Government definition of gender identity ideology

[AbnerBrown]

The definition in the draft Department of Education guidance is “the belief that a person can have a gender that is different to their sex”.

Does anyone else think this is a shit definition? Like defining Christianity as “the belief that a person can have a faith as set out by the doctrines of the Church”?

I’m not a Christian but it’s very clear to me that some people have such a faith. Similarly, I think gender is baloney but it’s very clear to me that some people have a strong sense of gender. It always seems utterly incoherent to me, but it seems to be something they have. So by this definition I am a believer of GII.

I’m struggling to form an alternative. I’d strongly prefer a definition that covers “the belief that every person has an internal sense of their gender” but is this enough?

“The belief that every person has an internal sense of their gender that can be different to their sex” doesn’t quite work as how can gender match sex when they are such different concepts?

But “… that can be different to societal gender norms” may capture the gender critical gender non-conforming?

overthinking due to hangover. Other thoughts?

Ah, OK. I took the mark-up to be a specific reference to just that one sentence.
I guess this is the important difference. If it's only that sentence that is potentially in dispute, and the rest of the definition is still OK, then I think (in my layman's capacity!) that it's still robust enough. If the whole lot has to go because a legal definition of "gender identity" as a term is needed, that's a different ballgame. But then, like you say, it would also scupper anything from a public body that currently relies on Stonewall Law's woolly definitions.

It seems like this guidance is treading a very fine line between using what's already good enough in law and needing the existing laws to be changed... and hopefully winning 🤞🤞

Michael Foran's view on the mark-ups was interesting. Screenshot below. Point 2 doesn't fully clear up the ambiguity on this but maybe it leans more towards the idea that it's just this sentence that is the issue? Either way, progress is being made under difficult circumstances, not least the difficulty of the ambiguity in the existing laws.

What I particularly liked about your definition was that it did indeed hit the nail on the head to describe what is actually happening. Even a TRA would struggle to refute it. They'd probably just say it was a dog-whistle and hope that this was enough to scare people away. A tactic which will not work for much longer, from the way that things are moving on in parliamentary discussions now.

Interesting.
If it's still there and being challenged, or has recently been removed following challenge, it sets a helpful foundation as to why no other beliefs should be accommodated as truths in schools (and therefore logically in other public bodies).

All of this will help to progress the forthcoming government consultation on RSE/PHSE. The current DfE guidance states that children need to learn about gender identity in a way that makes it sound factual. It's likely that the existing government will be in opposition by the time this part of removing gender identity belief as fact from schools' curriculums gets fully underway, but they could still put up a decent fight from that position and hold a Labour government to account. Fingers crossed that they at least get a document out for consultation before their current term ends.

Any definition that includes the word ‘gender’ without first defining what they mean by gender (in a non-circular way) is flawed. Gender means 100 different things to 100 different people.

@BonfireLady

sorry to @ you but here’s an Observer article from a year ago about the requirement for a collective act of worship in schools

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/dec/03/schools-call-for-end-to-archaic-daily-worship-following-uk-census-results

and the government guidance I could find

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/collective-worship-in-schools

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/re-and-collective-worship-in-academies-and-free-schools

My teenage son was telling me gender is just a social construct and talked about how the French gender inanimate objects. I just felt really confused and didn’t know how to respond.

“What I particularly liked about your definition was that it did indeed hit the nail on the head to describe what is actually happening. Even a TRA would struggle to refute it. They'd probably just say it was a dog-whistle and hope that this was enough to scare people away.”

The straightforward response to any ‘it’s a dog whistle’ nonsense would be to ask: so do you want to be deemed a member of the opposite sex or not? If it’s no, great, stay out of opposite sex spaces. If it’s yes, why are you calling accuracy about that a dog whistle, what’s the secret message hidden in accuracy about your campaign to be deemed a member of the opposite sex.

Ask him what French grammar has got to do with how babies are made.

He's not wrong.

The response is to ask him what, if anything, society should do to recognise this social construct, and whether toilets, prisons, rape crisis groups and sporting categories should be organised according to people's objectively real biological sex, or according to the social construct of gender, and why.

Speaking as someone who lives in France, I suspect the fact that inanimate objects cannot change their gender, as well as the fact that the French don't use the words "male" and "femelle" to refer to people, means these ideas haven't quite taken off in the same way here that they have in the Anglosphere.

Non binariness is also something that simply can't be accommodated in French grammar.

A challenge! How can we read your definition as a dog-whistle? So, this is it:

“the belief that if people claim to feel like a member of the opposite sex, then society should deem them to be a member of the opposite sex”.

Words like 'claim' and 'feel like' deny the very existence of trans people by suggesting it is contestable, and subjective, respectively, whilst the use of 'deem' instead of 'acknowledge' has offensive connotations of pretence.

Of course a real TRA wouldn't say that, they'd just get huffy and tweet some death threats. Because the only way to fix it would be to say...

“the belief that if people state they are claim to feel like a member of the opposite sex, then they are society should deem them to be a member of the opposite sex”.

The definition I work with is

A belief in gender identity is the belief that people have a soul which may be sexed (or sexless) and sexed differently from the physical body.

Believers in gender identity frequently believe that the soul is a more important characteristic than the physical body and should take precedence in society and law.

Believers in gender identity usually consider the identity of any given individual to be sacred and require respect as such.

If others do not share the beliefs of the gender identity believer this is perceived as blasphemy and a threat to the existence of the person with a soul sex not matching the physical sex. Therefore believers will make great efforts to compel others to feign belief and seek to push through societal changes which will criminalise non-belief in gender identity or committing sacrilege against the soul sex of an individual.

The basis for discovering a person’s soul sex or lack thereof, is the personal preferences, tastes and inclinations of the person in relation to the sexual stereotypes of the culture and country in which the person lives. For example in the US a boy who likes football might be considered to have a soul of the female sex because the game is more popular with girls and women in the US. In the UK (and most of the rest of the world) a girl who likes football might be considered to have a soul of the male sex because football is more commonly played by men and boys in the UK.

Thank you for your critique. (Genuinely.) You make good points.

I would change it to “the belief that, if people state that they feel like a member of the opposite sex, then society should consider them to be a member of the opposite sex”.

‘state’ and ‘consider’ are likely to be seen as more neutral than ‘claim’ and ‘deem’, I think. In my view “feel” needs to be retained as it’s at the heart of the belief.

Yes, that's pretty robust! Sadly, it is still too accurate, so I expect the DofEd to keep in the g word for its obfuscatory value.

It's when someone believes that there's such a thing as gender identity and believes that an individual can have a gender identity which they view as being incongruous with their sex.

The main problem of course is that it's a meaningless definition without it being understood what a gender identity is. Initially I would have thought gender identity can be expressed in terms of stereotypes but for some people it's purely an internalised self-perception thing. They believe that in a sense they have a gendered soul.

I don’t think that’s right, as it denies the existence of atheists. It’s not the case that if someone thinks they are conscious they must believe in souls. Many people obviously think they are conscious of being male or female (have self perception) without believing they have a gendered soul… that would be most atheists. Denying that people have self perception of being male or female (I.e. gender identity), seems like a non-starter, as it’s obvious most people have that. Disagreeing with essentialised understandings of identity seems more reasonable.

Self perception of being male (if you're male) or female (if you're female) isn't the same as feeling that you have a gender identity. A gender identity (as it is used by gender ideology believers) seems to be something which might be totally unrelated to your sex. This requires a belief that there is something apart from your body which has this gender identity. That there is something other than the perception of your physical body which is or has this identity. Whether you call it a soul or something else.

Denying that people have self perception of being male or female (I.e. gender identity), seems like a non-starter, as it’s obvious most people have that.

I don't have this. I used to think that I did, when people from the LGBT network at my work first explained gender identity to me. It initially made sense to me that I had previously been unaware of my feelings of being female because I was born female. It made sense to me that someone who had gender dysphoria experienced a mismatch instead and that this would be distressing. I listened to more and more people from the LGBT network to further my understanding (a combination of non-binary "AFAB"s and transwomen) and I began to doubt that there was such a thing as gender identity, primarily because of the explanations about what it felt like to be non-binary. I didn't doubt that any of the people that I listened to believed that they had a gender identity. None of the non-binary people talked about dysphoric feelings, which surprised me. But the transwomen did. Then I read and learned more until I realised that I didn't believe in gender identity at all. I still do believe that people can experience a feeling of gender dysphoria though (although there are clearly many who also pretend to.. the Malaga Airport crew).

Anyway. Back to the definitions...

Personally, I have no problem accepting that the definition of gender identity goes around in a circle. If you look at the Wikipedia definition of God it seems to have several holes in it too IMO. There are a lot of the unclear aspects to it all, with lots of variable maybes and no real consensus:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/God

The key point in both cases being that the definition makes sense to those that believe... Hence "not everyone believes that we all have a gender identity" being all that really matters in the guidance definition. Accepting that some people do (or pretend that they do) isn't an issue as long as it's not being forced on everyone else as a truth - and as long as schools are upholding their existing legal obligations at the same time.

Thank you for these links. Very interesting. It also helps to explain why our primary school suddenly announced (not long after the new leadership came in there) that assemblies would now be called "collective worship". It's not a church school, so that made no sense at all to be at the time. Eventually that term got dropped and it went back to being assemblies again - I guess they satisfied themselves that they were already achieving the obligation no matter what they named them.

I think you’re just describing an essentialised belief that some people have about it. Like some people believe because they are conscious they must have a separate soul, but obviously not everyone does. I agree some people think about (gender or other) identit(y/ies) / self perceptions in that way, but it just seems detrimental to assert that everyone thinks that way, as they obviously don’t, and thinking they do seems like it may get in the way of engaging with them, or helping them if they are struggling, as it assigns a belief to them that they may not have.

It sounds like you’re thinking more like me. Like most of the time I’m thinking about what I’m doing, not whether I’m male or female, or whether my feet hurt, etc. From time to time thoughts will pass through my head though: in a kind of like, oh it has just occurred to me my feet are hurting; I have feet; I should sit down and rest kind of way. I assume that when some people have those thoughts that they’re male or female, they interpret it as signs of a separate gender essence / soul, like someone was saying.

I'm gender critical in that I know gender is a social construct, usually consisting of stereotypes. I do believe people can have genders that differ from their sex, in the sense that someone who believes in those stereotypes can have a "masculine" personality or interests, but is a female. Therefore, I think the definition cited in the OP is confused, as it fits gender critical views better than it fits a gender ideology which states that gender is an as yet unidentified biological essence.

I wonder if it was me saying this that was a little ambiguous:

I still do believe that people can experience a feeling of gender dysphoria though

That might be better phrased as: I do accept that some people who believe that they have a gender identity will experience a feeling of gender dysphoria i.e. that the distress is real.

However, I think you've hit upon something interesting:

oh it has just occurred to me my feet are hurting; I have feet; I should sit down and rest kind of way. I assume that when some people have those thoughts that they’re male or female, they interpret it as signs of a separate gender essence / soul, like someone was saying.

This sounds like a variation of what Dr Az says in his book Detrans and also in a recent interview with Benjamin Boyce (there are a threads on this) about how the autistic detransitioners and trans identified people that he has worked with ascribe gender to their everyday actions e.g. "when I paid for my bus ticket today, I did it in a masculine way". It all points to a belief in something as a way to make sense of the self and the world.

How can someone have self perception of something that isn't true? My point is that for gender identity believers there must be something other than one's body that leads someone to the 'self perception' that they are the opposite sex or have no sex.

If their self perception is simply based on reality, they wouldn't be able to have a 'gender identity' which led them to believe that they are the opposite sex or have no sex. Therefore they must believe that they have something akin to a soul or 'essence' which is the opposite sex, and hence leads them to believe that this part of them has this gender identity.

If they simply believe in reality, their self perception must lead them to know that they are the sex they are. The alternative to the soul theory is that they are suffering from a delusion so are simply mistaken about what sex they are.

Interesting; maybe people do have different internal experiences of self perception?

A while ago I heard that some people are able to visualise things in their minds. I’ve never been able to do that at all, so it suddenly made sense of why people talk about visualising things.

If I’m having self reflexive thought then it’s like a stream of ideas, and a feeling of consciousness, but because I don’t believe in souls or essences, and see my thoughts and consciousness as part of my body it doesn’t make me think I have a separate soul. It makes sense to me that someone who believed in separate souls might talk about the same experience in that way though.

Are you saying you don’t have that internal sense of conscious self? A bit like I can’t visualise images of things?

OldCrone:”How can someone have self perception of something that isn't true? My point is that for gender identity believers there must be something other than one's body that leads someone to the 'self perception' that they are the opposite sex or have no sex.”

I think you can form an idea / internal sense of self that isn’t true, or at least some people can. Like I might form an idea of a thinner more athletic self, and experience it internally in the same way as any other sense of myself. The sense of that self might help motivate me to eat more healthily and exercise more. I don’t need my actual body to be thinner and more athletic to experience that internal self perception. Maybe that ability isn’t universal, like visualisation isn’t? It feels like more than just thinking what if I was thinner; maybe like visualising images is more than just thinking of the idea of something? I think it makes sense that people with that kind of internal self perception ability could form an opposite or no sex self perception.

I think you can form an idea / internal sense of self that isn’t true, or at least some people can. Like I might form an idea of a thinner more athletic self, and experience it internally in the same way as any other sense of myself. The sense of that self might help motivate me to eat more healthily and exercise more. I don’t need my actual body to be thinner and more athletic to experience that internal self perception.

What you're describing isn't a self perception that you're thinner than you actually are, it's a desire to be thinner. You're just imagining what it would be like. You are aware that imagining that you're thinner doesn't make it so.

What I'm describing is more like how someone who is anorexic might have the self perception that they are fatter than they are, so they keep dieting because their self perception isn't the same as reality. They are mistaken.

If I’m having self reflexive thought then it’s like a stream of ideas, and a feeling of consciousness, but because I don’t believe in souls or essences, and see my thoughts and consciousness as part of my body it doesn’t make me think I have a separate soul.

So do you believe that you could have thoughts and consciousness that actually belong to someone the opposite sex? If you're female, do you think you could have the consciousness of a man, or think like a man? That just sounds like sexism. Either that or you're just mistaken or perhaps suffering from a delusion that you're actually the opposite sex.