Is there any such thing as gender identity?

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Here is an article by Alex Byrne, Professor of Philosophy at MIT:
What is gender identity?

Byrne concludes, in part, as follows:
' If there is some kind of “gender identity” that is universal in humans, and which causes dysphoria when mismatched with sex, it remains elusive. No one has yet found a way of detecting its presence, and verifying that it is causally responsible for dysphoria .'

In fact, it seems, there just is no such thing as gender identity in the way trans ideologues intend. Some, noticing lack of anything like it in themselves, nevertheless allow that others may nevertheless suffer from its presence. I think this mistaken, factually and strategically.

The existence of gender identity is foundational for much trans ideology. Its importance can be deduced from its inclusion in Humpty Dumpty’s Stonewall's glossary entry on transphobia, 'including denying ... gender identity ', as part of orthodox trans dogma.

The foundations of trans ideology are built on the quicksand of gender identity. Pointing out the shaky nature of these foundations cannot but assist in demolishing the whole edifice of this ideology before it does any more harm to women, children, and wider society in general.

Of course those who believe in gender identity should not be discriminated against or disadvantaged in any way because of such belief, any more than should believers in guardian angels or invisible human auras. It does not follow that such beliefs themselves should be given any credence. Nor, a fortiori , does it follow that social policy or law should be based on any such beliefs.

There is no such thing as gender identity.

Or, perhaps science progresses is there now some way of detecting its presence, contrary to Alex Byrne's assertion?

And of course, we may think we are presenting ourselves in oneway, but the world may read us differently. You cannot totally control how you are read.

But gender ideologist are trying to use the science to prove that their world view is correct.

However it’s not clear how gender ideology helps trans people, except to provide affirmation.

What is the goal? - to identify real and fake gender identity regardless of whether an individual suffers from gender dysphoria or suffers discrimination because of gender non conforming behaviour? Can the rights of ‘fake trans’ people be ignored once we have a handy test for gender identity?

Intervening with surgery earlier? (Which would seem regressive taking into account experiences of people with DSDs)

There would still be no need to organise people according to gender identity.

The only reason to recognise sex is that it has unavoidable material consequences and those consequences won’t disappear.

Personally, I think it is utterly pointless to try to use neuroscience to prove that gender identity exists, or that you can differentiate trans individuals as a distinct group, or that TWAW and TMAM.

Gender identity, if it exists in some individuals, is a psychological state, an individual's view of themselves. Like any mental representation, that's likely to be based on the information the brain processes and stores, not the structure of the neural circuits themselves. Despite the claims of some neuroscientists, we can't (and most likely won't ever be able to) detect what information the brain is processing, only where in the brain that information is being processed.

TRA misuse of science to bolster their position is something that can be factually refuted. Showing that they're wrong about the science they are quoting establishes a pattern of lack of credibility.

[quote Gerla]@justspeculation - I asked the same question. No answer though![/quote]
No answer is possible. The problem with circular argument is that you can't break out of the circle. A=B because B=A. People are who they say they are because who they say they are is who they are. Any refusal to accept this denies their lived experience. Any questioning which is in any way challenging is destructive and, eventually, literally impossible to answer because any answer involves going outside the circle.

I always thought saying a transwoman is a woman because there is some vague ‘evidence’ about brain patterns, despite their entire physical form being programmed as a male down to their chromosomes, is a bit like saying humans can be bananas because we share 44% of our DNA with them.

@Awiltu

the observation is that trans women have a female gender identity and the claim (which you won't agree with of course) is that gender identity is more important than things like gonads when assigning a sex to someone

If gender identity is more important than gonads when "assigning a sex", why are gonads/genitalia used to "assign" sex at birth?

Why don't we wait and "assign" sex when a child is 2 or 3 and (according to Shizuku) their innate gender identity starts to manifest?

Given that "assigning" the wrong sex causes distress for trans individuals, why wouldn't we wait and assign the correct label? There must be a reason that humans have relied for millennia on the gonads/genitals to "assign" sex at birth?

"If gender identity is more important than gonads when "assigning a sex", why are gonads/genitalia used to "assign" sex at birth? "

Genitals are a really good indicator. It's not 100% but it's a useful system as long as you leave provision for the occasions when it was wrong.

How can it be wrong? Either you’re a male, or a female.

Whether or not the person confirms to gender stereotype BS is an unrelated matter.

Genitals are a really good indicator. It's not 100% but it's a useful system as long as you leave provision for the occasions when it was wrong.

Which would refer to individuals with DSDs, rather than transgender individuals, and individuals with DSDs have (tended to) ask that... can someone remind me? Is it a) to be frequently included as a gotcha or b) not to be?

@notyourhandmaid

Genitals are a really good indicator. It's not 100% but it's a useful system as long as you leave provision for the occasions when it was wrong.

Which would refer to individuals with DSDs, rather than transgender individuals, and individuals with DSDs have (tended to) ask that... can someone remind me? Is it a) to be frequently included as a gotcha or b) not to be?

Well, intersex people have asked for people to stop claiming sex is a simple binary, so if you want to defer to them on these matters...

oiieurope.org/statement-of-the-european-intersex-meeting-in-riga-2014/

"The four objectives are: 1. To challenge the definition of sex as consisting of only male and female and promote the knowledge that sex is a continuum, as is gender."

Well, intersex people have asked for people to stop claiming sex is a simple binary, so if you want to defer to them on these matters...

Not all intersex people. There are plenty of people who are pretty insulted by the idea that they aren't simply male or female with a disorder of sex development and somehow don't have a sex or are a third sex.

So it's difficult to know which set of intersex people we should defer to, and probably better not to appropriate their reality to make unrelated arguments in any context.

Still waiting for that magic third chromosome that proves sex isn’t binary...

Sex is on a spectrum is it? How are babies made?

There could be a thousand different sexes and the sex that produces large gametes and gestates babies would still need specific rights, services and protections, regardless of feelings about identity.

@Shizuku

Thanks for the link. I hadn't seen that Riga document before, and it was interesting. There are four objectives, and the fourth one I completely agree with. I don't see how anyone could disagree with it.

The third seems quite straightforward (though I cringe at the word "instruct", which is very authoritarian). The other two aims are just not clear.

On the one hand it says that sex is a spectrum. On the other, in objective two, it seems to be saying that sex is a matter of a judgement call based on a variety of other characteristics and the presence or absence of specific sex organs. So I have questions:

If sex is a spectrum, which means a measurable value that varies over a continuum, how can it be derived from an amalgam of different features? How do you derive a single value from these features?

If sex is a spectrum, then it would mean that some people are more or less male and female than other people. It was be a reasonable guess to say that, oh, Arnold Schwarzenegger met more of the male characteristics than, say Tony Robinson. So he is more male than Robinson. Equally, as this is a continuum, he is less female than Robinson. That's a bit weird. Is that how you see it? Do you see Tony Robinson as being in any meaningful way female?

Moving on, it would be theoretically possible for someone to have both more male characteristics AND more female characteristics than another individual. That is, if we are establishing sex by totting up significant features. And that can't happen on a spectrum. How do you deal with that?

Also, how would you account for the bimodality of secondary sex characteristics when you plot them on a graph? By this I mean that when you actually plot these characteristics on a graph, you get a grouping that has two modes - effectively two bell curves which overlap. It works, this. I've done it myself with shoe size (women tend to have smaller feet). Bimodality is an indicator that you are actually dealing with two distinct populations. And the grouping factor turns out to be - what? Well, it's sex, isn't it?

My last question is this. How do you know that secondary sex characteristics are sex characteristics (as opposed to some other kind of characteristic) if you don't have a concept of sex beforehand? And how, if you do have such a prior concept, can it be based on characteristics which you are using the concept to identify? That's totally circular.

I would be seriously grateful if anyone could point out where I've gone wrong with this, if I have.

JustSpeculation

When asked previously on a different thread, the answer involved passing the buck to ‘thousands’ of scientists to decided who arbitrates the axis for who is more female than another female.

I too am interested if they will come back with something more meaningful. So far, nothing but more links or repeated links. Let’s hope in the past week this poster has more information to share to answer our questions.

For the record, sex is binary as proven by human reproduction since human time began, so to speak. There is NO third gamete, there is no third sex.

There IS however a very wide diversity of body types within each sex. And with modern techniques, people with differences in sex development are identified as either male or female reliably. In fact, people’s differences are often only experienced by one sex.

But still, to reproduce, sex is binary and that is the ultimate purpose of the human body whether it can successfully do this or not.

It doesn't exist in the same way that God doesn't exist. It is an intangible feeling, a belief. And some people believe in it as an inherent reality, just as some believe in the reality of God .

I don't believe in either.

Apologies for the backpedal. My phone didn't show the last umpty ump posts 😊

Thanks @helleofabore. Maybe one of those scientists could drop in and answer them.

I have another question. Are people in the middle of the spectrum neither sex, or both sexes? Or is it that a meaningless question because it implies a non-existent binary? And if that's the case, why have sex at all? Why bother with the concept in the first place? We could all go off and play chess instead, and rely on the stork to bring babies...

OK, I'm getting silly now. I'll stop.

Are people in the middle of the spectrum neither sex, or both sexes?

This was asked also on another thread in the grouping of the questions which were answered with a flip it will be arbitrated by the thousands and scientists.

We also pointed out that there probably hundreds of thousands of scientists that don’t realize they need to go back and reprove the millennia of understanding that sex is binary. Because, it is only a small fringe who want to destabilize known science. I am all for theories and that theories should be discussed.

But not that pseudoscience theories should be considered proven and accepted science.

Are people in the middle of the spectrum neither sex, or both sexes?

The concept of a spectrum is just plain irrelevant.

It implies that you could grade all DSDs on a scale with male at one end and female at the other. That is not a helpful way to think of any individual condition.

So, yes. Still interested in those answers to your questions.

Preferably with evidence linked that hasn’t been linked before. It is always good to see what people use to form the basis of their beliefs.

Shizuku:

I owe you something of a response, I guess.

Here are two articles mentioned before on this thread, the first the one with which I started the thread:
What is gender identity?. This, by Alex Byrne, posed a challenge, as I put it.

The second is this, which you claim to answer the challenge:
Gender identity subtypes

This second paper (Benjamin Clemens, first author) is, you claim, '... a brain study that can literally see the apparently non existent thing we call gender identity, and which also gives a scientific basis for non-binary identities to exist .'

Thing is, Shizuku, it is apparent to anyone reading and understanding these two papers, that the second paper goes no way to answering the challenge set in the first.

Sure enough, the author of the second paper talks of 'gender identity'. But its definition in the paper is unclear, if not spuriously circular (and particularly different from yours, I notice). Further, the author shows no signs of understanding the issues raised in Byrne's piece. The science is fine in its own way. But it certainly does not answer Byrne's challenge.

Do we expect a young post-doc to have a clear grasp of such conceptual issues, as well as facility with their own scientific methods? Sadly, perhaps not. Clemens describes an interesting investigation. His results show measurements of certain brain connections to correlate with aspects of personality assessed by questioning the brains' owners, particularly about sexual stereotypes and their relation thereto. These results do not show the existence of 'some kind of “gender identity” that is universal in humans, and which causes dysphoria when mismatched with sex' , as Byrne put it.

Nor is it 'a brain study that can see gender identity' , as you claimed. The author makes some assertions about 'the subjective perception of oneself belonging to a certain gender' , which he labels 'gender identity' (not your definition, I note), but leaves 'belonging to a certain gender' dangling while he considers answers to a questionnaire about sexual stereotypes.

As Byrne says, such gender identity as he describes 'remains elusive' .

I am not going to argue this case further. Anyone who wants to can read these papers for themselves. Do not be put off by the jargon. Read the parts of Clemens' paper that describes what he actually did and what the results were in terms of correlation between resting-state fMRI scan results and BSRI questionnaire answers.

Enough. Shizuku, I remain unconvinced you understand the papers you have referenced. I suspect mostly you have not even tried to read them with any thoroughness. As far as these two pieces I mention above, either you have not read them both or you have read and not understood either one or the other or both. We know this because you have claimed the second as an answer to the first.

(The only other possibility is that you are a scoundrel trying to deceive. Not for a moment do I think that of you.)

My advice: do try to understand. Try to develop an open mind. It is hard, I know, especially when you are so invested in a topic like this. Remember Oliver Cromwell to the Kirk, 'I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken' .

I know I started this thread. And I have been heartened by many of the responses and learned from them. There is a lot of expertise and willingness to share it here on MN FWR. But I have spent enough time on it now and I have other things to do. It has been interesting meeting Shizuku, but generally I prefer discussion with those who try to understand what I say and seek help when they do not.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Community Access to Child Health is funded by Pfizer. Given America has a very expensive private health care system, I wonder could their be any link between the world's largest pharmaceutical company and the creation of a life long drug dependency in children?

After the AAP issued a policy endorsing "gender affirmation" as the only acceptable response to a child expressing transgender feelings their studies were fact checked 1 & 2 ...

"Although almost all clinics and professional associations in the world use what’s called the watchful waiting approach to helping gender diverse (GD) children, the AAP statement instead rejected that consensus, endorsing gender affirmation as the only acceptable approach. Remarkably, not only did the AAP statement fail to include any of the actual outcomes literature on such cases, but it also misrepresented the contents of its citations, which repeatedly said the very opposite of what AAP attributed to them." Dec 2019

"When asked for comment about those inaccuracies by The Economist, AAP responded only by restating the policy." Feb 2021

Where is the Nobel prize for the 'discovery' of there being more than two sexes? Such a discovery would change everything we've understood about evolution and biology, so there should be people rushing to claim credit for it.