Question about gender identity

What I mean is, why would someone who is intersex feel like a boy while being raised as a girl?

Why would someone who is female feel like a boy while being raised as a girl?

Some people of both sexes apparently "feel like boys".

Which seems to just be a statement about what they think boys are. Or more what girls are not - thinking they don't fit a "girl" stereotype. You're going to need to think more about what you mean by "feel like a boy" to make progress here.

Maybe he really believed he was female and "felt like a boy" because he didn't like being female? Like lots of ordinary girls do. Nothing to do with any self-perception of really being male at all.

And if this intersex boy hadn't "felt like a boy", would that have disproved "gender identity"? No, maybe he was just trans with a female gender identity, and they lucked out with the physical transition.

This whole concept is non-falsifiable. All you've done is renamed "feel like X" as "X identity" to make it sound fancy, and we still don't know what "feel like" involves, and it predicts nothing.

Now, an intersex person may have more concrete physical evidence of their actual sex, increasing as they develop, but that's not a "feeling". That's just observing your own body.

I don’t think this makes sense without an actual example.

We don’t seem to know of any intersex boys who were raised as girls or vice versa as an example here.

This gets raised from time to time, both as some sort of gotcha, and as a genuine question.

I really don't understand the logic behind it. If someone is, in fact, male, and is then mutilated and told they are female, but knows something is amiss, why on earth would this lead you to think that there is a disembodied ethereal gender identity?

The person is incontrovertibly one sex and they know it, despite being lied to and physically maimed. Why do you think this suggests that there is such a thing as an innate 'gender identity'. It just means it is almost impossible to hide someone's sex, either from others or themselves. It speaks to nothing about gender at all.

It proves that gender feelings are
bollocks (excuse pun given some of the sad examples) and biological sex tends to drive everything.

I think you are thinking of the case where a boy's circumcism went wrong (the hospital was trying a new method) and he was castrated as a baby.
The poor family was then contacted by some shady doctor who said to bring the boy up as a girl and to basically do a sex change on the baby. It was in america a long time ago.
The poor man never acomodated himself to being a girl and eventually the family had to tell him and he lived as a man, untill he killed himself.

The point is; he was male in everyway (not 'intersex' (not that that is really a thing imo, as congenital abnormalities of the reporductive system do not mean you are not a male or female) but had had a horrific mutilation as a baby)
So his 'gender identity' such as it were, conresponded to his biological sex.

Caster Semenya wore a boys uniform at school when she was raised and socialised as a girl.

What I mean is, why would someone who is intersex feel like a boy while being raised as a girl? If it's just a construct, then being raised as the wrong gender shouldn't matter?

Why would anyone feel like a boy when raised as a girl though? And why couldn't those reasons apply just as much to an intersex person as a trans person? In fact, since the parents would have been aware of the fact that their child had been assigned a sex, isn’t it perhaps quite likely that they would have deliberately encouraged e.g. feminine traits, outward appearance and behaviours in order to reinforce the child embracing the sex they'd been assigned? And pushing gender stereotypes on a child who may have gender-non-conforming tendencies may well result in them reacting against them.

I don't know. It's certainly not something you can do ethical experiments on, and hopefully the old "we'll turn them into a girl" approach has been dropped now.

I do know that many many people find gendered expectations oppressive so I think we should try to minimise them in our society.

That doesn't mean there are no differences between girls and boys but we have a choice as to how we treat people, and I think giving everyone the same opportunities as far as possible is the best approach.

How many actual people with DSD who were brought up as one sex and then found to be the opposite sex have you spoken to?
A colleague of mine gave birth to a baby born with ambiguous genitalia 35 years ago. The baby had genetic testing and very thorough ultrasounds carried out to determine their sex. He was found to be male, was brought up male and chose to have surgery himself when he was a teen. The days of determining sex by choosing the easiest surgery are well and truly gone at least here in the UK, and most likely the US, Australia etc.

Can you point to specific case studies? I know about the famous case of David Reimer who was raised as a girl after his penis was severely injured in a botched circumcision. But it's highly likely that in other ways he presented as physically male and was treated as such. He had a twin brother and he was also sexually abused by the psychologist involved in transitioning him - so lots of issues involved there and no doubt a huge desire to dissociate from a childhood as a girl associated with pain and abuse. His twin brother was later diagnosed with schizophrenia and took his own life. It's an incredibly complex case. I'm interested to know about the studies you're thinking of?

Sounds like an example of sex being real.

Exactly.

Do you have any statistics about what kind of numbers of intersex people were operated on and assigned a sex, without their knowledge, and then later said they had always felt like the other sex? Presumably it wasn't that common, since intersex occurs in approximately 0.018 of the population.

I personally don't deny that some people experience gender identity. However I don't think it is a useful legal category or relevant for the workplace, sport, healthcare and many other domains.

Sounds like an example of sex being real.