I run an annual survey, and we’re always asking about sexual identity. We include some options that are more obscure than most people are used to.
Something I occasionally hear in feedback, is people saying it takes a long time to answer, because they have to look up identity labels that were unfamiliar with. Or people will say they’re not sure they identify with a term, because they don’t know what it means.
I have to admit, I find this response baffling. If there is a word that you do not recognize, then we can say with 100% certainty that you do not identify with the word. How could you?
I would go so far as to say that this sort of response is detrimental to the survey data. One of the major challenges of measuring the prevalence of obscure identity labels, is that we worry that some of the people who selected the option are just confused. If only 1% of respondents identify as “abrosexual”, then all it takes is for another 1% of respondents to select that option in confusion, in order to compromise the data. If you stop in the middle of a survey to look up “abrosexual” in order to make a snap judgment, then it could very well be you, you’re the confused 1%.
So I discourage looking up identity terms in the middle of a survey. But… I don’t really blame people for doing that. Nobody is obligated to change how they think about language just to make it easier for survey-designers; rather, it’s up to survey-designers to work with what they have. So, what do people mean by “identity”?
Identity as communication
Ordinarily, when I say “identify”, what I mean is an act of communication. If I identify as gay, that means I tell others that I’m gay. Or, I tell myself that I’m gay.
Sometimes I say things about myself that are wrong, or at least not entirely correct. I’m gray-asexual, but sometimes I’ll tell people I’m asexual, as a simplification. Therefore, I identify as asexual. But I also dis-identify as asexual, in that I will tell people the opposite in other circumstances. And there are also some things that I believe are true about myself, but I choose not to communicate them to other people because I think it would be misleading, or I just don’t want to share that information.
Under this definition, identity is multifaceted. I don’t just identify as one thing, I identify as many things under different circumstances to different people.
Typically, surveys do not ask about those complexities. When a survey asks how I identify, it basically means, how do I identify right now to the survey right in front of me? Answering the survey is not merely an indication of how I identify, but an act of identification in itself.
Identity as being
However, sometimes when people talk about identity, they simply mean, “this word describes what I am”. Under this definition, you could identify with a word even if you never actually heard of the word. Therefore, if a survey asks you whether you identify with a word you’ve never heard of, you have to look it up to discover the answer.
Despite my disagreement, I will give this viewpoint some credit, and explore cases where it might make sense. For instance, I do not know the word for “gay” in Chinese. But I identify as gay in English, don’t I? Does that imply that I identify with the Chinese word for “gay”? If I was filling out a Chinese-language survey of orientation, with an English translation to guide me, wouldn’t I pick the option with the Chinese word for “gay”?
Second example: I identify as Filipino-American. Another word for Filipino is “Pinoy”, but I didn’t know that word until I was a young adult. Did I identify as Pinoy before I knew that word? If I had found “Pinoy” in a survey and then looked it up, shouldn’t I then select the option?
Even when talking about gender and sexuality, there are some terms that aren’t exactly identity terms, like “cisgender”. Lots of people who are cisgender do not think of themselves as cisgender. Yet, it’s common to describe them as “identifying” as cisgender. Personally I feel this is imprecise language. Nonetheless it is common usage, and if someone says it that way then I’m not going to willfully misinterpret them.
Something more?
From what I’ve seen, some people think of identity as something deeper, as if to denote allegiance to a particular in-group. For example, if you’re feeling particularly down on America, you might say that you do not “identify” as American. This would be fully consistent with telling people that you are American, because identity does not refer to who you are or what you tell people, it describes how you’re feeling about it.
These are but a few possible definitions. How do you use the word “identity”?
I’m gray-asexual…
Does that mean you identify as a Whitley-Streiber-style UFO pilot, or you just don’t find WSs UFO pilots sexy?
Or does it signify the same sort of approach to boomers?
(I identify as a picky proofreader.)
Just riffing and speculating and idling this morning, but….
Maybe the problem is in the word “identity” in the first place. As soon as you’re asked to put yourself in a multiple-choice category, you’re being asked something more than how you feel or how you see yourself, but also what group you consider yourself to belong in, how you want your interactions with the rest of the world to be done, how you want to be perceived, and so forth. That’s easy enough for some of us who are so far over to one end of the dial that we don’t have to look anything up or puzzle over relative percentages and conflicts.
But I can certainly see why some people might find questions of identity difficult to answer, not only because they may never have run into the terms, or may have thought in different terms that are not included in the survey, but because whenever you are asked such questions, you must be sure that you know what those terms mean to the questioner and what will be done with the results. We would like to think that when we ask a question it is free of implication and bias and spin, but it rarely is. Words have both denotations and connotations. Even without nefarious motives, categories are imposed based on perception and purpose. If I have a shelf of books, I can organize them by color, by size, by author’s nationality, by subject, by edition, by whether I’ve already read them, by Dewey number, etc. etc. a million different ways – all different and all right for some purpose even when some are entirely incompatible with others.
Again, I think for some of us, the issue of identity is pretty trivial. In just about any context, some of us can fill in the blanks, confident that we’ll be put in the right room or the right column or whatever, loved or hated for reasons that are obvious, without having to think about the finer points of what a term like “identity” even means. I’m pretty sure any questionnaire about sexual identity will have mine right there, and answering it will get me in a predictable line at the gates of the death camp or a predictable room at an orgy or anything between.
But I can easily imagine why for some it’s complex and ambiguous, and how even the idea of “identity” is fraught.
Just as a sort of general idea I think if one is making a questionnaire, it would be appropriate to say, not how one identifies oneself, which may deep,complex, and mutable, but how one prefers to be identified.
I identify myself according to the things I love and the things I hate.
My wife, as a secular Buddhist, dislikes the use of ‘identity’ in the first place, she says it reinforces (or tends to reinforce) the idea that we have a hard, unchanging, essence that we need to describe/map, when in her view we just are what we are at any given moment, changing from one moment or situation to the next. It is just practical to sometimes group people in certain ways (and in other ways at other times) without it implying anything essential about people.
When you have a survey question like “do you identify as x?” the point is not “how many people can be viewed as fitting the dictionary definition of x” but more like “how many people actually use this term in their actual lives and find it useful?” (Although maybe one could argue that it’s also good to figure out how many people fit a definition, even if they don’t use the word, because then you can say “see, lots of people have this experience, they’re just not talking about it” I guess?)
About identity labels in different languages- I used to be in a bilingual English/Chinese queer group, and we would usually write things in English (descriptions of our events, etc) and then translate them to Chinese. There were many many times that the Chinese members of the group were discussing “how do we translate this?” Some queer-related words seemed to have no Chinese translations at all- things like various specific labels for nonbinary genders, which have subtle differences between them, or different words for different forms of non-monogamy. Or concepts like homonormativity. Of course there are Chinese words for the general concepts of nonbinary gender, non-monogamy, etc, but the way that queer communities in western countries have subdivided them into all kinds of little categories with little labels… like, do we have to recreate that whole labelling system in Chinese? Maybe people in different cultures would categorize these things differently.