There's two ways of reading this. You can read it from a technical perspective and take the message of something along the lines of "Don't invest your ego into unnecessary technical questions because it'll stop you having logical and productive discussions". But if this were written today in the context of something like this SE issue you could read it as tone deaf - a trans-man/women doesn't choose to face discrimination, they don't have a choice over their identity, they merely express their identity, so telling them to "Keep your identity" small is basically akin to saying that they shouldn't express their identity - something that PG as a straight white male doesn't have to worry about.
Disclaimer: It was written in 2009, read in context it's very clear the first interpretation is the correct one, there's an entire concept of identity that didn't exist in the public discussion when this was written.
I see what you mean. I guess perhaps another way of characterizing PG's advice would be to keep your identity as small as possible, but no smaller.
I think it's a pretty good idea to think about how to not be a "Java programmer" or a "kitesurfer" (to pick two things that I could be identified as), since the former sets my brain up to be implicitly against, say, Kotlin or Haskell, and the latter sets my brain up to be against windsurfing. And I like all of those things too!
But certainly, there are things that are core to someone's identity, and I guess that's where each of us needs to find our own boundaries.
Not that I expect this to become universal mores, but wisdom traditions from Buddhism to Deleuze advise us (generally speaking, blurring important distinctions) to have no core identity.
Identity can be a tool and a crutch. My feeling (as someone who identifies as human and has been hanging out/coping with the world for 3-4 decades -- a feeling, informed by a lifetime of good and bad situations) is that identity politics hurts more the identity-assertion people; the opposite faction is merely annoyed.
PG's essays contain a good amount of quote-unquote "real talk". His SJW-isms espoused on Twitter and the like are obviously only superficial, a defense mechanism widely recognized as a necessity among semi-known, substantially-wealthy persons.
This is pretty common amongst business leaders; comparing their statements against their serious work quickly shows that it's not all so warm-and-fuzzy.
Virtue signaling may be its own reward to the masses, but it serves a real function for the well-to-do in preventing or at least confusing a Marie Antoinette effect. If there's any "let them eat cake" to be found, they can point to an abundance of more recent "truth to power" statements that will create enough ambiguity to tamp down the fervor of the mob, if and/or when it comes to that.
Some people would say that "keep your identity small" is functionally (although not in tone or spirit) the same as saying "gay men, stay in the closet" because in the absence of anything saying otherwise, people will assume you're part of the majority.
Furthermore, some people would say that everyone staying in the closet is bad advice for the gay community overall, as it means the average person will only hear about the 1% of gay people who are arrested for sex crimes, not the 99% of gay people who are perfectly nice people living normal lives and minding their own business, or the great scientists and inventors and authors who happened to be gay.
This is, as I understand it, an area of substantial strength of feeling in the gay community - it's part of what underlies concepts like 'gay pride' and the famous chant "we're here, we're queer, we're not going to disappear".
And although I've used gay men in the example above, it applies to any minority group - although with different details, I've never seen a female programmers' pride march!
I'm not gay, but I'm chronically mentally ill. I get (a version of, at least) the whole closet thing.
But here's the nub: the mental illness belongs to some contexts (therapist, friends, intimate relationship) and not others (trying to sell a project to a client).
The part about preferred pronouns feels a little too abstract and counterproductive. This is a personal feeling, coming from a personal interpretation of sources of wisdom. And it's not because it makes other people react in this or that way -- the point is not conquering the Other, you can't do this anyway. It's about how you set about to cope with the world and grow with it; how you deal with your own subjectivity.
Maybe I'm wrong. It's a very different minoritarian perspective.
Because given the prominence of identity as a central cultural debate, this essay comes across as tone deaf. I said it still might be because there's a tendency to judge past works by todays moral standards. For for instance, look at the twitter kerfuffle that ensued when Netflix decided to carry the old television show Friends.
