I'm open to being wrong, but for my money, "identify as"/"identifies as" is almost always a useless phrase. "She identifies as a woman" => "She is a woman." "They identify as Catholic." => "They are Catholic." And so forth. The only utility I can see is to distance the act of identification from actual belonging (as in the classic journalistic twist, "Name Lastname, who identifies as non-binary, [proceeds to misgender them]"), or to discuss the fallibility of survey results ("well, 50% of the cohort identified as sanitation workers, but it's possibly because you said 'garbage people' instead"). In my opinion, it's just not a phrase you should use, unless you can articulate why a simple "is" or "are" doesn't work.