I have been thinking more about being a woman. It is a characteristic, a state, that I identify with deeply. However, if didn’t have a vagina I would struggle to claim the identity of ‘woman’. For me, the meaning I give to a particular body part, vagina, is so strong, its absence would create too much mental discord for me to also claim the identity of woman.

Of course, this isn’t some universal truth – many cultures, across history, have assigned gender identities not tied to penises and vaginas. Plenty of trans folks are born with a penis or vagina and still have a sense of identity different than my own tightly coupled vagina=woman. This all begins to hint at the deeper reality that no matter how profoundly I ascribe meaning to particular 4es, no matter how much I may feel those meanings are supported by social convention, the meaning really never is in rupa.

Still though, I use rupa to build identities. I may only have this body temporarily, it may change states continually, but I cling to it because in my mind, my body is the scaffolding, the substrate, for the story of self I tell. I am woman-alana. You want proof? Check-out between my legs…

I had been watching a TV show, in it a main character is a successful editor. She is also a woman, in a time that few woman were successful anythings, better yet editors at important NY publishing houses. For the character, being an editor is her life – no family, few friends, few hobbies, just professional success. And then, her vision starts to fail. Just like that, her career –her identity—is ruined by something as small as inoperable cataracts. You can’t BE and editor if you don’t have eyes that can read.

Me, the editor, we rely on our bodies to build our identity. As I have said before, I cling to this body precisely because I view it as the necessary condition –the scaffolding – upon which I build my sense of alanahood. But if I rely on a body to build my identity, and the body isn’t under my control, the identity cant be under my control either. I can say, think, wish, imagine, that I am fitness alana all I want, if asthma prevents me from running more than a few steps then I can’t BE fit alana, at least I can’t anymore.

A body that can run, or read, or even have a vagina, these are states. This is not what bodies ARE, it is what they can do/the shape they can have, under certain circumstances. Can I run? Only if the pollen count is sufficiently low. If I am on my meds. If I haven’t been sick. Etc. If it depends on a bunch of stuff that I can’t force, or count on, that depend on a bunch of other factors and conditions beyond me, then why do I imagine that these states are going to prove who I am?

Over and over, I try to use the body to prove my identity, but in fact, the body dictates the limits of the identities I can ’build’. The rupa I cling to so tightly as a necessary condition for me telling the alana story, creating self, is a condition I must yield to; my story is at the mercy of this body, which makes it a pretty crappy tool with which to build identity. In short, it doesn’t do what I want, so how can it prove I am who I want to be?

This body — the state it was in, is in, it will be in — is just one of many circumstances that dictate the self I can imagine. What is circumstantial, conditional, can’t be who I am. The body’s states are conditional, so they aren’t who I am. But the identity I imagine, that is conditional too; the identity I imagine can’t be who I am.