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In the summer of 2014, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author Susan Faludi opened an email from the father from whom she had been estranged for close to 25 years. The subject heading was “Changes,” and the message read: “Dear Susan, I've got some interesting news for you. I have decided that I have had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man that I have never been inside. Love from your parent, Stefanie.” At the age of 76, the father she had known as Steven Faludi had just completed the final step of his transformation from man to woman with sex reassignment surgery in Thailand.
For his daughter, the news of her father's “change” and assumption of a new identity was both shocking and confoundingly ironic. Faludi's early identification with feminism and its centrality as a theme of her journalistic and literary pursuits had been stimulated by the tyrannical and patriarchal authoritarianism exerted by her father throughout her childhood and adolescence. Who is the person you “were meant to be?” she asks early on in In the Darkroom, the book that evolved from her odyssey to learn about the person she had never really known or understood as a father, who was no longer identifying as such.
Is who you are what you make of yourself, the self you fashion into being, or is it determined by your inheritance and all its fateful forces, genetic, familial, ethnic, religious, cultural, historical? In other words: is identity what you choose or what you can't escape? (p. 49).
We live in a time in which identitarian alignments are wielded like badges — blurring further the question of whether identity is inherent or constructed, found or made. Faludi cites the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman's observation that “if the modern ‘problem of identity’ is primarily how to construct an identity and keep it solid and stable, the postmodern ‘problem of identity’ is primarily how to avoid fixation and keep the options open” (p. 270). Faludi's main source for the psycholo