So what exactly is gender?

Just say it out loud. Job done.

I recently re-listened to an older episode (pre-2015) of a popular science podcast. The invited expert was chatting about differences in behaviour between the two sexes (in those ancient days, this was not a cause of controversy or apparent confusion). He mentioned two countries, one of which had the highest violent crime rate in the world and the other had the lowest. He then noted that the ratio of male:female convicts was 90:10 or something similar. Thus, I felt, neatly demonstrating both the nature and nurture aspect of differences in sexed behaviour.

But anyway, like the OP and the rest of us, I await input from any passing genderist.

@PriOn1

Great points about some behavioural differences being innate and sex-based. I think we have to accept this is true for practical purposes. The issues are, as with the physical/physiological sex-based differences, how great those differences are between the sexes and how much they matter, if at all. As an example, risk-taking and aggression are types of behaviour exhibited more in men than women. But that's as a class. History has many examples of bold or aggressive women (but none whatsoever of men who have given birth). The brain is plastic and anyone, male or female, can learn to be bolder or more aggressive. Also, as a society, we can decide to value traits exhibited more often in women. The reason we don't is because we don't value women.
Full agreement with your last paragraph about gender identity - in fact that is what the term originally meant. It was a stage in child development when they understood that they had the same kind of body as either Mummy or Daddy.

Moving on to pps' remarks, I reject the nationality/ethnicity analogy.
I would say that getting a GRC is not like moving to China, immersing yourself in Chinese culture, learning Mandarin, marrying a native Chinese person and then applying for and getting Chinese nationality.
It's more like

1. avidly watching some awful, racist, historically inaccurate drama serial set during the Opium Wars called Nympho Chinks - featuring nasty stereotypes of opium addicts, sexually compliant girls and lazy, obsequious orientals - with a cast of white actors in bad makeup, then
2. deciding that you love the drama serial so much that that you practically qualify as a Nympho Chink yourself and
3. on that basis, getting a Chinese passport but
4. keeping your British citizenship and continuing to enjoy the relative freedom of life in Britain.

And all the while you either don't know or you just ignore any actual Chinese people and you never go to China.

The analogy isn't perfect because in reality you could move to China etc, etc and China, though less free and prosperous than the UK, is more powerful. But it works because even if the drama serial was a well made historical drama with rounded characters, a deep appreciation of millennia of culture, presented the story from China's pov and adhered to the highest production values, it would still just be telly. No-one can have the experience of the opposite sex.

Before all this gender bollocks, my understanding of gender was on a spectrum from masculine to feminine.
Everyone is on that spectrum somewhere, but, they are not necessarily stationery, one day they might feel more masculine than the day before.

It's the sex of your body and I can't get my head around anything other. Maybe I'm wrong

The historical meaning of gender was that it was an aspect of grammar.

Gender as a more polite way of saying sex was invented in the 1980s and taken up by sociologists keen to have something to write about in their endless log-rolling academic publications. A few journalists, wanting snappy headlines when writing about Boy George et al noticed that it rhymes with bender and a world of obfuscation and exploitation was born.

I would push back against the idea that gender is based on 'norms' rather than culturally imposed - otherwise you could say that it is the norm in Afghanistan for women to wear Burqa and not speak in public - which infers that this is a choice that women have made, rather than that it is something that has been imposed through force (and violence).

Gender ideology's ideas and definitions are entirely different to the historical meaning of gender (and I would argue the common use).

They have created a mythical gender identity that must be taken on faith - as it is internal and cannot be measured or seen. This magical identity can change at any given moment, according to their will and enables them to make choices in that moment that is in direct opposition to rules of the country they are in (ie the use of single sex categories/facilities).

This gender identity superpower enables them to blast their enemies into silence and compliance with a wave of their hand and a call to HR/Police.

It's quite an impressive feat really, if it wasn't so toxic.

and coercion and control

And note well, it is about conforming to stereotypes. A person with XY chromosomes who wears a pink dress and a person with XX chromosomes who takes hormones to make their face whiskery are both conforming to constructed artificial stereotypes.

Gender is conformity and consumerism.

Gender is signalling an acceptance of sex role stereotypes and an insistence on imposing them on everyone whether they want them or not.

It's a useful marketing tool - you can sell much more stuff, particularly for the young, if you convince buyers that conforming to the stereotypes is obligatory.

The problem with any assessment of behaviour is that it’s impossible to say whether differences are innate or a result of socialisation. There are certainly feminists who have stated, here and on Twitter, that all behavioral differences between men and women are caused by the latter.

The reality is that we don’t know, as socialisation begins the moment we are born, so there is never a “blank state” situation and there is no ethically appropriate way to check. If however, we extrapolate from other mammalian species, it’s apparent that there can be quite significant behavioral differences between males and females, which are probably largely down to hormonal differences and which become more obvious after puberty.

The most obvious behavioural difference in humans, mainly because it’s the only one we tend to measure, which as far as I know has some consistency in various cultures around the world, is in violence and criminal offending. Some of that will be cultural, of course, but I doubt you will find anywhere in the world, where the women are more violent and commit more criminal offences than men, which suggests to me there is some innate difference, even if that is caused or related to physical differences in size and strength.

Regarding the nationality analogy, it works up to a point. I’ve often thought getting a GRA was a bit like me moving to a different country and working through the process to obtain a passport and citizenship. I’m then technically that nationality, but as I wasn’t born and raised there, I’m not really of that country in the same way those born there were. So legally I would be Spanish, for example, and the government would treat me as if I was Spanish. I might even pass as being Spanish, but I would know I wasn’t really, if I was any kind of rational person.

However, the analogy only works up to a point. Unlike sex, there are no consistent physical markers that would mark me out as British rather than Spanish. You might be able to instigate some kind of DNA testing, but even if you found I was ethnically Spanish, descended from families that had lived in Spain for millennia, that wouldn’t make me Spanish necessarily because nationality is effectively only a legal label, defined by where you were born or have lived or where your ancestors were born or lived. Being male or female is physically dictated by genetics and generally very easy to identify. It’s not simply a matter of legal labelling, although that is what gender ideologists are trying to turn it into.

As to what gender or gender identity is, gender ideologists seem to be pushing for some definition of it being “an innate understanding of what sex you are”, but I would argue that “having an innate understanding of what sex you are” ought to be closely linked to your actual sex. If you believe yourself to be the opposite sex to reality, then you probably need psychiatric help because something has gone wrong. Which is why the concept of “gender identity” needs an entire new, invented language to back it up. Without that language and the faith to believe something unproven and unprovable, the entire concept falls apart.

So how does one identify as a man or woman?

The point being not to do with legal gatekeeping, but with the fact that someone can think of themselves and be accepted as (and importantly in a sense other than the legal one, be) American (or Irish or Scottish) because they speak in a certain way and live in a certain way (and place), not because they have been through a legal process.

Picking up on this one...

It's not just "speak in a certain way" though is it? If I, who has no Scottish ancestry for at least 100 years, has never lived in Scotland and has a Welsh accent were to adopt a Scottish accent I might genuinely think of myself as Scottish, might even persuade some people I am Scottish, but I don't think anyone who knew my background would agree with my claim to a non-legal Scottish identity.

Unlike the genderological womanhood of biological men, the cultural/ethnic nationalities you are thinking of are all born out of some emperical connection to the culture or geography beyond a personal preference or resonance. And the more tenuous that connection gets, the less the identity will be accepted by others.

Worse, they say it's soooo much more important than sex, and that it should override everything else - particularly the opposite sex's rights to privacy, dignity and freedom of association, particularly when it comes to women saying NO to men in dresses.

Yes. And the real answer is, because they are not the same kind of thing.

In the case of being English and Ghanaian, it is possible to be both, in several ways. Ethnicity and nationality are different, a person can be French by nationality but not have a single ancestor from Europe and not be French at all ethnically. They are totally different things.

It's also very possible for cultures to mix, and for a person to have more than one cultural background. An Italian in the US will have both Italian cultural roots, and American ones, and in fact there is a distinct Italian-American culture.

Sex isn't like that. There is not a sense in which you can be both male and female.

Gender could be, I suppose, but only if completely separated from sex, which is not actually what people do. But even then, it's hard to know what it means. As much as some might like to talk about sex stereotypes, the fact is people are largely allowed to go against the grain on these things if they want to as individuals. People really don't mind women who like to fix cars, or men who like to do makeup, and they are still men and women. Men dressing as women might be the exception but even there, it tends to be because they (often rightly) suspect them of cross dressing which is a different thing altogether

'Sex' is biological - born of the body. 'Gender' is a concept born of the mind alone, entirely separate, a sum-total of all the messages, metaphors and stereotypes received since birth.

Of course. People find meaning through metaphors and stereotypes that resonate with how they see themselves all the time.

Other people who actually are the things they are identifying as may find this more or less offsensive on a personal level, most likely in proportion to the degree that actually being that thing has a material impact on their life.

The issue with genderists is that they are taking these personal metaphors and subjective identities and trying to elevate them into universally accepted truths about a person, and into legal rights.

FWIW I think we should understand "gender" like a spirit animal or a band T shirt - a way of labelling how you see yourself and maybe signalling who (and is not) "your tribe". And I think that's a valid and potentially social useful concept in which the much-maligned 127 or whatever genders even starts to make sense.

The only thing I don't accept about "gender" is the current incarnation that is appropriating the language, and in the case of women, the legal and social resources, of sex, based on what I consider to be a persoanlity metaphor, because sex is something different that exists in a material and fixed way and it is not interchangeable with identity.

It's too late to dig into the details, but if it's the study I think it is, what it proved was that people with bigger bodies - and therefore bigger heads - have a larger brain volume. When you control for body size the differences vanish.

And that taking cross sex hormones may cause a certain amount of brain shrinkage in men - which is a bad thing, it doesn’t make them.women but is a sign of brain damage; but doesn't cause brain growth in women - which a good thing, because it doesn't cause skull growth.

I am sorry to say that I absolutely disagree with what @MonkeyToHeaven wrote, above: "While I agree, mostly, there is mounting evidence that some aspects of what we consider socially/environmentally constructed gendered behaviour/traits are influenced by biology."

There followed some extracts, examples and references from a research paper whose scientific methodology and conclusions are entirely without any shred of evidence of any kind. The pseudoscientific arguments contained in the paper are not even worth bothering to read. The paper is baseless, witless and pointless from beginning to end.

Because it's extremely unhelpful to try to make the same word mean two different things when one of those things is nebulous, self defined and (IMO) has very little material impact on how one is treated by others in the grand scale of things, and the other is concrete, objective, fixed, and has a very signifiant impact on one's life outcomes, and therefore has specifical legal and social rights and supports.

Taking the example of the legally American but ethnically Ghanaian person, would you expect their Ghanaian ethnicity to actually give them the rights of a Ghanaian citizen if they are not legally Ghanaian? No. That is the difference.

A male's "genderologicness" as a woman in terms of his social personality and taste being more aligned to society's expectations for women rather than men is a very superficial and small subset of the full way womanhood is experienced by an embodied female.The two states are in no way the same, equivalent or interchangeable.

The issue with gender identity is not the identity, it's the use of appropriated language to claim access to sex based resources under the justification of gender.