-soteriological category, not a psychological category as it is for DeFranza. Second, for these authors, biological sex implies (or, perhaps, determines) gender. Thus, a biological male is gender-male, and a biological female is gender-female. Full stop. Therefore, were the authors of the Nashville Statement to use the term, gender identity, they would almost certainly mean something like, “Who you are as an ontological male or female.” Therefore, they need a different set of terms to refer to what is for them the very different referent of “self-conception,” which means something very close to what DeFranza means by identity. Thus, “self-conception as male or female” is roughly synonymous to her gender identity, but it is necessary, rather than redundant, because of what the authors mean by both gender and identity. A more complete understanding of each other’s terminology would provide the clarity DeFranza finds lacking.
All this transpires in a book that exists precisely for the purpose of facilitating dialog across the various camps debating how Christians should interpret and engage with non-traditional gender identity experiences and designations. And while I would suggest the book is largely a success, the instances I’ve cited highlight the need for definitional clarity. Simply put, I cannot blame my neighbor for being unpersuaded by my misunderstanding. And if these authors can take such missteps, how much more the rest of us?
What is the way forward? I am a person of no account in this arena. But if what I’ve articulated above is at all accurate, then it should also be to some extent suggestive. We begin by recognizing the conversation we’re having is not about one discrete thing; it’s about a nexus of issues converging on the individual’s experience of him or herself and unfolding in a sense of how a person ought to live, how society ought to be structured, and how those two domains intersect. Identity, in other words, is an ethical tool. This is true under almost all the rubrics I delineated above. Identity is our modern paradigm for accessing a sense of meaning, for navigating choices mundane and exigent, for organizing and operationalizing all the information we have collected into some composite of knowledge of self and situation, for mediating a sense of connection to or distance from other people, and more—much more (see here, esp. p3-107). And it serves these purposes best when it is well-networked among the various linguistic referents above: who am I as a social-transactional agent; as a created being; as a person capable of self-disclosure, self-knowledge, and—to some extent—self-modification; as a composite of all that is true of…me? And what do I do with the answers to those questions? Whether people recognize it or not, this, ultimately, is the set of questions they are asking; it is the collective inquiry into which all their identity-related questions climax. The question of who one is functions as “a ‘meta-question’: it’s a big question that ties together many smaller questions.” As a result, we may have one or another conceptualization of identity in mind when we use the term, but we almost invariably touch on issues beyond the scope of our stated or intended definition.
The discussion of gender identity is paradigmatic of this. It involves questions of a person’s sense of self, how individuals ought to conduct themselves in light of that sense of self, and how society ought to be structured in relation to each individual’s sense of self as in some way gendered. It zooms in on what occurs when sense of self trumps virtually all other considerations in both society and an individual’s way of making sense of bodies, minds, interpersonal relations, and more. And it illustrates what can play out when one facet of a person’s sense of self becomes so central, so crucial, that individuals are sometimes willing to lose family and friends and to spend tens of thousands of dollars on irreversible surgeries and sometimes life-long medical regiments to more fully become what they feel they already are. To confine our considerations of such a phenomenon to only psychology or only ontology or only self-referential authenticity or to any of the other conceptualizations I listed above is too limiting. It leaves too much unaddressed. And I suspect the way forward begins with recognizing that when we sit down to a discussion of identity, there is a lot on the table, and not everyone is commenting on the same dish. Stepping back to see the whole allows us to address the parts.
1. The literature on psychological trauma bears this out. It is difficult to say it better than Judith Herman in her landmark, Trauma and Recovery, esp. p. 52-56.
2. I feel I have heard this term used elsewhere, but I cannot find it. I do not want to suggest it is original to me.
3. Though, see p 123 for a more social-transactional and self-designational use where “adopting a cross-gender identity” is a management strategy one lives out in a social context. It’s difficult to reconcile gender identity as one’s experience of oneself with [cross-]gender identity as something one adopts unless a different sense of the term is in view.
4. See 176-177 where language of “authentic self” and “live authentically” occurs alongside “speak the truth about their sense of self.”
5. See p 175 where she mentions believers’ “identity in Christ” in a way that does not seem to primarily denote their sense of self, and p 177 where she refers to a person’s biological sex (or, at least, the collective of secondary sex characteristics alterable by surgery) as one’s “sex identity.”
6. See p 191-2 and 193 where Sabia-Tanis refers to believers’ “Christian identities” in ways that sound like a Psychological conception of identity. A Christian identity, in these contexts, is something believers may develop over time.