rudatron posted:

I honestly think the problem is rooted in psychological framing, where research focused on what people say about themselves, rather then about how they act or behave. The problem is that you ultimately cannot test what people say about themselves: what they really think and feel is stuck inside their own head. It's not simply a matter of conscious deceit, but they could simply lack perspective or even misinterpret their own experience (and draw false comparisons with other people, for example).

Taken to the anti-trans extreme, you hear people say "well you're just faking it to be a perv", but fundamentally that is based on a valid observation: I, as the other, have no way of cross-checking that what you say is true, and it would be irresponsible to simply take it on faith (because that leaves it open to abuse). So honestly, I don't think the concept of identities is useful, progressivism needs to discard it for something else. So people as elements of systemic forces, and still being agents with some predictable behaviours, reduce the model of the person to either one of those things. Individualizing systemic forces in terms of 'identities' isn't helpful and has massively backfired.