Self-identity and Community

written by Jack Parsons, 18 August 2025

When we talk about identity, we tend to assume the identification is being done by the individual, that one identifies and defines themself and therefore is the perpetrator of their identity. Community, however, is an incredibly important aspect of identity. We can address the importance of external identification by looking at gender identity: for many transgender people, existing as stealth is not enough for us to live fulfilled lives as a transgender person. Indeed, the act of being externally identified as transgender is important for the internal identity of many trans individuals. This is necessary because being transgender is inherently transgressive; most cisgender people already receive a basic level of external identification due to normative societal expectations of gender.

The same is often true of alterhumans who wish for external signifiers of their alterhumanity. If external identification matters so much for the building and maintaining of internal identity, then why wouldn't some amount of individual identity be influenced or determined by external factors? Why wouldn't there be cases where an identity is externally applied to an individual first, and only internally adopted at a later point? For many of us, our internal identities are transgressive and actively battle against the way orthohumans perceive us. But what about when they’re not?

ALEXANDER, ARISTOTLE, & I

Ever since I came here, I was told that I was destined to be Alexander the Great. Much like within his own early life, it was repeated to me by the person I considered my caregiver that I would fight and conquer and leave my mark upon the world. He called himself my Aristotle, who infamously tutored Alexander. It was a romantic image, but it was not one that was internally prescribed. I was assigned Alexander as a fate, a doomed narrative that I did not have a choice in. It was an externally given identification based in part on my demeanor and behaviours, and in part on projected narratives and archetypes. I had ambition and the person I trusted most dropped twenty gallons of kerosene on it.

In the wider view of society, the act of placing me in the role of Alexander and himself in the role of Aristotle is transgressive. From my point of view, though, it was normative: it was all I had ever known, and why would I question it? I leaned into it, made it my own, and Alexander was soon part of my identity. It became an archetypal point of reference as I continuously uncovered 'types that were explicitly based on Alexander. Yet I never explicitly framed it as alterhuman: it was like a name given to a child at their birth, that they go through their entire lives with and automatically accept as a given.

But is it alterhuman? Certainly, yes, it can be. Certainly, yes, it is to me. But that took me a long time to come to, and I have never before publicly identified my relationship to this as such. It is my worst kept secret that I am Alexander the Great, simultaneously a part of me while also maintaining the defaulted ambiguity of a birth name or assigned gender. I didn’t have to fight to be recognized as Alexander the way I have to fight to be recognized as Jack Parsons. I was seen as Alexander from the start, and that comes with a different relationship to the experience of identity.

SO WHAT?

In my essay Factkin and Fiction, I talked briefly about “sometimes… the reputation and mythology surrounding the person becomes larger and more influential than the ”hard facts“ themselves”. This also carries an interesting implication for identity. Reputation and mythology being placed onto a celebrity is a prominent example of external identification and definition, and a variety of personal responses are possible. Lord Byron, for one, actively played into and toyed with external perceptions of himself. Parsons, too, seemed extraordinarily susceptible to external influence, and I would argue that his spiritual experiences later in his life were in part a direct result of the way he was viewed and identified by others, especially the Thelemites with whom he regularly interacted and corresponded with. These external identifications were placed onto both, either due to their celebrity or mystique, and were eventually internally adopted.

The same is true of me, alive, in 2025: the external identifications that have now been placed on Byron, the bisexual disaster, and Parsons, mysterious black magic rocket guy, are important to my internal identity. Cameron believing that Parsons caused UFOs to appear after his death is important to my identity, too.

I believe that understanding the way community can affect identity is important for full accomodation in alterhuman spaces. Not only on behalf of those like myself whose identities are highly shaped by external forces, not only on behalf of the Alexanders of the world, but also on behalf of all alterhumans. Indeed, some alterhumans and their identities are much more based in external identification than is accounted for within our communities, and I hope that my account can help provide a better understanding of how this could come to pass, and that, as a community, alterhumans can become more accepting of identity that does not clearly come from the internal self.

Yet, all of us are affected by community, and indeed most of us sit somewhere in between both circumstances, shaped both by internal and external forces. Identity is important in the first place because we are social creatures. Selfhood is relational, determined in part by our social environment. Most importantly, when it comes to identity I frequently think: what next? Where do we go from here? What has shaped us and what do we want to shape us? I believe these to be questions that all of us could benefit from asking ourselves.

The path into the light seems dark,
the path forward seems to go back,
the direct path seems long,
true power seems weak,
true purity seems tarnished,
true steadfastness seems changeable,
true clarity seems obscure,
the greatest art seems unsophisticated,
the greatest love seems indifferent,
the greatest wisdom seems childish.