Pure and Simple

lb-lee:

From Kate Bornstein’s My Gender Workbook, pg. 67 (with the subheading, “Gender is Pure and Simple When You’re Pure and Simple, but Who Ever Really Is?”)

“Pure identities (or identities that pass as pure) are valuable things.  They’re valuable to those who have them, because there’s a sense that someplace will always be home, a space with others who claim similar pure identities.  And our pure identities are valuable to others.  We become easier to deal with.  Other people know who we are.  So we begin to lean into an identity, we support our lives on some identity, and when we or someone else starts to mess with it, then all of a sudden we’ve got something, this identity, to lose, and we get very protective not only of our own identity, but of the purity of that identity as a membership requirement for others.  This might be how identity politics does itself in.  We need to get past this.“

This book was published in ‘98, so almost twenty years ago.  The more things change…