Spreading the idea that everyone has a gender identity

Our shared characteristics are a collection of stereotypes and we display them to a lesser or greater degree. Some not at all. But many women display feminine behaviours. Many men display masculine behaviours. And many of each feel that those stereotypes are part of their innate personalities and expect people of the other sex to differ to them by virtue of being the other sex

AngryAttackKittens

Now you are giving me flashbacks of my inner monologue at Sunday school!

‘Jesus wants ME for a sunbeam? Does Jesus know how rubbish I’d be at it? I’m not remotely sunbeamish. He’d be making a dreadful mistake etc etc’

How can we experience anything anywhere other than within?

That should have said "Its origin is 'without' but we experience it 'within'

@herfemaleness I seriously doubt being left or right wing is in our genes! And neither is gender. Innate - no. Observable- yes

@lurker Yes I'm doubting myself there a bit. It depends whether you define gender resisting/non conforming/ a gender as a gender identity. Maybe it isn't. What I was trying to say was that we are all forced to respond to gender. It's origin it 'without' but we experience it 'within'

But it is unscientific to say that gender identity isn't a thing. It is an observable phenomenon

I'm left wing, this is as much to do with my genes as my upbringing. Left wing people have different brains to right wing people, something to do with the way we see threats and view new experiences.

You can make predictions about me based on my spoken assertion of my left wing identity because of shared characteristics which are true for a large majority of left wing people.

What predictions can we make about people with a woman gender identity? What are our shared characteristics?

Nurturing and empathy are defined as feminine behaviours.

It is an observable phenomenon

Observable how?

Prawn that study was begging the question. They defined masculine behaviours as less caring and then observed the less caring ones behaving in a less caring way

SarahCarer you said Gender is a part of all our identities though.

The thing is, everyone is different. It would be impossible to accurately describe all 'genders'.

Why have a 'gender' when you actually mean 'personality'. I think we can all agree that everyone has a different personality. Why constrain people to boxes labelled 'gender'. It really isn't necessary. The only use for it is to make sweeping statements about groups of people that are very rarely true, usually involving stereotypes.

As I've said on other threads - I'm a woman because my biology defines me as one, but I don't conform to the usual 'woman stereotypes'. What would my gender identity be? I'm certainly not a man. If I have to name a gender identity then it is 'lurker33'. No one is quite like me.

Gender refers to outcomes for women as a class, heavily influenced by society.

It cannot be reduced to how women feel, identify or behave. If women are sent to prison for miscarriage, that is a gendered outcome, based on how society treats women as a class.

But it is unscientific to say that gender identity isn't a thing. It is an observable phenomenon

When I look at the people closest to me, they're all a mish mash of supposedly masculine and feminine characteristics. I remember reading something a very long time ago about a study which filmed people left with a kitten after they'd been interviewed about their degree of stereotypical gender performance.

The ultra masculine types ignored the kitten. The ultra feminine ones clutched the poor thing so close the kitten struggled. The people in the middle played gently.

The study showed that extremes of gender performance aren't healthy. That definitely resonates with me.

However I can't find the study. I read it a very long time ago and it may have been debunked.

I can't imagine anyone being funded to study whether gender is harmful any more. Now it's not only beneficial, there are people trying to make it compulsory

TheWrongTrousers You 'identify' as a woman because that's your material reality.

Yes, probably, for me that is mostly true. Being a woman is my material reality and my social reality, and they line up more or less nicely with my internal sense of reality, which (as far as I can tell) has pretty much come out of those two external things anyway. I see my gender identity as largely a matter of playing the material and social hand I've been dealt. I am pretty sure that if I'd been born physically male and treated as a boy/man by others then I'd identify as a man and with men, and that it wouldn't feel like a worse fit than I fit now with being a woman. (Though of course I can't prove that.)

But I'm not everyone. Not everyone's internal gender identity lines up with external material or social realities. Rather than taking their internal identity from outside these people seem to start trying to change the material reality (e.g. via surgery) and/or the social reality (passing in society as the other sex) so as to approximate more closely to their internal gender identity. And some seem to be better at identifying "as" than "with", which is not surprising since the "with" component comes most easily from shared experience.

That should say tweens not teens

Politically an agenderist movement might be rather useful to us.

It would provide protection from discrimination on the basis of belief and might also encourage non-feminist atheists / materialists to join the fray

I'm back and I'm not being pedantic for the sake of it I promise. In our brains we are all forced to respond to gender. Many many people respond by internalizing the expectations of others. This starts from very young and we don't know it's happening. Some people respond by rejecting gender and that affects the way others see them as well but they have to work hard at that too and it is often an active choice. Even those who think they have rejected gender later find they have undiscovered elements still lurking in corners of their minds. If at 11 I had one person in front of me telling me gender identity isn't real and another person from mermaids I am certain I would have sided with mermaids because I knew my gender identity was real. I could perceive it within my mind. That's why I'm so keen on addressing the reality of gender identity and where it comes from and how it works. Trans people are no more mistaken about gender existing in their minds than many many non trans people especially teens who tend to be more highly gendered in their thinking. If we start with that reality we can start to explain how it came about. Patriarchy.

All trans adults showed behaviour typical of the opposite sex as children. They turn this round to suggest that all children who show behaviour typical of the opposite sex must be trans.

If gender is innate, I have a questions:

Why do pretty much all children breach gender roles? There's not a child alive who has flawlessly only ever displayed "gender appropriate" behaviour. I know that trans adults very often detail their childhoods spent displaying or yearning to be allowed to display opposite-sex sex roles. But it's not uncommon at all. It's retconned into being meaningful - and it's not.

Saying you have "a gender identity" is a bit like saying you have "an age identity".

I know I'm 45 years old. It's part of my identity and it is also relevant to how society treats and considers me and how other humans interact with me. But I don't have "an age identity" I just know how old I am and my physical appearance gives a pretty clear indication to others which age group I'm in.

(Except age does actually exist as a material reality whereas gender is a social construction so we'd do better to talk about "a sex identity" but that doesn't suit genderist ideology as it is patently ridiculous to assert that your "sex identity is female when your reproductive sex is male".)

Michael Cashman in my opinion is sore about the hard times some people gave him in the past, so he takes it out on women by defending the T in LGBT.

Taking out you issues in the past you have with family that forced you to do things you didn't want to regarding their religious beliefs and so forth, isn't really helping create alliances in the here and now, is it?

That 'forced feminisation' link is a good answer to anyone who says AGP doesn't exist, Prawn.

Capitalist Porn masters have Brosocialists by the balls?

It's like being forced to go to church as a kid when you didn't believe, isn't it? And then some keen person starts going on about feeling the presence of the lord and you're standing there all "well this is awkward".

Exactly this! I was raised in a churchgoing household, and I desperately tried to believe in the soul I was told I had. I couldn't find that soul, and for a long time I concluded that this was because I was defective.

I don't see any difference between the congregation who told me whether I could find it or not, I had a soul, and I was wrong and naughty to suggest that I didn't, and the gender ideologues who tell me that whether I can find it or not, I have a gender identity, and I'm cruel and ignorant to suggest that I don't.

Two remarkably similar authoritarian belief systems.

No. The second wave nailed it. Gender is imposed, not internal. You've got your sex, your sex roles and your personality. That's all.