 The principal argument for this view—that transworld identities require non-trivial individual essences—is that such essences are needed in order to avoid what have been called ‘bare identities’ across possible worlds. And some regard bare identities as too high a price to pay for the characterization of de re modal statements in terms of transworld identity. If they are right, and if (as many philosophers believe) there are no plausible candidates for non-trivial individual essences (at least for such things as people, cats, trees, and tables) there is, indeed, a serious problem about transworld identity. (The expression ‘bare identities’ is taken from Forbes 1985. The notion, as used here, is approximately the same as the notion of ‘primitive thisness’ employed by Adams (1979), although Adams’s notion is that of an identity that does not supervene on qualitative facts, rather than an identity that does not supervene on any other facts at all.)