Modern pundits and scholars from the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and New Zealand have spent a lot of energy and time on issues related to gender and sexual identity in a world that is characterized by aggressive territorial annexation wars by autocratic power, pandemics and threats of nuclear annihilation and widespread poverty and inequality. While I don’t think it is wrong to be preoccupied with geopolitical or moral priority, one could and should.
But if we are going to put so much effort into this topic, then we need to be as clear and precise in our thinking. In what follows, I will avoid taking a position on exactly which approach to these issues—or which “answers” to the puzzles of gender identity—I find compelling. I will, however, try to spell out a typology of identity “paradigms,” each of which represents a competing way to think about what gender and sexual identity are, how they arise, and what their conceptual limitations and implications seem to be. This conceptual clarification is to aid us in understanding a discourse.
