Sexed identities

Identity as being male or female develops once an individual understands 1) that they are one of two sexes and 2) which one they are. The fact that everyone is one sex or the other and the vocabulary to describe this has to be taught to children along with other complex material concepts, like family relationships, the difference between animals and plants, etc.

What typically follows from there is recognition by the child that people of each sex (especially kids) tend to play together and tend to dress and play in stereotypical ways. In many kids (around 3-4) there follows a period of extreme tribal sexism. I am a girl, therefore girls are better than boys, therefore I won’t play with boys and I won’t do “boy stuff”. This is an important time for intervention from adults, and learning concepts like empathy and fairness. Reminding the child that, previously, they liked X, what changed? Or, does wearing pink/a dress make you a girl? How silly!! No, it’s your body that tells you what sex you are, right? This type of correction is essential to developing sense of self as a sexed being, but also an individual, rather than member of a tribe. Also helps combat sexism.

Some children never participate with the tribalism and prefer to continue with strong interests. They will choose playmates based on interest rather than sex. GNC children have always existed. I think it’s about 10-20% consistently. These kids are also neuroatypical at a higher rate than other kids.

It seems that pro-gender activists would like parents to stop teaching children the vocabulary in the first step of gender identification (I have a sexed body more like other male or other female people), and instead tell the children that their sex is determined by their choice of playmates / interests during the sexist socialization phase of gender identification. And finally, corrections about sex stereotypes are to be verboten. It becomes transphobic to say “no, playing with dolls doesn’t make Jason a girl, Jason is a boy no matter his interests - it’s not fair to assume someone shouldn’t do something simply because they have a penis.” The goal is modifying language in a way to misinform children about their bodies, and instead to allow gender stereotypes to define sex, without correction. Deeply sinister.

And where does that leave the vast majority of children who would otherwise have been GNC yet have no issues with their sexed bodies? It leads them to think they are actually the opposite sex. Because we are told to educate them otherwise is transphobic.

Yes! It’s the using of the same language for both an acquired identity and a factual statement. So the phrase gender identity is correct until it is conflated with sex.

When did the words “I identify as” replace I am?

I am a woman vs I identify as a woman.
I am Jewish vs I identify as Jewish.
I am black vs I identify as black.

Is it an indicator that the one identifying does not feel fully entitled to the word at the end of the sentence?

I have no problem saying I am a woman, it’s factual. However I expect that my legal sex could be described in a data report as identity - woman.

Someone who is a UK native with a traditional British type name with Caucasian appearance is unlikely to experience racial discrimination in casual encounters even if they are mixed race and identify as such. They could experience it in a situation where their racial identity is known. Their identity is the same in both situations.

Maybe we also need to think about the meaning of the word 'identity'.

Is it the empirical, verifiable, reality of how others recognise an individual, or is it an individual's internal sense of how they recognise themself?

It has to be a biological identity. As does disability and age. None of those can be defined or be of use if they become a concept.

I don't know what to say about intersex experiences of sexed identity, except that, for the one woman I knew who discovered her dsd at puberty, it wasn't the gendered element of womanhood she felt had been ripped from under her feet, but the sexed element.

Yes, this is the point though, because in fact, her sex didn't change. She was always the same sex. Which suggests that her sense of herself as a sexed being is not directly entirely, and irrevocably created by the actual sexed body.

The sense of an identity as a woman or man didn't come from what the body was, but from what she thought the body was, and society thought the body was.

This led people to think that there could be other instances where there could be a incongruity.

The gender pay gap data calculations use the legal sex data captured for HMRC. You cannot actually run payroll without the binary sex field completed. That data feeds the ONS national data set. Obviously if people have changed their sex on their passport then payroll reflects that but it can only be male or female.

Identity data collected by D&I isn't a full data set as it's an optional field (although D&I people would prefer to have it forced on employees). There is pressure from D&I to use optional data sets which includes nb and prefer not to say in the gender pay gap which in practice means the young women identified as nb are deleted and the well paid men, sick of being maligned by D&I also get the chance to prefer not to say and delete themselves 😂

Foot and shooting comes to mind.

This is already apparant in ethnicity pay data. The highest paid groups are in the column "prefer not to say" and "refused" . Not surprising is it?

If D&I constantly tell you that you are bad people you are not going to join in with their monitoring of you. It's the way of the world. Hoist on their own petard.

Have I missed anything?

One more
Non binaries literally have no human rights so it doesn't matter if women are insulted, just be thankful you can still get some benefits.

Feminism will certainly be weakened if the only feasible way of discussing the group that is likely to experience sex-based discrimination, sex-based violence, sex-based religious oppression and so on is to call them vulva people or ovary-havers or individuals with a cervix.

Although the loss of exact language defining female-bodied people is perhaps a more theoretical one to many than the other concerns linked with the wholesale attempt to replace biological sex with an abstract gender identity, it is one which makes feminist research, analysis and data collection much more difficult, especially if it becomes more common for female-bodied people to declare themselves nonbinary (partly as an attempt to escape sexism, I believe), because earnings data, for instance, would then have several gender categories and each category would have varying numbers of female-bodied people.

The real reason why women earn less than men is mostly sex-based, but collecting data only on gender identities could disguise that. So we would find that nonbinary people earn less than men but more than women, on average, and we would not find out that this is probably because the male-bodied nonbinary people earn male wages and the female-bodied nonbinary people earn female wages, on average.

Trans women whom others see as biologically female will also suffer from this, ultimately, and so will female-bodied nonbinary people, because feminism without the proper data will be less effective and much more cumbersome. Each separate problem from pregnancy discrimination to sexual violence will be treated separately, even though they affect exactly the same group.

Most teens were always mainstream in their musical tastes. There are still a minority of kids identifying with niche music culture.

Ignoring the input of male-born persons, as I also am not interested in the context of feminism and women's rights, the language of identity is fairly irrelevant when it comes to sex.

It is a material fact about our existence. The word woman describes our female maturity. I can give this fact about myself a great deal of attention and importance, and call it my identity, but it remains a salient life fact if I don't.

I really don't like to get into the 'how to parse gender' game, because I reject the whole premise. There's sex, sex-linked behaviours, and cultural stereotypes about our sex. That's it.

I think it's fair enough to say plenty of people aren't persuaded that the inclusion of transpersons would affect feminisms goals negatively. I don't really even see that its arguable, clearly many don't see that, whether or not they are correct. It just doesn't resonate and it's reasonable, and probably helpful, to ask why.

Do the kiddlywinks still define themselves by musical tastes, or has that been superseded? Back in my day blue hair didn't mean you were woke with plural prounouns. It meant you were some flavour of mosher, which was the colloquial term covering punks and goths and all the other alternative musical subcultures. It also usually meant you were due a bollocking over the state of the bath.

No, I don't see many using music style for identification. A few use the fact that they are into music at all, but they seem to be more serious and listen across genres. Other kids seem to have very mainstream predicable tastes - maybe based on Spotify? - and I don't think as many are learning to actually play music either.

High school groups here seem very basic - jocks, nerds, popular kids, high-achievers, stoners - some of them overlap significantly.

"I think the achievements of second wave feminism were world changing but the goals went somewhat beyond those achievements. And sexual violence is still endemic, women are objectified as much as ever, the pressure for physical perfection and the harm that causes is as powerful as ever and the economic marginalisation of working class women is as acute as ever - and that's in the West, elsewhere things are much worse. Most of the gains really benefitted middle class people which is why I think intersectional feminism (and marxist and anarcho feminism which are both somewhat resurgent within the third wave) emerged as the next step.

I'm not sure many people are persuaded that the gains of the second wave will be lost because of this. I mean even if the term birthing partner or something annoys the shit out of you, is it really likely that this will threaten maternity pay or services? Young women are facing growing economic precarity, the threat of climate change, endemic sexual violence and sexualisation, and GC activism has little to offer except telling them they shouldn't be kind to their mates and panicking about non existent trans bogeyman prowling round toilets. It doesnt seem to reflect many young people's lived experience, or their most pressing concerns. And it certainly doesn't represent a threat to patriarchy which is why it has been so enthusiastically embraced by otherwise misogynist men."

What a load of rubbish!

According to jj feminists made great changes but they really didn't and even if they did it only helped the Karens of the world. Young people get it ,they know G C activists are just trans hating paranoid old women who care nothing about how hard life is for everyone . Transwomen were in the thick of the fight for female equality, just like a transwoman( who wasn't even there and wasn't even trans) started the Stonewall riot. Anyway hardly anyone is GC and even if the vast majority of people don't believe transwomen are women and transmen are men, we'll just call them bigots until they shut up. No transwomen are predators and if they are they are not really transwomen and they didn't harm any women in a female only space , so it doesn't count.

Have I missed anything?

I do not expect you to understand what it feels like to be born female in a male-dominated world just as I don't know what it feels like to be born black in a white supremacist country

To be fair to jj there's masses of stuff on FWR which doesn't resonate with me either and I am female.

I don't see any evidence of feminism being weakened by trans inclusion.

Of course you don't. You don't want to.

Surely there is space to fight together against things that affect all women, such as male sexual violence, domestic abuse and objectification, whilst offering solidarity and support to each other for the things that don't such as reproductive rights and trans healthcare.

The complete opposite of solidarity has been offered. I've been on the receiving end of unbelievably extreme hostility from trans inclusive groups. I believe my own experience, not your dismissals.

You can try to recast our experience as wrong or unimportant or any other bullshit about us harming women but it is not going to work as that is just plain old gaslighting.

I get why people might have concerns about this, but I don't think those concerns have been borne out. Women still exist, as dowomen's rights and the struggle for them, in California, or Copenhagen, or Buenes Aires where trans acceptance and inclusion has been normal for years. I'm not sure expanding a category necessarily erases it.

We have both been on numerous threads where plenty of evidence was provided that changing the definition of woman to include men claiming womanhood has had a profoundly harmful impact on women and girls wherever this has been done worldwide. I have explained the direct harm it did to me, as did many others.

I do not expect you to understand what it feels like to be born female in a male-dominated world just as I don't know what it feels like to be born black in a white supremacist country.

However, as you know what it feels like to be a non-gender-conforming boy in a patriarchal society, to be subjected to homophobic abuse, so do I know what it feels like to be an immigrant and to be subjected to xenophobic abuse. Framing the damaging experiences we had because of this as harmful and discriminatory is no less valid than women or black people describing their experiences with misogyny and racism as oppression and/or discrimination. But it isn't the same. You do not live the harms done to women and girls because of transgender ideology and legislation. I do not live the harms done to black people because of racism.

So I wouldn't ever - not ever - tell black people that their analysis that policies are harming them - policies which have been adopted in pursuit of an agenda that is not in their interest but some other group's - is wrong, unfounded, mistaken or exaggerated.

And yet, here you are, telling us once again we have it all wrong.

P.S. Even though you continue to conflate the two, the gender critical movement is not in and of itself a feminist movement. Even if it contains various feminist groups, some of which are radical feminist ones.

So once again, why do you insist on judging the GC movement as failing to pursue radical feminist aims?

Furthermore, radical feminism is not Marxist feminism - indeed one of the criticisms most frequently levelled at radical feminists is that they ignore another important class issue, that of economic class, chosing instead to focus on sex classes.

May I suggest some more detailed reading on the various branches of the feminist movement? Just to make sure your next put down of the gender critical movement for not pursuing radical feminist aims at least omits aims that aren't actually radical feminist ones?

@jj1968 yes of course there is space to fight together. But that was always historically the case. Women and trans people have long been allied. It is only recently that activism has driven a divisive wedge via the twaw no debate mantra.

@JoodyBlue
all I have to say is "if you can't name women, you can't claim women's rights".

I get why people might have concerns about this, but I don't think those concerns have been borne out. Women still exist, as dowomen's rights and the struggle for them, in California, or Copenhagen, or Buenes Aires where trans acceptance and inclusion has been normal for years. I'm not sure expanding a category necessarily erases it.

The struggle for reproductive rights in Ireland was supported and aided by trans women, women and trans women are on the streets of Poland together right now and trans inclusive feminist groups in the UK led the charge against austerity and cuts to women's services. I don't see any evidence of feminism being weakened by trans inclusion. Surely there is space to fight together against things that affect all women, such as male sexual violence, domestic abuse and objectification, whilst offering solidarity and support to each other for the things that don't such as reproductive rights and trans healthcare.