Christianity champions limits, definitions, and absolutes. You are a person created by God. You have a gender. You have a purpose. You will die and face judgment. You need the grace of Jesus. To hear these things spoken today with unflinching clarity is like a cold shower after napping in the sun. Locking onto a Christian understanding of identity is the fastest (and only) way get on with the business of actually moving forward in your identity.

“You can be anything” is Barbie’s latest slogan. They’ve promoted some rendition of this line of empowerment since the ‘80s. Growing up in the ‘90s, I remember the warm blanket of cultural nurturing went something like: “If you believe in yourself, you can be anything you want.”

This spurred the Fight Club reaction: “We’ve all been raised…to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

Sex and gender confusion today lands as the latest iteration of many confusions and frustrations that come from setting the bar of your human potential at “limitless possibilities” (another Barbie slogan). There’s now a group of people who fall into the category of otherkin: “beings in human bodies who identify as non-human.” A 20-year-old Norwegian woman went viral in 2016 for her decision to identify and live as a cat. This madness is only beginning. Marco is a teenager who identifies as “cloudkin”—a cloud trapped in a human body.

In one of the most subtly prescient movies in the past decade, M. Night Shyamalan takes this question to its logical conclusion in his movie Split. The movie’s protagonist bounces between twenty-three different personalities, complete with different accents and medical conditions (one takes insulin shots). The movie culminates with the emergence of a twenty-fourth personality—a beast with superhuman power.

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