Gender Is Not Identity

How Depth Psychology Warned Us of This Fixation

The Illusion of Gender as Soul

In the modern world, gender has become a surrogate for self. But gender is not the self. It is not even stable. It is a construct—a set of social signifiers designed to describe patterns of behaviour loosely correlated to one’s biological sex. What was once a linguistic tool to describe masculine or feminine grammatical categories has now become a cornerstone of identity politics, a stand-in for essence, soul, and destiny.

In recent decades, gender has been reified—transformed from descriptive language into prescriptive identity. It’s no longer how someone expresses themselves, but who they are. And not just in passing, but as a totalizing framework through which meaning, power, and worth are filtered. This is not evolution. This is the psychological equivalent of mistaking the clothes for the body, the mask for the face, the avatar for the soul. It is collapse—not of the individual per se, but of our collective capacity to hold nuance, to tolerate ambiguity, and to allow identity to unfold over time.

We have confused what is socially fluid with what is spiritually foundational. And in doing so, we have tethered ourselves to a concept that is more reactive than reflective—more about cultural trend than core truth.

---

Freud: The Fixation in the Lower Realms

Sigmund Freud understood that human beings pass through stages of psychosexual development—oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. Each stage represents a psychological challenge that must be integrated in order for the individual to mature. If the psyche becomes fixated—stuck at any of these developmental tasks—it leads to neurosis, compulsive behavior, and identity confusion.

The modern obsession with gender identity and sexual expression is a fixation at the phallic stage. This is the phase where identity becomes centered on the genitals, on desire, on the tension between pleasure and shame. Identity becomes tied not to character or soul, but to what turns us on, how we want to be seen, and how others affirm our self-perception. This is not maturity. This is regression—a return to the realm where libido becomes the organizing principle of the self.

This is where the lower chakra system dominates: root (survival), sacral (pleasure), and solar plexus (will, control, external validation). This is a developmental stage that has its place—but when mistaken for the destination, it becomes a trap. We are not meant to live from the sacral alone. And yet, that is exactly what identity politics encourages: a perpetual performance of self rooted in pleasure, pain, power, and projection.

Where is the heart (compassion, integration)? Where is the throat (truth, voice)? Where is the crown (union, purpose, divinity)? These higher centers of human development are bypassed. The soul, in this schema, is dismembered—fragmented into parts that perform instead of parts that integrate.

---

Jung: Archetype Fixation and the False Self

Carl Jung warned us of the danger of over-identifying with a part of the psyche. In his framework, identity is not invented—it is revealed through the long and often painful process of individuation. The Self is the totality of our being—conscious and unconscious, light and shadow, masculine and feminine, ego and soul. But when the ego grabs hold of an archetype—say, the androgynous, the rebel, the orphan, or the trickster—and calls it the whole self, the individual becomes fixated. Not in a supernatural sense, but in a psychological one: they are no longer in dialogue with the full psyche.

Today, we see a culture fixated. Not by demons, but by dismembered archetypes. A person’s entire identity is collapsed into a fragment: “I am queer.” “I am trans.” “I am non-binary.” These may be important aspects of someone’s experience, but when they become the total identity, they act as a container too small for the soul. As Jung said, “The more compulsive the identification, the more likely it’s a defense against a greater unknown within.” In other words: what we cling to most ferociously may be exactly what we need to question.

The problem isn’t that people seek meaning through identity. It’s that identity becomes a fixed narrative, defended with religious zeal, used to signal virtue or demand allegiance. The sacred space of psychological development is overtaken by social performance.

---

The Chakra System: Arrested Ascent

From a spiritual framework, we can view this as a failure of ascent. Human development, when left unimpeded, moves upward—from root to crown. We begin with the basics of safety, survival, and belonging. We explore pleasure and desire. We develop autonomy and ego strength. Then we move through the heart—where we learn love, forgiveness, and emotional intelligence—before rising into truth, vision, and transcendence.

But what happens when the process is interrupted? When society rewards individuals for remaining in the lower chakras, when it affirms and incentivizes the performance of identity tied to sex, pleasure, and personal affirmation?

We get cultural stagnation. A collective loop. People circling the same wounds, repeating the same scripts, never moving beyond their initial self-definition. This is not just a spiritual crisis—it is a developmental one. True growth requires moving through the sacral, not staying there. It requires facing grief, integrating shadow, forgiving betrayal, owning projection, and reaching beyond the self into something transpersonal.

The current gender discourse claims to be about liberation. But in many ways, it is a bypass—a socially endorsed mechanism for avoiding the deeper work of identity integration. It is easier to change your name than to grieve your childhood. Easier to alter your body than to face your parents. Easier to demand affirmation than to cultivate internal coherence.

---

Identity Is Not a Flag

The soul is not your pronoun. Your essence cannot be captured by a DSM code, a political slogan, or a social media banner. Identity is not self-chosen in the egoic sense—it is self-discovered through descent, disruption, and devotion.

The LGBTQ movement originally fought for visibility, safety, and the right to exist. And many of those battles were noble and necessary. But now, much of that movement has hardened into a new orthodoxy, where questioning identity claims is heresy, and complexity is flattened into slogans.

Jung wrote, "The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are." Not who you’re told you are. Not who you declare yourself to be to gain approval. But who you uncover, slowly, painfully, with integrity.

You are not your gender. You are not even your name. You are something deeper—something ancient, archetypal, and uniquely yours. And it cannot be affirmed by others, because it was never truly lost to begin with. It only needed to be remembered.

Take heart,

Jason

I'm conducting a confidential, spiritually grounded survey exploring identity through the lens of unique energetics rather than conventional psychology. Each submission helps expand a growing sample aimed at uncovering deeper patterns beneath gender-related distress. If you identify as trans, are questioning your identity, or know someone who is, your participation would be deeply valued.