Gender identity research

From where does the concept of "gender identity" originate?

One of (if not the) earliest, proponents was Dr John Money. He conducted an experiment on a pair of twin baby boys in the 1960s. One twin, Bruce Reimer, suffered a botched circumcision. Money convinced Bruce's parents that their son would be better off as a girl. The Dr then set about completely removing Bruce's genitals, and told the child's parents to give him a "girl's" name and treat him as a girl.

Money's belief was that Bruce was too young to know that he was really a boy, and if his parents simply treated him like a girl, he would become one. This is where "gender identity" comes from. A man who conducted experiments on children (and TRIGGER WARNING sexually abused them in the process), who thought nurture could overrule nature and who lied about the efficacy of his experiments in order to roll his "treatments" out beyond the poor, tragic Reimer boys. Bruce, aka Brenda, aka David Reimer is the subject of a book which I highly recommend everyone read:

As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl
https://amzn.eu/d/9bBTCOB

@Hepwo www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/genderidentity/bulletins/genderidentityenglandandwales/census2021

”Gender identity
Gender identity refers to a person’s sense of their own gender, whether male, female or another category such as non-binary. This may or may not be the same as their sex registered at birth.

The question on gender identity was new for Census 2021. It was added to provide the first official data on the size of the transgender population in England and Wales. The data will help to:

provide better quality information for monitoring purposes
support anti-discrimination duties under the Equality Act 2010
aid allocation for resources and policy development
The question was voluntary and was only asked of people aged 16 years and over. People were asked “Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?”, and had the option of selecting either “Yes”, or selecting “No” and writing in their gender identity.”

@Hepwo ONS called it the “gender identity” question and the responses to the question “Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?”, were:

• Yes
• No, write in gender identity.

The ONS guidance stated:
“What is your sex?
Why we ask this question
Your answer is key to understanding trends in the population. It also helps your local community by allowing charities, organisations, and local and central government to understand what services people might need.

This information will be used for equality monitoring between groups of people of different sexes in your local area. Your answer also helps public bodies to identify discrimination or social exclusion based on sex, and work to stop it from happening.

The sex question has been asked since 1801.
This question is vital for understanding population growth and equality monitoring. Please select either “Female” or “Male”.

If you are considering how to answer, use the sex recorded on one of your legal documents such as a birth certificate, Gender Recognition Certificate, or passport.

If you are aged 16 years or over, there is a later voluntary question on gender identity. This asks if the gender you identify with is different from your sex registered at birth. If it is different, you can then record your gender identity.”

I am aware the wording in the guidance may have changed slightly in relation to the sex question following the legal judgement.

This sets out the thought ONS put into the methodology. www.ons.gov.uk/census/censustransformationprogramme/questiondevelopment/genderidentity/census2021finalguidanceforthequestionwhatisyoursex#final-what-is-your-sex-question-guidance-for-census-2021

If you have time you can drill down into the data and one of the classifications was “not applicable” I.e. I don’t have a gender identity.

You may not like it but the intention of the question was to find out whose gender identity matched their birth sex and whose didn’t.

Some of the issues to raise are not just whether everyone has a gender identity but whether everyone has an innate gender identity or even a stable and lasting gender identity.

• the rate of detransition, and the reasons commonly given for detransition, for detransitioners commonly say they realised that their problems weren't really caused by their gender identity / body and they weren't being solved by transition www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-transyouth-outcomes/
• the sudden discovery of a trans identity by vast numbers of young people. If it was caused by social acceptance then the change would be much more consistent across age groups. Something social is causing a (possibly temporary) change of gender identity in many young people. The Littman study
• it's impossible to predict whether a child's trans gender identity will remain or change after puberty, for most it will go back to their own sex. www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4732993-310123-interesting-twitter-thread-from-leor-sapir-about-finnish-paediatric-bodys-position?reply=123552808 and the article translated twitter.com/LeorSapir/status/1620448053357592576 There is no relationship between how strongly the young person believes in their trans identity at a given point in time, and whether they reject it later or not - someone said this in Hannah Barnes' book, maybe Marcus Evans?
• sexual orientation is pretty stable through adult life but gender identity isn't. There is an account of transwomen with dementia forgetting that their present gender identity and being distressed to find they now have breasts. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-43365446

Surely you would first of all have to define what you mean by gender identity. Which even the most high profile academics and activists of gender identity are unable to do, falling back on ‘ oh well, it’s very complicated you see’. Yeah, so is theoretical physics, but academics in that can define their terms and concepts.

From my point of view, there may be some differences in behaviour between the sexes as a population. men in every country in the world are massively more violent than women, so that even in the country where women are most violent, they are still markedly less violent than the men in the country where men are most peaceable. But I think individual characteristics like that which are more prevalent in the population of one sex over another, is very different from an actual ‘gender identity’ that exists in every individual.

Basically gender identity was created as a hypothesis to explain gender dysphoria. But it would need to be defined, then investigated and tested to meet the criteria of a scientific theory, and then investigated and tested some more to gain acceptance as a rigorous explanatory model and theory.

Its a real failure of politicians around the world to buy into something with no evidence, science, or even definition, behind it.

Could it be worth asking the school how gender vs sex may impact upon the accuracy of their data e.g. attainment data?

As in, if all pupils believed their gender was opposite to their sex, how would the school be able to determine which pupils require intervention and support, when all of the historic attainment data is based on biological developmental differences between boys and girls?

At least 2.9 million people in England and Wales did not respond when asked if they had a gender identity. Realistic it is safe to assume some of those didn’t respond because they don’t have a gender identity.

This is false though.

They were not asked if they have a gender identity.

They were asked if they were still the same as when they were born. This is a fundamentally different and it's ridiculous to interpret that as over 40 million people agreeing they have a gender identity. They won't even know what that means. All they answered was that they were still the same.
I certainly would not tell a school over 40 million people have a gender identity.

@nepeta you were very clear.
The fact that some people may have unthinkingly ticked the 'yes' box to a badly-worded question is no proof that a large number of people believe in a bonkers quasi-religious belief.

Sorry, went on a rant there. The answer to the OP's question is that it is impossible to empirically verify or falsify the existence of an abstract gender identity. It's a belief, similar to religious beliefs, and there are no known ways of creating empirical tests of those.

Note that the belief-part here is on the assumption that gender identity is not based on the sex of the body but independent of it for everybody, not just for trans people, say.

For me it's useful to stress that the gender identity framework argues for the existence of an abstract gender identity which is NOT based on the person's biological sex, but may or may not happen to match it.

When some unthinkingly agree that everyone has a gender identity, they don't realise that they are agreeing to this concept.

They most likely think about it the way the majority of us define our genders: based on living in a sexed body.

I call that an embodied identity, but it's based on material facts and on the passing of time and the experiences we have while living as sexed human beings. So I am a woman because I am an adult person of the female sex, because the sex of my body has affected my life experiences both directly in what it does and does not do, and also indirectly in how others in the society have treated me.

It's this embodied identity which is currently being invalidated, but so far really only for women. The category 'women' is now mixed sex, and so a new definition of 'woman' must be forced on all of us.

And that new definition will be based on sexist stereotypes about femininity and on presumed acceptance of retrogressive female sex roles and norms. This is how the gender identity ideology will eat away women's rights over time if it is not resisted.

OP, as others here have wisely said, a belief in a 'gender identity' is a quasi-religious belief in a sort of 'sexed soul'.
As a nutty, quasi-religious belief, it should NOT be inflicted on our children.
A belief in the existence of this mythical 'sexed soul', which may or may not align with the sex of the child, is tantamount to saying that a child can be BORN IN THE WRONG BODY.
The DofE have expressly forbidden schools from teaching this.

No children are born with a pink brain in a blue body.
Stick to the science.
There is no science on the gender woo-woo side. None at all.

Isn’t the problem that a lack of gender identity is considered a gender identity? E.g. agender.

There's as much evidence for gender identity as there is for the existence of souls, which is pretty much what gender identity theory is, the existence of a gendered soul. Quite similar to Scientology really.

Slaby and Frey (1975) demonstrated that children move through a series of stages: first learning to identify their own and others’ sex (basic gender identity or labeling), next learning that gender remains stable over time (stability), and finally learning that gender is a fixed characteristic that is not altered by superficial transformations in appearance or activities (consistency)

And then they encounter this nonsense and try to pretend they don't know all of that...

This is one of the papers which uses the term 'gender identity' which has been discussed on here before.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17650129/

Full text here:
archives.evergreen.edu/webpages/curricular/2007-2008/psychologyofgender/files/psychologyofgender/Gender%20Constancy-Ruble%20et%20al%202007.pdf

In the first paragraph it says:

Slaby and Frey (1975) demonstrated that children move through a series of stages: first learning to identify their own and others’ sex (basic gender identity or labeling), next learning that gender remains stable over time (stability), and finally learning that gender is a fixed characteristic that is not altered by superficial transformations in appearance or activities (consistency)

They seem to be using the terms 'sex' and 'gender' interchangeably, and it appears that they are simply saying that children recognise their own sex at this age, not that they believe that they have a 'gender identity' which may or may not be congruent with their sex.

@MrsDanversGlidesAgain

Rather like religious faith, then.

Very much like that.

I’m fairly sure that left to myself I wouldn’t have come up with the idea of a personal relationship with Christ had I not been prompted to try & introspect one.

We don’t need research that disproves it, because it’s for those who make the novel claim that everyone has a gender identity to prove it - or at least, to show why it might be a reasonable thing to believe.

I agree with this. If the school is claiming that everyone has a 'gender identity', they should be able to produce some scientific evidence that this is the case, and also be able to define exactly what is meant by the term 'gender identity'.

The use of 'gender' when 'sex' is meant has produced some confusion regarding research about 'gender identity', so you need to be prepared for the possibility that they will produce scientific research which they may claim is evidence that children know what their 'gender identity' is at a young age. What is meant in these papers is that children become aware of what sex they are, but the term used in the papers is 'gender identity'.

I've discussed this with posters on here previously. They were convinced that the papers showed that everyone has a 'gender identity' ( a belief-based identity), when all they actually showed was a stage in a child's development where they become aware that they are either a boy or a girl.

I'll see if I can find these discussions.

I think eg "non-binary" is a way for current teenagers and young women to avoid the new highly gendered labelling (pink/unicorns/etc) and increased sexualisation that has come with social media. Another way of saying, lay off, I'm an individual, don't you categorise or persecute me. Unfortunately that can also lead down rabbit holes that say #bekind to those wanting to intrude on women's spaces, sports etc.

@Vebrithien you can also add this if you think it is useful. I wrote it for the workplace but could be repurposed.

The 2021 Census for England and Wales www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/genderidentity/bulletins/genderidentityenglandandwales/census2021 included a voluntary question “Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?”. Overall, 45.7 million (94.0% of the population aged 16 years and over) answered the question. In total, 45.4 million (93.5%) answered “Yes” and 262,000 (0.5%) answered “No”.

As the vast majority of over 16s stated their gender is the same as their biological sex (93.5%), making all toilets effectively unisex is not a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.

We propose that one male and one female toilet are repurposed as Unisex toilets, which anyone can use, and all other toilets are retained as single sex facilities. This is a proportionate response that reflects the vast majority of employees identify as their biological sex, protects women from harassment, voyeurism and sexual assault at work whilst also providing appropriate facilities for the small number of employees that identify as transgender or non-binary.

With regards to schools -

Unfortunately it appears to me that when you enrol or apply for your child's school they generally ask you or 'assign' your child their 'gender' for the yearly dept of education survey - I realised this when I enrolled my children into their school and filled in the online application, and also had to manually edit the health information form which asked their 'gender', to say sex (it's sex that is important on a medical form for children, surely!!?). As far as I can tell (assume), they assumed "gender" at that age to mean "sex" not "gender identity" because it looks like the answer might affect potential applications for single sex schools. Because of this yearly census they must have to provide the govt information on each child's "gender" - I honestly don't even know what would happen or how they would handle statistics or applications, if you wrote female if your child is actually male.

Out of curiosity does your school use the wording "gender" or "gender identity"? Some laws it appears even also use context to assume "gender" means sex. Which just makes things more complicated and why we need to be clear on statistics. (Just in case your school is recording sex alongside 'gender identity'.)

explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-pupils-and-their-characteristics

I think for real research on this you'd need to look at thinking on identity overall - and I think there is quite a bit in psychology about how people develop a stable identity. But I don't think it especially squares with the mainstream thinking on gender identity.

@Vebrithien definitely use it and provide the link to the ONS data as it lends credibility to the quote.

This thread has a series of articles around personality between the sexes and as with many of these things relating to sexist assumptions about men and women, a lot of it comes down to the statistical methodology employed

twitter.com/neurosgs/status/1619047656663433218?s=46&t=A2fpFNgDRyXF2d6ye97wEA

@NecessaryScene thats my whole point, if Stonewall have such waffle on their definitions page use it to challenge those who are captured as they can hardly say Stonewall are wrong on that without having to admit they may have got other things wrong.