Fuck me, I just wanted to exist without ordering the prix fixe, be more than an infinitesimal coordinate in a million-dimensional matrix of demographics—identity, and its convenient synergy with personal branding, the caricature of you it puts in other people’s heads. Suppose it’s true: this idea that your identity imbues you with membership, a kind of inborn sorority with inherited values and traits. Sounds nice. You’re less alone. You get a shorthand for your oppression that in certain quarters commands deference. It goes some way toward feeling less crazy to understand why it’s not your fault you’re treated like dogshit. But I hate having my life judged as the output of generic forces, that however I understand or react to them is secondary to the fact that I share them with others. Identity is diet history, single-serving sociology; at its worst, a patriotism of trauma, or a prosthesis of personality. Privilege discourse a well-meaning attempt to balance scales that has become tainted, like most things American, by the puritanical paradigm of original sin. Never mind that the loudest ones are always the ones trying to expunge their privilege or conceal their complicity—with reaction formation, Freud was right on the fucking money, I fear. This isn’t even mentioning the quirks and hobbies that have come to function as identities; not only the Marcusian stuff, not even anything as robust as astrology, but, like, fandoms, knitting, coffee. Pit bull owning. IBS! Come on.