For me, self-identification was a con

In 2005, I changed my name to Sebastian, because the internet told me to. That was a fairly eccentric thing to do 15 years ago. Now, it seems like everyone’s at it. Far from being a set of fairly stable cultural norms with a few outliers, gender is now at the heart of an insanely toxic debate, which seems on course to swallow all of culture and politics. The right to personalise one’s gender is now backed by corporate philanthropy, well-funded third-sector lobbying and prominent celebrities.

But while it may feel like mainstream culture has gone down the gender rabbit hole with bewildering speed, the enabling conditions have been gathering force for some time.

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In search of ‘my people’, I fell feet-first into a ‘genderqueer’ subculture that’s well-developed now. If I were in my early twenties today, I’d doubtless have a full bore ‘non-binary’ identity, complete with flag, fancy pronouns and a raft of internet friends lining up to validate me becoming my authentic self.

In the noughties, though, this subculture was just a tiny corner of the wild, emerging world of online communities. In its London incarnation, it had two hubs: one weekly bar night, and one corner of a then-popular lesbian messageboard. We’d all meet up offline for beer and chat, but the lion’s share of the culture-building happened online, via all the classic traits of an online subculture: in-jokes, micro-celebrities, sacred truths, fantasies and friendships and spectacular messageboard fights.

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Offline, though, it doesn’t really work like that. Having created Sebastian, I found it easy to get people who didn’t know me well to use that name, but longstanding friends were a different matter. Put simply, it felt weird. And yet self-created identities feel unreal until they’re affirmed by other people, meaning Sebastian only ever was real inasmuch as people actually used the name. Even if my reluctance to demand validation from my parents is proof that I wasn’t truly serious about my new identity, it also pointed to a deeper truth: there’s no such thing as an identity created independently of the way others see you.

To reinvent ourselves without regard to our contexts also implies an inhuman degree of mastery over our bodies. The year Ella Enchanted and Facebook both appeared also saw the launch of one of the defining scifi series of the noughties. Battlestar Galactica depicted a fraying remnant of humanity pursued through space by the embodied-but-mechanical, humanoid-but-infinitely-reincarnated flesh/robot hybrid Cylons. In reality, though, it’s the other way round.

I can’t just upload a new face or different secondary sex characteristics when the old set no longer feel quite ‘me’. Just as our inner sense of selfhood is both consolidated but also constrained by the willingness of loved ones to recognise it, so our ability to apply the digital style of selfhood in ‘meatspace’ is limited by the stubborn refusal of our bodies to behave like a slate we can wipe clean and over-write at will with new selves.

I may have dreamed, as Sebastian, of being able to reincarnate as a new, unblemished me when the old one didn’t suit. But as has become apparent with age, I will always be pursued by the fraying, beleaguered traces of old selves: childhood scars, stretch marks, a C-section scar, the piercings I no longer wear.