Sexed identities

[TyroTerf]

Been mulling this over for a while; thought I'd throw it out there and see if it makes sense.

I'm not keen on the idea of 'woman' being a gender identity, because it's antifeminist to tie the understanding of womanhood (female-bodied personhood) to an adherence to or preference for the culturally-specific shackles of our oppression; it creates dysphoria in women.

Yet I can truthfully say I identify as a woman - because I understand myself to meet the biological terms of that descriptor. (Shoutout to the feminist foremothers who pushed this prophylactic against female dysphoria!)

Woman (adult human female) is my sexed identity.

By definition, this identity can only be shared by others of the female sex.

But what of gendered identities? Who we understand ourselves to be in reference to the gendered world of pink and blue, fucker and fuckee, boss class and service human, skirts and shaved heads, all the sexist gendered crap we're immersed in - all our experiences in that world affect who we are.

I was groomed for the whore caste (csa), but my first conscious gendered identity was: resister. Through my teens I added broken; later I overwrote this with feminist.

I've since learned that the word for female resisters who assert a sexed identity is terf. There's sure as hell a gendered aspect to the label; it's used to silence females who resist patriarchal control of our language, and it's often accompanied by threats of sexual violence. It's a gender identity.

It's my gender identity.

But that's beside the point. The main thing I wanted to raise is the idea of sexed identities. Because we're always on the back foot having to defend ourselves, we're always being dragged into arguments over whether Woman is an identity or not an identity, when the question really is: is it a biological fact or a psychological identity?

Clearly it's both. One word with two related meanings: the having of the female body and the understanding of that having; and the former is both a necessary and sufficient condition within which to develop the latter.

The sexed identity of Woman is only found in females. Other sexed identities may be available, but this one is open to all and only female humans. And it matters. It's just as important, just as valid, just as equally fully human, as all the others. Yet it's consistently viewed as the worst abomination of the twenty first century.

Does this make sense?

Most teens were always mainstream in their musical tastes. There are still a minority of kids identifying with niche music culture.

Ignoring the input of male-born persons, as I also am not interested in the context of feminism and women's rights, the language of identity is fairly irrelevant when it comes to sex.

It is a material fact about our existence. The word woman describes our female maturity. I can give this fact about myself a great deal of attention and importance, and call it my identity, but it remains a salient life fact if I don't.

I really don't like to get into the 'how to parse gender' game, because I reject the whole premise. There's sex, sex-linked behaviours, and cultural stereotypes about our sex. That's it.

Feminism will certainly be weakened if the only feasible way of discussing the group that is likely to experience sex-based discrimination, sex-based violence, sex-based religious oppression and so on is to call them vulva people or ovary-havers or individuals with a cervix.

Although the loss of exact language defining female-bodied people is perhaps a more theoretical one to many than the other concerns linked with the wholesale attempt to replace biological sex with an abstract gender identity, it is one which makes feminist research, analysis and data collection much more difficult, especially if it becomes more common for female-bodied people to declare themselves nonbinary (partly as an attempt to escape sexism, I believe), because earnings data, for instance, would then have several gender categories and each category would have varying numbers of female-bodied people.

The real reason why women earn less than men is mostly sex-based, but collecting data only on gender identities could disguise that. So we would find that nonbinary people earn less than men but more than women, on average, and we would not find out that this is probably because the male-bodied nonbinary people earn male wages and the female-bodied nonbinary people earn female wages, on average.

Trans women whom others see as biologically female will also suffer from this, ultimately, and so will female-bodied nonbinary people, because feminism without the proper data will be less effective and much more cumbersome. Each separate problem from pregnancy discrimination to sexual violence will be treated separately, even though they affect exactly the same group.

Have I missed anything?

One more
Non binaries literally have no human rights so it doesn't matter if women are insulted, just be thankful you can still get some benefits.

I agree, BlackWave - identity is a largely irrelevant diversion. We remain women however we identify; if the identification were a necessary precondition for being a woman then do we stop being women when we die?

Unfortunately in the world we have, identity-talk currently has currency. We're shooting ourselves in the foot by not having a means to fight our corner in identity-language.

We could say "no such thing as gender identity" and be dismissed by the well-being masses who know that learning of the two sexes and mentally positioning oneself in the correct class is a normal part of psychological development. Or we could fight back using their own words: sex is not gender, my identity is sexed and rooted in my female body, and as such is categorically not the same as these male people's identity, thus we cannot and should not be treated as identical.

I find it interesting that the derail is straight on to tw. We have lots and lots of threads about tw. We've been subjected to countless accounts of what tw think of the concept of Woman-as-identity. I don't care. I'm interested in what other women think.

A woman-identity rooted in the female body one has and is, is not the same as a woman-identity rooted in some mysterious other thing that none of them can explain and a male body.

One's a female-variant identity (because it occurs exclusively in females) and the other's a male identity (because it's found exclusively in males).

Very interesting point about the pay gap, nepeta. If everyone IDed as nonbinary it would become invisible, because it's an undifferentiated mixed sex group. Which is why it's so important to call it the sex pay gap, not the gender pay gap. I do wonder how long it would take the female enbies to realise they're typically on lower than average pay for their class, and why that might be.

The gender pay gap data calculations use the legal sex data captured for HMRC. You cannot actually run payroll without the binary sex field completed. That data feeds the ONS national data set. Obviously if people have changed their sex on their passport then payroll reflects that but it can only be male or female.

Identity data collected by D&I isn't a full data set as it's an optional field (although D&I people would prefer to have it forced on employees). There is pressure from D&I to use optional data sets which includes nb and prefer not to say in the gender pay gap which in practice means the young women identified as nb are deleted and the well paid men, sick of being maligned by D&I also get the chance to prefer not to say and delete themselves 😂

Foot and shooting comes to mind.

This is already apparant in ethnicity pay data. The highest paid groups are in the column "prefer not to say" and "refused" . Not surprising is it?

If D&I constantly tell you that you are bad people you are not going to join in with their monitoring of you. It's the way of the world. Hoist on their own petard.

I don't know what to say about intersex experiences of sexed identity, except that, for the one woman I knew who discovered her dsd at puberty, it wasn't the gendered element of womanhood she felt had been ripped from under her feet, but the sexed element.

Yes, this is the point though, because in fact, her sex didn't change. She was always the same sex. Which suggests that her sense of herself as a sexed being is not directly entirely, and irrevocably created by the actual sexed body.

The sense of an identity as a woman or man didn't come from what the body was, but from what she thought the body was, and society thought the body was.

This led people to think that there could be other instances where there could be a incongruity.

To be clear, I've no idea of that friend's chromosomal sex. It never mattered to me. She was raised with the same expectations based on her phenotype as all women, and then it transpired that her body wasn't going to play ball with biological expectations.

Her understanding of herself as a woman was predicated on phenotype+socialisation. The former being a necessary precursor for the latter.

I suspect the early researchers were hampered by their lack of feminist analysis though. And the whole thing is obscured by more recent attempts to sanitise and obfuscate the language.

The thing that I always noticed in the old school transsexuals' accounts of their experience, is that the primary issue they were struggling with wasn't wanting to be the opposite sex but rather not wanting to be their own. They didn't feel like women in men's bodies; they felt like not-men in male bodies.

That's the only common factor I can see. Feeling like a failure at being the sex you are. But my friend felt this way because her biology proved non-standard in a world that expects all women to birth children; whereas in dysphoria/dysmorphia (speaking from experience) alternative biology isn't the starting point for the trouble.

Anyway, those early researchers: how did they account for the psychological impact of feeling like a non-man in a man's world on people with dsds and male phenotype? Because if they didn't have the premise that sex roles are hierarchical built in, then the resulting analysis is always going to be flawed.

And, of course, the experiences of people with dsds don't tell us anything about innate, born-this-way identities; quite the opposite. They tell us something about how identity emerges and evolves. The identity isn't simply extruded by the brain according to genetics, but develops in conjunction with lived experience of the material world.

It's like the David Reimer case. The existence of his twin will have made it clear he was a non-man rather than a woman by biology, and so how could he possibly have been expected to develop a born-phenotypically-female identity?

It has to be a biological identity. As does disability and age. None of those can be defined or be of use if they become a concept.

That's just it - you can't divorce the identity from the biology. Whatever the identity is called, it wouldn't have arisen without that specific biology.

This is the other half of why twaw is wrong: their identity emerged in the context of a male body.

Maybe we also need to think about the meaning of the word 'identity'.

Is it the empirical, verifiable, reality of how others recognise an individual, or is it an individual's internal sense of how they recognise themself?

@JellySlice

Maybe we also need to think about the meaning of the word 'identity'.

Is it the empirical, verifiable, reality of how others recognise an individual, or is it an individual's internal sense of how they recognise themself?

That’s an interesting thought if you apply it to the existing protected characteristics. I am under the impression that legal discrimination takes place from what is perceived or known by the discriminator who then uses that perception or knowledge to treat unfairly.

Someone who is a UK native with a traditional British type name with Caucasian appearance is unlikely to experience racial discrimination in casual encounters even if they are mixed race and identify as such. They could experience it in a situation where their racial identity is known. Their identity is the same in both situations.

When did the words “I identify as” replace I am?

I am a woman vs I identify as a woman.
I am Jewish vs I identify as Jewish.
I am black vs I identify as black.

Is it an indicator that the one identifying does not feel fully entitled to the word at the end of the sentence?

I have no problem saying I am a woman, it’s factual. However I expect that my legal sex could be described in a data report as identity - woman.

It's both, Jelly.

For a language with such an extensive vocabulary, we don't half like to condense everything to a tiny range.

There's objective identity (this person is identifiable to others as female, caucasian, whatever). And there's internal identity, which is just... The words you choose to describe yourself.

Objectively I'm English so that goes on my ID documents, but I identify as Yorkshire (and if you attack the grammar you've missed the point). I can't identify as French, because I understand the necessary and sufficient conditions there and know I meet none of them.

To link back to the OP, in terms of the words we use to describe ourselves, we identify ourselves as being women because of biology. The reference points are all about sex, not gender. And if the sods hadn't changed the term from sex identity to gender identity we would not have this ridiculous battle of words on our hands.

We'd just be able to say "yours is a male-variant sexed idrntity, and mine is female-variant; we are not qualitatively the same thing."

BaseDrops I think that's a fair assessment of what's going on with 'I identify as' vs 'I am'.

It's a tacit acknowledgement that not all potential conditions are being met. 'I dont identify as' shows it clearly: I don't identify as English because I don't feel the stereotypes applied to the southeast apply to me, and because I was raised northern; the English are Them not Us to me.

But I wouldn't say I'm not English because, well, objectively, I am. I've seen the maps, I've read the histories, these are my evidence that English means people all the way to Hadrian's wall nowadays.

Yes! It’s the using of the same language for both an acquired identity and a factual statement. So the phrase gender identity is correct until it is conflated with sex.

Identity as being male or female develops once an individual understands 1) that they are one of two sexes and 2) which one they are. The fact that everyone is one sex or the other and the vocabulary to describe this has to be taught to children along with other complex material concepts, like family relationships, the difference between animals and plants, etc.

What typically follows from there is recognition by the child that people of each sex (especially kids) tend to play together and tend to dress and play in stereotypical ways. In many kids (around 3-4) there follows a period of extreme tribal sexism. I am a girl, therefore girls are better than boys, therefore I won’t play with boys and I won’t do “boy stuff”. This is an important time for intervention from adults, and learning concepts like empathy and fairness. Reminding the child that, previously, they liked X, what changed? Or, does wearing pink/a dress make you a girl? How silly!! No, it’s your body that tells you what sex you are, right? This type of correction is essential to developing sense of self as a sexed being, but also an individual, rather than member of a tribe. Also helps combat sexism.

Some children never participate with the tribalism and prefer to continue with strong interests. They will choose playmates based on interest rather than sex. GNC children have always existed. I think it’s about 10-20% consistently. These kids are also neuroatypical at a higher rate than other kids.

It seems that pro-gender activists would like parents to stop teaching children the vocabulary in the first step of gender identification (I have a sexed body more like other male or other female people), and instead tell the children that their sex is determined by their choice of playmates / interests during the sexist socialization phase of gender identification. And finally, corrections about sex stereotypes are to be verboten. It becomes transphobic to say “no, playing with dolls doesn’t make Jason a girl, Jason is a boy no matter his interests - it’s not fair to assume someone shouldn’t do something simply because they have a penis.” The goal is modifying language in a way to misinform children about their bodies, and instead to allow gender stereotypes to define sex, without correction. Deeply sinister.

And where does that leave the vast majority of children who would otherwise have been GNC yet have no issues with their sexed bodies? It leads them to think they are actually the opposite sex. Because we are told to educate them otherwise is transphobic.

Given the feminist distinction - echoed in English law - between sex (biological) and gender (sociocultural) I think gender identity might be a valid term to describ some people's sexed identities.

Because, for some women, knowing that they're meeting local expectations is a key feature of who they feel they are.

For many women, they're not. And for others the sociocultural aspect is an irrelevance to the sense of self-as-woman. If gender's irrelevant then it doesn't make sense to describe those identities as gender identities.

Who is the arbiter in matters of identity? (Who are the arbiters?)

I think one of the reasons I was attracted to Gothic clothes was that its so in your face, its the first thing someone will notice.

I've never fit in with my peers and this continues to this day. At school I was ostracised, whilst the other girls would crowd around their Celebrity gossip magazines and talk about what happened on Hollyoaks that night; I would read my Manga books, listen to European metal bands on my headphones, plan what game I wanted to play after school and wish there was someone I could talk to about what happened on my favourite anime that night. I mainly hung around nerdy boys and other 'weird' girls. Perhaps part of what marked me as different was that I am Autistic, but I was only diagnosed at age 16. To me, it is a much better definer of who I am than my gender.

I feel a deep disconnection with people a lot. It was so bad in University that I became an insomniac shut in, simply unable to attend classes or associate with my peers. No one but my would be partner noticed. I was going through a lot both financially and personally and felt like all those bright, hopeful people, supported by their family through Uni could never understand. Being surrounded by all their carefree happiness made me feel ill, so I sequestered myself away in the dark.

I had to drop out. My partner and I were homeless for a while. When we did get housed things turned around. But my feelings of disconnection have never truly abated.

I'm a staunch member of the Childfree movement. I despise the physical maladies that come with being a woman such as periods, discharge, breast tenderness, mood swings etc. I don't want to have them, or even acknowledge I have them, as that is just too 'womanly' for me. The image of a group of 30 somethings women sipping their wine whilst complaining about relationships, children, gossip and their 'woman problems' floats to my head with a screech of "You don't want to be like this!"

And I don't. I want to be seen as me first and not what gender I was born as above all else. I don't want to be seen as 'woman' because I associate it with too many negative things from throughout my life. What I want to be seen as are things like 'Goth', 'Gamer', 'Otaku', 'Pigeon rescuer', 'Pagan'. Those are the things I chose to be, the things that appealed to me, not born as without a choice.

I don’t know why people get their knickers in a twist over ‘disorder’. My daughter has a rare, life threatening immune disorder (when confronted with a virus or bacteria some of her white cells get over agitated and destroy healthy red cells instead of the ‘invader’, leaving her systemically imbalanced and her body unable to function. Without intervention it’s always fatal because the immune system destroys anything it can find leading to multi organ failure).

She doesn’t have an ‘immune difference’ or an ‘immune incongruence’, but it’s not a disease, she didn’t catch it, it’s a normal function of the human body that doesn’t quite work properly for her.
(It’s probably genetic but the in-depth genome sequencing she has been referred for is super specialised and harder to access at present due to Covid).

If we accept at face value that gender identity is a thing, but people who have a normal functioning one aren’t aware of it (like a normal functioning immune system, which mostly just runs in the background without us being aware of it, and then turns on when needed, a bit like a computer fan)

Then a ‘gender identity’ at odds with a sexed body IS a disordered state of being.

And If it isn’t a disorder, why treat it with medical and surgical interventions?

Males with disordered gender identities are still not females, of course, because male and female are reproductive categories, not identities.

I am pondering your thoughts on ‘sex identity’.

Personally I am increasingly of the thought that ‘identifying as’ anything is worthless. You are a thing or you aren’t a thing and there has to be some material, objective way for someone else to look at the evidence and say ‘yes, that checks out’. A society cannot be organised based on everyone’s individualised sense of self. Everyone will end up completely demented and demoralised (borrowing phrasing from Douglas Murray there).

Males with disordered gender identities in relationships with other males with disordered gender identities calling themselves lesbians or describing their relationship as a lesbian relationship doesn’t check out. They don’t need access to the protections that exist to enable lesbians to exist in a largely heterosexual society and they don’t need the specific provisions that lesbians need in healthcare (ie, access to screening for the female reproductive cancers that are more common in lesbians than in heterosexual women, or access to donor sperm and the safety screening and fertility care that accompanied that). Recording these males as lesbians will eventually fuck with statistics to the point that we will no longer be able to determine that some cancers disproportionately affect lesbians. Lesbians are a small percentage of women anyway, so it doesn’t take that many erroneous inclusions to the category to render data meaningless.

What the two males in a relationship might actually need, is access to services and healthcare for homosexual men, such as Prep (and some types of prep are only suitable for males, so sex difference is important here).

Thus treating their lesbian ‘identity’ as though it is meaningful increases risk of harm to both the males themselves and the minority group they have identified themselves into.

Yet on the surface, two men living quietly together ‘as women’ is harmless and no ones business but theirs and anyone who even thinks ‘hold on a minute, I have some questions’ should be dismissed as a bigot.

So yes, I agree that a woman’s sexed identity should be taken as seriously by the identity crowd as a man’s ‘gender identity’ but actually, we’re better off sacking off the concept of identity altogether.

It’s a bit like the campaign to make misogyny a hate crime - like, I agree that if victimisation on the grounds of race/minority sexuality/gender reassignment/religious belief is a hate crime then yes, misogyny should be in there too.
But actually, the entire concept of hate crime needs looking at again, because what began with the best of intent in the wake of Stephen Lawrence’s murder has somehow morphed into investigating youtube interviewers for hate on the basis of something their interviewee said on a live broadcast, or trying to prosecute Linda Bellos (a black, lesbian, feminist, life long left wing activist and senior citizen) and Miranda Yardley (a transsexual and former local level LGBT officer for the Labour Party) for hate crime, despite no evidence of either of them committing any crimes, let alone crimes motivated by hatred).

We need to get back to objective truth and stop fannying about with identity. It’s a dead end for humanity.

If it walks like a man and quacks like a man it’s a man.
Telling the truth is not a hate crime.

We remain women however we identify; if the identification were a necessary precondition for being a woman then do we stop being women when we die?

To expand on this, an adult human female with a profound cognitive impairment may never have experienced a conscious sense of self at all.

But she if she is an adult, human, and female, she is a woman, and to call her anything else would be unthinkable. She has a right to safety, privacy and dignity and a same sex carer, even if she cannot conceptualise nor articulate those rights.

No ones internal sense of self, no matter how sincere, can be allowed to take precedence over her material reality, even if she is unaware of her material reality.

And I don't. I want to be seen as me first and not what gender I was born as above all else. I don't want to be seen as 'woman' because I associate it with too many negative things from throughout my life. What I want to be seen as are things like 'Goth', 'Gamer', 'Otaku', 'Pigeon rescuer', 'Pagan'. Those are the things I chose to be, the things that appealed to me, not born as without a choice.

I totally get this. I’m a misfit too, always have been. The past I have lived and the choices I make are more meaningful to understanding me as a human than the facts of my birth.

But if you can stop thinking of ‘woman’ and ‘mother’ as identities and see them only as descriptions of material reality (one of which applies to you and one that doesn’t) they have far less power over your sense of self.
You need to be recorded as female in order to access the lifelong healthcare your body needs, including access to the full range of options that allow you to make a conscious decision to be child free.

So female = useful medical knowledge, necessary to enable your conscious choices and to provide certain legal protections that you may or may not need in your life time.

And woman just = adult human female, no more, no less, and says nothing at all about the clothes you wear, the activities you enjoy, the people you associate with and the work you choose to do.

I hesitated to call myself a woman until I was in my mid thirties, because it seemed like too grand a title to live up too, and in my head, I’m still the same green haired, stripy tights and bovver boots ‘grebo’ I was in 1992... (and I’m extensively tattooed so I’m never going to look completely mainstream, even if I am back to my natural ginge)

But now, in my mid 40s, I am truly able to just say
‘women = female human over the age of 18*’
‘girl = female human under the age of 18’

And just leave all the other womendothis womendothat baggage behind me.

It’s incredibly freeing**

*I say 18 because it’s the voting age in the jurisdiction where I live, but obviously, the laws regarding adult status vary a bit internationally.

** And I don’t mean in a menstuation pride, yoni steaming, yogurt meaning way, sacred goddess stuff is all completely optional, I promise! 😆

I'm nodding along; CrazyPigeonLady's post certainly resonates and Betty's interpretation I share.

One thing that helped me with feeling uncomfortable about being 'the thing the mother-stereotypes attach to' - the thing, really - is this place. Because here we're none of us bodies, we're creations of our own words.

The screen makes the body invisible; here we're all just conscious human entities. Everyone's using the same font, no separate styles to denote sex. We're sex-blind here. Which meant my issues about being female-bodied weren't constantly interfering with my capacity to allow myself to be accepted by other women.

If we're talking in terms of gender identity then, CrazyPigeon, it sounds like you've got an element of 'definitely not womangender' going on in there. Is that a fair assessment?

Betty the point about severe cognitive impairment is a bloody important one.

If twaw and tmanw then a particular conscious identity is a necessary condition of w. There are a hell lot of worrying implications there.

Who is the arbiter in matters of identity?

Crucial question. Different answers depending on which meaning of identity we're using.

I think within the confines of our own heads we can call ourselves whatever we like, but as soon as we expand things to include others then there has to be a degree of common consent around definition and qualification.

Sexuality as an example. A same-sex-attracted female might identify as dyke or lesbian or straight-transman or a host of other things. All of these identities are commonly understood to be flavours of same-sex-attracted female, so if someone doesn't meet that condition then whichever label she goes for will be challenged.

We have to use the material world as the basis of common understanding, because that's the part we have mutual access to. Bodies and behaviours exist in the material world, so we can cross-reference with them to see that someone meets those conditions. Or doesn't, in the case of tw.

We cross-reference with the body of human writings too. Hence the need to go after the dictionary - it's the usual arbiter when we're disagreeing on definitions.

I think a quick way to cut through the waffle and not get too tied up with it all is to scrap the word 'gender' and substitute the phrase 'sex stereotype'. Works for me.

I do have a fondness for waffle, but that's a good suggestion!

Although it still leaves us wide open to attack via the conflation of sex-stereotype with sex. I can see the arguments now.

Plus that leaves us where we are now in terms of people thinking a bimodal distribution of physical sex characteristics is in some sense a stereotype and thus essentially the same as behavioural expectations and dress standards.