So. About 15 pages into this thread,¬†someone says ‘in the queer community I choose to be seen as…’ whatever it was. But, reading this, it struck me that this person doesn’t CHOOSE to be seen a certain way, they ASK to be seen that way. And no doubt they put a lot of effort into making sure the community is aware of that request and (out of solidarity, friendship or whatever) collaborates in sustaining that person’s self-identification.¬†¬†¬†¬†

Now, elsewhere, I find someone complaining that notwithstanding their lack of interest in ‘choosing to be seen’ a particular way, they are still seen that way by the queer community. I think this points to one of the things that gets routinely glossed over by all the rhetoric about self-identification, and the utopian vision of reinvention and personal choice it implies. You may ’self-ID’ as something, but if your social context refuses to collaborate with you in that ’self-ID’ then it’s pretty much meaningless.

And social context - a set of undiscussed, received opinions about what behaviours, attitudes or appearances constitute a particular ‘identity’ - varies hugely. This is why ‘essence of butch/femme/whatever’ arguments go on indefinitely: because the social contexts against which people read an individual as these things vary so much. A working-class white lesbian, a black middle-class straight man, the FTM child of a Bangladeshi millionaire will all have wildly diverging assumptions about what constitutes ‘a real man’, a ‘real woman’, or how you ‘read’ masculine or feminine behaviours in someone regardless of their body.

For example. I’m short-haired, mouthy, bespectacled, usually wear trousers and believe I have a right to a place, voice, success and status in the world. Relative to most of my lesbian friends, I’m about as butch as a chihuahua in a tutu. Relative, though, to the public-school-educated white boys I studied with at Oxford (and the blonde pony-tailed Sloanes they’re all now engaged to) I’m pretty damn butch. What to make of this? Am I butch or not? The answer is no, I’m not, relative to the first context, and yes I am, relative to the second.

But where does this leave my supposedly all-important ’self-identification’? How do I self-identify? I don’t think it makes any difference how I self-identify, because it takes the community around me to corroborate that ID or not. And - unless you spend your entire life on the specialised corner of Planet Queer that privileges self-identification over all other factors -you might as well get used to being flexible.

So when people ask me about my ID, I tend to offer them my driving licence. I simply don’t think appropriating a third-hand mongrel set of recycled gender-stereotypes would be a useful contribution to my sense of myself. I appreciate that some people have struggled against a more oppressive and unpleasantly-policed set of behavioural norms than mine, to arrive at a sense of themselves that feels right. And I appreciate that within a community that shares that experience it’s appropriate to corroborate that self-ID, in solidarity for suffering we know to have taken place. But in many instances the reality is that the sanity of the ’self-ID’ brigade really doesn’t depend on which one they finally choose, and that this level of soul-searching really is the narcissistic privilege of a post-industrial metropolitan elite.

I find myself a long way from social context in writing this. But I feel that the proliferation of gender stereotypes is a byproduct of this ’self-ID’ navelgazing. People for whom it really doesn’t matter either way scrabble around for a peg to hang their selfhood from, and settle on whichever unexamined piece of retrograde behavioural nonsense they want to play with this week. And meanwhile, the prevailing social context (the urban one in which most of us live) continues to see us as probably queer, perhaps worthy of laughter, friendship, flirtation or whatever, and just. leaves. it. at. that.

This utopian project of self-reinvention probably has its roots in the original decision by the Pilgrim Fathers to abandon an oppressive situation and reinvent themselves as colonisers of a new continent. As a phenomenon, it’s much accelerated by the Internet - see, for example, Steven Johnson’s much-used example of the thousands of self-identified vampires in the USA. Perhaps an inconclusive note for (at least in the context of gender dysphoria) a much-contested topic, but I think we could do with a little less of the ‘personal choice’ stuff and a bit more attention to the communities and social contexts that generate the received opinions within which those self-proposed identities read, articulate, and function - or not.