Twitter isn’t the best place to find well-stated ideas, but I think Wesley Yang sums up the problem of “self-identification” as a concept — and as a means of reordering of social space — quite well in just a few tweets.
Self-identification presents itself as a kind of freedom but is actually a form of dictatorship of the individual self over those who would perceive and address it — which the state and civil society have pledged to enforce
— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) October 20, 2022
Self-ID and its compulsory recognition is the place where Western individualism, through the instrumentality of the civil rights state, loses its equipoise and tips over into the domination of all by each, subordinating common reality to each solipsistic reality
— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) October 20, 2022
In order to be free, you must announce a rigidly understood identity to the world, and everyone else must be compelled to perceive and address you in this way, or else a serious harm has to be adjudicated. Self-identification is, thus, a kind of reductio ad absurdum of individualist thought.