The basic illogicality of internal "gender identity"

I don't think anyone here would be having a problem if there were a few sincere people who were just quietly living their lives and doing their best and being part of the world

Since time immemorial this has happened. A few vanishingly rare trans people have used the ladies toilets only. Possibly a few, like a handful used or tried to use changing rooms, crisis centres and the like.
This was no problem at all, because the chances of you meeting one were slim, very slim. They were for the most part quite respectful and chances were they were terrified that women would create a scene, chuck them out, turn on them. No it wasnt at all nice for those women like me who have trauma from men. But we could put it aside for the few men that we in fact felt sorry for. And were unlikely to meet.
Then came the current situation which is uncontained, uncontrollable, and is all about keeping women on the back foot. So just why have women as a class risen up and said NO? Hmmm I wonder if it has anything to do with the sheer numbers of trans now? The fact we know more about it and dont want to be someones fapping material? The sheer audacity of demanding access to spaces they do not belong in?

But but women never say no, we are conditioned from birth to be pleasing and pleasant and comforting and helpful etc. So why now after all this time are we saying no? Cant quite put my finger on the answer.

There are many theories as to why more young people are CLAIMING a trans identity here, but none of them fit the data very well. First, the vast majority of people who claim such aren't even the least bit gender dysphoric:

sillyolme.wordpress.com/2019/07/19/how-many-trans-folk-are-there-really/

So, if they aren't gender dysphoric, what are they? This may seem strange, but they are mostly people who are appropriating the identity so as to be perceived as "cool" in certain well off (advantaged) socially privileged and politically liberal venues. Actual transsexuals, especially "early transitioning" (HSTS) have been at ever growing loggerheads with them for the past decade:

sillyolme.wordpress.com/2017/04/16/getting-lost-in-the-crowd/

It's not about "gender" or 'identity', sexuality, or patriarchy, etc. its about being part of the "cool kids club" (which, as an actual transsexual kid, having been viciously beaten multiple times, bullied, treated as a pariah, disowned by family, intermittantly homeless, etc. well... you can image how silly this seems to me and those like me).

The fact is, actual transsexuals (both kinds) are being shouted down by the ever growing chorus of non-gender-dysphoric "trans" (who aren't trans at all)... and even villified as "truscum"... and the latest sillyness being that they are paradoxically claiming that the very word that best describes us, "Transsexual" is a perjoritive !!!

sillyolme.wordpress.com/2020/09/14/the-silent-transsexual/

Actually, I do believe "gender identity" can exist, as a psychological phenomenom (in particular, when it results in gender dysphoria). And it's worth talking about. Because it's mostly fundamentally toxic. And something people should ideally free themselves from, not embrace!

The way I understand it, "gender identity" is based on strongly internalised gender stereotypes and (in the case of trans people), cognitive dissonance, because their "self" (likes, dislikes, thoughts, feelings, personality...) does not align with the stereotypes that they attach to their sex.

For instance, a submissive man... strongly believing that male = dominant, and female = submissive. Unable to reconcile their temperament with their sex. In theory, there's 3 ways to solve that dilemna:
A) change your temperament
B) change your body
C) change your pre-conceptions!
For me option C is the only sensible and viable one (even if that also involve challenging social norms), but clearly some people struggle, and may fruitlessly try A for a while, before settling for B...

... I think it's really sad. And I find the current medical approach disgusting.

Exactly. I don’t have ‘identities’ either, just facts eg my sex, my ethnic background, etc.

All I can think is it’s a feeling. For example, I feel younger than I am. But - that to me is a ‘realistic’ feeling because I’ve lived through the previous years of my life so I know what it is to be 25, 30 or whatever. But ‘feeling like the opposite sex’ is something different because a person wouldn’t know what being the opposite sex felt like. It just sounds like identifying with stereotypes, which is why I think the whole Gender Identity thing is depressingly regressive.

By definition, someone can’t feel like someone they’ve never been and never felt the feelings of. Added to that, women all feel differently so there’s no ‘woman feeling’. The feelings are only ‘woman feelings’ because they’re being felt by a woman.

I truly don't understand identity, really. Maybe I'm just dumb. I don't have 'identities'.

I have things I am. My nationality, my age, my sex, the fact I'm a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend- and things I can see - the job I do, the ways in which I spend leisure time. There are many observations I can make about myself in the world. But beyond that? Idk. What is 'identity', let alone 'gender identity'?

Men are trying to tell me not only that they are women, but that there's this little self living in their head? This little woman-self?

It makes no sense. I only understand GD as 'person observes discomfort and distress focused on their primary and secondary sexual characteristics'. Beyond that, it makes zero sense to me.

I do wonder if my lack of identifying with identities is normal or abnormal. The only things I can understand as 'identity' is being a fan.

None of it makes sense to me, really.

And like previous posters have said about religion, I accept that other people have religious beliefs/feelings/experiences that I don't share, and I don't ever try to argue against that, but if someone insisted that we all do in fact experience religious feelings I'd be confused. And if the state mandated that we had to act as if the religious belief was fact, that would be a concern.

I do think that one of the reasons that more young people are presenting to "gender identity services" is because they're being taught that people have such a thing as a gender identity.
So if they don't feel that they have one, they think they must be different, and start wondering - are they non-binary? asexual? trans? If they don't have a strong "gender identity" of girl, are they a boy?
I can't imagine what it would be like to have a gender identity, or to have a strong feeling of either being, or not being, a woman or a man. I can understand that some people might have such a feeling. But if I was taught that everyone had that feeling, I'd wonder what was wrong.

I always find the most interesting conversations on Mumsnet FWR.

But when I was 13 and realised that life and the world was totally unfair on women, I didn't immediately think "Oh, crikey I must be a 13 year old boy then" I struggled both personally and politically with patriarchy. I became a feminist.

And that meant working and reading and thinking, hammering out ideas and philosophies, defending your beliefs, trying to behave authentically. Not the easy path, but richly rewarding.

Thank your lucky stars (as I do) that you weren't born 13 years ago and now being gently encouraged to escape that messy female future, because your independent mind shows that you're really a boy.

I’m looking to find a way to reach Canadian parents who are curious about the lessons being taught at their kids’ school around gender identity. It would be great if they could have a platform on which to exchange ideas about it.

Very interesting thread and I completely agree OP. Not much rational thought is required to see that ‘gender identity’ doesn’t make any sense. How does a man know how other men feel inside, let alone how a woman feels? So how can they possibly say they ‘feel like a woman inside’ when they cannot have the faintest idea of how a woman feels inside? Hell, I don’t know how other women feel inside I can only say that I personally have never had a ‘woman feeling’ and my only identity is as a unique Hunan being. But I wouldn’t presume to say that other women felt like this. How would I know?

And ‘identifying’ as a woman? What does that mean? Unless a ‘female gender identity’ can be defined and described then what am I identifying with? I can’t identify as an ‘oogymaflop’ if an ‘oogymaflop’ doesn’t exist.

In The Daily Telegraph there is a series of articles by a man (still describes himself that way) who is transitioning to be a woman. In an early article he said he always suspected he was a woman because he was emotional, cried in films, likes fashion and interior design. In another words a set of the crudest gender stereotypes that you can get, presumed to be ‘what a woman is’. Being an emotional man who liked interior design was not, it seems, permissible.

I don’t believe in gender identity. It makes no sense. I don’t know what drives some people to want to transition but I think the answers are more likely to lie in rigid cultural stereotypes for the sexes than in any internal gender sense

It’s so depressing that leaders of the woke movement like Nicola Sturgeon, don’t seem able to think this through..

Goosefoot, I appreciate your efforts here. I feel as if you are trying to communicate something difficult. I enjoy watching Rose of Dawn, but I honestly don't think of her as a woman, though I can understand she is happier that way. I like Blair White, too. I can understand that certain people in this world really do want to live as the other se, whatever that means to them. I don't think anyone here would be having a problem if there were a few sincere people who were just quietly living their lives and doing their best and being part of the world, as may I take ityou? are trying to be. People who try to communicate sincerely and don't talk over and try to control the group with which they identify.

I do understand that identity is complicated, personally. I raised my children in my husband's religion, and was an active member of his faith's religious organization. So I know how it feels to identify with a community but not be part of it (I don't believe in God so I could not make myself join any faith, but I also have respect for faith traditions like this one). Because I come from a more privileged faith, I felt that my role should be one of respectful support and service to the community. To this day, I feel that in reality, I have an honored role as an insider/outsider--someone who understands issues within the community and can communicate them with people outside the community.

If more trans women took an attitude of respectful service and appreciation toward women, instead of demanding care from them, then they would get a very different response. If, instead of demanding validation and crying about their neediness andwell, you know all the ways women are pissed offthey got on the front lines of fighting for women's reproductive rights, or learning why women are undrpaid, or really digging into all the ways that women are treated like shitthe real, honest, dirt of what it's like to be a womanthen they would find that women were powerful allies in their defense, not cynical and wary.

I certainly wasn't intending to be nasty - I'm sorry you read my post that way. Not sure what was in it that was "nasty" to you personally. I was partially agreeing with you, but taking issue with some points. It's the "Yes, but ..." form of dialogue which can build common understanding and generate new ideas through discussion.

Ah, well I'm sorry then, I read you entirely the wrong way, I thought you meant I was disagreeing just for the sake of it.

As far as the concept, I think we do actually need to differentiate out different types and origins of what is being called gender identity. There are people who I would say are "appropriating" in a certain sense - in terms of it's political meaning. And there are people taking the piss too, who have no real identity issue and either are deliberately being manipulative, or are not thinkers and have just gone along with what seem to be the new social claims.

But as far as the internal sense of identity, that's not a political thing. It is a set of structures and boundaries that are built up over time in our mind, which are important to a stable personality. Our sense of our body as being ourselves is part of that, and like RoyalCorgi said there seem to be a number of things that can go wrong along those lines, at least some in relation to some sort of trauma, especially during periods where identity formation is really active. (And I think some of the personality disorders are linked to issues with identity too - I might be misremembering though.)

I would not tend to call someone who has sexual identity issues of that type "appropriating." Even if a few of them end up "living as the other sex" as it were in order to control symptoms, I don't think that's really what's going on. I would like it to be very clear in people's minds that these examples are not biological women (or men in those rare cases) or even women at all in the normal sense of the word, that it's not some sort of inner essence that has been revealed, that while certain things associated with women may be opened to them, others may not. And I'd like people to realise it's a fairly rare thing, not something we need to be hyper-vigilant about spotting in kids etc.
Even teen girls with RODG, it seems to be in part issues around identity formation, though in that case it seems like the best approach is to help them overcome them, as most girls do eventually.

But I can't see any reason we'd dismiss the whole idea of identity.

In a way I think being masculine and feminine are a whole different ball of wax, and it's an unfortunate confusion that people are seeing this as "gender". To some extent I think we've always realised there are some masculine women and feminine men, but how that is expressed may be more or less flexible. I'm not sure how important that flexibility is. If we lived in a place where by necessity everyone wore close to the same clothing, or almost no clothing, how would we express that? Would it be a problem that it would be limited? Sometimes I think we've contributed to the current problem by putting too much emphasis on the need to express ourselves in order to be authentic and self-actualised. It almost creates more pressure than it relieves at times, and it makes us pray to a sort of consumerism around our own image - including our image of ourselves. I wonder if that has had a hand in making young peoples identities more fragile?

It's like faith.

I volunteer at a centre which has a religious group the session after.
The lady who runs it told me, with absolute certainty, that Jesus told her to set up her class.

I have absolutely no concept of what having a Jesus tell me to do would be like; just as she has no concept of life without the guidance she gets from him/his voice.

The difference being that neither of us tries to tell the other we are bigoted for believing/not believing, nor have I once been assaulted by her.

In terms of gender non-conformity, the 80s were much more progressive than today.

Yes, absolutely, the two concepts of "being trans" and being "non-binary" are incompatible. You don't expect any of this drivel to make sense do you?

Yes people have various identities but with most of them we understand that they are constructed and not innate. Nobody is a Yorkshireman or a Conservative or an atheist in the womb.

Thanks to MoleSmokes for the links to my blog. (Yes, please do NOT confuse that other blog "Sillyolyou" with me or mine... that other one was created to lampoon my work and to create confusion.)

I may have a few other useful links on it for the present topic of "gender identity" in transsexuals & transgender (not always the same phenomena):

The Origins of Cross-Gender Identity In Transsexuals
sillyolme.wordpress.com/2009/12/28/the-origins-of-cross-gender-identity-in-transsexuals/

The Gender Identity Fallacy
www.transkids.us/gid.html

I think some people can very strongly feel things about their own body that aren't true, iyswim. So anorexics may wrongly believe they're fat. People with body dysmorphia imagine themselves to be ugly. There is a group of people who really see themselves as disabled and go out of their way to find a surgeon who will amputate their leg.

On a more mundane level, I'm sure a lot of us feel a kind of dissatisfaction with the way we look and believe that somehow the "real" us is slim and beautiful, not overweight and haggard. (Or is that just me?)

So it makes sense that there are some people who really desperately feel that they are the wrong sex. They don't know how it feels to be the other sex, but they think they do. It's very hard to know what goes on in someone else's head. Some people are convinced they have a personal relationship with God. I'm convinced they're wrong, but then they would say that I'm in no position to judge what happens in their head.

I don't think I have an internal sense of gender identity, but I don't actually know how that's supposed to feel, so perhaps I do without realising it?

At this point, I feel, like Douglas Adams's God, I'm about to disappear in a puff of logic.

But if it's used in a politicised way, then accuracy is really at stake. Our attempts to ameliorate structural inequalities in white capitalist patriarchy mean that certain identities are significant

I'm not sure why you feel the need to be nasty because I didn't totally agree with what you said. People ask if we are inclined to purity spirals here... well....

But yes, accuracy is important. And I think I said that I thought the current gender identity narrative was "pretty dumb" and also not in line with scientific understanding about identity.

But there is a really strong tendency by many posters here to simply say that gender identity is a ridiculous and completely illogical idea, and that it has nothing to do with questions about transgenderism.

But that's not really accurate either, is it? Identities are talked about, at great length, is psychology, there is a lot of research into them. And in fact there is some real scientific thought that certain problems relating to sexual dysphoria may be related to identity, and especially that ROGD may be have identity disorders as a very important element.

I'm not a fan of ignoring those elements because the idea of gender identity, or gender at all, doesn't fit in with an ideological position that we should abolish gender.

However, identity is a thing. We can have a tribal identity, a national identity, even a sense of personal identity, family identity. These are all constructed but clearly they reflect a capacity of sorts that human's have, probably as a way of creating group cohesion. I don't see why we'd not have a gender identity.

But our tribal identity has to be for our actual tribe, otherwise it's viewed as cultural appropriation.

Our national identity has to be for our actual nationality - I think people would (rightly) regard me as a bit nuts if I decided that my national identity was French, even though I am British and live in the UK.

Family identity - I'm a member of my family, not anyone else's.

So we could have a 'sex identity' as a member of our own sex, but a 'gender identity' as the opposite sex is appropriation. Although I can't see why people shouldn't have a gender identity in terms of masculinity or femininity. So a man might be a feminine man or a woman might want to describe herself as a masculine woman. This would be truly progressive, and doesn't require appropriation of the experience of people belonging to another group.

The linguistic hoops we have to jump through on this board in order to have a perfectly lawful and factually accurate conversation...