pigeon, cat, toaster: on what it means to 'identify as' something
Content note: this is about the current (entirely confected) moral panic about children identifying as cats, which is, of course, deeply transphobic.
When I was training as a teacher in a mainstream school, there was an autistic kid in one of my classes who absolutely loved pigeons. I guess you could call pigeons his ‘special interest’, though I don’t always see a need for that term - he just fucking loved pigeons. He wanted to talk about pigeons all the time, and he would sometimes stim by making pigeon noises. If the general noise level in the classroom started to rise, it would often be accompanied by cooing.
I was trying to teach him beginners’ German, and he wasn’t interested in German, because it had nothing to do with pigeons. So I taught his 1:1 teaching assistant the word “die Taube”, and showed her how to put the sentences we were doing in the third person. While the other kids wrote “I like maths”, “I am good at PE”, “I find history boring”, the kid wrote “the pigeon likes maths”, “the pigeon is good at PE”, “the pigeon finds history boring”. Suddenly his pages were filled with sentences.
His TA was (pleasantly) shocked by what I did and how well it had worked: to me it seemed completely obvious. I don’t think the kid genuinely thought he was a pigeon. But in that specific time and place, allowing him to swap ‘ich’ for ‘die Taube’ helped him to do what was asked of him. This was 2016, and nobody was yet fearmongering with totally fictional urban myths about children identifying as cats, so my adjustment went without comment from my teacher training mentor. I can’t help wondering if I’d get away with doing what I did now.
A few weeks ago, in the staffroom at the school where I now work, I was sitting at a computer with my headphones on, but they weren’t loud enough to drown out the conversation my colleagues were having behind me. ‘There’s one at my granddaughter’s school’, someone was saying. ‘Thinks he’s a girl, and all the children have to call him a girl. They’re too young to know!’
There were murmurs of assent from others. Yes, they’re too young to know. ‘I could just come in one day and say I was a toaster’, said a colleague. They all laughed. ‘I could identify as a washing machine’, said someone else. ‘I think I’ll identify as Scarlett Johannsen!’ said one.
I sat, frozen, wanting to go and challenge them but unable to move my limbs. I’m not out as non-binary at school, but it’s generally known that my wife is trans. I knew at least one of the people speaking knew. I took my headphones out to signal that I could hear the conversation, but it didn’t stop.
Afterwards, I went to speak to a sympathetic senior leader, who had a word with the people involved. After being spoken to, one colleague came to apologise to me - sincerely, I believe. She started to say, “but I’m just so worried about these children, it’s too young for them to know…”. I did my best bridge building. “We all want the best for children, whatever we think that is. But if we care about these kids, whatever we think about how schools should respond, don’t they deserve better than being turned into jokes?” This stopped her. She is, I believe, someone who genuinely cares about children - and the inconsistency of her talking points was suddenly made clear to her. I talked about Brianna Ghey. She cried, and we hugged. I felt relief, and exhaustion.
There is often pushback in the trans community against the use of ‘identify as’. It is seen as a softening, a caveat. If we say ‘she identifies as a woman’ only about trans women, for example, and never about cis women, we’re setting up a hierarchy between ‘identifies as’ and simply ‘is’. I don’t think the phrase has to be delegitimising - but until we’re regularly talking about cis people identifying as men or women, it will often function that way.
In the current confected moral panic about children identifying as either animals or trans - yes, they’re functionally interchangeable in the discourse, and yes, that’s the point - there’s an obvious parallel with arguments made against gay marriage in the 2000s, where it was claimed that if we allowed same-sex couples to marry, it’d be a slippery slope to people marrying their dogs. Here, the argument goes that if you believe children when they tell you their gender, it’s just a short step to having to believe them when they tell you they identify as a cat. In this fearmongering, the term ‘identify as’ looms large. It’s not just that they’re declaring themselves to be cats. Children declare themselves to be all sorts of things, all the time. It’s the identify as that makes it different somehow, scarier. Once children identify as something, it is implied, then schools are forced to go along with it, ad absurdum. They are forced to take action.
Identifying as something is not just claiming that you are something - it’s asking to be treated as something. ‘I identify as’ functions as shorthand for ‘I want you to see me as’. The reductio ad absurdum of ‘there are children identifying as cats’, then, is supposed to make us dismiss the idea of identification used in this sincere way. The child’s imagined request to be seen as a cat is positioned as representative of the kind of demand society simply should not accept. I am a cat, and I want you to treat me as such. Ridiculous! See also: I am trans, and I want healthcare.
The cat example attempts to make an absurd contrast between a person’s core, ‘real’ self (human) and then, on top of it, their demand to be identified (as a cat). And yet, of course, this apparent divide is rarely so clear-cut. We all ask to be seen in different ways all the time, without the process being labelled identifying as. We find examples of this without even having to go too deep into gender theory. In English, we can introduce ourselves with our names, as if our names are who we are. We say ‘I am Steve’. Of course, the name Steve doesn’t exist biologically, essentially, even necessarily legally (it’s probably Stephen on his birth certificate). Yet usually, people tend to accept Steve’s demand to be identified by his name - as long as Steve is cis, of course. We habitually accept some requests to be seen and identified, without asking for proof, while some are made impossible. These choices - to see or not see - are choices made by individuals, groups, societies, states. They are being made all the time, everywhere. They are sometimes messy. They are never neutral.
When my colleague said sarcastically “I could identify as Scarlett Johanssen!”, she didn’t mean that she could simply ask people to call her Scarlett Johanssen - which she could, of course. The joke lay in the idea of being as conventionally attractive - and therefore desirable - as Scarlett Johanssen. Imagine if it were that easy, the joke goes. Imagine if I could just be treated, seen, desired differently, just by asking to be. That’s the terror at the heart of these panics, I think. Imagine if you could just ask something of those around you, and have it honoured? I’m not saying that, as individuals, we should have to desire anyone who asks us to desire them. But what about a society where different kinds of bodies are desired more freely and openly? What about a world where it wasn’t ridiculous to want to be desired like a famous actress? Imagine if we could think about that rather than relegating it to the ridiculous and impossible. Imagine if requests to be identified were not frightening demands, but openings to new possibilities. Imagine if, rather than refusing to change how we see people for fear that they will ask for too much, we looked carefully and lovingly at what they asked of us, and asked for more for ourselves?
