Question about gender identity

[Aspiringmatriarch]

I've been wondering about something. Many posters on here state that there's no such thing as a gender identity, and it comes down to gender stereotypes and being non-conforming. I don't know if I agree with this or not, but one particular question is bugging me and I'm wondering if anyone can help me clear this up.

Firstly I know intersex is not the same as being trans. However. What about people who are born with ambiguous genitalia and, in the past at least, were sometimes operated on and subsequently brought up as one sex without knowing they were intersex? Some of these people have a strong sense they are not actually female (if raised as female) and vice versa, and only realise the cause of this when they discover they're intersex. Isn't this an example of gender identity being real? Or am I misunderstanding something?

Sounds like an example of sex being real.

I personally don't deny that some people experience gender identity. However I don't think it is a useful legal category or relevant for the workplace, sport, healthcare and many other domains.

What I mean is, why would someone who is intersex feel like a boy while being raised as a girl? If it's just a construct, then being raised as the wrong gender shouldn't matter?

Sounds like an example of sex being real.

Exactly.

Do you have any statistics about what kind of numbers of intersex people were operated on and assigned a sex, without their knowledge, and then later said they had always felt like the other sex? Presumably it wasn't that common, since intersex occurs in approximately 0.018 of the population.

Can you point to specific case studies? I know about the famous case of David Reimer who was raised as a girl after his penis was severely injured in a botched circumcision. But it's highly likely that in other ways he presented as physically male and was treated as such. He had a twin brother and he was also sexually abused by the psychologist involved in transitioning him - so lots of issues involved there and no doubt a huge desire to dissociate from a childhood as a girl associated with pain and abuse. His twin brother was later diagnosed with schizophrenia and took his own life. It's an incredibly complex case. I'm interested to know about the studies you're thinking of?

How many actual people with DSD who were brought up as one sex and then found to be the opposite sex have you spoken to?
A colleague of mine gave birth to a baby born with ambiguous genitalia 35 years ago. The baby had genetic testing and very thorough ultrasounds carried out to determine their sex. He was found to be male, was brought up male and chose to have surgery himself when he was a teen. The days of determining sex by choosing the easiest surgery are well and truly gone at least here in the UK, and most likely the US, Australia etc.

I don't know. It's certainly not something you can do ethical experiments on, and hopefully the old "we'll turn them into a girl" approach has been dropped now.

I do know that many many people find gendered expectations oppressive so I think we should try to minimise them in our society.

That doesn't mean there are no differences between girls and boys but we have a choice as to how we treat people, and I think giving everyone the same opportunities as far as possible is the best approach.

What I mean is, why would someone who is intersex feel like a boy while being raised as a girl? If it's just a construct, then being raised as the wrong gender shouldn't matter?

Why would anyone feel like a boy when raised as a girl though? And why couldn't those reasons apply just as much to an intersex person as a trans person? In fact, since the parents would have been aware of the fact that their child had been assigned a sex, isn’t it perhaps quite likely that they would have deliberately encouraged e.g. feminine traits, outward appearance and behaviours in order to reinforce the child embracing the sex they'd been assigned? And pushing gender stereotypes on a child who may have gender-non-conforming tendencies may well result in them reacting against them.

Caster Semenya wore a boys uniform at school when she was raised and socialised as a girl.

I think you are thinking of the case where a boy's circumcism went wrong (the hospital was trying a new method) and he was castrated as a baby.
The poor family was then contacted by some shady doctor who said to bring the boy up as a girl and to basically do a sex change on the baby. It was in america a long time ago.
The poor man never acomodated himself to being a girl and eventually the family had to tell him and he lived as a man, untill he killed himself.

The point is; he was male in everyway (not 'intersex' (not that that is really a thing imo, as congenital abnormalities of the reporductive system do not mean you are not a male or female) but had had a horrific mutilation as a baby)
So his 'gender identity' such as it were, conresponded to his biological sex.

@MajesticWhine

Sounds like an example of sex being real.

Exactly this. I think in the past, the choice often was to go for whatever surgery would be the easiest and most successful cosmetically, thinking this was the most important factor - that if a child looks properly female or male, then the rest will follow, just be being socialised accordingly. This didn't always work out so well, because surgery can't change genes and suppression/supplementation of hormones (of all kinds) is an inexact science.

It proves that gender feelings are
bollocks (excuse pun given some of the sad examples) and biological sex tends to drive everything.

Sounds like an example of sex being real.

I think in the past, the choice often was to go for whatever surgery would be the easiest and most successful cosmetically, thinking this was the most important factor - that if a child looks properly female or male, then the rest will follow, just be being socialised accordingly.
This didn't always work out so well, because surgery can't change genes and suppression/supplementation of hormones (of all kinds) is an inexact science.

I'm probably not explaining myself very well. Maybe I'm thinking of the poor guy who had botched surgery and was then brought up female - but I believe there are other examples. I'm trying to say this is potentially an example of both sex and gender identity, being real. Otherwise in this case the female gender identity wouldn't have been rejected, because upbringing as a girl = female socialisation = female 'gender identity'. But it appears in this case the person's gender identity was male despite being raised female, which to me implies that people may have an internal sense of their sex regardless of how they're socialised. I'm trying to work out whether this is constitutes the elusive gender identity. Obviously being trans is a step further from that as it would mean that person's gender identity (understood as 'internal sense of one's own sex') has developed differently from their apparent physical sex.

This gets raised from time to time, both as some sort of gotcha, and as a genuine question.

I really don't understand the logic behind it. If someone is, in fact, male, and is then mutilated and told they are female, but knows something is amiss, why on earth would this lead you to think that there is a disembodied ethereal gender identity?

The person is incontrovertibly one sex and they know it, despite being lied to and physically maimed. Why do you think this suggests that there is such a thing as an innate 'gender identity'. It just means it is almost impossible to hide someone's sex, either from others or themselves. It speaks to nothing about gender at all.

Caster Semenya wore a boys uniform at school when she was raised and socialised as a girl.

Could you elaborate? I'm aware Caster Semenya's sex and/or gender has been debated. I'm not sure if you're giving a random example of an intersex person or making another point (sorry).

The person is incontrovertibly one sex and they know it, despite being lied to and physically maimed. Why do you think this suggests that there is such a thing as an innate 'gender identity'.

Again I might be explaining badly or missing the point. They know they're not the sex they've been raised as - not because of obvious physical difference but because they're internally not the sex they're being treated as. Is that gender identity? Or is it more like someone thinking 'If I'm a girl, why the fuck do I have an Adam's apple and no periods?!'

In which case I'm guessing it would only become an issue at puberty.

I don’t think this makes sense without an actual example.

We don’t seem to know of any intersex boys who were raised as girls or vice versa as an example here.

What I mean is, why would someone who is intersex feel like a boy while being raised as a girl?

Why would someone who is female feel like a boy while being raised as a girl?

Some people of both sexes apparently "feel like boys".

Which seems to just be a statement about what they think boys are. Or more what girls are not - thinking they don't fit a "girl" stereotype. You're going to need to think more about what you mean by "feel like a boy" to make progress here.

Maybe he really believed he was female and "felt like a boy" because he didn't like being female? Like lots of ordinary girls do. Nothing to do with any self-perception of really being male at all.

And if this intersex boy hadn't "felt like a boy", would that have disproved "gender identity"? No, maybe he was just trans with a female gender identity, and they lucked out with the physical transition.

This whole concept is non-falsifiable. All you've done is renamed "feel like X" as "X identity" to make it sound fancy, and we still don't know what "feel like" involves, and it predicts nothing.

Now, an intersex person may have more concrete physical evidence of their actual sex, increasing as they develop, but that's not a "feeling". That's just observing your own body.

Whether or not it only became an issue at puberty would depend on what the surgery was. If you were obviously different to everyone else, you are going to notice before puberty.

What about people who are born with ambiguous genitalia

Your premiss here is the problem.

Most people born with DSD (Differences in Sex Development) are genetically male or female, and rarely are their external genitalia ambiguous. DSD is generally at a genetic level, where the number of X or Y chromosomes differs from the standard.

Which is a consequence of sexual reproduction & basic evolutionary biology.

The idea of having both sets of external genitalia (hermaphrodite) is mostly a fantasy (one that a certain J. Yaniv is fond of).

We also now that sometimes, because of the effects of different levels of hormones at birth and soon after, some new borns have "abnormal" genitalia - a new-born girl may have an enlarged clitoris, or a new-born boy may have a very small penis.

I gather that in the past, with very standardised, normative notions of sex stereotypes, such new borns may have been considered to have "ambiguous" external genitalia. But I think that midwives & obstetricians understand better the hormone "flood" which can happen at a child's birth - for the infant, as well as the mother.

You're suggesting that if they have had their genitals mutilated, they will not be obviously the opposite sex? I mean, I'm not really sure that can ever be the case. Small children, maybe. But a small child takes time to develop a sense of personhood anyway. But as a person grows, the differences will become more marked.

And you need to be asking yourself some questions about the interplay of all factors when it comes to how gender is constructed socially. I'm not a blank-statist, so I think that the hormones in a human male, for example, will be a factor that, when combined with socialization around aggression and entitlement, create what we perceive to be the 'masculine gender'. Transactivists wheel out the existence of sex being more than chromosomes as though feminists had no idea before someone wrote an article about it Medium.

The existence of a male balance of hormones in a male body creating feelings is a physical sex thing. Not a gender thing.

It really does all tend to come down to defining terms. If someone is a male, and this is disguised some how, but they know they are a male none the less, then they simply know their sex, because they indeed are that sex.

So I guess my counter question, in an attempt to try and tease out what it is you're asking here, is what do you mean by 'know they are male'? Because obviously, they are male. So that's not a feeling, it's a fact. What does feeling like a male, or a female, mean?

You seem to be speculating about why someone who is one sex, would experience physical feelings that follow from being that sex (chromosomally, hormonally, developmentally. Sounds a lot like material reality to me.

But really, there's too much speculation in your posts for anyone to be able to respond to you precisely. 'What if this instance that I have no evidence or examples of ever having happened, occurred?'. Well, did it? Has it? How many times? Is the evidence simple, or complex? Or did you dream it?

I'm not doubting your sincerity btw. I'm just saying, if you wanting to ask a question, you need to know what the question is that you're asking.

I think this is an interesting question. So OP would your definition of gender identity be 'the sex someone believes they are'?

I don't think this is an inherent knowledge, I think most people simply observe what sex they are. But I think some people become confused about it, or it's not entirely straightforward. Ray Blanchard's theory of transsexualism explains this. A young person who is gay or who likes the things that traditionally are supposed to be liked by the opposite sex, reasons from that that they are in fact the opposite sex. Many gay man and lesbians have told of their experience of this. It's why in the past the majority of trans-identified kids desisted and grew up to be gay.

The growing number of detransitioners certainly points to the absence of a reliable internal sense of what sex we're supposed to be.

But I do think it's an interesting question and I wouldn't be 100% sure about it.