Why Some Identities Become Subjective While Others Remain Objective

In my previous essay, Demystifying Gender, I explored how the word gender gradually evolved from a grammatical category into something far larger and more abstract.

Originally, gender referred primarily to classification in language. Many languages assign masculine, feminine, or neuter forms to nouns. A table may be feminine in one language, masculine in another, and neuter in a third. Nobody assumed the object itself possessed some hidden metaphysical gender essence. Grammatical gender was largely a matter of convention, structure, and linguistic agreement.

Later, the word gender became a polite synonym for biological sex.

Then the two concepts gradually split apart.

Sex remained tied primarily to biology:

reproductive function,

hormonal development,

and sexual dimorphism, despite occasional biological variation and edge cases.

Gender increasingly became psychological and subjective:

and personal affiliation with sex categories.

This transformation created enormous conceptual confusion because people continued using the same word while referring to entirely different layers of reality.

or metaphysical selfhood.

In Demystifying Gender, I suggested that much of the confusion disappears once gender is understood not as a mystical standalone essence, but as a qualifier:

Sex-gender refers to a person’s subjective psychological relationship to biological sex categories.

Sex-gender refers to a person’s subjective psychological relationship to biological sex categories.

Once viewed this way, the conceptual structure suddenly becomes easier to analyze logically.

But this realization immediately raises a much larger philosophical question.

If subjective identity may detach from objective classification in the domain of sex-gender, why should this logic stop there?

And here, I think, modern identity philosophy begins encountering its deepest unresolved tensions.

The Expansion of Subjective Identity

Modern society increasingly accepts that a person’s subjective sex-gender may differ from biological sex.

But humans possess subjective relationships to many categories besides sex.

A person may feel profound affinity toward:

another civilization,

People already do this constantly.

Converts adopt religions they were not born into.

Immigrants adopt new national identities.

Individuals assimilate into new civilizations.

People develop emotional attachment to countries where they were not born.

Others feel alienated from identities assigned to them at birth.

Some people strongly identify with cultures or ethnicities different from their ancestry.

Historically, many individuals attempted to “pass” into different racial, ethnic, or cultural categories in order to escape assumptions associated with the category imposed upon them.

The phenomenon itself is not new.

The real question is why some forms of identity fluidity are increasingly considered morally legitimate while others remain socially guarded — or even taboo.

The Hidden Hierarchy of Identity

Modern society appears to treat identity categories according to very different philosophical rules.

Some categories increasingly permit subjective self-definition, particularly the expanding framework of sex-gender identity, which now often encompasses:

internal psychological identity,

linguistic self-identification through pronouns,

and symbolic or aesthetic self-presentation.

Other categories remain far more........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)