Question about gender identity

Males have different bodies in many different ways than just having penises. Even prepubescent boys are generally physically stronger than girls. After puberty, they are, in general quite a bit larger, heavier, stronger, and hairier than females. Their bones are thicker and they move in notably different ways. They have heavy brows and chins and Adam's apples and large hands. A male raised as a girl would only have to hear his own voice or look at his hands to know the truth--that he is male. The situation with trans women is the opposite of that, not "a further step."

Girls and boys remain Female and male - regardless of how they are raised.

Nature AND nurture.

*guise

I saw a documentary about the David Reimer case a good 20 years ago. I think you also need to consider that Reimer, as he was growing up, probably noticed physical differences between himself and girls. Even before puberty, boys have physical growth differences to girls outside genitalia - this is shown in growth charts and in their muscle types, and bone structure. Reimer suspected something was off for a long time and when told the truth, obviously it was devastating...not to mention all the other issues of abuse and mental health.

Very young children can tell the differences between males and females, even when clues stereotypical clothing and hair styles aren't in play, so Reimer would have noticed these physical differences in himself and the gaslighting seemed to have only confused him more.

If we could raise girls and boys in a completely stereotype free world, would we see differences in their choice of play? I think that's an interesting question, but the Reimer case alone can't answer that.

Caster Semenya is not the only male athlete who is being put up for representation in world/nationwide/Olympic races and teams under the guide of them being female.

I think that this is a good point OP. Here is one paper. The results presented here are very mixed:

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1421517/?fbclid=IwAR0SzJYu8rSVS0-VoY2SXBTyZ1B-L8TMGk46yx7ZYh-hAw_ASCiduzeTFYc

I think that the mixed findings are interesting. It seems that there are reasonable numbers on both sides - biological males raised as girls who have felt uncomfortable and wanted to revert to being boys, and biological males raised as girls who have been quite happy as girls.

It also seems that there are average behavioural differences that didn't entirely go away when children are raised as the opposite sex.

I've seen this paper presented as an argument on both sides of the gender ID debate.

The fact that a significant number of boys raised as girls were quite happy as such, suggests that there is no innate fixed gender identity - otherwise you'd expect nearly ALL of them to want to be boys (since trans people are reasonably rare in the general population). But the fact that there were also a significant number who WEREN'T happy, suggests that there is SOME nature component in this story, it isn't all nurture.

I think that the behavioural differences means that you don't need a story about any kind of magical "gender identity" - you just have to say that a very stereotypically masculine behaving person can find it hard to exist in society as a girl, and vice versa. And on average, biological boys are more masculine in behaviour - that's what the paper found.

Caster Semenya is male.

With a medically noted DSD that is pointed out by undesended testicles.

He was - wrongly - always reported as being a "put-upon" female, or as "a woman" by those with an agenda. It was done to fool people.

Claire Graham's blog has a number of relevant discussions and statistics that might be helpful to the OP:

mrkhvoice.com/

I wouldn't disagree with that. As I said, I'm not a blank slatist. I think heredity plays a role to, in terms of disposition. I am, annoying enough, just like my father, and that's less likely to be a nuture thing because he abandoned my family and we were estranged for many years. But it's clearly not a gender identity either because he's a man and I am a woman.

I asked pretty much the same question when I first came on here AspiringMatriarch although I never got what I felt was a satisfactory answer from the posters on here.

My personal opinion, although most on here would probably disagree, is that we are all born with a blue print of a personality. You could think of this as being 'boyish' based on stereotypes 'girly' based on stereotypes or somewhere inbetween but this is not gender identity. I'm not denying that we are later shaped by society and our environments but that innate blue print is a huge factor in who we become.

The conflict (gender identity) seems to arise when a child picks up that their developing personality is not 'correct' for their sex, e.g. told it is wrong to be a boisterous girl or an effeminate boy.

In the case of the Reimer twins it is likely that sexist stereotypes were ridgedly enforced on both children as that is what the parents were told to do.

I'd recommend looking up Debra Soh and her book 'The End of Gender'

I recently read the book about David Reimer and the awful abuse he suffered at the hands of so-called sexologist Dr John Money, As Nature Made Him. I highly recommend it.

Money was a blank slatist who believed that any child could be socialised into being male or female if you got to them early enough and strictly enforced rigid gender roles, and performed surgery before the child was cognisent of the truth. I believe that he set the wheels in motion for the nightmare we have now with childhood transition. He was well respected and seen as the go to expert in a field no one else was knowledgeable about. He pumped out lies, for decades, via papers and conferences. He was lauded by medical professionals who took him at his word, and whole clinics were set up to follow his protocols. He was a monster.

Nicely put, @FloralBunting.

I don't believe there is such a thing as an innate, ethereal 'gender identity'. Or if there is, I sure as hell have no idea what mine is.
I mean, I know I'm female - periods and childbirth are a bit of a clue.
But I don't know what it means to 'feel like a woman' (or a man) in any other meaningful way.
If anything, I tick more of the stereotypical boxes for men than women, in terms of my interests and preferences. Is that enough to make me a man? No.
But if I wanted to be a man, would it be enough then? I don't believe so.

I always recommend Rebecca Reilly-Cooper's presentation on this.

I can't think of anything better to help dig through the morass of circular reasoning behind the concept.

Cheers, Short!

If it's any help, as a lesbian, I can say that for a long time as kid, becoming aware of myself and the world around me, I knew I liked women, and the only representations of people who liked women romantically, and later as I began to understand, sexually, were obviously men. So for the longest time, I identified strongly with male characters everywhere. I had a short back and sides, I was a tall, skinny kid, and I got chased out of the ladies by angry grannies a couple of times when I was about 11/12. I watched boys getting to do all the things I wanted to do and wasn't allowed to. My body started changing and it was utterly hideous, as puberty often is. I remember a conversation with a girl I met where I pretended to be a boy and the feeling was what I suspect the Trans Youtubers say is 'Gender Euphoria'.

But I was simply a lesbian tomboy. It's remarkably easy to accept sex stereotypes as some sort of innate norm. We built whole societies on these ideas. And all we really did was trap people in boxes.

so I think that the hormones in a human male, for example, will be a factor that, when combined with socialization around aggression and entitlement, create what we perceive to be the 'masculine gender'

@FloralBunting I always enjoy your posts and the way you can summarise complex stuff so well - to the point, clear short & sweet!

Thank you

I think this is an interesting question. So OP would your definition of gender identity be 'the sex someone believes they are'?

I don't think this is an inherent knowledge, I think most people simply observe what sex they are. But I think some people become confused about it, or it's not entirely straightforward. Ray Blanchard's theory of transsexualism explains this. A young person who is gay or who likes the things that traditionally are supposed to be liked by the opposite sex, reasons from that that they are in fact the opposite sex. Many gay man and lesbians have told of their experience of this. It's why in the past the majority of trans-identified kids desisted and grew up to be gay.

The growing number of detransitioners certainly points to the absence of a reliable internal sense of what sex we're supposed to be.

But I do think it's an interesting question and I wouldn't be 100% sure about it.

I'm not doubting your sincerity btw. I'm just saying, if you wanting to ask a question, you need to know what the question is that you're asking.

You seem to be speculating about why someone who is one sex, would experience physical feelings that follow from being that sex (chromosomally, hormonally, developmentally. Sounds a lot like material reality to me.

But really, there's too much speculation in your posts for anyone to be able to respond to you precisely. 'What if this instance that I have no evidence or examples of ever having happened, occurred?'. Well, did it? Has it? How many times? Is the evidence simple, or complex? Or did you dream it?

You're suggesting that if they have had their genitals mutilated, they will not be obviously the opposite sex? I mean, I'm not really sure that can ever be the case. Small children, maybe. But a small child takes time to develop a sense of personhood anyway. But as a person grows, the differences will become more marked.

And you need to be asking yourself some questions about the interplay of all factors when it comes to how gender is constructed socially. I'm not a blank-statist, so I think that the hormones in a human male, for example, will be a factor that, when combined with socialization around aggression and entitlement, create what we perceive to be the 'masculine gender'. Transactivists wheel out the existence of sex being more than chromosomes as though feminists had no idea before someone wrote an article about it Medium.

The existence of a male balance of hormones in a male body creating feelings is a physical sex thing. Not a gender thing.

It really does all tend to come down to defining terms. If someone is a male, and this is disguised some how, but they know they are a male none the less, then they simply know their sex, because they indeed are that sex.

So I guess my counter question, in an attempt to try and tease out what it is you're asking here, is what do you mean by 'know they are male'? Because obviously, they are male. So that's not a feeling, it's a fact. What does feeling like a male, or a female, mean?

What about people who are born with ambiguous genitalia

Your premiss here is the problem.

Most people born with DSD (Differences in Sex Development) are genetically male or female, and rarely are their external genitalia ambiguous. DSD is generally at a genetic level, where the number of X or Y chromosomes differs from the standard.

Which is a consequence of sexual reproduction & basic evolutionary biology.

The idea of having both sets of external genitalia (hermaphrodite) is mostly a fantasy (one that a certain J. Yaniv is fond of).

We also now that sometimes, because of the effects of different levels of hormones at birth and soon after, some new borns have "abnormal" genitalia - a new-born girl may have an enlarged clitoris, or a new-born boy may have a very small penis.

I gather that in the past, with very standardised, normative notions of sex stereotypes, such new borns may have been considered to have "ambiguous" external genitalia. But I think that midwives & obstetricians understand better the hormone "flood" which can happen at a child's birth - for the infant, as well as the mother.

Whether or not it only became an issue at puberty would depend on what the surgery was. If you were obviously different to everyone else, you are going to notice before puberty.