The latest edition of Christine Burns’ Just Plain Sense podcast series takes a fascinating look at a new exhibition that has opened in London at the Wellcome Collection. Part of The Identity Project, the exhibition looks at eight different people as a means of illustrating different aspects of identity. The people covered include:

• Samuel Pepys, whose identity is shown to be re-interpreted by the editors of each subsequent edition of his famous diaries;
• Alec Jeffreys, the inventor of DNA fingerprinting who tried to trace his own ancestry to the notorious Judge Jeffreys and ended up finding ancestors from Mali instead;
• Claude Cahun, a Jewish-French lesbian artist who ran a campaign of subversion during the Nazi occupation of Jersey; and
• April Ashley, one the first people to undergo gender reassignment surgery.

I’m certainly going to find time to see the exhibition while it is on. I’ll be interested to see how well it manages to walk the fine line between allowing people to express their identity as they wish and pigeonholing them because of that identity.