The Identity Crisis: A Struggle With One’s Self

This is an excerpt of Dr. Jordan Peterson’s new series Vision and Destiny. You can watch DailyWire+ offers the best deal

Podcast time: 00:25

Gender. Is there a real gender identity? It depends on what you mean. real. It’s not true, as the gender identity ideologues insist. They are bad psychometricians. In their stupid disciplines, they don’t know how to measure these phenomena. Having said that, obviously there are important functional differences between men and women — the most important of which, you might say, is the fact that if you take the typical man and the typical woman and they engage in sexual activity, there is some reasonable probability that a child will emerge. It is a fact of life that this happens. The binary process that produces the new life takes place. Here is where it gets really interesting. You can find markers to help you do this. Although men and women have distinct chromosomal structures, there are many biological attributes that they share. However, you can still tell the difference because it is how you know that we are human.

There is biological sex as it is embodied, but then on top of that, there is the flexibility that comes with the fact that human beings are flexible actors, perceptually and conceptually — and that we are also creatures that undergo a very lengthy period of education, of socialization. Our brains are not wired with a deterministic instinct from birth. It must mature in a social setting. While some of that is dependent on the social environment, it also depends on some biological factors that are more closely linked to sex.

It is known that the personality, for instance, is a complex structure with five dimensions. You can now distinguish it into 10 different aspects. This method gives you a bit more detail and resolution. There is much debate over whether it should have five or six dimensions. It all depends on how the statistics are presented. There are five main dimensions of temperament, which everyone agrees on. Temperament can be described as a set of distinctive ways that you perceive and act in the world. 

• This is a tendency for positive emotion, called extroversion.
• Neuroticism is a propensity to experience negative emotions.
• Agreeableness can be described as the maternal dimension. It is politeness, compassion and politeness. It’s the proclivity for self-sacrificing for others. This might be a great way to think about it.
• Conscientiousness is characterized by diligence, orderliness and industriousness. 
• Innovation and openness are both the domains of creativity and interest.

There are five dimensions of variability and this is on top the binary biological platform. 

This is because women and men have different sex types. On average, women are more inclined to be negative and less agreeable than men. There are also minor differences with the other traits that I won’t go into here because they are smaller. On average, women are more tolerant. They are more self-sacrificing in relationship to others, which goes along with their propensity to care for infants — because you have to do that when you care for infants — and they are more threat and negative emotion sensitive. You could argue that the world is actually objectively more dangerous for women — because they are vulnerable on the sexual front and because they are smaller physically — but also that the world needs to be reacted to by some degree as if it is a more threatening place because women are charged with the primary care of infants, and infants are very vulnerable. So, you could say, you have binary sex for all functional purposes — Naturally for all functional purposes because you need a man and a woman or their biological equivalence to produce a new baby, which as I said, is where the rubber hits the road — and then on top of that, you have variation in temperament in five dimensions that is somewhat sex-typed. 

It gets more complicated when you consider that men and women have on average different personalities. Aside from their differences in personality, they also have differing interests. This means that women are more interested in people than men and vice versa. This is valid across cultures and is the largest difference between men and women. That is another dimension of variability, although it is associated with temperamental differences — so agreeable people tend to be more interested in people. In any event, the five-dimensional space is filled with enough variation to allow for more masculine and less feminine women. They are not all binary in their basic biological function, their cellular identity and a variety of physiological markers. This is not to say that they aren’t both.

If gender is like temperamental variability then it does exist. It doesn’t have temperamental variability. Gender theorists are far more fuzzy than anyone else. They don’t try to reduce their concepts to a multi-trait, multiple-method measurement. This is a problem if we are talking about gender. “What do you mean?” Well, “What do you mean, what do you mean?” What do I mean? “How do you know it exists? What are the techniques of assessment detection that you utilize technically to specify the target of your claim? What is gender?” Well, “It is what people feel they are.” This is your theory. This is a foolish theory. That theory isn’t going anywhere. It is just a theory to allow you to claim the primacy over your narcissistic desires. It does not have to do with the precise definition of identity. 

It is complex because there is variability in masculinity and femininity — on top of the binary biological substructure. You must also be open to roll variation. This is because there are both masculine and feminine women. It is more difficult for them to accept a rule that is compatible with their biological identity. They are not born in the wrong place. The question is: “What exactly is it that is born in the wrong body? Is it some sort of soul?” These people are not usually on the same side as those who claim the existence and immortality of the soul. “What the hell is it exactly that is born in the wrong body?” “The person’s core identity. The person’s true self.” This is all hand-waving. I don’t know what you mean by that, unless it’s part of a context-dependent story in which we more or less agree on terms. But to abstract them out and say: “Well, that is not the person’s real core self,” sorry, man. You have strayed into territory that is not yet known. First, you think that you understand the core of people. Are you sure? Do you? I don’t think so. 

Or, you could make a radical statement and claim that there are infinite gender identities. If you choose to play it this way, then yes, because there is so much variability in a five-dimensional space. If you combine gender and temperament, then every individual on the planet has a unique identity. If you want to combine these two things, you can. When you add sex to the mix, it becomes extremely problematic. “Sex and gender and temperament, they are all the same thing.” They aren’t. They aren’t because you need both a man or a woman to have a child.

You might ask, “What is a man and what is a woman?” You can only say one thing: “A man is half of what it takes to produce a child, and the woman is the other half.” You can’t subjectively define that, but it is the place where the conceptual structure and temperamental structures are located. The reproductive sphere is still to be shaped by the way we see that temperamental structure. You might even say: “Well, we do not need any of that messy reproduction because there are too many people on the bloody planet anyway” — or something like that. First of all, this just unmoors and you may think it’s a liberating identity. However, all it does is create so much chaos that you won’t be able to handle it. You are the only one who knows what to do with your life. 

This was one of the reasons I objected to compelled speech on Canada’s pronoun front. Trans activists would approach me and say, “Well, you know, you are really hurting me if you do not accept my indeterminacy of identity.” And I thought, “Well, that is what you think.” As a clinician and a trained counselor, I believe I will do you more harm in the long-term by agreeing with you that you are free to be whatever you like at any given moment. Because you see social restrictions as barriers to your full potential, this is a liberating thought. However, I know that to be truly healthy, you must be integrated at all levels of your social network. If you make it unclear what your status is at the sex level then no one will be able to help you. How are they going to play? They don’t even know what you are. That is what makes the game possible.

That is no recipe for long-term wellbeing — because that is always bandied about, that notion of wellbeing and harm. No, regardless of your temperamental variation, you must negotiate an identity.

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson He is a professor emeritus and a clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto. He was an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard from 1993 to 1998. He is the international best-selling author of Maps of Meaning and 12 Rules For Life. You can now listen To or watch His lectures are very popular on DailyWire+.

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From The Identity Crisis: A Struggle With One’s Self

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