Gender as performance or as innate essence

[SaltPorridge]

Why is it that kids talk about "coming out" as trans when they change their names and ask to be treated as the opposite sex/gender? Yet I also see references to gender as a performance, which seems to come from Judith Butler.
Where did the idea of an innate gender that is unrelated to sex come from?

Well, if it's not your male or female body that determines whether you're a man or a woman, it must be something else.

John Money. In the 80s a baby boy had a botched circumcision and Money had the idea that the baby should be brought up as a girl.

Some feminists at the time espoused that gender was a social construct and we think we are men/women because society tells us we are, so arguably this should work. The poor lad knew all along he was a boy no matter what his parents said which proved that idea wrong, so the idea of an innate gender identity was born.

To be fair he didn’t separate it from sex, but the second wave feminists had been proved wrong so the gender studies theorists had to make up gender wang.

@CraftyNavySeal

Sorry, could you clarify what you mean when you say feminists were proved wrong?

They believed that gender and gender differences were socially constructed not innate.

If that was true you could raise a boy as a girl and they would think they are a girl, but the little boy in the study knew he was a boy all along.

Arguably it just demonstrated that we have an innate sense of what our sex is but it was used to justify this wibbly wobbly internal gender identity.

If that was true you could raise a boy as a girl and they would think they are a girl, but the little boy in the study knew he was a boy all along.

That's because gender and sex are two totally different things.

Performing gender is never ever the same as biological reality.

Yes, that's why feminists stressed that gender referred to the social expectations and limitations placed on each sex by the prevalent society.

It's easy to show that the vast majority of these are, indeed, social constructs: they vary wildly by location and era, therefore they aren't innate.

An inner sense of one's sex is easy to understand. Most people, having never questioned their society's gender constructs, find it hard to separate a "sense of one's sex" from "social stereotypes".

Then there's an ill-defined grey area in the middle, where some behavioural patterns are sex-linked. It's easiest to identify these in the area of mating-related behaviours and that, again, is rather grey because some people don't have any mate-attracting behaviours and some display those more usually associate with the opposite sex.

Going further, there are possible sex-linked behaviour patterns in other areas of life. Controlled studies to try and establish such patterns would be unethical, so we have no real idea whether they're all socially imposed or not.

From my extremely limited and selective reading of Butler's opus, she was originally talking about this grey area. A woman crossing and uncrossing her legs, for instance, is "performing [feminine] gender" as part of a flirtatious performance. A gay man walking with an exaggerated wiggle is "performing [feminine] gender" to communicate sexual availability. A man with his feet planted apart and shoulders squared is "performing [masculine] gender" to convey power, and so is a woman doing the same.

In feminism, gender performance is used to describe any gendered behaviour. I'm "performing gender" when I show up to an event with my hair and makeup done - I'm not sexually interested but, instead, am showing respect for the gathering's general expectations of female appearance.

Whether Butler took it further, I don't know, but it's easy to see how a superficial grasp of both concepts could lead to a hypothesis that all gendered behaviours are innate. Conveniently, this is exactly what people who never think about it think, so it's an easy sell.

From there it is a very small step to suppose that someone with an affinity for the usual behaviours of the opposite sex must really be the opposite sex, in character at least. Again conveniently, this dovetails with the popular intuition that the wiggling man "is a woman" and the dominating woman "is a man".

It's really bloody annoying!

@CraftyNavySeal

Do you believe Money's work proved this? That's more what I was getting at.

Really intersting, thanks!

You could say that the case of the Reimer twins suggests that gendered behaviour is intrinsic to sex. Money advised the parents to bring up the injured twin as a girl. But the "girl" realised he was a boy when he was 9.
On fact it's horrific what Money did and Im not sure it proves anything at all. There are many cases where xy males have been mistaken for xx females at birth and raised as girls without additional interference. Studies of these people are more reliable and interesting, and Cass refers to the research in her report.

However, the popular ideas that are currently being promoted to our children appear to originate with Butler and academic gender studies and Butler seems to be very supportive of these ideas.

I'm going to have to read the book aren't i?

Brilliant explanation.

For a very long time (when I first started looking into the world of transgender identity), I thought I had a "gender identity" and that I "feel like a woman".

If a man takes oestrogen, or a woman takes testosterone, it stands to reason he will experience some feelings that are driven by these hormones - and there are detransitioned women who talk about their increased libido and aggression when on testosterone. But our bodies aren't designed to run on opposite-sex hormones so a) it's the wrong fuel type and will cause health issues and b) any "opposite-sex feelings" that do occur have been artificially induced.

I can't imagine anyone will ever find an empirical answer that explains the boundary between the feelings that are driven by sex hormones and the feelings that emerge from other influences.

It's going to come down to personal belief. Do you believe that "we all have a gender identity" or not? I did, but I don't any more. For me, the balance is stacked way more to the idea that my sex hormones drive a small aspect of who I am from within my own body, the rest is a combination of the societal sex-based expectations and limitations that I've navigated throughout my life. My personality has been formed around the ones that I've rejected or embraced, sometimes consciously, sometimes subconsciously (e.g. I've had long hair since I was a child and never thought about why it "feels like me"). But, to my understanding now, none of it is my "gender identity". I don't have a gender identity, I just have a personality that's all mine. I have some things in common with other women because I have the same core biology (specifically a biology that is organised around the production of large gametes) and similar cultural experiences regarding the societal expectations/limitations that we've navigated.

This is what helped me to get my head around everything:

So where I am now is that:
a) I accept that some people genuinely do believe that "we all have a gender identity". I can't see this ever changing.
b) there are vulnerable children and young people who are prone to being pulled in to this belief as an explanation for their distress e.g. puberty being a confusing time
c) there are autogynophiles who feign a belief in gender identity so that they can carry out their paraphilia

At this point it all becomes like any other belief, in that if you place it at the core of who you are, and how you act, it can lead to some extreme places (such as chopping off healthy body parts, irrevocably damaging the balance of the endochrine system - which has consequences - or demanding that others accept you in women's sports/spaces etc etc)... and....

It's really bloody annoying!

Also, like any other belief, it has no place as an accepted "truth" in laws, education or healthcare.

Isn't there a more practical motive?

If I can convince you that my "gender" is innate, it's harder for you to deny me the things I want.

my sex hormones drive a smallaspect of who I am from within my own body, the rest is a combination of the societal sex-based expectations and limitations that I've navigated throughout my life

Yes, that's really well put, @BonfireLady, and I like the way you've progressed your idea of gender identity. Great talk by RRC, can you believe it's eight years old?!

Just re-reading the Cass report, OP, and have found some interesting comments (page 101) that pre-natal testosterone appears to influence play choices! She notes that this is based on research with DSD kids, but they'd be the easiest cohort(s) to study in this way. I hadn't seen it before and will try to follow up a bit.

Sections six and eight are really interesting on the potential effects of sex hormones on behaviour and "identity".

Butler did 'take it further'. She's often misunderstood for saying that gender is a 'performance' as this implies people are consciously chosing which behaviours to 'perform' like actors on a stage. Butler says this isn't the case, she says that people unconsciously act out a whole range of gendered behaviours as we're so enculturated with them from birth, they become second nature.

She takes it further again and says that these learned gendered acts then work to give the illusion that sex is binary and natural (the gendered acts 'produce what they name'). What she means here is that, because we see men and women moving and speaking and acting in these two very distinct ways, we falsely assume that this springs from natural biological differences. When, in actual fact (as Butler argues), this isn't true. Sex is just as much a social construction as gender (yes really!) It's just the repetition of gendered acts which give it the appearance of being real.

Interesting...but bollocks of course 🤣

I genuinely can't believe any person could think that mutilating, gaslighting and sexually torturing someone to the point of suicide tells us anything credible, or that any scientific data can be obtained at all. The fact that people hold it up as science, research or a data point confounds me to my very core.

Reimer realised he was male, and to me all that shows is the power of reality, that sex is real. Gender has nothing to do with it.

In studying autism, Simon Baron-Cohen developed a theory of "the extreme male brain". There are a set of tests of characteristics like systematising and focus on details which he showed male-female differences, with autistic males at an extreme.
So, innate behavioural characteristics associated with sex.

But only differences in the average with a huge overlap between the sexes. None of these behaviours are exclusively male or female.

I think he and the existence of people with gender dysphoria disproved the blank slate theory of gender. We aren’t blank slates conditioned into all of our behaviours and preferences.

It still doesn’t explain why certain behaviours and preferences are considered “gender” at all or what gender even is in the first place.

Rebecca Reilly Cooper mentioned up thread pretty much sums up my thoughts on gender as well.

The logical conclusion of gender theorists should have been gender abolition, gender as a concept is unnecessary.

How did he know he was a boy all along?

There's also neuroplasticity - a newborn baby's brain is - well, as I understand it, it's not a 'blank slate' that things including gender stereotypes are written on, rather a huge set of neural connections which are strengthened or weakened by what the brain experiences as the baby grows up.

So if experiments show differences between men's and women's brains, well, duh, they've had a whole lifetime of being 'fed' difference experiences and inputs because of gender stereotypes.

The classic example is the effect on the brains of London taxi drivers of committing to memory the huge complexity of 'The Knowledge', all the routes through the complicated cityscape of London. The part of their brains that handles navigation and memory is highly developed in comparison with us mere mortals.
London taxi drivers are not born, they are made

So if all girls but no boys were taught The Knowledge, adult women's brains would be very superior to men's in spatial navigation and long-term memory recall...

....coming to think of it, adult women's brains are very good at responding to
'Muuuum! where did you put my.....[insert any item, in any place, from any time in the previous x years..]'

Reimer realised he was male, and to me all that shows is the power of reality, that sex is real. Gender has nothing to do with it.

Can you imagine how hard it would be to successfully pass as the opposite sex to yourself? People's sex is blindly obvious to the casual observer - the idea that someone spotting their own sex needs to be explained by some mysterious "gender identity" is blatant pish.

The logical conclusion of gender theorists should have been gender abolition, gender as a concept is unnecessary.

You're definitely not wrong!

But, then, certain philosophers wouldn't have been able to relaunch their careers with all the glitter of post-modernism and the power of political influence 😏 It's really not a bad trick, turning a classroom thought experiment ("what if everything we 'know' is just an artefact of the words we use?") into a real-world social experiment with worldwide effects on real lives.

It gives Lysenkoism a run for its money. But hasn't killed as many people yet.

@CraftyNavySeal

Absolutely agree. The feminist interpretation of gender, the superficial societal stuff that arises because of your sex, should indeed move towards meaninglessness. Gender is the expression of sexism.

On the point about gender dysphoria, I have seen no convincing evidence that the suffering these patients feel is any different to other body dysmorphia diagnosis, whether it's body integrity disorder, anorexia etc. except that the focus of the negativity is towards parts of the body we associate with sexual dimorphism.

Psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy as an industry have never met a fad they didn't push on the flimsiest of pretenses. They have a long history of "hunches" being put forward as a basis for treatment.

I think we can safely say that the boy in question wasn't safeguarded and was emotionally abused.

All other 'findings' fall under that context and have no scientific basis