Women are amazing in juggling from one identity to the next. The flirty date you might meet at a party at happy hour could be a completely different person during nine-to-five. Behind the mask, maybe not quite the safe encounter for some resilient bachelor out for fun. Similarly, watch out for your digital encounters: chat with someone unknown via social media and you get into even worse trouble, especially if you are a child and nobody is around to warn and protect you. Multiple identities are an ever-present issue, but no matter how exponential the growth in physical and digital identities is, the integrity of one biological identity, which we can try and camouflage or deny, is the one true ‘me’ that we will need to live and die with.
Turning forty made me realize that beyond all scattered reflections of our persona, biological identity is the one starting point all roads lead back to when we follow the many paths of identification and try to arrive to their ultimate, ‘strong’ conclusions.
There is no denying of who we truly are in the end. “You will need to live with that skin forever”, so you better wear sunscreen when out in the sun. And some screen must be proposed to us when we are out there in the physical and digital worlds – needing protection for even better reasons than trying to avoid freckles. Policy makers, systems and technology experts are formulating a mix that can work and that I hope can have us reap the benefits without exposing us to risk.
As a woman I might feel the oneness of biological identity with greater impact as age advances. As a human being I feel that my body is once again to be considered at the heart of the individual that has to be protected by law down to the detail of DNA and who’s integrity should not be compromised ever, for any reason.
