jj1968 Most dysphoric people don't seek to change our bodies, no matter how we identify. There have multiple studies on this, GIRES did a good summary for Parliament and it's less than 6% in the UK at the time had sought out medical treatment for this purpose, the highest they found in a country was 20% (I want to say Netherlands). There aren't any benefits to pushing that idea. We are a diverse group of people.
Yes, dysphoria comes from more than stereotypes, but the idea that it comes from something innate within us is an idea that not all of us agree with and doesn't bear out when we consider that gender dysphoria shows up in people with trauma disorders. That's been shown for decades, it was well recognized, it's why "best practice" is to assess for trauma and other mental health disorders prior to cross-sex hormone treatments because said treatments can be harmful and for some condition are listed as a contraindication for use in treatment. It's more complicated than just having those emotions, like our other senses, they can be fooled by biological and environmental factors.
Yeah, I can see why a man saying he doesn't have a gender while embodying his socially designated sex-role is infuriating and we do need to be able to discuss sex vs sex roles. It's become harder to use gender for the latter when people have made gender so individualized rather than social. When people say you have a gender, you have a gender identity, how is it expected people are going to react?
I find it infuriating when people say I must have a gender identity as prescribed by current gender ideology as something innate, something I have. All I hear is that they think they've got it all figured out about themselves so, using themselves as a model, they have to be applied to the rest of us. I hear that their ideas on identity are worth more than any of our current social theories and research on fluctuating perception of self and identity as socially derived. Hell, when cisgender moved out of academia into popular discussion, many of the people involved spoke about how important it was not to create another binary, how it had uses at a population level, but we had to be careful not to apply to every individual largely because it was acknowledged that not all dysphoric people identify as trans, not all cultures fit the Anglo set up that the social theories that started using it were looking into and not everyone views gender or identity the same way. Like many academic theories moved into the popular limelight, it got butchered and universalized into something it was never meant to be and I suspect like many things in the humanities in its current replication crisis, we're going to find the most individualistic areas of our Western society end up the outlier on a larger scale (I mean, it's pretty obvious by how much other cultures gender norms have been butchered by so many to fit into this).
I completely get and understand people framing their identity and self perception as they want, some do that with gender identity, some with religious identity, but applying it to the rest of us? I can't see the ethics in that. I see even less in trying to act like sex discrimination is all about gender.
If we abolished gender then it's unlikely refuge's would need to exist because male violence towards women is a function of gender, not an inherent part of being human.
And all the other animals where the stronger sex is regularly violent towards the weaker sex?
Honestly, I love the optimism, but sociobiology across species has shown that while some violent behaviours can be reduced through social means, there is no utopia where it can be eradicated.
Policy needs to deal with the reality, not what we wish humans could be like.