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?

I understand the things you are concerned about. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have concerns.

You keep saying that you understand and then go on to demonstrate your lack of understanding.

Reality though is that people use their senses to determine what sex they are, and therefore they have a sense of what sex they are (sense of sex / gender also referred to as gender identity - I know some of you will say it’s sex not gender, but sometimes, as in this context, the words are used interchangeably).

The reality is that the majority of female people will use their senses to determine that they are in fact female. This will generally be based on their anatomy and the way their body functions. There are also a small group of male people whose senses tell them that they are female when this is demonstrably false. Sensing (or knowing) you are female when you are female is not the same thing as sensing you are female when you are male. These two different things cannot possibly fall under the same category of "gender identity" or "sense of sex" because they are in no way similar.

I don’t see how it’s beneficial to try to deny reality.

The irony of this.

"Sense" as in sight etc isn't what people mean by sense of self - I asked the same thing years ago - are people hallucinating that they see different body parts on themselves? I was told no, this is not what it meant. It was an internal feeling, not touch, sight, etc.

Good to make that clear though.

Yes quite. A woman's sense of herself (mine at least) is based on bodily function. A man's sense of himself as a woman can only ever be based on an inner feeling. These things are not even remotely the same and should not be shoehorned into the same "gender identity" category.

I deduce my sex exactly the same way I deduce anyone's sex - by observation, using exactly the same criteria.

But then I am a bit boringly logical like that.

I’m going to leave this conversation now.

The reality is that the majority of female people will use their senses to determine that they are in fact female. This will generally be based on their anatomy and the way their body functions.

That is what I am saying.

The draft guidance currently says that having a sense / feeling / knowledge of being female / a female identity (whatever phrase you want to use for a sense of being female, rather than liking pink) is a contested belief, when it obviously isn’t. It’s what you have described in that paragraph and what most people here are saying they have. It’s causing some people here to try to tell me they haven’t got a sense of being female, when they have, so that they don’t fall within the definition. The guidance therefore needs redrafting.

Beliefs in female souls, or any other kind of female essence, whether you have female anatomy or not, are contested beliefs.

If the guidance is to talk about contested beliefs, then it should talk about actual contested beliefs, not try to tell every (young or adult) person that having a sense / feeling / knowledge of being female is a contested belief.

It's the belief that everyone has a gender identity, that a small number of people have a gender identity which is incongruent with their sex, and that society should treat these people kindly and fairly.

I am prepared to defend the above as possibly true in fact (I'll write a separate post about it).

But there's a practical problem. If it's true, then I believe the numbers should be tiny, and easily diagnosed and distinguishable from Malaga Airport enthusiasts, people trying to 'trans away the gay', and sufferers from adolescent MH problems or social contagion. Also, the measures that are being taken are unkind and unfair to women (as the less powerful sex class). So a statement of the belief as actually practised at present (and which I don't share) would be:

It's the belief that everyone has a gender identity, that a small number of people have a gender identity which is incongruent with their sex, that we should take their word without question, and that society should treat these people kindly and fairly as having the sex that aligns with their declared gender identity.
**

Brilliant conversation. And one that clearly exemplifies that a belief that is so incoherent, so difficult to clarify / identify and completely lacking in evidence should be nowhere near children and schools.

I think the reason you're struggling to understand is because you're trying to use the term "gender identity" in two different ways, then trying to make sense out of what then becomes a contradictory mess.

Until very recently, "gender identity" was a term used in child development studies to describe the stage at which a child understands that they are a boy or a girl. This "gender identity" is an understanding that their physical body is what makes them a boy or a girl. This is not a contested belief.

Recently, "gender identity" has been used more often to describe something completely different, that is, a feeling that some people have that they have a gender, which may or may not have anything to do with their bodies. This is the contested belief.

The DfE confirm that they are using the second definition of gender identity.

Gender identity: is a contested belief. It is a sense a person may have of their own gender, whether male, female or another category such as non-binary. This may or may not be the same as their biological sex. Many people do not consider that they or others have a gender identity at all.

A while back it was popular for the be-kinders to posit the question "what if you woke up tomorrow in a man's body? That's how trans people feel."

Obviously this is a stupid question because magic doesn't exist, but I did think about it and came to the conclusion that, as far as I can imagine this hypothetical scenario, I wouldn't feel like I was a woman trapped in a man's body, I would think my body had been transformed into a male body, ergo I was now a man.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be very frightening, but not to Gregor Samsa extremes. At least I'd still be human, plus I'd be able to pee standing up which would be a tiny consolation.

I genuinely don't think I have a gender identity separate from my sexed body. I can't possibly know how other people experience their bodies.

When the draft guidance defines 'gender identity' the word 'gender' which is contained within that definition is clearly not synonymous with sex because it includes 'non-binary' as a gender category and obviously non-binary is not also a sex. Clearly the document means something else by gender but they do not clearly define this word so any debate is likely to go around and around in circles as we can see on this thread. As PP said the word gender just needs ditching entirely. It is never clearly defined and the idea that it is synonymous with sex should just be scrapped at this point.

I am prepared to defend [that everyone has a gender identity, that a small number of people have a gender identity which is incongruent with their sex, and that society should treat these people kindly and fairly] as possibly true in fact

I agree, clavecinist.

I consider myself an agnostic on gender identity and whether it's everyone, some people, or nobody, that has one. That's agnostic in the "I believe this is likely to be unknowable" sense, rather than the weaker "I don't know" sense.

Even if we got a non-contested, solid definition that everyone could agree on of what "gender identity" actually is, the contents of others' minds are knowable to us only indirectly, and we can't be sure that what one person means when they describe their experience is the same thing another person understands by it. (Like the thing when you're a kid, and it suddenly hits you that maybe what you see as red and call "red", others see the same way you see blue, but still use the name "red" — and that maybe there's even a possibility that everyone has the same favourite perceived colour.)

As I'm agnostic on the first part regarding gender identities, it starts to get very abstract and convolutedly "if-this-then-that-but-if-this-then-something-else-but…", for me, if I start wondering about the second part, what "incongruous" would mean in this context anyway, and what if anything should be done in response to it.

The third bit would ideally go without saying, IMO. But unfortunately, not only does it need saying, because there are still many circumstances where trans people are not treated kindly and fairly, it also needs some vigorous hashing-out of what constitutes kindness, what constitutes fairness, and how those could be implemented within a society that understands that everybody deserves those two things.

@Raxacoricofallapatorian

Thank you. Actually my idea ought to be testable, because it's based on gender identity being what child development experts mean by it ie the way the individual classifies themselves relative to other human beings. This would get round the problems of, how can a man feel like a woman and, what about gender stereotypes?

By three years of age, a child can tell male and female humans apart, and knows which of the two groups he belongs in, irrespective of whether he's seen anyone's genitals or talked to anyone about his own. This seems to be true, so is it possible he's wrongly classified himself?

Between three and seven, children believe you can change sex by changing clothes, but by seven they know that sex is immutable throughout life. At this age, boys and girls start to play separately. And they interact differently. Same-sex interactions are as playmates/comrades/rivals/sparring partners and opposite-sex interactions contain more curiosity/fear/disgust.

My hypothetical trans child is puzzled because he gets the opposite reactions to what he expects. He wants to play with the girls and wishes the boys would leave him alone. He adopts feminine gender norms to fit in, not because he has a natural affinity for them.

All this could be testable with careful child studies, or maybe even animal studies. But I'm not really proposing a theory, just trying to come up with at least one way in which transness can be conceived of as a real thing.

Obviously this is a stupid question because magic doesn't exist, but I did think about it and came to the conclusion that, as far as I can imagine this hypothetical scenario, I wouldn't feel like I was a woman trapped in a man's body, I would think my body had been transformed into a male body, ergo I was now a man.

This is exactly the conclusion that I come to with this particular thought experiment. Obviously it would be a little odd at first and it might take time to adjust to a different body but then I've never felt quite at home in my own body so perhaps it would be an improvement. I just can't imagine developing a mentality where I would become completely preoccupied with pretending that I was a woman when all the objective evidence pointed to me being a man. I can only conclude that I would feel the same about sexed bodies as I do now and whilst I may not feel entirely at home in my new male body that is no different from my current experience of being female.

It’s causing some people here to try to tell me they haven’t got a sense of being female, when they have

The point is that it isn't a special privileged "sense". That "sense" of oneself being female is exactly the same as the "sense" of anyone else being female.

If I "sense" that someone else is male, and they "sense" that they are female, then one of us must be wrong, and we can determine which objectively. It could be either of us.

That's clearly not the definition of "sense" we're talking about here - a definition where the person's own "sense" wins, and there's no objectively correct one.

Actually my idea ought to be testable, because it's based on gender identity being what child development experts mean by it ie the way the individual classifies themselves relative to other human beings.

Assuming I've understood you correctly, which is entirely possible I haven't:

I agree it would be testable, insofar as you could define a set of behavioural features and/or questions to identify a set of children/people who apparently classify themselves socially with the opposite sex, and maybe even identify further common features, and then test an individual to find out if they meet the criteria. And you could say you've tested whether there are people who have a gender identity leading them to classify themselves with the other sex, because you've identified a group who say they classify themselves that way, and maybe described how this emerges during childhood in some people in the group.

But I can't think of any way of testing if there's some actual inner experience/essence/ thinking style/whatever that's identifiable and falsifiable, and meaningfully distinct from experiences that other people would describe using other frameworks.

To be fair, this lack of objective verification is the same for a hell of a lot of things human beings experience, but still manage to communicate about and form shared definitions for. But with gender and gender identity, we get lots of different, often very mushy, sometimes mutually exclusive definitions, or the same term is used to describe several different things to elide them into each other for rhetorical purposes, and I would guess at least some of this fuzziness and slipperiness is an attempt to avoid being tied down to something that people might ask awkward questions about.

I doubt you could persuade many transactivists, or even trans people, to get on board with a definition of gender identity based around rigorous child/animal studies identifying features of individuals who appear to have socially miscategorised themselves sexwise. It doesn't seem to me that it's likely to be accidental that the definitions transactivists give are hard to grab hold of logically. The vague or circular "definitions" people/groups cite when asked for an explanation of "gender identity" are usefully unverifiable and unfalsifiable, and IMO are dependent for their credibility on the reification of the individual, and the idea that the individual has an undisputed right to define themselves independently of the intersubjective social world humans actually exist in. More rigorous definitions, or attempts to create them, would I think be deemed transphobic and rejected outright.

I do share your feeling (if I've understood your posts, apologies if not) that there really ought to be a way to properly look at this as a developmental, social, sociological, psychological etc. phenomenon. To create a consistent, scientific understanding of what's actually going on for people with and without declared gender identities, and a proper, non-circular definition of gender identity, one which ideas and concepts can be tested against, and which we can work with as a society to accommodate people, where necessary, and as much as is feasible (even if I think inner gender identities are ultimately unfalsifiable and unknowable). But I don't think many of the people pushing the overwhelming importance of gender identity in society would want this.

Apologies for the length; my ADHD meds are making succinctness very difficult for me today 😣 I've tried to make some sentences a bit less unwieldy, but it's probably still quite tangly.

My hypothetical trans child is puzzled because he gets the opposite reactions to what he expects. He wants to play with the girls and wishes the boys would leave him alone. He adopts feminine gender norms to fit in, not because he has a natural affinity for them.

All this could be testable with careful child studies, or maybe even animal studies. But I'm not really proposing a theory, just trying to come up with at least one way in which transness can be conceived of as a real thing.

You're not really describing transness here, are you? This is gender non-conformity, which has always existed. There have always been so many little girls who preferred playing with boys, doing activities which were labelled as "for boys" or liking to dress like boys, that the word "tomboy" was coined for them.

Before the idea of transgenderism for children became so popular, did any of these girls think they actually were boys? Some of them may have wanted to be boys, or say that they did, but they were actually just rebelling against repressive gender stereotyping. They still knew they were girls.

Boys wanting to be girls or to do the things that only girls were allowed to do have also always existed. This has generally been seen as a negative thing, and boys behaving like this were (and sometimes still are) likely to be punished by adults for their unacceptable behaviour.

This is the bit we're not meant to talk about. For all the "in the wrong body" rhetoric, if you actually listen to what many early dysphoric transwomen in particular say about their childhood it's about:

• not allowed to do the things they liked
• bullied for their preferences and appearance
• told, or treated in a way that suggests, that they're not a "real boy" or a good enough boy or that there's something wrong with the way they think.
• told that what they like/behave makes them a girl

Unless you can unpick the external stressors/enablers I'm not sure how you identify what's innate and what's learnt/protective behaviours.

No, my hypothetical test would involve painstaking and non-leading interviews of large numbers of two and three year olds, plus later follow-up. For instance show them lots of pictures of humans and get them to tell you which are 'like' or 'not like' them, or get them to put a picture of themselves in one group or another.

I wonder whether it happens in animals. Because they know what to do instinctively don't they?. Lions know to fight, f*ck and eat cubs that aren't theirs. Lionesses know to hunt and look after cubs. Does it ever go wrong?

I agree that if we found a true scientific explanation for any of it, the TRAs would be livid.

And that's without even touching on homophobia and internal homophobia.

Yes, in the end it all gets a bit circular. A very long way for me to say 'I'll concede that trans might exist, but it makes no difference to what I think the law should be, because I'll always worry about data integrity, misdiagnosis, medical harms, and unfairness and danger to women'.

I'm honestly no longer interested in whether it exists or not. I'm solely interested in protecting the rights of everyone else from the movement trampling over it, including children. Beyond that, the movement is welcome to go right on enacting the oozlum bird.

This is the bit we're not meant to talk about. For all the "in the wrong body" rhetoric, if you actually listen to what many early dysphoric transwomen in particular say about their childhood it's about:
**

• not allowed to do the things they liked
• bullied for their preferences and appearance
• told, or treated in a way that suggests, that they're not a "real boy" or a good enough boy or that there's something wrong with the way they think.
• told that what they like/behave makes them a girl

** ** Unless you can unpick the external stressors/enablers I'm not sure how you identify what's innate and what's learnt/protective behaviours.

I know I said I’d finished talking on this thread, but I thought what you said was important.

It is like if, as a society, we had decided that people who want to dye their hair blonde are sick, and we’ll say the people who want to dye their hair blonde are suffering from blonditis.

We’ll assess people, and the people we think have genuine blonditis, we’ll allow to dye their hair blonde.

There would be Drs who thought blonditis must be caused by something in the brain, and studies to try and work out at what point in childhood people had developed a belief about their hair colour, and when does it become fixed. Is it even possible for some people to have a different brain hair colour to their actual hair colour. Is brain hair colour fluid. Do people even have a brain hair colour. Do people just fancy having a different hair colour? Are they influenced by people around them with blonde hair? Do some people have blonde souls?

We’ll try to come up with a test to distinguish the people who have genuine innate blonditis from the people who just want blonde hair.

Perhaps the government might decide it is such a serious situation that there should be a register and we’ll make people register for blonde hair recognition certificates. It would be a very serious thing and they must promise to keep their hair blonde until they die.

Really there would be a million reasons why someone might want to dye their hair blonde. If you didn’t have a separate soul then there must be something happening in your brain which reflects wanting to dye your hair blonde. You would be influenced by people around you.

There would be people who had been diagnosed with blonditis who genuinely believed they had blonditis; it’s a real condition. Others with the diagnosis would be trying to argue that it’s not a medical condition at all.

There would be attempts to have it removed as a medical condition.

Some people would argue that it must be a medical condition, as people who believe their hair colour is different from what it is are obviously delusional and in need of help.

Some people with blonditis would try to argue that they don’t think they’re delusional because brain hair colour doesn’t exist. People would tell them it definitely does and is formed at age 3, as that’s the age when children asked what colour their hair was started giving consistent answers.

People who want to dye their hair blonde definitely exist though.

The situation would become so toxic that the government would issue guidance to schools saying anyone who thinks they know what colour their hair is has a contested belief, and is in an ideological hair identity cult.

People who think knowing what colour their hair is isn’t a contested belief would complain about the guidance.

That is the kind of situation we are in, and I think many transgender people know that as well.

In my opinion all the developmental stuff about children having a fluid idea of sex at certain points and a fixed idea at other points is fundamentally wrong. The children would have just been trying to work out what answers the questioners wanted. At some point they’ll work out what answers the questioners want and give consistent answers. The idea that the children had fixed or fluid beliefs about sex, or even the same concept of sex as the questioners, were just beliefs of the questioners that they applied to the results. The large numbers of people who don’t fit those ideas prove it.

I’m definitely retiring from this thread now!

I have followed this thread from the start. A large number of posters have struggled to find a coherent definition of of either 'gender ideology' or 'gender'. They have argued, presented theories and frameworks, suggested testing methods and proposed guidelines. Many have fallen out over interpretation of words and interpretations. The one thing that they have all had in common is a desire to get the definition fixed.

On the other side, I have seen nothing from the Gender Ideologists offering their understanding of 'gender' or 'gender ideology'.

Janes, that's part of why I've ended up describing my position (or the position I try to maintain) as agnosticism. I recognise I have a strong desire to understand and define exactly what it is we're/they're discussing when we/they say these words, and thereby to hash out once and for all whether this is something all of us have, some of us, or none of us, and what the ramifications are, or should be.

Reminding myself that the whole thing — at least, as it's usually spoken about by genderism adherents — falls into the category of "fundamentally unknowable" helps me avoid fruitlessly chewing it over in my mind. People have put forward this subjective, unevidenced, unfalsifiable thing, and they claim that its purported existence places obligations upon me. Thinking in terms of agnosticism helps me remember that I have no obligation even to spend time considering that type of idea. It's Russell's teapot territory.

It gender and gender identity is the basis for which children are given puberty blockers and wrong sex hormones, then the obligations should absolutely should be on those who do so to define these terms properly.