What is identity?

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?
[Read more…]

Waking up, past tense

Do you like waking up? Yeah, me neither. I prefer that all my waking be done strictly in the past tense, i.e. to be woke.

I’m looking at my drafts bin and I have a lot of stuff here that I never finished and never will finish. I thought I’d turn some of these ideas into a more casual blogging. How do you like this format? How do I like this format?

I have a draft dated to 2023, whose premise is “a linguistic analysis of ‘woke’”. Basically, I would use google trends and time-constrained google searches to identify the historical trajectory of the word and its meaning. I’ve done this a few times before, e.g. tracing the history of “No homo”.

[Read more…]

Reviewing 6 conlang games

A conlang game is a game that asks the player to learn a fictional constructed language. Recently there have been a few well-known examples, namely Heaven’s Vault (2019) and Chants of Sennaar (2023). And so we may speculate about the emergence of a new “genre” of conlang games. Of course, two games does not a genre make. So I am here to tell you that I have played no fewer than six conlang games, and I’m going to briefly review each one.

[Read more…]

I read books: Philosophical Investigations

Philosophical Investigations, by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe

To steal a description from Existential Comics, Wittgenstein solved philosophy in 1921 with the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and then unsolved it again in 1953 with Philosophical Investigations. Philosophical Investigations is primarily concerned with what we mean with our language. Many 20th century philosophers (including early Wittgenstein) have tried to translate our language into something more precise, as if to uncover what we really mean. Philosophical Investigations argues that meaning is much more complicated, deriving from practical use.

I have a book queue that consists mostly of queer mystery and romance novels, but Philosophical Investigations was an oddball among them. I’ve been interested in Wittgenstein largely as a result of my husband. He has a degree in philosophy, and his seminar on Wittgenstein was particularly impactful. If you want to know what our banter sounds like, it’s not altogether unlike the text of Philosophical Investigations. I had never actually read it though, so I thought to correct that.

[Read more…]

Tips for respecting microlabels

Readers may be familiar with the idea of stacking queer labels, especially words related to asexual and nonbinary people. For example, somebody might call themselves a nebulagender panromantic aegosexual fraysexual, and what does any of that mean? Perhaps you’ve seen these label stacks applied to a hypothetical person, a caricature meant to be mocked. Perhaps you’ve seen label stacks provided as a rhetorical example of someone worthy of respect, as if to say, “yes, we even tolerate those people”. Or perhaps you’ve seen the real thing in the wild: a person who unironically chains four or more identities together.

I’m assuming that the reader is interested in respecting others, and is not just coming here to mock labels they don’t understand. I offer some basic tips.

[Read more…]

Attraction to nonbinary people

Difficult survey questions

I’ve spent a lot of time making surveys that ask people about their orientation, so I’m familiar with the messy relationship between orientation and nonbinary genders. Gay and straight are labels that assume that a binary gender for both the subject and object of attraction–men who love men, men who love women, etc. If you’re a nonbinary person who loves women, or a woman who loves nonbinary people, “gay” and “straight” don’t really succeed in conveying that information.

Some nonbinary people, I’m aware, will identify as gay or straight anyway. For example, if you’re commonly perceived as a man, and your dating pool primarily consists of men who love men, you might feel that “gay” fits–or is at least useful–even if you don’t identify as a man. On the other hand, some nonbinary people would be uncomfortable with a label that frames them within a binary gender identity.

In any case, if someone fills out our survey, and they say they’re nonbinary and gay, I’ll say sure, that’s what they are. The survey isn’t there to judge, only to measure. But… I have no idea what genders they’re attracted to. If I want to know that information, I have to ask directly. Are you attracted to men? Are you attracted to women?

But isn’t it strange? In order to understand the orientations of nonbinary people, we’re asking about attraction to men and women. Didn’t we leave some other genders out? What about attraction to nonbinary people?

[Read more…]

Terrible graphs of agnostic atheism

Rebecca Watson, unfortunately, reminded me of a meme from the old days of new atheism. It’s those agnostic atheism diagrams.

A diagram showing agnostic theist, gnostic theist, agnostic atheist, and gnostic atheist as four quadrants

Credit: Skepchick

I have a rant in me about these diagrams. Agnosticism and atheism are political terms, and whether you identify with them has more to do with what you find useful in your social context than the literal definitions of these terms. This diagram became popular because it explains and justifies a particular choice in identification labels, but it is not an appropriate framework to understand more broadly why people do or do not identify as agnostic. Thus, as a meme, this diagram is a barrier to empathy and understanding of fellow nontheistic folks of diverse label preferences. Also it’s just kind of incoherent.

[Read more…]