Identicide: institutional destruction of natal identity
Identicide is a neologism coined by Olmo Gómez Aldaz to name a specific form of structural violence: the deliberate or institutionally legitimised destruction of a person’s natal identity.
The text situates adoption as the institutional paradigm of identicide: a system that erases filiation, origin, genealogy, name, memory and biological truth, replacing them with a fabricated identity legitimised through documents, records and discourses of protection.
Naming identicide makes it possible to recognise this violence as a specific category of harm and as a moral frontier: no system committed to truth and justice can be founded on the falsification of origin.
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Related
This page is part of the Undoing Adoption line of work, devoted to dismantling adoption as an institution of substitution, erasure of origins, identity violence and documentary destruction of filiation.
View the main Undoing Adoption page
Identicide names the institutional destruction of natal identity. It should be read together with the other critical texts in the same line:
On this page
- What identicide is
- Why it was necessary to name it
- Natal identity, filiation and truth of origin
- Adoption as the setting of identicide
- Manifestations of identicide
- Identicide as structural violence
- Documents, records and legal fiction
- Memory, genealogy and restitution
- A concept to expand the language of human rights
- Key concepts
- Structure of the text
- Publication, versions and records
- Access to the publication
- Recommended citation
What identicide is
Identicide designates the process by which a person is stripped of their natal identity — their genealogy, name, lineage and truth of origin — and replaced with a fabricated identity.
Unlike physical disappearance, identicide acts upon symbolic existence. It does not kill the body, but it destroys the person’s biographical coherence: the continuity between origin, memory, filiation and identity.
In the context of adoption, identicide occurs when the truth of origin is suppressed, substituted or falsified through legal, religious, family, registry or social mechanisms.
Why it was necessary to name it
The term identicide arises from a necessity: to name a violence that existed but had no word. For decades, modern adoption and other institutional forms of identity substitution have presented themselves through discourses of protection, charity or love.
Yet beneath those discourses, a systematic operation of destruction was taking place: the erasure of origin. Naming that violence is not a rhetorical gesture, but a political act.
Giving it a name makes it possible to break the consensus that turns falsehood into law, falsification into kinship and dispossession into virtue.
Identicide is not merely a new word. It is a conceptual tool for stating that identity is not a psychological ornament, but an ontological right.
Natal identity, filiation and truth of origin
Natal identity is rooted in genealogy, name, filiation, origin and biological truth. It is not reducible to an administrative datum or a subjective preference.
Identicide acts precisely on that core. It breaks the bond between being and origin, replaces real genealogy with a fictitious one and socially normalises that replacement.
The harm it produces is not merely psychological. It is biographical, legal, symbolic and ontological. The person is forced to inhabit a story that does not correspond to their truth of origin.
In this sense, filiation is not a legal accessory. It is a basic structure of recognition, memory and existence.
Adoption as the setting of identicide
Modern adoption constitutes the space in which identicide attains its most stable institutional form. It is not an accident or a deviation within the system, but a legal and moral device designed to legitimise the substitution of filiation.
Through adoption, the State, the Church and the family have been able to articulate a machinery that turns the falsification of origin into an act of social good.
Adoption is not limited to establishing a relationship of care. It produces a new identity, detached from lineage and memory. The issuing of a new birth certificate does not only erase the previous genealogy: it inscribes into the records of the State an ontological lie naturalised as truth.
Naming adoption as the setting of identicide does not mean denying the existence of affection. It means recognising that affection has been instrumentalised to justify the suppression of origin.
Manifestations of identicide
Identicide does not manifest as a single or isolated event, but as a continuous process of dispossession.
It appears in documents, records, rewritten biographies, family silences, substituted birth certificates, missing files and every instance where the truth of origin is denied, relativised or made irrelevant.
In the field of filiation, identicide replaces truth with narrative. The adopted person learns to recognise themselves within a fiction imposed from a position of power.
In that fiction, memory ceases to be a space of truth and becomes a device of obedience. Identity, instead of being a process of self-knowledge, becomes adaptation to institutional falsehood.
Identicide as structural violence
Identicide is not an error of the system: it is one of its conditions of operation. Its effectiveness lies in the fact that it requires no visible repression or coercive force.
It operates through law, moral discourse, bureaucracy, documents, archives and socially accepted forms of kinship.
It is structural violence because it is embedded in the very forms of social, legal and symbolic organisation. It is exercised under the appearance of normality.
Its root lies in the belief that identity can be administered by authority and that origin can be replaced in the name of good. That belief turns truth into property and filiation into an instrument.
Documents, records and legal fiction
Identicide acts above all through documents. It does not need to physically destroy the person, because it is enough to substitute their symbolic and legal inscription in the world.
A new birth certificate, a false registry filiation, a missing file or a legally fabricated genealogy can produce a form of civil disappearance.
The violence does not lie only in the initial falsehood, but in its stabilisation as public truth. The document turns fiction into administrative reality and forces the person to live within an identity that does not belong to them.
That is why identicide is not only a private harm. It is a violence inscribed in records, institutions and systems of social recognition.
Memory, genealogy and restitution
Identicide also affects collective memory. When a society normalises the erasure of origin, it renounces truth as a shared principle.
Restitution, therefore, is not only an individual act. Recovering the truth of origin also means restoring the memory of the human.
Genealogy is not a private curiosity. It is a form of continuity, belonging and memory. Erasing it means breaking the relationship between past, present and future.
Naming identicide and recognising its manifestations is the first step towards a reparation that cannot be limited to the psychological or the administrative: it must also be historical, legal, political and symbolic.
A concept to expand the language of human rights
The concept of identicide expands the critical vocabulary of human rights, identity studies, decolonial thought and the abolitionist critique of adoption.
It makes it possible to link identity erasure with broader histories of domination, disappearance, cultural substitution and dispossession.
In dialogue with concepts such as genocide, ethnocide and enforced disappearance, identicide shifts attention from physical elimination to the symbolic suppression of identity.
Its force lies in affirming that destroying a person’s natal identity is a form of structural violence that must be named, recognised, repaired and abolished.
Key concepts
- Identicide.
- Natal identity.
- Filiation.
- Origin.
- Genealogy.
- Memory.
- Biological truth.
- Identity erasure.
- Documentary falsification.
- Adoption.
- Structural violence.
- Civil disappearance.
- Restitution.
- Abolitionism.
Structure of the text
The article is organised as a conceptual and political proposal. It begins from the need to name a violence that had no word: the institutional destruction of natal identity.
It then develops the conceptual framework of identicide, defines the term, situates adoption as its paradigmatic institutional setting, analyses its manifestations in truth, filiation and memory, and formulates it as a form of structural violence.
The conclusion argues that naming identicide means breaking the silence that made it possible and opening a new dimension of memory, justice and restitution.
Publication, versions and records
Access to the publication
The publication is available on Zenodo. The general DOI identifies the full record and its versions, while the version DOI identifies a specific edition of the text.
Recommended citation
Gómez Aldaz, Olmo. Identicide (Adoption): a neologism to name the institutional destruction of natal identity. 2025. Zenodo. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17457585.