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.

Lurking these kinds of threads made me go from

‘curious observer, why on earth would anyone object to transfolk?’

To

‘There is a Trojan horse full of wangs trying to get into all of the women’s spaces I and my daughters have taken for granted using bad science as justification’

And ultimately made me take up the anti-wang baton.

Like my mumsnet foremothers I have learned to see posters like this as the absolute gift they are.

I just feel bad for all the lovely transfolk I know who will end up on the receiving end of the inevitable societal backlash.

BettyDuMonde
My sentiments exactly. I was much of the ohh leave the transfolk alone you horrible lot. To much bloody hell the ramifications of self id and the like is fucking scary.

The use of science is like the arguments of flat earthers.

Thank you Datun, Ann Rozylo and yes Lilly.
And yes i still feel sorry for the lovely transfolk caught up in the backlash of the this gender monster.

Barracker - i feel like handing out patronising 'gold stars' for amazing posts, though I know that's a bit shit!

Apparently female? We're not just boys with no winkles you know. This isn't a Blackadder sketch. We actually have our OWN ANATOMY!
Imagine! Uteruses and ovaries and fallopian tubes and internal clitorises and all sorts of remarkable physiology that you managed to overlook because, oh well, no more willy = 'apparently female'?!

And another patronising gold star goes to Betty for taking up the anti-wang baton

Awaits the phrase the 'anti-wang baton' being the next to fall in the 'things we must not say' Olympics!

You get so-called scientists publishing papers denying climate change; touting their exciting new alternative to chemotherapy or vaccinations; and demonstrating thanks to the kind (but undisclosed) backing of corporate sponsors, that nuclear power, fracking or genetic modifications are perfectly safe. So the fact that there are some academic papers supporting the theory of gender means nothing when the pro-trans lobby has created a toxic environment against true research by making it taboo to publicly question the faith of genderiness.

But even so it's irrelevant. Even if a true phenomenon of gender independent of social and cultural pressure could be proven (impossible until a truly egalitarian utopia gets established so don't hold your breath) and it is sometimes different from biological sex, that means nothing when some things - like having different sports categories for men and women - will still need to go by biological sex not "feeling" - even if that feeling was provable.

pombear

I’ll wear my patronising-gold-medal with pride. Thanks!

Have you looked at the trans threads on datalounge.com? I like to think of it as our proud, gay, parallel universe.

Won’t link as some of the content is very much NSFW but here’s a screenshot I took of a post-worth-preserving:

Betty I've also lurked on Datalounge, particularly after Juno Dawson wrote an article for a gay magazine saying that gay men were trans in denial. They weren't impressed!

Wow! Way to use-your-new-identity-to-invalidate-every-gay-man-ever to go, Juno!

I can imagine the collective datalounge rebuttal being rather fierce

You know, reading these threads and others I am beginning to think that actually sex and gender are the same thing, or they were until three years ago, and we began creating more categories.

Genders of men and women are just casual terms for describing sex that is male and female. Gender stereotypes are a problem not gender/sex itself.

I hate the mental gymnastics we have to do. I'm done. Gender is related to sex but it's really still just male and female, and remains unchangeable. I know the ship has sailed but I don't care. You're a man or a woman, a male or a female. Everything else is a personality type, or serious psychological issue that needs compassionate treatment.

Because it's late at night, and I am a child at heart.

I'm just trying to visualise all of the human race bumping around each other trying to work out how to reproduce, cos we can't work out what's what, unless we've worked out the other person's gender identity.

And if biological sex is redundant and it's all about this inner sense of gender identity, what is it based on, given that gender stereotypes and activity differs culture to culture?

And no, this isn't a homophobic post about how could we reproduce (skin in the game here!) it's just that I can't work out how, based on Wakame's thinking, that anyone, anywhere managed it!

Head hurts from trying to see it from Wakame's point of view, so now just visualising 'imaginary' electrons bumping around in the ether!

I know!

With all the intersex biology-spectrum links we are told to ‘read and learn’ from, you’d think contraception was almost entirely unnecessary!

I can imagine the collective datalounge rebuttal being rather fierce

You imagine correctly

I remember the first time I ran into the argument that "everyone who denies being trans is trans in denial" in 2004. That was when the Gays and Lesbians got their first clue they may have taken a viper to their breast.

Yes I imagine some people saw it coming a long way off but it went in then under the radar. If I had known about it then I would be as outraged as now.

These kind of arguments (those from the OP) make me really sad for womankind. Centuries of being seen as the ‘weaker’ sex, because we menstruate and have children, literally owned by men, raped, beaten by abusive husbands, dying in childbirth, having child after child because of no contraception and no access to abortion and because childbirth is dangerous, suffering diseases related to female reproductive organs - these things happened (and some of them still happen) because of material reality, not some innate ideas in women’s heads.

When women found the language to distinguish the means of their oppression (socially constructed sex roles), they called it gender to distinguish it from sex, to show the ways women were socialised into female sex roles and the attributes seen as feminine. To the extent that one may ‘feel’ a gender identity, it is then a greater or lesser acceptability of that socialisation, or in the case of trans people, a complete rejection of the socialisation of their birth sex.

That is the only way I can understand gender identity as a concept. Thus being transgender is a rejection of the socialisation of one’s birth sex. Being transsexual is a rejection also of the physical manifestation of one’s birth sex.

So far so good. The problem comes with what replaces the rejected socialisation/sex. Because the way sex and gender work is they are ascribed (biologically and socially respectively from birth). It is simply not possible to go back and recreate the body and experiences of the opposite sex, any more than it is possible for me to go back and recreate a kind and loving family for myself instead of one riven by alcoholism.

KataraJean that is a brilliant post. Thank you.

In terms of the thought experiment, if I found myself in a man’s body.
It would be very strange. The things which have happened to me which make me think I am a woman are to do with being part of a female body. So, not being the son my mother wanted, being groped/flashed/sexually assaulted/raped/beaten up, miscarriages, childbirth trauma, all of these things happened because I have a female body.

If I woke up a man, well, I would probably want some new clothes. But my day to day life would not change. I would still get up, tidy my house, feed and look after my children (being a single parent), do my job (just struck me I would get lauded as a single dad, instead of judged), look after my garden, my car - all of these things. I might find it easier to get promoted too.

So I am not clear, the thought experiment works. The things which define me as a woman happened because of my biology and the way society treats women. My day to day life would not change if I woke up a man but people’s reactions to me would. It would be odd, sure, having to learn to pee standing up, and which side to dress, but I am not sure how that proves an innate gender identity, just that male and female bodies are different. And you have to imagine waking up as the opposite sex because it is not something that generally actually ever happens.

imchlibob thank you

Genuinely.
There are so many women come to these boards having a rough time, because they are women and female and the things that happen to them are because they are women and female, that to have someone come along and say it is all in our heads, in some form of identity we ascribe to, is just mind-blowingly beyond belief. It’s the equivalent of being told you are mad and not seeing things right by an abusive husband.

KataraJean well said and to you.

Especially like this bit There are so many women come to these boards having a rough time, because they are women and female and the things that happen to them are because they are women and female, that to have someone come along and say it is all in our heads, in some form of identity we ascribe to, is just mind-blowingly beyond belief

The way they treat it, like some costume they can appropriate, a fun novelty to explore, is disgustingly ignorant. And then they tell us they're the same and our issues are the same and they know better than us what makes a woman, and they have every right to our spaces and rights. And they wonder why people are angry.

Hi all

I've been lurking here for months and I don't really know how this all works - just made an account to say, like the poster above, there are probably lurkers like me watching how deftly you all work through your gc arguments. Even when people are patronising you. Threads like this are actually what made me start questioning the whole thing i.e. "do i have a gender identity" (no i don't.)

So, thanks

As other posters have said, what relevance does the the aetiology of gender identity matter to this board?

Gender identity ‘exists’ because people claim to have gender identities. Posters talk about concerns about reinforcement of sex-based stereotyping and the limiting impact this can have on women and girls when people conflate gender identity and sex.

Posters on this board also want sex as a category to be applied correctly so sex based protections can be put in place.

Whilst you yammer on about how important you think gender identity is, Oxfam are recommending that female toilets to be geographically separated from male ones in refugee camps to prevent males from raping females on toilet trips.

The penis is a male organ and can be used as a rape weapon to put females at risk of pregnancy, STIs, and physical and mental injury.

Gender identity has nothing to do with the capacity to rape and is why we are fighting to keep sex protections and retain current limits on the ability of males to obtain the legal fiction of sex change. You have to be very very privileged to prioritise subjective feelings so highly. Females, who risk rape by existing in the presence of males, can't be so choosy. This is why so many transmen prefer to use the female loos and, when imprisoned in the US, have petitioned to be allocated to the female prison estate[1].

[1] "Normal life : administrative violence, critical trans politics, and the limits of law", p. x, by Dean Spade (2015).

What's not obvious in my previous post is that Jim is a transman.

So, thanks

No - thank you to all the lurkers, reading and watching from the sidelines.

I'm just trying to visualise all of the human race bumping around each other trying to work out how to reproduce, cos we can't work out what's what, unless we've worked out the other person's gender identity.

If anyone has read any discworld novels this is how the Dwarves are on the discworld.

Good morning all! Especially to everyone newly delurked - it’s great to know the wang baton is being taken up by more and more women everyday.

I went over to datalounge last night to read the thread Ereshkigal mentioned re: a Juno Dawson interview in Attitude magazine. Juno is on record saying ‘there are a lot of gay men out there who are gay as a consolation prize, because they couldn’t be women’.

I lurk there from time to time. It’s one of the few open message boards where it’s possible to express a gender critical viewpoint, albeit one subject to moderation, like here.

It’s interesting because many of the views posted are so, so similar to ours, albeit viewed through a different lens, and informed by a different history of marginalisation. It’s a NSFW kind of place, so I will not link, but it is, at times, hilariously funny and at other times, incredibly poignant.

Knowing that others can also see that the emperor (Empress?) is naked is a great relief, and it’s a bit like taking a city break style holiday. I would very much recommend it.

I made a couple of screenshots...