Please help me untangle why gender is such an issue

Gender identity is a well studied scientific fact

You need to do better than that.

would you feel like a woman inside a man's body or a man?

But what does a woman feel like? You still haven't answered this. To me what you're describing seems like discomfort with one's body, feeling out of place. Because a male person can't innately know what it feels like to be a woman. Unless, that is, you view women through the prism of unreconstructed gender stereotypes e.g. gentler, more passive, liking pink etc I'd really like to know what female attributes your gender identity aligns with?

People live in a gendered society. They can't just leave it and few people (likely including yourself) possess the ability to be utterly free from it. It's in all of us.
Furthermore, trans people are helping the subversion of gender by proving that it's not so steadfast and unimpeachable. Transitioning from a gender to another shows that gender is just a label or collection of ideas and actions and not some deep innate thing.

Thanks for all your replies, wow there are a lot of opinions on this! For some reason my username isn't available, I think it's because I'm on another device now.

I can start to understand why someone would want to change their physical looks, and their hormones. If they want a vagina rather than a penis, that's somewhat understandable to me (though obviously I can't relate to feeling like you should have a different physical body).

However, I can't relate to someone who feels like they want to change their gender. What biological components are involved in gender? I see it as entirely socially derived, but maybe I am "agender" and don't put much emphasis on gender as part of my identity.

Explaining what gender identity feels like to someone who doesn't have one, is like explaining what red looks like to someone who was born blind. I'm not really sure there's a way to do it.

Sometimes people get it if you ask them to imagine their brain transplanted into the body of the opposite sex, so would you feel like a woman inside a man's body or a man? But completely agender people may still not really get that.

2% driven by actual gender dysphoria.*

*made up figures

Hard numbers are uncertain in this area but the estimate is that about 0.01% of the population of the UK have gender dysphoria. If 0.3% of the population is trans, this means that about one in 30 trans people have gender dysphoria. In that case, who are the other 29 people?

Positrans would you mind explaining what it is about your gender identify that makes you sure you're female. Could you describe what female feels like?

"Agender" means lacking a gender identity - if you don't have one, that's the word for not having one.

With respect, that is the word used by people who do believe in gender identity. It is similar to calling people heathens or infidels for not believing in god. You have to start from their perspective, and god based model of the world, to fit into their box.

Agender means lacking a gender identity - if you don't have one, that's the word for not having one.

On whose say-so?

@christinarossetti19

"There isn't an 'understanding complex human behaviours' course"

• There is. It's called psychology

"Agender" means lacking a gender identity - if you don't have one, that's the word for not having one.

Positrans - I think a lot of what you're saying makes sense but where does that leave the increasing number of people who claim to be trans, but with no dysphoria and no desire to change anything physically?

I don’t have a gender identity. Not because I’m agender or whatever the term is, but because I don’t believe in it. I am a woman. Not because I believe in that either, but because that’s how I was conceived.

@Positrans I do think there is a spectrum between those who have debilitating dysphoria and have surgery and other interventions to live as the opposite sex, and whilst I still have major concerns about this in relation to young people and where this comes from and what they are being told to believe, I also see it as very different to someone who considers themselves the opposite sex (and therefore everyone else must too) without any intervention or ‘stereotypical’ behaviour.
I am the opposite sex simply because I say I am, is extremely problematic to me.

Not everyone has a sense of their gender identity mind - some people are agender

It means this:

Some people don't believe in gender identity. For these people we apply to them the gender identity "agender". Everyone can have whatever gender identity they want but they must accept at least one of them.

@EdgeOfACoin perhaps my previous post will help answer some of your questions.

For your last 2 questions - if you are not aware of your gender identity, it probably means you are agender. There's nothing wrong with that at all. Something like a third of people are in some sense vague about their gender identity.

As for medical interventions - it's the same as women who aren;t trans but who grow a full beard, having a medical intervention like laser to remove it. Not all women with beards do that, but most non-trans women are uncomfortable sporting a beard, and trans women are the same, except it's more than a beard.

Positrans the report in the link is over three years old, and the assertion that the use of HRT in children is 'effective, relatively safe (when appropriately monitored), and has been established as the standard of care' was just last week debunked by the Royal Courts of Justice.

Well, we don't know about the appropriate monitoring as GIDs didn't bother with that, but effective, safe and a 'standard. No way.

I have two daughters. They are completely different. Neither of them particularly conform to gender stereotype. Some people find it challenging that one of my daughters is really into climbing, she can get quite high up a tree before feeling uncomfortable. I have noticed this causes discomfort in others because they are conditioned to believe in gender stereotypes - little girls don't climb trees. I believe this narrow way of thinking about the world constrains us all and may lead some children to believe their bodies are 'wrong' for their innate sense of who they are.

Your use of the term "Tom boys" interests me and suggests that you are not immune from this societal conditioning. It's a sexist and regressive term which implies that 'girls' behaving in a certain way are more like 'boys'. They're just females doing things they enjoy doing.

Male and female are the only fixed thing about us.

Positrans what is gender identity if it is not biology and not stereotypes? What does feeling like a boy 'feel like'? What does feeling like a girl 'feel like'? How do I know what my gender identity is? Why are hormones and surgery required to align biological sex and gender identity?

Sorry, I know this is a lot of questions but they are all genuine. I've seen them asked on here before but they never seem to get answered.

No one knows exactly how they have that innate sense. That's still being unravelled.

All I can tell you is that by the age of 4, I had a sense of there being boys and girls in the world, and the feeling that I was one of the girls, and that was coupled with certain parts of my body feeling like they didn't belong to me. The feeling that I was girl was my secret but it was a constant throughout my childhood into adulthood. Thanks to the wonders of medical science, my body doesn't feel weird any more.

Humans are social animals and social animals have social groupings, so it makes sense that there might be some instinctive sense of which group you are in.

Last thing I saw about the science was posted on Twitter. It was this link to the Endocrine society:

www.endocrine.org/advocacy/position-statements/transgender-health

Which says:

The medical consensus in the late 20th century was that transgender and gender incongruent individuals suffered a mental health disorder termed “gender identity disorder.” Gender identity was considered malleable and subject to external influences. Today, however, this attitude is no longer considered valid. Considerable scientific evidence has emerged demonstrating a durable biological element underlying gender identity.1,2 Individuals may make choices due to other factors in their lives, but there do not seem to be external forces that genuinely cause individuals to change gender identity.

Yes. You are your biological sex because it’s written within your DNA from the point of your conception.
On the outside that can look however you want it to look, that’s your business, you can act however you feel comfortable doing so, we should be fighting the gender stereotypes that suggest otherwise, instead they are being hugely amplified via this ideology of a gender identity.

*Dysmorphia even

I suppose if I woke up tomorrow in a man’s body would I be happy with that and feel that body fits who I am as a person? Absolutely not. That is often the way trans people describe how they feel, that they just know that they are a woman/man, but they’re in the wrong body. They often describe being children and being certain that they’re the opposite sex, despite being told repeatedly they’re not.

I often wonder if I was born with a male body whether I would adapt to it and accept myself as a more stereotypically feminine man or whether I would feel I “should” be a woman and be very distressed about not having a female body, I think it’s hard to say if you’ve not experienced it.

Positrans how can someone feel they are something they physically aren't, especially when you strip away gender stereotypes? It reminds me of a twitter thread of female presenting trans boys which was actually a depressing read.

I can't know what it is to truly be a man any more than I can truly know what it is to be my sister. It doesn't make any sense.

I do believe in a dysphoria that makes people extremely uncomfortable with features of their body but that isn't the same as being positive you are something you manifestly are not.