You do not get to decide my identity
Walk into a room and within seconds you instinctually judge others, guessing their personality by their appearance, making a whole range of assumptions about their identity. Pop psychology aside, those assumptions we make impact how we move through the world, leading us to project those assumptions into online spaces where we only have photos and words to make those snap judgements on. Yes, sometimes snap judgements do pan out, looking at you with the suffragette flags and red cards plastered over your profile name, but this becomes problematic when you use those assumptions to decide another person’s identity. When you demand that a person confirm to your view of the world, especially when you state that someone else is compelling your speech because they expect you to uphold their personal dignity, you are essentially saying that only you matter, your version of the world is paramount. They will call anyone who disagrees narcissists, reality deniers, fools, yet in the world of the mono-perspective the rest of the world is a blind spot.
Our personal identity is always shaped be the influences on us, meaning that unless you are left on a desert island and raised by mongooses you will always be an artefact of your environment. However, that does not mean that you are bound by the strictures of your society. You have the right to subvert those strictures, to walk away from and reject those mores, and no-one has the right to haul you back into their own personal understanding of normal. Yes, society is forever shifting and reforming what normal means, and in online communities we all shift and change as we move through different networks. We become homo digitalis in cyberspace, yet in the real world those identities are bound to the expectations of those around us. In rejecting normal, or embracing it, we make personal choices. In demanding we return to normativity, become normal those making those demand essentially make society in their own shape.
Racism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, indeed any ideology that spews hate is essentially rooted in making the world a reactionary version of personal perspectives. There is no such thing as absolute normal, we are all abnormal in different circles, our personal normality will always be different from everyone else’s. Fear of the other is rooted in fear of change, fear of difference, fear that your personal normality needs to change to accommodate the other. Reactionary values root a halcyon past in the notion that culture was never changing, yet the reality is that all culture changes, all values shift over time. Being yourself requires adaption to the evolving societies we find ourselves in; forcing others to tether themselves to your values is a sign of desperation. The cardinal sin of reactionary politics is forgetting the past is a foreign land, often not the idyl you imagine it to be.
No-one can ever demarcate where you end and society begins, it is always an ebb and flow as we move through the world. To force your normal onto others mistakes your normal for the normal. Those who seem to think that forcing others, bullying others, to confirm will achieve anything forget the hardest lesson of reactionary values: they always fail in the end. No reactionary political movement survives contact with society, and the harder those who believe strive to impose their values the more acolytes sloth away. Only the diehard hardcore believers are left at the end, a rump minority shaking their fist at clouds. Yes, they can do a lot of damage to society, and they invariably shift the narrative towards their point of view, but in the end they fail because every movement will eat its own if it does not evolve and change.
Society is never static, and as such what was normal today will become quaint and old fashioned tomorrow. We do not say “bully for you” or “groovy” because they fell out of fashion, likewise we do not use racist language because it has been deemed deeply offensive. Indeed, those who cling to phobic language are treated as anacronyms, people who are avoided in polite society. No-one wants to be publicly associated with hate speech because it clings like cow much to everything it touches. Once a racist, always a racist. Phobics do not get to define any identity because their fear, their hate, does not grow roses, it simply creates an almighty stench.
In a world where we are all individuals moving through the world, it is vital we remember this. No amount of forcing your identity on the world will make the world a better place. We are in perpetual negotiation with the folk around us, with the networks we inhabit, in need of building a narrative of hospitality with everyone else. You are no an island of one, you are an amazing bundle of all the influences you have ever encountered, filtered through your own perception of the world. Your identity is your own, yet you do not get to decide what my identity is or should be.