Gender Identity - what is it?

[Wakame]

Gender identity, simply put, is a person's innate sense of their own sex. Now, if you are one of the minority who either don't have, or are not aware of their gender identity, then this can be a difficult thing to understand. You're like a person who was born blind trying to understand what red looks like.

However, don't let that put you off - we can't see electrons either but we know they exist because they are suggested by science. So what science is there to suggest that gender identity exists? Well here's one for you:

There is a birth deformity called "cloacal exstrophy" which involves severe malformations of the lower abdomen. In the past boys born with this condition were often given a "sex change" shortly after birth and were raised as girls with no knowledge of their male past. Despite this, a large percentage go on to express a male gender identity.

That innate knowledge of their own sex is gender identity.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1421517/

One thought experiment you could try is to imagine what it would be like if an ingenious neurologist transplanted your brain into a man's body. Would you now feel like a man, or would you feel like a woman inside a man's body? There's no right or wrong answer and if you are genuinely "agender" (without a gender identity) then the experiment is not going to tell you anything. However, for some people, it's an experiment through which they start to understand.

It's a thought experiment so it's not about current medical science, however, the boys with cloacal exstrophy kind of did have their brains transplanted into apparently female bodies, so it's a good analogy. And as you can see, many of them felt like boys in female bodies.

Most of you will of course, dismiss this. That's OK - doctors and scientists don't doubt the existence of gender identity, and you'll make little progress until you acknowledge it.

I think it's interesting to try and imagine if somehow your biological sex was kept a secret from both you and everyone around you, would you have a sense of yourself as a particular sex? And which??

Great. Except this is impossible. Our biological sex is what defines us ..well ...biologically. We have a sense of our sex because we ARE that sex.

There may be reasons one feels disassociated with hat but hey does not change what we are.

I don't care that much. I don't have a gender and I don't care if others think they do or not. I only care about sex segregation and safe spaces for biological women. Believe what you want about gender, it still doesn't change someone's biological sex, no matter what they identify as.

This topic is 'feminimism chat' isn't it? Should there be a topic called 'mansplaining'?

Maybe we could ask MNHQ to open up a topic especially for the mansplainers. So I can permanently avoid it.

imagine what it would be like if an ingenious neurologist transplanted your brain into a man's body.

But imagine what it would be like if an ingenious neurologist transplanted your brain into a small/tall, thin/stocky, black/white person's body. It would feel wrong because you've always had a small/tall, thin/stocky, black/white person's body. Pure and simple familiarity. eg You've been small, so unable to see over peoples' heads in crowds, unable to reach for things in the supermarket, not picked for sports teams at school or whatever, which helped to make you who you are.

Men haven't had periods, men haven't got a cervix. They have observed women, but they haven't lived the biology. That's what makes you a woman, living the biology, not seeing a woman and wanting to emulate her. I might want to emulate my favourite popstar but I haven't lived her life, I am not her and never can be, even if I have facial surgery to look like her and dress like her, because I haven't lived her life.

It's to do with life experiences which happen to a woman because of her sex which a man can never ever share as they don't have the equipment to do so or to be seen to do so or to be reacted to when they do so.

A false vagina without a cervix, without a uterus that sheds its lining and can nourish a fertilised egg in no way resembles a real vagina. I could have an 8-inch hole excavated into my flesh under my armpit, and lined with my gut wall, but it wouldn't be a second vagina would it? I could have pump up balls made from thigh skin hanging from my earlobes, but they wouldn't be testes at all. And I certainly wouldn't be welcome in the men's or the women's loos so get yourself a third space for goodness sake!

Is it just me, or is it glaringly obvious that Wakame (and probably Daimbar) are TRA/MRA plants?

Dearie me where to start..

Minority? Evidence for that please - I don’t have a gender identity, oodles of women onbhere have said they don’t have one. As far as I’m aware no comprehensive body of work exists on asking the population at large I’d they have a gender identity. probably because there is no objective definition of it

Electrons are not suggested by science. They exist. You can produce them and fire them at stuff. If you watched the telly in the 90s you’ve seen them in action. Electrons are measurable, objective, the lot.

As I’ve said to you multiple times the intersex community are not there for your gotcha moments, stop appropriating them it is grotesque. DSDs tell us nothing about the fact that humans are either men or women. As I’ve said to you before, a child born with severe holoprocencephaly does prove there’s a norm of cyclopia, not does a child born with sirenomelia prove there’s a norm of one legged people.

doctors and scientists don’t doubt.. as again I have said to you, and as other actual working scientists have said to you over several threads. this is not true.

Right. So electrons exist and are measurable. DSDs are not transgender and the intersex community does NOT want to be used this way, and gender identity is undefinable.

If you, personally, have an innate feeling of something then you do. You’re describing a soul. If you want to believe in that that’s fine, but I don’t and science doesn’t.
If that ‘innate identity’ is a feeling that one the opposite sex one cannot objectively know that that’s what one feels like any more than I can say I know what it’s like to be a northern white rhino.

How does one know how women feel? There is no ‘way women feel’
How does one know how women think? There is no ‘way women think’

one can see how women are socialised to dress and act, that’s observable, and one can ape it. One cannot ‘know’ how itvis to be something one is not.

In the past boys born with this condition were often given a "sex change" shortly after birth and were raised as girls with no knowledge of their male past. Despite this, a large percentage go on to express a male gender identity.
But their parents presumably did.

I think we all know that you are a "true believer" and your group requires that you proselytize here until you are banned and open a new account to continue to proselytize in hopes of destroying this website by driving the women away. Your mission is doomed to fail.

All 16 subjects had moderate-to-marked interests and attitudes that were considered typical of males.

I must be a chap! I’d like a pay rise and for people to listen to me more..
... I’m a chap because I had a STEM education, loathed pink, hated dolls, loved lego, obsessed with dinosaurs, very handy with machinery, love doing the DIY/construction jobs at home, working as a scientist. Never wear makeup, live in jeans a t shirts.

Except all those interests and attitudes are stereotypical not diagnostic of maleness or femaleness. I’m no more a man for liking tinkering with machinery than a man is a woman if he is in a caring profession. It’s these stereotypes feminists are trying to smash because they harm us all. Men can be amazing carers. Women can be engineers. We know we are men because we can see it. I know I’m a woman because I’m about to have a baby.

There’s no mystic soul essence needed. People can identify as whatever gender they wish. But when it comes to segregated spaces, and safeguarding of children, BIOLOGY is important. Not how you feel. Not what your beliefs are. What sex you are.

I think it's interesting to try and imagine if somehow your biological sex was kept a secret from both you and everyone around you, would you have a sense of yourself as a particular sex?

It is an interesting question. Personally I think I'd assume I was male, which is the default and also the dominant gender. This is presuming that I was living in some kind of void, maybe a computer simulation, where my body couldn't offer any clues.

As I child I didn't feel particularly drawn to either stereotypically masculine or feminine things. I read books for boys and girls, I had baby dolls and toy soldiers, I did computer programming and I loved horses. It's possible that, if I lived in a computer-simulated void and had decided I must be male because that was the norm and better, I'd have developed more masculine interests.

One thought experiment you could try is to imagine what it would be like if an ingenious neurologist transplanted your brain into a man's body. Would you now feel like a man, or would you feel like a woman inside a man's body?

It would definitely be weird. I've spent my whole life in this body, being socialised as female. A better question would be, if you were reincarnated into a body of the opposite sex, reborn as a baby with no memories at all of your previous life, with socialisation from the start associated with your new sex, would you at some deep soul-level feel like you were in the wrong body?

^
Betty exactly, your post:

Let me get this straight

The boys in your study were deformed baby boys, raised as girls?

Who grew up to insist they were in fact, boys?

Because that’s not evidence of gender identity, that’s just recognising their material biology, despite the absence of genitalia

This actually supports the GC feminist argument, that male born people are still male, even if their genitalia has been surgically removed

Yep, I saw that too, and went 'huh'?!

I think the vast majority of people are too busy living their lives, earning their living, nurturing their families, gaining their qualifications and generally pursuing their ambitions in every field of endeavour to bother trying to compartmentalise their sense of self sufficiently to disentangle something that could be called a gender identity. If you did any kind of survey in which you ask people about their gender identity the vast majority of people will tick the box corresponding to their biological sex not because they have that gender identity and fit that nasty label 'c*s' but because ffs life is too short to write an essay in the "other" box every time (assuming there is a "other" box which there often isn't).

If gender is a feeling in the brain then it's no more self-defining than a categorisation between those good at numerical reasoning and those good at artistic expression (with acceptance that some people might be "fluid" and identify as both depending on their current mood). Though this isn't a great example as those talents are objectively measurable with testing, so gender identity is less relevant to defining someone than talent categories.

Your OP explanation comes across as exactly as batshit as if you wanted to segregate some services, facilities and opportunities according to whether they have a fuzzy-edged aura or a sharp-edged aura. There is no need for it.

There is a need to segregate some services, facilities and opportunities according to biological sex.

One thought experiment you could try is to imagine what it would be like if an ingenious neurologist transplanted your brain into a man's body. Would you now feel like a man, or would you feel like a woman inside a man's body?

I would feel thankful that I was no longer oppressed by female biology (an immutable material reality that is often exploited by males in many countries). I have no idea what feeling like a man or feeling like a woman means. My brain is not a pink lady brain, but I know as a 5ft 2" , 7st woman, I can't defend myself against someone much taller and stronger than myself with IQ points, hard work or education... I also know if I want to pass on some of my DNA to the next generation, as a woman, I have to risk my life enduring pregnancy and childbirth, unlike a sperm cell producing human.

Innate Gender Identity is BS. If it makes someone feel happy to believe in the concept and embrace it, however, I don't care... providing their actions don't infringe on the hard won rights of biological females.

This is what it looks like when some members of the scientific community try to force human beings into the gender hierarchy.

Thousands of women were destroyed by the scientific cult of prefrontal lobotomy.
"Between the years 1935 and the mid 1960s thousands underwent the surgery before ethical concerns paired with the emergence of effective antipsychotic drug therapy ultimately lead to its disuse. "

" that’s not evidence of gender identity, that’s just recognising their material biology, despite the absence of genitalia."

They have been brought up as girls, and never told they were boys. There is no physical evidence that they are boys. So what did they recognise?

"Results of experiment (published 2006?) not yet repeated?"

As far as I know, they no longer to this to boys with cloacal exstrophy. It is a msall study, but if you have a better study showing that gender identity is either an illusion or entirely a social construct, you are free to post it.

"Innate Gender Identity is BS."

The doctors, neurologists, psychologists, scientists etc who study the phenomenon disagree with you. You are of course free to disagree with them, but I'm afraid your opinion is unlikely to have much effect.

Gender Identity is a person's innate sense of their own sex.

I nominate this statement for the Darwin Awards 2018.

If your sex is male, then your innate sense of your own sex by necessity must therefore be male.

It is philosophically, logically, and materially IMPOSSIBLE to have an innate sense of SOMEONE ELSES' SEX.

If you are male, it is impossible for you to have a sense of someone else's sex - ie female, like mine.

The stupid. It burns.

I would imagine that not going through a female puberty was a big clue.

The doctors, neurologists, psychologists, scientists etc who study the phenomenon disagree with you. You are of course free to disagree with them, but I'm afraid your opinion is unlikely to have much effect.

Great. Now I'm even more terrified about the future for girls and women than I already was.

Wakame - we keep telling you that XX and XY are easily able recognise each other, survival of the species (all mammal species) demands it.

If I, as an XX can differentiate between XX’s and XY’s (and I have the offspring to prove I can) why wouldn’t that exact same skill allow me to recognise myself as XX?

And that exact same skill would have told those boys they were XY.

This is all far simpler than you make it out to be.

My not-particularly-bright-Greyhound is able to differentiate between dogs and bitches, usually from quite a distance.

She’s scared of male humans, so I’m sure her detection skill is cross species, although mine isn’t.

Wakame many trans people, especially girls who identify as boys, don't have any cross-gender feelings or at least display cross-gender behaviour until puberty. Other children who never cross-identify do show cross-gender behaviour and might insist, at certain points, that they wish they were the opposite sex (but know they aren't). How do you account for that?

It's interesting that so many people here say that a belief in gender identity is something akin to religion.

This is something we can test to a degree. I'm sure you would agree that God is not a scientific concept and you therefore do not see mention of god as a factor in any peer-reviewed science (do correct me if I am wrong).

If gender identity is the same, it also won't be a factor in peer-reviewed science, and yet the paper in the OP suggests otherwise. Similarly, try a search for "Gender Identity" on Springer link for example:

link.springer.com/search?query=gender+identity

If it's nothing more than a religious belief, why are there literally thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers that proceed from the basis that it is real?

Perhaps it is your political ideology that is closer to a religion.