[quote DadJoke]@NotDavidTennant
The third paragraph in, the authors state "Every person has a gender identity", but provide no citation or supporting evidence.
Can you cite any evidence that all people (or even most people) have a gender identity?
Their are multiple cites in the paper. Follow them. It's like asking for cites for the statement "every person has a sexuality." You really don't need me to do that work for you.[/quote]
I've had a look at the paper you posted a link to.
It doesn't give any evidence that everyone has a gender identity as far as I can see. The first paper referenced is by Stoller, from 1968. I can't find a full text version of this, but I would hope that any real evidence that everyone has a gender identity (if true) would also be found in more recent papers.
The next reference is to the 'Guidelines for psychological practice with transgender and gender nonconforming people.' from the American Psychological Association. There is no evidence there that everyone has a gender identity and only a fairly woolly definition of what it is.
The next citation is in a section headed 'Gender Identity': Every person has a gender identity. Children typically become aware of gender between the ages of three and five (Ruble et al. 2007).
This is the paper: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17650129/
There's a link to the full text on google scholar
It's clear that the authors aren't actually talking about 'gender identity' as an identity which has nothing to do with one's sex, it's talking about 'sex identity', in other words, the understanding a child has that they are male or female, and that this is a fixed attribute (my bold).
One of the most compelling yet controversial ideas in the gender literature is ‘‘gender constancy.’’ As proposed by Kohlberg (1966), children’s developing understanding of the permanence of categorical sex (‘‘I am a girl and will always be a girl’’) is a critical organizer and motivator for learning gender concepts and behaviors. Slaby and Frey (1975) demonstrated that children move through a series of stages: first learning to identify their own and others’ sex (basic gender identity or labeling), next learning that gender remains stable over time (stability), and finally learning that gender is a fixed characteristic that is not altered by superficial transformations in appearance or activities (consistency). Thus, children are thought to reach a full understanding of constancy once they recognize that they will always be the same sex, across time or change in situation (e.g., a boy who puts on a dress and a long-haired wig is still a boy even though he resembles a girl). These stages have been confirmed in other research, including cross-cultural studies (e.g., De Lisi & Gallagher, 1991).
This is from an article by Katie Alcock (child development specialist) about how the language has changed over time:
What this also means is that terminology has changed. When this area of research first started, everyone knew, and was clear, that they were talking about children’s knowledge of biological sex. The terms “sex identity” and “sex constancy” were used, to mean children’s knowledge of whether they were a boy or a girl, and whether they or others could change into the opposite sex. Around the 1990s everyone started getting squeamish about the word “sex” and started using “gender” as a euphemism. Researchers, however, still meant a child’s knowledge of biological sex.
That paper doesn't seem to contain any evidence for what you are claiming.