Is this "gender identity"?

[Kaiserin]

What does it mean to "feel like a woman"?
For a long time this made no sense to me, and sounded it was all about embracing gender stereotypes. However there seems to be (according to some) a distinction between gender identity (in your head) and gender expression (the way you dress and act).
So what's that womanly feeling? Do I (a female) even feel womanly?

Then it clicked: when a man is mean to me, I feel threatened, but that feeling is only as deep as how much I fear that man may be able to hurt me (otherwise? shrug, whatever). When a woman is mean to me, I doubt my self a lot more ("what's wrong with me?"). The man is "other" (still human, but distinct). The woman is a mirror, another self, and her rejection hurts my own sense of identity and adequacy.
I'm not saying that feeling is right or wrong, or that everyone has it, but (I've just realised), for me, it's real (and a bit shameful, as I thought I had stronger "mental boundaries". I guess deep down I'm still a little girl trying to please my mum...)

So, assuming that feeling is "gender identity"... trans women see men and feel they are "other", they see women and feel "that's another me!"... And if a woman says "sorry, but I don't see you as another me", the trans woman's feelings get hurt... But is that any different from anyone being rejected by the "peer group(s)" they identify with?

I'm a female with not very feminine interests. I identify with females based on our shared lived experience, due to being the same sex. I also identify with people (often male) who share my interests. I have experienced rejection from both groups due to my otherness. But surely I can't force people who don't identify with me, to identify with me? I can expect kindness based on our shared humanity, but surely I can't demand control on their own feelings, or request that they lie about such feelings?

So... unrequited feelings of identity are real ("I identify with you, but you don't identify with me, and it hurts"), but they are not any more a hate crime than, say, unrequited love.
... Does this idea I just got make sense to anyone else?

@midgebabe

You don't need monastic culture to reduce birth rates, you reduce birth rates quite well by educating girls and giving them other options. The birth rate in many developed countries is below replace levels , and is falling in other places as women get more opportunities to control their reproduction

That presumes you have access to birth control, which in the history of humanity is a tiny amount of time and has never applied to everyone.

There also hasn't been a modern social safety net through most of history and that kind of protection comes through families.

So giving people the option of not having children has generally tended to mean making sure there were ways to live outside of traditional married life while having an occupation, being cared for if you were sick, and so on. And there is a psychological element as well - if people are going to remain celibate, they often need some community support for that as it isn't always easy.And it needs to be seen as a valuable path, worthy of respect, rather than a privation.

There are different ways to potentially accomplish that, one being creating a sort of class of people not allowed to marry, like soldiers, but the different approaches have some strong similarities across cultures.

@OldCrone

I think in so far as it's a think it's similar to other kinds of identity. Almost everyone has such a thing - they identify as Scottish, or Progressive, or a metalhead, or black, or as a member of a profession, or as a member of a particular family.

Many people do have identities like this, but I think it would be wrong to say everyone does. And not everyone has the same type of identity.

Insisting that everyone has a gender identity is like insisting that everyone has an identity connected to their nationality or ancestry. It's like a person who feels a very strong affinity to their Scottish identity insisting that another person with mixed ancestry who was born somewhere unrelated to that ancestry and has lived in various countries must also have a strong identity linked to nationality. Or like someone whose identity is based around their Christian faith insisting that everyone else must have a strong feeling of identity linked to their religion.

Yeah, I think whatever the mechanism around identity is, it's fairly flexible. Which makes sense, if it was like being imprinted like a bird we'd have to have very rigid social structures.

I am not so sure about gender identity though -- I think we might live at a time where it is less felt than maybe any other time in history. We all have an experience of living in our bodies, and we have an experience of living in our sexed body, and we share that experience with other women and men.

I don't think many people have really managed to get out of that experience of body. We talk a lot on FWR about how having kids can radicalise women, I think another way to say that is that it makes us aware of the realities of our sexed bodies in a more immediate way. And it's a shock for quite a few younger women who haven't seen that much in their lives. But I don't think that was true, say, 100 years ago.

Look, people keep twisting themselves in pretzels to understand a bogus concept, that of gender identity.

There's no such thing. Get rid of the word gender.

When you do that you can see there is sex, there is sex-based dysphoria, there are sex-linked behaviours/patterns, there are sex-based stereotypes, there are stereotypical presentations (feminine, masculine) that are coded to each sex.

No male 'feels like a woman' because there is no universal feeling for woman.

Some males have dysphoria around their sexed bodies which they resolve through social, hormonal and surgical treatments (transsexuals). Some males prefer to present in the stereotypically feminine ways usually coded female (trangender). Some males have a cross-dressing fetish (cross dressers).

There is zero need for the bogus concept 'gender identity' to explain any of these conditions or choices. So it's a giant waste of feminist energy to bother.

It's as bad as talking about souls.

I am super happy for people to believe they have souls, I may even use soul as a metaphor at times, but it's just a belief. There's no data to support the existence of soul, there's no data to support the existence of gender identity.

People are free to worship how they wish, but they're not free to impose their creed on others. Goes for GI as much as anything more traditionally religious.