“I feel like I’m becoming who I really am.”
– A common expression, but beneath it, a profound contradiction.
In a world where identity has been severed from Being, where presence has dissolved into process, fluidity emerges as an ideal. To be fluid is to be free, unconstrained, endlessly open to becoming. This modern myth is nowhere more vividly expressed than in the discourse around gender.
What once appeared as form: male, female, body, soul; now appears as function, symbol, or social construction. Identity is no longer discovered; it is curated, chosen, or discarded. But this seemingly liberating model hides a deeper despair: the rejection of form is the rejection of Being. And the collapse of form leads not to freedom, but to dissolution.
The Rise of Fluidity: When Form Becomes Oppression
To the modern mind, form is equated with limitation. To say “I am” is, implicitly, to say “I am not something else”, and in a culture allergic to boundaries, that sounds like a threat.
Gender, in particular, has become the battleground of this rebellion. The biological form, the body, is now viewed with suspicion. It is seen not as a revelation of Being, but as a contingent accident, a raw material to be altered, interpreted, or transcended.
Desire, feeling, and identification become the arbiters of truth. “I am what I feel I am.” But feeling is notoriously unstable: it flows with mood, time, society, and personal history. If identity is grounded in feeling, then it floats, and what floats has no root.
But the fear beneath this movement is real: the fear that form traps us, that Being is a kind of prison. And so fluidity is offered as salvation, a way out of necessity.
Yet only what is necessary can be truly free.
Desire and the Illusion of Creation
The modern self wants to create itself. It believes that by choosing, it affirms its freedom. But choice, when untethered from Being, becomes a kind of self-erasure. Each new version contradicts the last. The “true self” is always just ahead, never now. It becomes a ghost chased through the hallways of desire.
Desire is not evil. But when it becomes the ground of identity, it becomes a tyrant. The self no longer rests in presence; it must be pursued, redefined, medically sculpted, socially affirmed. And even then, doubt remains. Because desire cannot provide what it promises: the permanence of Being.
Form as Revelation, Not Constraint
In the metaphysical structure of Being, form is not a cage; it is a necessary appearance. To be is to appear in a certain way. Not arbitrarily, not contingently, but necessarily. The eternal self is not formless, but eternally itself, appearing in a particular form that is not reducible to biology, yet is not foreign to it either.
Masculine and feminine are not cultural constructs, nor are they rigid molds. They are modes of appearing that reflect deeper metaphysical realities. The body, rather than an obstacle to freedom, becomes a witness to Being. It is not everything, but it is not nothing. It is the place where eternity touches the visible.
To affirm form is not to deny complexity, variation, or uniqueness. It is to say: you are not an accident. Your appearance is not arbitrary. You are not a shapeless will floating in space; you are a presence, appearing here, now, in a form that reveals, rather than restricts, your truth.
The Collapse of Form Is the Collapse of Meaning
When fluidity is taken as the final truth, form collapses, and with it, meaning. Nothing holds. Language becomes unstable. Identity becomes exhausting. Community fragments. And ultimately, the self dissolves into performance and contradiction.
This is not an argument against compassion or the complexity of individual experience. It is a metaphysical diagnosis: if Being is replaced by becoming, then form becomes enemy, and identity becomes illusion.
But what appears in truth, what is, cannot be fluid in essence. It can only appear ever more deeply, not by changing, but by revealing what was always already true.
Looking Ahead
We have examined the crisis of gender as a reflection of the deeper crisis of form. But this crisis also extends into the realm of relationships. If the self is fluid, and the other is fluid, what does it mean to love? What remains when no one stays the same?
In the next article, we turn to love, recognition, and the eternal other, and ask whether true relationship is still possible in a world that has forgotten what it means to be.
Next: Article 4 — Relational Beings: Love, Recognition, and the Eternal Other
It Is What It Is 
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