Religion is a Mental Illness

A Biologist Explains Why Sex Is Binary

In an effort to confuse the issue, gender ideologues cite rare ambiguous ‘intersex’ cases.

realityslaststand.com

The transgender movement has left many intelligent Americans confused about sex. Asked to define the word “woman” during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings last year, Ketanji Brown Jackson demurred, saying “I’m not a biologist.” I am a biologist, and I’m here to help.

Are sex categories in humans empirically real, immutable and binary, or are they mere “social constructs”? The question has public-policy implications related to sex-based legal protections and medicine, including whether males should be allowed in female sports, prisons and other spaces that have historically been segregated by sex for reasons of fairness and safety.

Chase Strangio of the American Civil Liberties Union frequently claims that the binary concept of sex is a recent invention “exclusively for the purposes of excluding trans people from legal protections.” Scottish politician Maggie Chapman asserted in December that her rejection of the “binary and immutable” nature of sex was her motivation for pursuing “comprehensive gender recognition for nonbinary people in Scotland.” (“Nonbinary” people are those who “identify” as neither male nor female.)

When biologists claim that sex is binary, we mean something straightforward: There are only two sexes. This is true throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. An organism’s sex is defined by the type of gamete (sperm or ova) it has the function of producing. Males have the function of producing sperm, or small gametes; females, ova, or large ones. Because there is no third gamete type, there are only two sexes. Sex is binary.

Intersex people, whose genitalia appear ambiguous or mixed, don’t undermine the sex binary. Many gender ideologues, however, falsely claim the existence of intersex conditions renders the categories “male” and “female” arbitrary and meaningless. In “Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex” (1998), the historian of science Alice Dreger writes: “Hermaphroditism causes a great deal of confusion, more than one might at first appreciate, because—as we will see again and again—the discovery of a ‘hermaphroditic’ body raises doubts not just about the particular body in question, but about all bodies. The questioned body forces us to ask what exactly it is—if anything—that makes the rest of us unquestionable.”

In reality, the existence of borderline cases no more raises questions about everyone else’s sex than the existence of dawn and dusk casts doubt on day and night. For the vast majority of people, their sex is obvious. And our society isn’t experiencing a sudden dramatic surge in people born with ambiguous genitalia. We are experiencing a surge in people who are unambiguously one sex claiming to “identify” as the opposite sex or as something other than male or female.

Gender ideology seeks to portray sex as so incomprehensibly complex and multivariable that our traditional practice of classifying people as simply either male or female is grossly outdated and should be abandoned for a revolutionary concept of “gender identity.” This entails that males wouldn’t be barred from female sports, women’s prisons or any other space previously segregated according to our supposedly antiquated notions of “biological sex,” so long as they “identify” as female.

But “intersex” and “transgender” mean entirely different things. Intersex people have rare developmental conditions that result in apparent sex ambiguity. Most transgender people aren’t sexually ambiguous at all but merely “identify” as something other than their biological sex.

Once you’re conscious of this distinction, you will begin to notice gender ideologues attempting to steer discussions away from whether men who identify as women should be allowed to compete in female sports toward prominent intersex athletes like South African runner Caster Semenya. Why? Because so long as they’ve got you on your heels making difficult judgment calls on a slew of complex intersex conditions, they’ve succeeded in drawing your attention away from easy calls on unquestionably male athletes like 2022 NCAA Division I women’s swimming and diving champion Lia Thomas. They shift the focus to intersex to distract from transgender.

Acknowledging the existence of rare difficult cases doesn’t weaken the position or arguments against allowing males in female sports, prisons, restrooms and other female-only spaces. In fact, it’s a much stronger approach because it makes a crucial distinction that the ideologues are at pains to obscure.

Crafting policy to exclude males who identify as women, or “trans women,” from female sports, prisons and other female-only spaces isn’t complicated. Trans women are unambiguously male, so the chances that a doctor incorrectly recorded their sex at birth is zero. Any “transgender policy” designed to protect female spaces need only specify that participants must have been recorded (or “assigned,” in the current jargon) female at birth.

Crafting effective intersex policies is more complicated, but the problem of intersex athletes in female sports is less pressing than that of males in female sports, and there seem to be no current concerns arising from intersex people using female spaces. It should be up to individual organizations to decide which criteria or cut-offs should be used to keep female spaces safe and, in the context of sports, safe and fair. It is imperative, however, that such policies be rooted in properties of bodies, not “identity.” Identity alone is irrelevant to issues of fairness and safety.

Ideologues are wrong to insist that the biology of sex is so complex as to defy all categorization. They’re also wrong to represent the sex binary in an overly simplistic way. The biology of sex isn’t quite as simple as common sense, but common sense will get you a long way in understanding it.

"We are amazing BECAUSE we are queer."

"Being queer is what defines you."

Gender Identity Isn't Real

The Secret Beliefs of the Transgender Movement

cutdowntree.substack.com|Steven A Richards

Shortly before I decided to detransition, I had a conversation with a trans friend about the Gender Unicorn. I was frustrated by it. I said, it doesn't make any sense! It doesn't actually represent what being trans is about at all! In some ways, the ideas it represents run completely counter to the actual goals of the trans movement!

My friend's response was that it didn't matter; it was better than the binary concept of gender believed by mainstream society. The Gender Unicorn didn't have to make sense, it just had to be simple and easy to spread. It's not an accurate representation of the ideology behind the transgender rights movement because it was never meant to be.

It's a recruiting tool.

The Lies of Gender Ideology

According to the Gender Unicorn, everyone has a gender identity: an internal gender separate from their sex. Like sex, it can be male or female. It can also be things other than male or female. In fact, there’s no limit to what a gender can be! Some people are “non-binary”, meaning their gender identity is neither male nor female. Gender identity doesn’t correspond to anything physical in the body or brain. It can’t be observed from the outside, but is known to the person experiencing it. A person can know their gender identity at any age, and can never be wrong about it—except when they are. Gender identity has no bearing on a person's personality, behavior, or mannerisms—except when it does.

When one’s gender identity doesn’t match one’s biological sex, this causes a condition known as gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria has no cure, but nevertheless should be treated via gender transition. Gender transition involves interfering with a trans person’s endocrine system to cause them to develop secondary sex characteristics of the opposite sex and surgery to remove or alter unwanted sex characteristics. This is called medical transition. Medical transition changes a person’s sex, not their gender—except that it doesn’t change their sex, because one’s sex is determined by their gender identity. A male whose gender identity is female actually has a female body, and his—sorry, “her”—penis is a female sex organ. Despite this, “she” may want to get surgery to make “her” penis into a non-functional caricature of a vagina. Such an act should be celebrated.

Just as important as medical transition is social transition. When someone tells you they’re trans, you need to affirm them. You need to allow them to access facilities and opportunities intended for the opposite sex. You need to treat them, in every circumstance, as if they are the opposite sex—even when it comes to sex and medical treatment. You need to call them by whatever name they choose. You need to use their preferred pronouns. Most importantly, you need to believe. You need to look at someone who’s obviously male and believe, deep down in your heart, that he’s actually a woman.

If you don't understand this ideology—if you think it's absurd and incoherent—that's because it makes no sense. But the thing is, it doesn't have to. It’s a lie. Some trans rights activists—often new recruits—believe it whole-heartedly. Others sort of believe it, or have developed complicated justifications to make it make sense (maybe they weren’t born trans, but became trans due to being “socialized as the wrong gender”). Some recognize its absurdity, but see it as useful for bringing more people into the movement. A few don’t like it at all. But all of them benefit from it.

The seeming contradictions of gender ideology make perfect sense when you understand how they serve the interests of the movement.

For example, consider gender expression. Gender expression encompasses both your behavior and the clothes you wear. It's completely disconnected from your gender identity—except when it's not. Sometimes, being a guy who wears dresses or a girl with short hair says nothing about your gender identity. Other times it's indicative of repressed knowledge of your gender identity. The purpose of this seeming contradiction is to bring people into the movement and keep them in it. If you're a "cis person" who doesn't meet the stereotypes of your gender, well, you're probably trans. But if you're a trans person who doesn't meet the stereotypes of your chosen gender—say, a female "trans man" who likes dresses and flowers, or a male "trans woman" who loves video games—then that doesn't suggest anything at all about your gender identity. The rules are inconsistently applied to serve specific purposes.

Likewise, every trans person knows their gender identity, and this cannot be questioned. "Trans kids know who they are" is a popular rallying cry among proponents of childhood social transition. However, sometimes trans kids don't know who they are. Sometimes, they think they're "cis". If a male child thinks he’s a boy, he should question his gender, because he might actually be a girl. If a male child thinks he’s a girl, though, that belief can’t be challenged under any circumstances.

Social transition is the most insidious trick of all. It weaponizes your empathy to force you to act according to the beliefs of the trans movement and tries to guilt-trip you into adopting those beliefs. If you don’t go along with someone’s transition without question, you’re a transphobe. You’re doing harm to them. This expectation can easily establish a stranglehold over a community, and then force compliance by threatening expulsion for anyone who doesn’t act properly and adopt the right beliefs. And once you’ve taken on one belief which obviously doesn’t reflect reality—say, “trans women are women”—it becomes much easier to push you into believing even more extreme falsehoods.

So, if gender identity is fake, what are the real beliefs foundational to the trans movement? Where did they come from? What do members of the movement talk about behind closed doors?

Tumblr Leftism

When I was a teenage transsexual, I considered myself a radical feminist. Not a TERF; us radical feminist transsexuals didn't think TERFs were true radical feminists like we were. After all, a feminist fights for all women. TERFs only fought for cis women. They weren't real feminists; they were bigots hiding behind the cloak of radical feminism to spew their hate.

So, what did radical feminism mean to me? I hadn't actually read any works by radical feminist thinkers, only excerpts from writings by feminists like Andrea Dworkin, Judith Butler, and Julie Bindel, which were posted without context on Tumblr by other trans-inclusive radical feminists. Some of those feminists were trans themselves; some were not. They were the thought leaders. They constructed an ideology collaboratively, using social media as their medium. Not all of them agreed with each other, but a spiderweb of mutual follows connected them, and what one wrote on any one day would influence what a dozen others wrote the next day. When I was fifteen years old, I adopted a kaleidoscopic, schizophrenic ideology patched together from hundreds of individual posts talking about feminism, disability, gender identity, queerness, race, capitalism, and leftism. I didn't have the context for any of it, and neither did any of the other teenage kids on Tumblr at the time–of which there were many. I knew a few of them well. I called the police to one's house during a suicide attempt. We took this stuff in and internalized it. We believed it.

An interesting point of this belief system is social constructionism. Social constructionism suggests that gender is made up: a tool used by the patriarchy to oppress women and control men. If it weren’t for the patriarchy, all divisions between men and women would disappear. We would all be equal. Radical transsexuals will admit, to trusted cult members, that they believe gender is socially constructed. They'll admit that they weren't born trans, but chose to become trans.

So… why would anyone choose to transition? Why do individual trans people care so much about receiving treatment, and why do members of the movement spend so much time facilitating the transition of others? When a trans person questions the narrative, or wants to gain a deeper understanding, what do they discover?

Metaphysics of Marginalization

Medical transition is ritual purification.

The world painted by Tumblr's radical queer, feminist, transsexual theorists was one that has since become familiar to many people. You might know it as Wokeism, DEI, Successor Ideology, or Critical Theory. It has many tenets, but to massively oversimplify, it applies a pseudo-Marxist analysis to pretty much every social issue: men oppress women, whites oppress People of Color, the abled oppress the disabled, and so on. Through the magic of Intersectionality, these class antagonisms coalesce into one great struggle: the oppression of the Marginalized by White Supremacist Capitalist Cis-Hetero-Patriarchy (the Enemy). The world is wicked, and it is that way because it was made wicked by the Enemy.

One has to understand the nature of the world’s evil before one can repair it. The first step in obtaining that knowledge is realizing that our bodies are not us, but things which we're trapped inside of. We're not humans; we're ghosts haunting rotting corpses. To stop the Enemy, trans people need to make us all understand that our true selves don’t exist in our corrupted material forms. This is what gender identity actually means: We are not our bodies.

Virtuous souls have been unjustly trapped in profane flesh. The most virtuous are those who suffer most from their embodiment: women, “queer” people, the disabled, those lower in the hierarchy of the racial caste system described by critical race theorists like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi. These are the Marginalized. The Marginalized are the chosen people. They are chosen because they suffer. If you aren’t Marginalized, you can become Marginalized by deciding to transition. If you’re already Marginalized, you can become even more virtuous through transition, because Marginalized identities stack. A Woman of Color is more virtuous than a white woman, and a Trans Woman of Color is more virtuous yet. Trans actually carries more weight than some other forms of Marginalization; a woman transitioning to become a trans “man” or a gay person becoming a “straight” trans person are increasing their net Marginalization despite giving up Marginalized identities.

If those who are born Black or disabled are the chosen, trans people are the converts who have voluntarily accepted Marginalization. They choose to suffer more from their involuntary embodiment. Because of this, they become virtuous. They are saved.

To the trans movement, every transitioner increases the amount of virtue in the world and represents a blow struck against the Enemy. They’re another soul rescued from the clutches of evil. Not every member of the movement understands this on an intellectual level, but they know in their gut it’s all in service of the greater good and that convincing as many people as possible to transition is a moral imperative. If that means grooming teens online, then they'll groom teens online. If that means encouraging people to indulge in destructive fetishes, they'll encourage people to indulge in destructive fetishes. If that means indoctrinating kids in school while lying to their parents, they’ll do that. If that means convincing gay people they're heterosexuals trapped in the wrong body, they'll do that too. If that means prescribing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and performing surgery…

The world created by the Enemy is irredeemably wicked. For trans people to simply integrate into society would be to surrender to the Enemy. White Supremacist Capitalist Cis-Hetero-Patriarchy can’t be bargained with or reformed. It can only be destroyed: torn down utterly, uprooted and burned, and replaced with Feminist Anti-Racist Fully-Automated Luxury Communism.

The dream of the trans movement is of a world where no one has to do anything they don't want, where no one is forced to work, where everyone can indulge their every desire without fear or shame, where all distinctions between people have been abolished and we're all completely equal. In a word: Utopia.

If human biology gets in the way of that, then human biology must be fixed. If human nature gets in the way of that, then human nature must be fixed. Until Utopia is achieved, the movement hasn't done its work. If you stand in the way of Utopia, then you've got to be fixed as well, by any means necessary.

They need you to believe that the world is wicked and must be destroyed. They need you to believe that we're floating spirits trapped in dead flesh. They need you to believe that the fundamental facts of reality can be changed, if only we believe hard enough and are willing to do what must be done.

They need you to believe that trans women are women.

Labels: The Good, the Bad and the Downright Ugly - Areo

Ada Akpala and Kai Whiting on labels and their role in language, stereotyping, race, racism, white privilege.

areomagazine.com

Few things are as multifaceted or complex as personal identity. Yet, numerous social media posts and newspaper articles seem to suggest that we can somehow capture our unique individuality in one or two words, using broad labels such as black, white, gay, male and so on. But how could one word ever accurately depict a person’s culture, history, life experiences, physical characteristics, values and beliefs—not to mention a variety of other factors? Will two men have nearly identical experiences just because they happen to be men? To what extent can any label—or even a whole set of labels—help us to accurately understand the world inside someone else’s head and capture our own sense of self and the nature of our emotions, ideas and intentions?

Humans have been naming, labelling and categorising ever since we could paint cave walls. In the Abrahamic scriptures, Adam is asked to label every kind of animal that God introduces him to. Labels often help to simplify matters, making it easier for members of the same group to seek each other out for activities such as collective worship, marriage and friendship. But they can also cause us to judge others as if they were one-dimensional representatives of their group characteristics, rather than individuals in their own right, and this can impoverish our human experience and damage our sense of connection.

Consider the label privileged, which is often applied to western people with pale complexions on account of their lack of melanin. It is a fallacy to assume that racial privilege always trumps all other factors that impact a person’s life—even if we make provisions for those factors using the concept of intersectionality. In any case, labels do little to alter pre-existing attitudes. As researcher Erin Cooley found when she conducted a survey on attitudes towards poverty, when liberals read about white privilege, “it didn’t significantly change how they empathised with a poor black person—but it did significantly bump down their sympathy for a poor white person.” The counterargument to this is that, while white privilege does not guarantee the absence of struggle, it guarantees the absence of race-based struggle. But even this is not always true, since white people are not immune from being excluded or discriminated against on account of their racial identity.

The placement of whiteness at the apex of a hierarchy of privileges is paradoxical. What about white people in countries such as Latvia? Is it reasonable to assume that Latvian culture reflects American or British culture when it comes to notions linked to identity? Might it be that the language used by Americans to describe themselves is drawn from a specific context and a history that does not readily form part of the Latvian understanding of the world? Where do Romanians fit in? How many of them see themselves primarily as white in the same way some Americans might? The danger of assuming, stripping away, downplaying or even overemphasising a specific identity marker is that we might ignore the plethora of other potentially more important markers. We then might overlook the associated privileges that someone can be born into, such as a stable family life, a prosperous nation, high social class and access to wealth, an agreeable geographical location and English as a native language. All these elements affect a person’s outlook and opportunities.

Labels played a key role in shaping the dystopian realities of the twentieth century. The Holocaust, apartheid, Jim Crow laws and Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians from Uganda all relied on the use of language to both unite and empower the tyrants and to stigmatise and exclude their victims. The weaponisation of language was an enabling factor in the genocidal Parsley Massacre of 1937, which resulted in the racially motivated murder of 12,000 Haitians living in the Dominican Republic. When the Dominican military could not rely on the colour of the person’s skin to ascertain whether they were Haitian, they made them say the Spanish word for parsley (which Haitians pronounce without a rolled R). Failure to pronounce the word perejil in the right way meant death.

So, to what extent has the West learned from such atrocities, which led to the criminalisation and ostracization of entire populations? And how well do we understand the role of language in fostering or undermining social cohesion?

Most people seem to agree that words matter. In recent years, there has been no shortage of celebrities, politicians and even members of the public apologising for using “inappropriate” language or making “inappropriate” remarks. Most reasonable people take great care as to how they address others—avoiding derogatory words because they genuinely do not enjoy upsetting people, not solely because they wish to avoid public backlash or professional repercussions. The challenge in navigating the public square, particularly on social media, is that certain colloquialisms or linguistic trends that were popular just a few years ago, have since been deemed so offensive that they should never be used, regardless of context.

At the same time, newspaper editors and journalists seem unconcerned about offending specific groups, so long as it is seen as punching-up. The Glastonbury Festival was chastised for being “too white.” After England’s women’s football team defeated Norway 8–0, much ado was made about the lack of non-white players on the field and on the bench. The team’s performance was of secondary concern, as was sport’s meritocratic selection process, which differentiates based on ability and not on immutable characteristics—at least not since the days of South African apartheid, when who could represent that country was determined on the basis of skin colour. Yet in 2022, while the English public was celebrating the team’s accomplishment, the BBC was so taken aback by the players’ white faces that they questioned whether a “fix” was required. White is no longer a descriptive label, denoting one’s melanin levels; it has been transformed into a political and moral issue. Yet, the GB women’s relay team that broke a national record at the Tokyo Olympics was entirely black—and no one seemed to deem this lack of diversity unacceptable. When did it become acceptable to report that an all-black team exists because of effort, skill and hard work, whereas an all-white team can only exist because of privilege, inequity and the exclusion of ethnic minorities?

Labels are not inherently bad or unimportant. The fact that you are white (pale-skinned) matters on a hot summer day. Likewise, it matters if someone offers to bake you a cake and you happen to be diabetic. If you are invited to a barbecue, you should let the hosts know if you are a vegan. Our preferences, needs and ways of life can all be revealed by labels—and that’s great. However, we must also remember that life is often more nuanced than this.

During an interview for 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace asked Morgan Freeman how to end racism. Freeman responded, “I will no longer refer to you as a white man and I will request that you stop referring to me as a black man.” Freeman wasn’t renouncing his heritage or ignoring the ethnicity of the man opposite him; rather, he was highlighting the ways in which labels can create a problem that would go away if we changed how we relate and refer to one another.

Identity should not be exclusive. One’s love for one’s native country, for example, should not preclude immigrants from loving that country too. The existence of one person’s privilege does not imply that another person lacks privileges of their own.

The heptapod language featured in Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film Arrival depicts the past, present and future as cyclic, fluid and simultaneous. In the film, their language enables the aliens to transcend time. This is a fantasy—but it is not so far-fetched to believe that human language, if used appropriately, could help us transcend the limitations of labelling and categories. With a bit of effort and care, it could also assist us in getting rid of the zero-sum mentality that some labels have come to imply. Our relationship with language must evolve, and, as we learn to use language as a tool to foster connections, we can effectively de-tribalise our culture and de-weaponise our speech.

GIF by gullagulla-deactivated20240917

And to top it off, basically 80 percent of japanese customs, traditions, and food, came from other countries. Japanese is an integration of different cultures, like america. Japan takes influences from places like korea, china, russia, and europe. If japan stuck to itself, there would be no tempura, japanese tea, tea ceremonies, kabuki, japanese bread, japanese curry, j- pop, anime, cars, or modern fishing techniques.

When you tell people they can only experience things ‘meant for their race’, it totally smacks of segregation to me and I can’t stand it. As someone who (obviously) loves Japan, I say let people learn about it, let people experience it, let people appreciate it. You don’t have to know every single thing about a culture to enjoy it.

What my acting class taught me about identity

Opinion

fairforall.substack.com|Gabriel Brown

In January 2018, I was sitting in a poorly ventilated room, in a building just off of Kensington High Street in London. In the circle of chairs around me were my new classmates—students who, like me, had come across the Atlantic from various cities and schools to study theatre. There were twenty-five of us in that room, and our head acting coach was about to completely change my perspective on identity.

She was in her early sixties and had a tall and commanding presence, with a warmth and quick wit that reminded me of my mother. Leaning into her chair, she began the lesson. “Let’s go around the circle,” she said. “Describe who you are in three words.”

It was still our first week abroad, so this did not seem unusual. A “get-to-know-you” exercise, we figured.

“Dancer, creative, outgoing” the first student offered.

Another from Boston answered, “Lesbian, Jewish, smoker.”

When it got to me, I said “Kind, sister, enthusiastic.”

Once we had all responded, our coach pointed to the Bostonian. “Lesbian, Jewish, smoker?”

The Bostonian softly nodded.

“No,” our coach said. “You can’t be any of those things. You can’t.”

The playful vibe in the room dissipated. Some students prepared to pounce. One girl audibly scoffed. Others’ eyes widened, unsure if they had heard right.

Our coach calmly adjusted in her seat, unfazed by our reaction.

“Imagine I get called into an audition for a new film,” she said. “My agency sends over a description of the role I’m being called in for, and let’s say it’s for the role of ‘the mother.’”

We all sat transfixed, wondering where this was going.

“Mother,” she repeated. “That word describes my role, but it says nothing. ‘Mother’ doesn’t tell me anything about the character. It provides no help to me, as an actor, for how to play ‘the mother.’”

The Bostonian cocked her head, not quite understanding what our coach was digging at. But at that moment I felt something in my head begin to shift.

“How many different ways can you play ‘mother’?” our coach continued.

“Is she soft?” She asked, as she slid down into her seat as though she was melting. Her chest caved in, her shoulders rose to her ears, and her head jutted out as if to listen to what I began to imagine was a pushy and demanding son.

“Is she needy? Si-si-si-simpering?” She then rocked and rubbed her hands obsessively, her lip quivering and eyes bulging.

I felt another gear in my head shifting slowly.

“Or,” she continued, her spine elongating, rolling slowly through each vertebrae, her elbows tucked in and hands clasped, giving us a long, piercing glare, “is she cold and cruel?”

The room was still.

Our coach righted herself, sitting up in her seat again.

“You cannot be ‘lesbian,’ ‘Jewish,’ or ‘smoker,’” she said. “What kind of a ‘smoker’ are you? Who are you?”

In the minute that followed, we watched as she physicalized eight distinct ways of holding an imaginary cigarette. As she fluctuated from form to form I saw characters come to life—a stressed and cross housewife at 3:00 a.m. waiting for her husband to come home from a one-night-stand; a nervous and unsure fifteen year old surrounded by peers pressuring her to smoke at a party; a paranoid and twitchy user who finds a sickening and green relief in every drag; an overworked but easy-going grocery clerk on her fifteen-minute break, scrolling through texts on her phone; a graceful heiress, pretend-struggling to light her cigarette and flirtatiously thanking an older gentleman for his assistance…

I have never seen an actor as clear, articulate, and spontaneous as she was in that moment.

“There is no one way to be a lesbian,” she explained. “There is no one way to be Jewish. There is no one way to be a smoker. Those are all what you are. Give me a description that you can play. Who. Are. You?”

With that, the gears in my head began to grind. I could feel my perspective widening. Playing someone—being someone—is not about what you are. What was I in that moment? A student, a daughter, an actor, an Australian-American, a volunteer… None of those things said anything about me—about who I was. They didn’t capture how my silly side comes out when I’m with my brothers versus my friends, or the fire I spit when I get lost in anger rather than forgive, or how I reveal different shades of reverence and spirituality in choir as compared to yoga, or how I cry when I listen to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.

I asked myself, “Why would I ever try to limit myself to titles that aren’t accurate descriptions of who I am?” But that’s what I and many in my generation had done. We’ve invested our sense of self-worth into our superficial identities and not our deeper selves. It finally dawned on me then that we are more than our groups and titles. We are unique. We are not defined by what we are but who we are, and who we choose to be.

In that moment, sitting in that poorly-ventilated room, I felt more empowered and clear-headed than ever before. I realized that my life cannot be reduced to these labels placed upon me, or those that I had placed upon myself. No, I’m an active player in my life, and my choices make up who I am.

Our coach then asked each of us to give new words to describe ourselves. It was suddenly hard to pick just three. There was so much of me to describe.

“Explorative, enthusiastic, home,” I said.

Our coach smiled.

The class mostly understood the lesson, though some of us were still on edge, and would remain so for the rest of the semester. I noticed as some struggled with tolerance over the next few months. They found it difficult to embrace new perspectives and trust our teachers and classmates. Instead they often judged, looking for reasons to be upset, and ended up causing drama rather than studying it.

That class laid the foundation for me to break from group-think. Whereas all I used to see were people’s superficial identity markers, I had now begun to see individuals defined by their character, words, and actions, and I actively sought to keep seeing them that way. I started making friends with people I had once cast aside because they didn’t identify with the same labels I did, and I often found we had more in common than not. Those I had once thought were “intolerant” because they held views different from mine were actually more welcoming than those I had originally identified with. I also lost friends because they couldn’t understand why I would want to strip myself of labels or engage with others who weren't like “us.” It was often difficult, but it was growth, and it was worth it.

You can call yourself a “friend,” but that title says nothing about what kind of friend you are. You can call yourself a “feminist,” but that says nothing about how you choose to treat others. You can call yourself an “American,” but that says nothing about what you believe.

I don’t care what you are. Who are you?

“Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre ... There was truth and there was untruth. And if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

-- Winston, Nineteen Eighty-Four

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.”

-- Nineteen Eighty-Four