I don’t know why people get their knickers in a twist over ‘disorder’. My daughter has a rare, life threatening immune disorder (when confronted with a virus or bacteria some of her white cells get over agitated and destroy healthy red cells instead of the ‘invader’, leaving her systemically imbalanced and her body unable to function. Without intervention it’s always fatal because the immune system destroys anything it can find leading to multi organ failure).
She doesn’t have an ‘immune difference’ or an ‘immune incongruence’, but it’s not a disease, she didn’t catch it, it’s a normal function of the human body that doesn’t quite work properly for her.
(It’s probably genetic but the in-depth genome sequencing she has been referred for is super specialised and harder to access at present due to Covid).
If we accept at face value that gender identity is a thing, but people who have a normal functioning one aren’t aware of it (like a normal functioning immune system, which mostly just runs in the background without us being aware of it, and then turns on when needed, a bit like a computer fan)
Then a ‘gender identity’ at odds with a sexed body IS a disordered state of being.
And If it isn’t a disorder, why treat it with medical and surgical interventions?
Males with disordered gender identities are still not females, of course, because male and female are reproductive categories, not identities.
I am pondering your thoughts on ‘sex identity’.
Personally I am increasingly of the thought that ‘identifying as’ anything is worthless. You are a thing or you aren’t a thing and there has to be some material, objective way for someone else to look at the evidence and say ‘yes, that checks out’. A society cannot be organised based on everyone’s individualised sense of self. Everyone will end up completely demented and demoralised (borrowing phrasing from Douglas Murray there).
Males with disordered gender identities in relationships with other males with disordered gender identities calling themselves lesbians or describing their relationship as a lesbian relationship doesn’t check out. They don’t need access to the protections that exist to enable lesbians to exist in a largely heterosexual society and they don’t need the specific provisions that lesbians need in healthcare (ie, access to screening for the female reproductive cancers that are more common in lesbians than in heterosexual women, or access to donor sperm and the safety screening and fertility care that accompanied that). Recording these males as lesbians will eventually fuck with statistics to the point that we will no longer be able to determine that some cancers disproportionately affect lesbians. Lesbians are a small percentage of women anyway, so it doesn’t take that many erroneous inclusions to the category to render data meaningless.
What the two males in a relationship might actually need, is access to services and healthcare for homosexual men, such as Prep (and some types of prep are only suitable for males, so sex difference is important here).
Thus treating their lesbian ‘identity’ as though it is meaningful increases risk of harm to both the males themselves and the minority group they have identified themselves into.
Yet on the surface, two men living quietly together ‘as women’ is harmless and no ones business but theirs and anyone who even thinks ‘hold on a minute, I have some questions’ should be dismissed as a bigot.
So yes, I agree that a woman’s sexed identity should be taken as seriously by the identity crowd as a man’s ‘gender identity’ but actually, we’re better off sacking off the concept of identity altogether.
It’s a bit like the campaign to make misogyny a hate crime - like, I agree that if victimisation on the grounds of race/minority sexuality/gender reassignment/religious belief is a hate crime then yes, misogyny should be in there too.
But actually, the entire concept of hate crime needs looking at again, because what began with the best of intent in the wake of Stephen Lawrence’s murder has somehow morphed into investigating youtube interviewers for hate on the basis of something their interviewee said on a live broadcast, or trying to prosecute Linda Bellos (a black, lesbian, feminist, life long left wing activist and senior citizen) and Miranda Yardley (a transsexual and former local level LGBT officer for the Labour Party) for hate crime, despite no evidence of either of them committing any crimes, let alone crimes motivated by hatred).
We need to get back to objective truth and stop fannying about with identity. It’s a dead end for humanity.
If it walks like a man and quacks like a man it’s a man.
Telling the truth is not a hate crime.