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?

I think you got away with it

I went to an all-girls school, and then a mixed-sex school, my school tie wasn’t intended to code me as masculine it was simply part of the uniform. Just like the school blazer, it was intended to show the public what school I was attending because it was made in the school colours. Our teachers frequently told us that we were expected to behave well in public while wearing our school uniform because we were representing the school and its values. I also suspect that, on a practical level, schools here insist on ties for all students because it looks tidier than open-necked shirts.

I’m afraid that I don’t understand your point that girls wearing a tie as part of school uniform is strengthening masculine coding for clothes. I think they’re adhering to formality and to communality because uniforms create a social bond among children - everyone wearing the same clothes means a school spirit can develop and there are no opportunities for social distinction to develop caused by some students wearing expensive clothing that other students can’t afford. Uniforms also prevent students from signalling teenage tribes via dress or hairstyles while at school which can serve to create distractions from learning and differences among students. To my mind, ties, like school blazers and school scarves, are a way of identifying a student as being from a particular school (they’re practical in that they serve as walking advertisements for schools and they make uniforms look more coordinated and tidier).

Re your daughter’s school, I think the school created a problem for itself in letting children wear their own clothes. The school could make all students in every year wear a school uniform and that issue re signalling ideology/identity wouldn’t arise - every student either wears a school tie or doesn’t as part of the uniform code.

Thing is, I pretty much agree with all of this stuff. I simply don't see how it leads to the conclusion that we need to replace all existing sex based rights, protections and language with exactly the same but aligned to performative gender instead, nor why people who don't enact the repetition/construction of gender are nevertheless swept into the gender buckets because of their sex when sex itself is considered subordinate to gender.

It's a sixth form. Where we live, it is unusual for sixth forms to have a uniform. They have a dress code instead. This sixth form has separate dress codes for boys and girls.
The sixth form girls who chose to wear ties identify as trans and are signalling their masculine gender identity by adopting the masculine dress code.

A woman who wears a tie as part of a costume intended to code her as masculine doesn't break the coding but strengthens it.

In theory yes, but in practice no, because the construction of "reality" through performative repetition depends not on the intention of the performer but on the meaning experienced by the audience, and the sex will be read over the gender. The tie works to confer an intention of masculinity on the trans man but the trans man's performance does not in turn strengthen the construction, so over time if all trans men wear ties they will cease to functional as a masculine construct.

If gender performance were entirely disconnected with sex, then people performing masculinity would reinforce masculinity regardless of their sex.

Yes, this is kind of how fashion trickle down works.

10 years ago my 20-something friend in London came to meet me wearing a black dress and white trainers – looked cool and fresh.

10 years later, my friend’s 75-year old mum wore the same kind of look to a family meal in a suburban newtown in the north east.

The look no longer means what it originally meant.

The sixth form girls who chose to wear ties identify as trans and are signalling their masculine gender identity by adopting the masculine dress code.
And doubtless the boys who didn't want to wear ties would have happily identified as non-binary if pressed.

No. They wear the cheapest ties, often clipped on, and put them in their pockets when they can. They complain that the tie rule is sexist and unfair. They take the trans stuff very seriously and don't mess with it, ime.
But returning to the main point, some people may have misunderstood performative act as meaning gender is like a stage performance (Live Action Role Play, or Larping, is another word i have heard.) But in practice gender as a performative act sits alongside ideas of transness.
Butler appears to fuse sex and gender but maybe i have misread that too. Butler seems like the kind of person who focuses so tightly on the details that the big picture fades away. And does not accept responsibility for impact of easily misunderstood words.