In Understanding Transgender Identities: Four Views, five authors, all identifying as Christians, engage in respectful, mostly irenic dialog about transgender identities and how they relate to Christians and Christianity. The book is a window into the many areas of dissent among believers and nonbelievers alike regarding identity, gender, sex, and sexuality. It is well worth your time.

Imagine you wake up one morning to a notification that your identity has been stolen. Hours later, you scroll through social media and pass a post about identity politics. At lunch, you have a deep and intimate conversation with a friend about his ongoing identity crisis. And at dinner, you attempt to facilitate a discussion with your kids about their identity in Christ. In each case, identity means something different. At times, the difference is a matter of nuance. At others, the linguistic referent belongs to another category entirely.

In day-to-day life, these differences are manageable and largely intuitive. You know that someone can steal your identity without impacting who you are in Christ or the political category into which you fit. And while your identity’s theft may be a crisis, it’s not an identity crisis. We know all this intuitively, because we are fluent in the language of identity. But when we step outside the day-to-day, and especially when we engage with those who diverge from our vision of good and right forms of self-identification, the matter becomes significantly more complicated.

In Understanding Transgender Identities: Four Views, five authors, all identifying as Christians, engage in respectful, mostly irenic dialog about transgender identities and how they relate to Christians and Christianity. The book is a window into the many areas of dissent among believers and nonbelievers alike regarding identity, gender, sex, and sexuality. It is well worth your time.

While most of the authors’ differences make it onto the table, it seemed to me that the issue of unsynchronized definitions never became fully conscious. There are instances in which one author presents an argument about identity with identity-definition-A in mind, and another responds thinking of identity-definition-B. This dynamic doesn’t derail the book entirely, but when it does crop up, it seems to me that the contributors talk past each other, quite in spite of themselves. What this means is the authors not only disagree about what your identity is; they diverge on the question of what identity is in the first place. This is instructive for us, because we will never agree on the former until we align on the latter.

I would argue there are at least three distinct definitions of identity at work in Understanding Transgender Identities, and they are a subset of the larger collection of options on offer in our current cultural moment. Not all of these concepts conflict, but most are sufficiently dissimilar to suggest the risk of misunderstanding is high, and the need for clarification is great. Before we dig into how the definitions operative in this book impact the authors’ discussion, it will benefit us to lay out what seem to be the most frequent options to which participants in these conversations make reference.

Here are five definitions of identity I suggest are in use today:

Identity as Social-Transactional Agent

As illustrated above, terms such as “identity theft” and “student ID” capture the notion that each of us is a unit within a larger infrastructure of institutions, systems, and processes. My social security number and credit card tell banks, merchants, and the government who I am with respect to certain transactions I make with each. If someone steals one of these forms of “ID,” they can impersonate me in certain contexts. Moreover, my employer recognizes me as an employee and ascribes to me an employee ID, a job title, a place in the corporate hierarchy, and so on. These convey explicit recognition of the validity of my identity with respect to these institutions and the systems in which they are networked (I am a citizen, a customer, an employee, etc.), and they illustrate the more transactional side of our Social-Transactional referent.

But we also use the term, identity, to refer to a more social, less formal set of social-transactional relations. Each of us negotiates a place, a set of shared experiences, norms, and practices, and even a distinctive vocabulary with the individuals and groups with whom we “do life.” We are a particular “somebody” in these contexts, whether or not and to whatever extent this role matches the inner thoughts, desires, emotions, and otherwise typical forms of expression that we generally think of as our personality or “inner self.” For instance, among family, I am, “Alexander”; among most friends, I’m, “Alex”; among former coworkers, I was, “A.T.”; during a church internship, I was, “Therm”; and to my wife, I am, “My love.”

Each of these designations taps into the fact that I am or have been a member of a different social unit. Each name summarizes who I am to each person or group, the role I play, the place where I belong, and so on. And each identification requires the give-and-take of both sides of the social transaction—whether two sides of a dyad or the individual and the group. The individual must inhabit the identification, and the other or others must recognize the identity as valid (imagine if I considered myself married but my wife did not!). In any case, we also refer to this coalescence of individual participation and collective recognition as an individual’s identity. It is more social than transactional, but it is nonetheless both. We might codify these referents as a Social-Transactional understanding of Identity (Note: I’m distinguishing this from social identity, which fits in the next category).

Identity as Mental Construct

“Self and identity theories converge in asserting that self and identity are mental constructs, that is, something represented in memory” (Handbook on Self and Identity, 75). For the academic psychologist, an identity is generally something like the in-the-moment operative sense of who one is that drives behavior. Your sense of who you are will vary somewhat from situation to situation, because it is context-sensitive (Handbook on Self and Identity, 93). We’re not talking about a full-fledged identity crisis because you’ve shifted from the office for work to the in-laws’ for dinner. Rather, consider how much of an outsider you might feel yourself to be at your in-laws’ house versus how integrated and crucially important you may feel from 9-5. Moreover, consider how different your behavior may be from your professional context to your familial.

Your in-the-moment sense of self, or identity, contributes to these alterations such that your behavior is likely to follow the contours of your in-the-moment, operative identity. Nevertheless, this identity is also stable and consistent, seemingly because one does not reshuffle one’s psychological deck with each new situation and because new situations tend not to be so new as to have no continuity with events gone by. The greater the discontinuity, the greater the potential impact to one’s sense of self.¹

This conception of identity aims to be an empirical observation of someone’s psychological functioning. Under this rubric, psychologists see people as possessing multiple identities: self-identity, social identity, gender identity, etc. Much more could be (and has been!) said of this, but this gloss is sufficient to guide us in our assessment of the book and should clue us in to what some of our print and online interlocutors mean when they speak and write about identity. We might abbreviate this as a Psychological conception of Identity.

Identity as Authentic Inner Self

This is the preeminent definition of identity in our culture today. It is the notion of the real you, buried deep within, which no one but you can directly access, which only you can know. It is necessarily pre-cultural, pre-perceptual, and psychologically primordial, because it is understood to be who you are apart from the influence of others. In line with this, it is often experienced as a discovery, as we will see below with Dr. Sabia-Tanis. This conception of identity does not necessarily involve or correspond to any empirically observable facts about a person. Indeed, an individual’s identity—conceived of as an authentic inner self—may exist in conflict with such facts.

However, that inner self is considered to be truer, more real, more binding on how one should live than empirical data to the contrary (See here, here, and here). Because this is cast in terms of authentic/inauthentic, true/false, real/fake, this conception of identity is restricted to only those traits, characteristics, proclivities, etc. that originate in or constitute this authentic self. Anything else is not the real you. Consequently, it seems fitting to characterize this as a kind of psychological essentialism², and we may dub this an Interior Essentialist conception of Identity. It’s important to note two crucial differences between this and the Psychological notion of Identity described above:

First, where an academic psychologist would regard an individual’s identity as something constructed and, therefore, necessarily distinct from the facts of who one is, an Interior Essentialist reckoning considers this sense of self to be identical with the most fundamental and defining fact there is to know about a person. Indeed, it may be more accurate to construe this notion of identity as your self rather than your sense of self.

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