Could you get on board with this definition of gender identity?

Does Beardy Alex really believe he is performing 'gender identity:woman' though? I think a lot of these individuals are just taking the piss. None of us know what they feel inside, just as they have no idea how women feel inside. In the days when to be trans meant that you spent hours and hours on psychiatrists couches maybe there could be some legitimate claims made as to the inner lives of transexuals as a class (although very much through the eyes of the psychiatrist, some of whom very much had their own opinions and prejudices) now the trans umbrella is so broad as to be meaningless.

Gender identity to me remains in the realm of faith. Very important to some, a mystery to others and with a significant potential given to some advocates to manipulate both believers and bystanders.

for example, boy who loves soccer does not think "I love soccer because Dad does and Uncle Jon does and they have penises too...boy thinks "I love soccer because I am a boy"

And girls/women like me who loved (and played) soccer from a very early age and still do, despite knowing I'm very much a woman who knew as a girl she was very much a girl?

I agree with 'performance'
Not with instinctive.
Beardy Alex believes he is performing 'gender identity:woman', with his tache, beard and male genitalia. Because: skirts +blue eyeshadow.
Nothing instinctive about that.

I would say it is a learned performance of a sex-based stereotype, coupled with a dogmatic belief that behavioural stereotypes should remain firmly connected to biological sex and presented as if innate.

Not catchy, I know.

I do understand what you’re getting at though. I’m just not sure instinct is the right word.

What you mean (I think?) is that children learn by copying - that is a valid point. I’m thinking of how best to express it... it’s almost like the original biological definition of a meme - a culturally infectious transmissible behaviour.

I don’t like the word instinctive here either.

Instinctive has a specific meaning. It’s a pattern of activity the organism is born capable of doing rather than learning it. It’s a behaviour that will occur the first time the appropriate stimulus is applied. For example a bird building a nest, a puppy drooling at food, a spider constructing a web.

Instinctive implies innate. Since gender roles have a massive learned component, instinct isn’t an appropriate term.

I’m on my way to work with a bus full of women taking young children to school. I’m passing by lots of other women walking kids to school. Women of all ethnicities and ages.

And that’s women performing gender. That’s what femininity is and the strongest message young kids get about what it is women and girls are supposed to do.

Whether or not you put a dress on while doing all this unpaid work is a tiny, trivial part of messages about femininity. But the trans debate has centred these minor issues. If ‘gender identity’ was actually about women’s experience of gender roles and why they conform to them, it wouldn’t be pink and lipstick we’d be making central.

because if all children have an instinctive desire to behave in the way they are told/ observe their sex should behave then you would never have children who do not conform to their culture's sex stereotypes.

Well not really because a lot of children wrestle between the desire to fit in with their gender and their personal preferences.

It’s weird because I remember the actual moment when, as a girl, I told myself that I had to stop all my tomboy stuff (climbing trees, being scruffy, using a male name) because I would never get a boyfriend if I continued and I would never be like the other girls.

Gender identity feels more natural to some than others because they don’t mind the stuff that goes along with their assigned group.

And I figure that trans is just a stronger version of what I felt. You feel much more strongly attached to the behaviours and attributes that have been assigned to the other sex (although not being trans I am just speculating I guess).

But I believe that if we get away from such strong gender stereotypes people will be able to let all the aspects of their personalities be free and not feel they have to be or the other.

I agree that children are given powerful messages about how they should look and behave according to the gender rules society assigns to each sex. As humans are social creatures most children will adapt their behaviour at least to some extent in order to conform to the rules they are given, and this is reinforced by frequent positive messaging from the adults around them, and policed by negative messaging too.

However I don't think that this can be taken too far because if all children have an instinctive desire to behave in the way they are told/ observe their sex should behave then you would never have children who do not conform to their culture's sex stereotypes. No gender non conformity and no transgender individuals. Plus I don't think that performance is static, many people (sadly not as many as during other fairly recent periods) play with gender performance in minor or major ways over time. I for example generally am fairly non conforming, I have short hair, wear androgenous clothing, never wear make up, am often fairly bolshy etc, but at other times I like to dress up in ways that accentuate my female form, and there are times I enjoy being submissive. My identity does not change with my clothes or my behaviour. I'm always my unique self, and I don't 'identify' as female or understand what gender identity means to other people. I'm also not convinced I'm unusual in this, I don't think that gender identity as a term is particularly meaningful to most people. Most people simply know what their sex is and are more or less OK with the gender stereotypes associated with that sex.

I agree with bab it's the linking of different aptitudes, behaviours, clothes etc to gender rather than just recognising as part of the rich variations of humans, male and female. It's the stereotypes we need to get rid of.

OP I agree. The instinctive desire to belong to immerse yourself in the category that’s been assigned to you.

To copy people in that group by wearing the markers.

But I don't mean compliant. I think perhaps I mean "co-operate"

Sorry I can’t make sense of that. Complicit and compliant are both adjectives and obviously easily confused - cooperate is a verb - even if you mean cooperative (adjective), that means working together towards a mutual goal. Surely it was compliant (as in, compliant with stereotyped sex-based role) you were after? That makes logical sense...

Gender is totally an artificial social construct. You can see that from the way it varies around the world and through history. In some societies men wear sarongs instead of trousers and decorate their skin with tribal markings, among the Masai it’s the women who cut their hair short and the men who grow it long, in 18th century Britain, it was the men who wore gaudy colourful clothes and fancy wigs, in Asia maths and science are not seen as mainly subjects for boys, etc.
The only constant everywhere is biological, genital and chromosomal sex, not gender. A transgender person can certainly feel uncomfortable with the gender stereotype of their particular society, but they can have no idea how it “feels” to be the opposite sex as they lack any of that sex’s attributes. Surely we should be working to get rid of gender stereotypes altogether for everybody, not just trans people? So that a gender dysphoric man can simply be comfortable to be a man who likes dresses or make up- he doesn’t need to claim that it somehow makes him a woman?

‘Instinctive complicity’ is absolutely meaningless without either performance of copying added.

Young children are far more exposed to pregnant women and nudity far more than any other age group. They know mummies have babies and daddies do not.

It is also oppressive to women to try and claim that femininity can be decoupled from the female body.

Femininity is societal rules about the treatment and perception of female bodied people.

If identity is nothing but performance, how is it identity? Identity is internal.

Ah, is it?

Dictionary googling again! I think relavent definition of ‘identity’ here is ‘the fact of being who or what a person or thing is; the characteristics determining who or what a person or thing is’.

Facts and characteristics - those are not internal things. I’d counter that in this context - discussing ‘gender identity’ - it is less about some indescribable internal sense of self, and more about how the individual wishes to be perceived and treated by others; hence adopting/forging traits and characteristics in order to invite that perception/treatment - based on what that individual has learned about societal interactions, in this context based on stereotypes sex-roles. Hence, identity can be described as performance, because it involves the display of this conditioned (learned) behaviour.

I hope that all makes sense

It is oppressive to women to redefine womanhood as femininity

This is a superbly succinct way to explain it to people.

I chatted to an excuse me a fortnight or so ago. He was a bit fey and softly spoken but otherwise completely male in an 'I know best' sort of way. I'm astonished he thinks he is female.