Identity - Part I

Today we talk in terms of identity.  Everyone wants to know what we are identifying ourselves as.  We have a category of identity for everything from race to gender.  What is your gender-identity?  Being humans, we follow the rituals of our father.  Our first father Adam must have doomed us to an existence of classification.  But, really, what do all these words mean?  When we talk of identity, we are not discussing who we really are inside, and what we believe ourselves to be.  No.  Instead, we are discussing a version of ourselves that we want to present to others.  Your identity that you insist be recognized by one and all of your human siblings is a carefully crafted facade' by which you insist on being acknowledged.  The fact is, these identities are just a fiction that allows us all to push ourselves into categories where we only imagine that we will feel more comfortable.  It is as simple as that.  We believe if only we could be recognized by a simple word, the tedium of our existence would carry greater weight, and then we might not swoon before the gaping maw of inexistence.

They are just words.  Fundamentally, what is different between these people that carry their large cumbersome labels?  Genetically, physically, psychologically we are all remarkably similar.  We are, as I have heard it put bluntly, little more than 28 feet of gut.  All of us.  My fire and brimstone neo-conservative father in reality is so very similar to free-wheeling Lady Gaga, that it takes an eye carefully trained over millions of years to tell them apart.  And, that must be the crux.

We must be able to tell each other apart.  There is a sort of latent tribalism that pervades our psyche so deeply, it becomes almost unthinkable to imagine yourself outside of some sort of loose familial construct.  Whether it is actual shared genetics that binds you to your clique or some sort of synthesized ideaology, it is this little group of people standing behind us that makes us feel big enough to carry the weight of our chosen identities.

What if we refuse to carry these signs, these slogans promoting our little circles of life?  What if a person says, "Fuck all this, I don't care what little group I'm supposed to belong to...I just feel like being human?"

Too bad.  You will surely have an identity thrust upon you.  Anyone who has attended elementary school could tell you this.  That's right, our innocent, wide-eyed, promise-of-the future children are busy crafting and impaling each other with identity before they even know that boys and girls piss out of different organs.

So, let's be both humble and bold.  Let's try to both shun the pomposity of a self-chosen, designed, glorified identity and the humiliation of a publicly affixed branding of ourselves.  Let's take some ill-concieved stamp meant to lump us into a pile of undesirable human dross, and instead of bearing it like a burden, re-afix it as a sigil.

I.  I am a sissy.

Now, there are lots of people who would argue whether I was born a sissy, whether the odd minutia of my childhood formed me into a sissy, or I chose in some intensely sexual cathartic moment to be a sissy.

It doesn't matter.

What matters is this.  I am a part of a social group that is largely spurned mostly because it is mis-understood.

Let's flash back to the school-yard once more.  Remember that foreign kid that joined up with your class part way through the year?  Maybe ___

[ Necessary aside:  The english language is devoid of any pronouns that are gender in-specific.  While I tend not to get caught up the femenists crusade to make the masculine the non-default gender, I do find the lack of an appropriate pronoun decidedly imprecise in certain situations....like this one.  So, voila, I'm  creating my own neuter set of pronouns that I will use henceforth.  Ve, vem, ves, ve's.  These are my new pronouns.  I have created them.  So shall it be ]

Now.  maybe ve wasn't actuall from a different country, or even a very different culture.  Perhaps ve was just from some far away state that was a bit different.  It doesn't matter, because to your small little eco-system of the classroom, ve was a foreigner.  At recess, this new child was not accepted, and, as is most likely, was probably tormented for the most part because of ves actually minute differences.  The distaste and seeming ire of the school children was not born from any carefully considered critique of the child's mannerisms.  Neither was ve shunned because his state was "unnatural."  God did not call all those snot-nosed kids to set hem apart as a judgement for ves sins.  No, no.  The child was hated by ves classmates only because they didn't understand vem.  They looked at vem, felt confused, and, being that confusion is an unpleasent state in which to remain for very long, displaced their confusion with aggression.  They gave vem a label.  That label said, "Ve's not one of us."  And then, digging deep into the misty red pit of human instinct, they circled and descended upon vem to eradicate vem from their habitat.

So it is with we sissies.  It is so much easier to fix a label like a bright red target than to actually think about us. Aggression requires no reason, just cold, pre-scripted action.  Resistance and isolation hail from an age before language.  Here, within the flow of primal agression, anyone can find peace even in debauchery.