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Ontology of identity: identity is not a feeling

In philosophy, there are three different notions of "identity". Gender identity rhetoric systematically confuses them—and then demands the legal and social consequences of the strongest concept, whereas only the weakest was ever defensible. The erasure of the category of woman rests on that equivocation.

Three types of identity

Numerical identity (Leibniz): X = Y if and only if they share all attributes. Qualitative identity: X and Y are of the same type. Narrative identity (MacIntyre, Ricoeur): the self-construction one makes of one's life. These three are radically different — and gender rhetoric deliberately mixes them.

Which one is being claimed?

When someone says "I am a woman" with a male body, this can mean three things: (1) numerically identical to women — impossible, because there is no female gamete production ; (2) qualitatively identical — factually incorrect in essential characteristics; (3) narratively identical — a self-narrative. Only (3) is defensible, and is then a personal construction, not an ontological fact. A feeling is not an identity (see being versus feeling ).

The equivocation

In public discourse (3) is claimed but the legal and social consequences of (1) and (2) are demanded: access to women's spaces, women's sports, women's quotas, women's prisons, shelters for women. A narrative identity does not grant those rights — just as someone who is "a scientist at heart" does not enter a laboratory with that. See also feminist critique and denial of reality .

Identity is always sortal

The philosopher David Wiggins emphasized that identity is always sortal : identity-under-a-concept. A person is identical as a human being , as a person , as an individual . The sortal concept of "woman" has criteria—biological—that cannot be fulfilled by self-declaration. Without sortal criteria, "I am a woman" means nothing concrete. See natural kind : woman is a natural kind, gender identity is not.

The damage caused by the confusion of concepts

Those who do not define identity cannot build just policy upon it—and yet, in practice, they do. Puberty blockers in children, mastectomies in healthy girls, and the erasure of the category of woman rest upon this confusion. Criticism is dismissed as hate and silenced. Transition does not heal—the detransition cohort bears the irreversible damage.