Identity: My Thoughts

Identity has become a very touchy subject recently, what with gender, racial, and sexual identities being a topic of debate among many people. To be honest, it's nobody's business what defines a person's identity, but I understand why some will get irritated by other people over it. People tend to lead themselves to believe that the most basic form of identity is all that matters, when that contradicts the nature of sociology within humanity. Every person has their own distinct nature, personality, mentality, appearance, and attitude, all of which, and more, being the elements of one's identity. These identities are all given labels, because society functions simply by following these labels, I find. It also seems that when some new identity with a new label comes along, or somebody identifies as something else, despite containing all the attributes to a specific identity, society as a whole begins to fall apart because it seems to me like this is a concept that no understands immediately, or that some people refuse to see something like this change.

I believe the reason some people create an identity for themselves is because they get confused about who they really are and an answer to that question as all the more emotionally satisfying. This is a totally legitimate reason to seek an identity, because all some people need to move on from the difficulties of life are answers. And I won't deny that, recently, the internet has become rather infested with people who take advantage of this logic for attention. People tend to deny this but I happen to be close friends with people who are legitimately transgender and/or suffer from mental illnesses, and they don't shove it in people's faces and tell everyone how "oppressed" they are over their identity half as much as those pretenders do. I sound bitter over this but I legitimately get so frustrated when people make up reasons to say they're "oppressed" (that's pretty much a buzzword, at this point, on Tumblr). It only trivialises real-life oppression towards people over their identities.

As mentioned before, a lot of people don't immediately grasp the concept I brought up earlier about the satisfaction of finding an answer to the question of one's own identity. I feel like it should be something people are taught in school or by their parents at an early age. If people understood the reason some girls choose to identify as boys, and vice-versa, or just the fact that there are several more identities out there than what the media leads people to believe but make people less inclined to get frustrated at the notion.