I say it doesn’t, really. If you (a) like ManU in some sense, and (b) are willing to call yourself a ManU fan, you are a ManU fan.
And yet there are plenty of sports fans that question the legitimacy of other fans, based on accidental characteristics.
I.e., “You can’t be an Auburn fan, you’re a goddamn Yankee!”
Which, in essence, is the same problem I think: there’s all sorts of semantic and pragmatic meaning attached to concepts like gender (and fandom!) that exist outside of the mind of the individually engendered or fanatic person, which cause other people to feel that their own meaning is being betrayed by that person. In a weird way, I think this is part of a failure to keep one’s identity small—when people include potentially falsifiable beliefs-about-the-world/beliefs-about-others in their own identity, they risk having that identity thrown into crisis whenever those beliefs are challenged.
Well, in some sense, obviously, you can identify as whatever you please. But it’s a rare identity that carries no implications about the world or at least how you react to it. To run with the example, I expect there are a number of imperfectly correlated reasons you might call yourself a Manchester United fan: you might for example feel more excited—a physical, measurable response—when watching ManU games than games ManU isn’t involved in, or you might be involved with the club’s fan community. Generally, however, these are going to be statements about the state of the world, not purely arbitrary stances.
To the extent that it makes sense to talk about the legitimacy of an identity, it might be said to refer to how closely that identity maps to these evidences. That’s not to say that a good litmus test exists in every particular case, though.
Could you explain what you mean by this via an easier to grasp concept than gender identity, preferably in a way that preserves relevance to identity?
Sure. Does it make sense for an individual to think about the probability that they (themselves) are a Manchester United fan?
I say it doesn’t, really. If you (a) like ManU in some sense, and (b) are willing to call yourself a ManU fan, you are a ManU fan.
And yet there are plenty of sports fans that question the legitimacy of other fans, based on accidental characteristics.
I.e., “You can’t be an Auburn fan, you’re a goddamn Yankee!”
Which, in essence, is the same problem I think: there’s all sorts of semantic and pragmatic meaning attached to concepts like gender (and fandom!) that exist outside of the mind of the individually engendered or fanatic person, which cause other people to feel that their own meaning is being betrayed by that person. In a weird way, I think this is part of a failure to keep one’s identity small—when people include potentially falsifiable beliefs-about-the-world/beliefs-about-others in their own identity, they risk having that identity thrown into crisis whenever those beliefs are challenged.
Well, in some sense, obviously, you can identify as whatever you please. But it’s a rare identity that carries no implications about the world or at least how you react to it. To run with the example, I expect there are a number of imperfectly correlated reasons you might call yourself a Manchester United fan: you might for example feel more excited—a physical, measurable response—when watching ManU games than games ManU isn’t involved in, or you might be involved with the club’s fan community. Generally, however, these are going to be statements about the state of the world, not purely arbitrary stances.
To the extent that it makes sense to talk about the legitimacy of an identity, it might be said to refer to how closely that identity maps to these evidences. That’s not to say that a good litmus test exists in every particular case, though.