One of the silliest things people say in this silly time is, apparently, "Be Who You Are." If it is not a tautology that would apply equally well to a dog, a tree, or a rock, what can it mean? Oh, I am aware that it has to do with sex. Nobody says, "If you feel like a swindler inside, don't make yourself miserable by suppressing it! Find those easy marks! They are too dumb to deserve to keep their money. Not that it matters. You have to be who you are." Nobody says, "If you feel like a potato, dig a hole in the ground, sit there, and do nothing. As long as you can afford it, be that starchy spud. Grow eyes on your backside. Do it, man! Be who you are."
Applied to little children, it is malevolent and pernicious. A kid who doesn't know where babies come from, or that five and five make ten, is supposed to "know" that she's a he or he's a she. And along comes the surgeon and Big Pharma, who will collect how many buckets of big dollars from the drugs the kid will have to be on for the rest of his life? Doctor Mengele, thou shouldst be alive at this time. Were I a Hindu, I'd believe that you are.
But it's a generally foolish thing to say, "Be who you are." The inscription at the oracle of Delphi read, GNOTHI SEAUTON, which the Romans rendered into Latin as GNOSCE TEIPSUM -- KNOW THYSELF. The assumption is that men do not generally know themselves. It is the patient and error-ridden work of many years, and some people do not attain it, and none of us sinners and fools ever know ourselves completely. I think of the raving of Orval in Lewis's Till We Have Faces, which she intended to be an accusation of the gods, but the veil is off, and she hears from her own lips the none too edifying motives that have moved her all her life long -- and she has been a notably virtuous woman and an excellent ruler. Or I think of the old and dying Louis in Mauriac's novel Vipers' Tangle, who learns only in his last days that he loved his wife after all, and that she loved him, or that they tried to love. Who dares to say that he knows himself? And sin, at that, deforms and confuses. Dante did well to submerge many a kind of sinner beneath personality and identity: the opportunists, the avaricious.
Our English is unusual in that we have the single word KNOW for knowing a person (German KENNEN), knowing how to do something (German KOENNEN), and knowing that something is so (German WISSEN). It wasn't always so. The common Anglo Saxon word for knowing something was WITAN, which survives as a verb in the fossil phrase TO WIT, that is, TO KNOW. WITAN is a cousin of all those W-words in the Indo European family that have to do with seeing and understanding: Latin VIDEO, I SEE; Greek OIDA, I SEE; Welsh GWELY, to SEE, Sanskrit VEDA ... But KNOW comes from the root GNO-, giving us Latin GNOSCERE, to KNOW (as in to RECOGNIZE), Greek GNOSIS, KNOWLEDGE, Russian ZNAT', to KNOW.... Indo European G > Germanic K (cf. Latin GENUS, English KIND; Latin GELUS, English COOL, Latin GERMEN, English CORN), and that's how we get the C(K) in CNAWAN and KNOW, and the consonant was pronounced into the 15th century. The odd thing is that the GN in Latin also tended at the beginning of a word to be reduced to N, so we have GNOBILIS > NOBILIS, describing someone you ought to KNOW, someone of distinction (English NOBLE); the opposite is *INGNOBILIS > IGNOBILIS (English IGNOBLE), where the G hung around under the influence of the preceding N. Latin NOTUS > English NOTE is similar.