of their true gender
The only thing that can objectively and factually be described as 'true' is sex.
It is well recognised that a high percentage of young people who question their gender identity do not pursue this.
There are prominant trans-rights activists who have at first asserted their gender identity being 'transmen' or 'transwomen' and now identify as 'non-binary'.
There are currently 71 (?) gender identities listed on Facebook, why not 84, 176, 2376, 32451? Presumably no-one would insist that at this moment in history we 'know' all of the possible 'gender identities'?
Rebecca Reilly Cooper writes,
'Gender is not a spectrum
The idea that ‘gender is a spectrum’ is supposed to set us free. But it is both illogical and politically troubling'
(extract)
"Humans of both sexes would be liberated if we recognised that while gender is indeed an internal, innate, essential facet of our identities, there are more genders than just ‘woman’ or ‘man’ to choose from. And the next step on the path to liberation is the recognition of a new range of gender identities: so we now have people referring to themselves as ‘genderqueer’ or ‘non-binary’ or ‘pangender’ or ‘polygender’ or ‘agender’ or ‘demiboy’ or ‘demigirl’ or ‘neutrois’ or ‘aporagender’ or ‘lunagender’ or ‘quantumgender’… I could go on. An oft-repeated mantra among proponents of this view is that ‘gender is not a binary; it’s a spectrum’. What follows from this view is not that we need to tear down the pink and the blue boxes; rather, we simply need to recognise that there are many more boxes than just these two.
At first blush this seems an appealing idea, but there are numerous problems with it, problems that render it internally incoherent and politically unattractive." (continues)
And here we have an irony about some people insisting that they and a handful of their fellow gender revolutionaries are non-binary: in doing so, they create a false binary between those who conform to the gender norms associated with their sex, and those who do not. In reality, everybody is non-binary. We all actively participate in some gender norms, passively acquiesce with others, and positively rail against others still. So to call oneself non-binary is in fact to create a new false binary. It also often seems to involve, at least implicitly, placing oneself on the more complex and interesting side of that binary, enabling the non-binary person to claim to be both misunderstood and politically oppressed by the binary cisgender people.
If you identify as pangender, is the claim that you represent every possible point on the spectrum? All at the same time? How might that be possible, given that the extremes necessarily represent incompatible opposites of one another?" (continues)
Once we assert that the problem with gender is that we currently recognise only two of them, the obvious question to ask is: how many genders would we have to recognise in order not to be oppressive? Just how many possible gender identities are there?
The only consistent answer to this is: 7 billion, give or take. There are as many possible gender identities as there are humans on the planet. According to Nonbinary.org, one of the main internet reference sites for information about non-binary genders, your gender can be frost or the Sun or music or the sea or Jupiter or pure darkness. Your gender can be pizza.
But if this is so, it’s not clear how it makes sense or adds anything to our understanding to call any of this stuff ‘gender’, as opposed to just ‘human personality’ or ‘stuff I like’ (continues)
aeon.co/essays/the-idea-that-gender-is-a-spectrum-is-a-new-gender-prison