The WNBA’s “What Is a Woman?” Issue

This is for my Straight Guy Basketball Fan Friends debating this in my Group Chats.

There is a flaw in the way we have been arguing about identity. One side wants identity to be something assigned to us, usually by biology, history or an institution. The other side frequently responds that identity is something we possess the agency to declare for ourselves. Inclusionism offers another way of thinking about the problem. Identity is neither merely assigned nor merely declared. Identity accumulates. Identity has provenance.

Inclusionism.Org

Human beings accumulate interactions, relationships, recognition, agency, participation and consequences around who we understand ourselves to be. We live through identities. We negotiate them with other people. We organize parts of our lives around them. Institutions recognize some of them and reject others. Communities contest them, reinforce them and sometimes change their meaning. This is why identity cannot adequately be reduced to either a chromosome or a checkbox. Identity has a history.

That does not mean someone needs permission from an institution to become who they are. Quite the opposite. Agency is fundamental to Inclusionism. But self-determination and self-declaration are not necessarily the same thing . Self-determination describes the exercise of agency over one’s life. A declaration is an expression. The declaration may be evidence of identity, perhaps very powerful evidence, but the words themselves do not necessarily constitute the entirety of the identity.