Asking: is the self a performative costume we swap out at will, or a sedimented structure built through lived experience?
Identity that ignores this (like trans) becomes like a thin shell: endlessly customizable, visually striking, but prone to fracture under pressure. Thread below 🧵 Details here:
Asking: is the self a performative costume we swap out at will, or a sedimented structure built through lived experience?

Below is one way to frame that using classic depth psychology, then juxtapose it with late‑modern “identity manufacture,” with Pinker and Byung‑Chul Han as bridges.

1. Core claim: self emerges from experience, not the other way around
On a depth-psychology view, you don’t start with a fully formed “Self” that then goes out to have experiences. Instead, your sense of self is gradually generated by how you meet reality: caregivers, limits, losses, triumphs, shame, love, embodiment, time.

The process is roughly:

Biology gives potentials and constraints. Temperament, affective reactivity, cognitive style, etc., are there from the beginning. Pinker would call these part of our evolved psychological “toolkit,” not a blank slate.

Relational experience organizes those potentials. Attachment patterns, mirroring, attunement/misattunement, cultural narratives—all shape how those potentials are integrated or split off.

Narrative and meaning consolidate the self. Over time, we weave experiences into a story (“who I am”) that becomes the baseline of identity. That story is constrained by what has actually happened and how we’ve metabolized it, not just by what we wish to perform.

So: self is enacted and sedimented across time. Identity is a derivative—a way this underlying structure gets named, expressed, and socialized.

NO, sorry but trans id youth are NOT decreasing 📊📈
- my analysis, I scoured data across western nations
- I also work globally with this population
Deep dive thread 🧵📉⤵️ 1/9 Growth in Transgender Identification Among U.S. Youth (Ages 13–17)
2016: 0.7% (≈150,000 youth)
2022: 1.4% (≈300,000 youth)
2025: 3.3% (≈724,000 youth)
This trend reflects a nearly fivefold increase in percentage over the nine-year span, at least now over 700000 trans id in USA.
2/9

Excellent article by David C Geary Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences and the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program at the University of Missouri.
"In other words, the measure is capped at parity even in situations where boys and men are doing more poorly than girls and women.
This approach ensures that boys’ and men’s disadvantages are hidden, and that “parity” will not be achieved until women are in an equal or superior position on every single factor in the entire GGGI index." quillette.com/2025/05/15/the…

“Wow my mind is trying to kill me”
What an insightful statement re the mind of the sensitive soul. We feel powerless but we always have the choice to override the nihilism.
Great podcast ⁦@michaelmalice⁩ ⁦@DrDebraSoh⁩ 💚💚💚 podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/the… #orthorexia #dysmorphia related. Also I agree we don’t speak about the battles we won in the 90s.
AIDS has not gone away and millions engage this struggle each day quietly.
Again the woke overreactions to minor social issues is grotesque in light of people’s real suffering.

@JackPosobiec Mostly 3 provinces. Affecting most malls near poor settlements.
Those are NOT live rounds being fired.
But we are on the brink of collapse.
The state has no solution besides the usual BS Statements.
Mostly this is about poverty, joblessness.
We are a morally bankrupt place @JackPosobiec Triggered by the jailing of a prominent Zulu. That was just the last straw. These looters couldn’t care about Zuma. He’s an excuse.
They are starving. Others are simply opportunists just like the ANC National ‘leadership’. Corruption is coming home to roost.
Pray for us.