So what exactly is gender?

[XChrome]

I'm still waiting for [redacted], to explain in depth what gender is. According to many people, it's a feeling, a self-perception, which they are labelling as gender. My question would be; how do the people who are using this label for a feeling know that the label they are giving it is accurate? How do they know it's not just the result of being socialized into believing certain feelings or interests signify that one is the gender that society has deemed corresponds to those feelings and interests?
I genuinely want to know, because I have never had this feeling in my life. I can perceive only my biological sex. I have always regarded my self-perception as the result of my individual personality and experiences, not about either gender or biological sex. However, many of those experiences are sex specific, so biological sex does play into it in that sense.

Can anybody answer this question about what gender is? Can you describe the feeling and explain how you know what it signifies? Please note that this is not a goading post. I'm not looking for an argument, just an explanation.
Thanks.

[Post edited by MNHQ to remove tag]

Yes, I understand what you are saying. My replies are explaining why I think you are wrong.

In your example, the Anglophile does not "become" English to anyone until they have actually moved to the UK. If they did all these things and stayed in the US, they would be seen as an American with a weird obsession about being English (and very likely laughed at by English people who would know that a single human can only ever express a limited aspect of their culture, not a quality that is "Englishness"). This is in contrast to gender identity where it is asserted that ones identification with the social constructs of the sex one is not is seen as an meaningful quality that others should accept and honour as making you objectively aligned in some way to the opposite sex.

Going back to your American Anglophile, if they did move to the UK, you might accept them as "English" due to their legal status but you'd surely also be aware of their Americanness? You'd not suddenly assume they'd had the same cultural touchoints as you, and you'd probably get a bit miffed if they started talking about "our" English childhoods. You mentioned in passing adopting an English accent but clearly that would be critical for people they met, even if they were a bit more nationalist and gatekeepy about it to take them as English. But by the sme token, if it were then to become known to those people that the person had consciously adopted this accent and that their native accent was American, it would not be seen as a natural expression of their English identity, it would be seen as inauthentic and deceptive. Far from being accepted as somehow "English by Angophilliac identity" they would be seen as a fraud. Being an Anglophile is not what makes someone English. It can be a legal status, or it can be a from birth experience, (and they are different things - the from birth experience of Englishness of someone who is not legally English does not confer the right to legal Englishness at a certain level of cultural Englishness), but it is not a self-defined affectation.

So I think you have (perhaps unwittingly) given a great illustration of the genderist linguistic sleight of hand here. Yes, we might well accept them as "English" if they move to England and take English citizenship and we want to be welcoming and inclusive to people who move to our country, but that is done not in recognition of their "Englishness of personality" if you see what I mean, it's an expression of our choice to extend legal Englishness. We'd do the same if they'd legally emigrated from China and had no interest in an "English" personality at all. The two things, their Anglophiliac "English" persona and their acheivement of legal "Englishness", are separate and not dependent on each other. They could have totally different names and nothing would change.

But none of that means that a man can have a woman's brain or vice versa, which seemed to be what that paper was arguing.

Who knows really

Who are we to know

@AuntyBumBum

I think I understand what you're trying to say up to a point.

I don't have ginger hair and can't stand Irn-Bru or whisky but that doesn't make me a non-Scot (possibly Scottish non-conforming).

If someone dresses like Russ Abbot's CU Jimmy, lives on haggis and drinks Dewar's and Irn-Bru all day long, does that make them Scottish?

No, it makes them an irritating parody with a dose of xenophobia chucked in, so very similar to a TW in that respect.

I think where your analogy falls down is that I was born female, will always be female. I happened to be born in Scotland to Scottish parents but if I'd been born in say, Germany to a Scottish father and an Irish mother and moved around a lot because of their jobs I possibly would feel more a "citizen of the world" than Scottish, Irish or German.

But I'd still be female.

(Apologies if that is your point, looking over this before I press post I think I've confused myself).

I have no doubt that it is more complex than a single spectrum. There are many spectrums, such as gentle to aggressive, or fluffy to rugged, or nurturing to ambitious, and where anyone fits into cultural expectations is a mix of all of them. I know of no-one who is at all the "masculine" extremes or all the "feminine" extremes. I also question the validity of many of these spectrums.

I live in France and am a gender non conforming female that went into construction. I have also lived in 3 other countries coming to England in the 1970s. Maybe I can help.

A Brit who moves to France, who wears berets and Breton tops, and constantly has a Gauloise hanging on their bottom lip and shrugging at every question would be viewed as a complete twat and in no way would be 'accepted' by the local French community.

A Brit who moves to France, accepts that they know nothing, gets constantly bemused and confused by the French Bureaucracy, who does their best to learn the language and treats the French culture with respect is much more likely to integrate but will never really be accepted as 'French'. They will always be British. And they will be accepted as British and probably introduced as a Brit forever to their friends.

I don't think any Brit is actively turned on by the idea of being a bit of a Saucie Frenchie when they pop a Beret on in or out of the bedroom. And no French person would want to be part of that sex game, unless it was agreed in advance. They would think you are out of your tiny mind.

And women are not turned on by wearing jeans and t-shirts - unlike men who are turned on by wearing lingerie to work and by invading female spaces.

Which is the part of the analogy you are completely missing.

The nationality analogy is just an analogy.

It's for one a completely different thing to whether you're male or female.
It secondly doesn't change the fact that people of all nationalities no matter where they've been born or who there parents are or what passport they've had or what citizenship test they've passed, are all either male or female.
And their sex matters.

Many of these posts suggest that gender is a costume. One worn, or adopted in behaviours or attitudes. Which imply that gender exists. That it is a thing - outside of grammar.

I do not think it exists other than as a concept.

Well, I'm still hoping that one of the genderists on FWS is lurking behind a bush ready to jump out and, with a big "ta-da!", reveal what gender is.
And then tell us what gender identity is.
And if we're really lucky, what sex is, and what the relationship is between sex and gender.

Any minute now...

Funny that they're not all over this, isn't it?

That depends on what you consider a woman's brain to be. We were talking about gender not sex anyway. Brain development starts with neurulation from the ectoderm of the embryo and takes on average, 20 to 25 years to mature. That's a lot of complex biochemistry at work, a lot of it variable, a lot environmental.

Why is it inconceivable that some brains will develop differently given different paths of development, before and after birth?

No, it's not inconceivable. The brain of a London black cab driver, a heavy drug user and a polyglot will all develop differently because of the demands they put on it. Everybody's brain is a bit different to everyone else's because of their unique circumstances.

What development pathways before and after birth are you talking about, specifically?

And are you saying you can explain what is meant by gender with reference to those pathways?

A woman's brain is one inside a woman.

As a female can I be born with a man's liver or stomach? Or is it just the brain organ that's subject to this?

So... gender is ladybrainz because <sciencey-words>?

The recent thread about a checkbox for cisgender really brought home to me the consequences of using terms for which there is no consensus and the trouble with shifting definitions. You had people arguing cisgender means the opposite of transgender and someone arguing ‘woman’ is a term for a social construct unlike ‘female’, which represents sex.

How often are we getting into debates where these terms are used and we aren’t even picking up on the vastly different ways people understand them? How do we discuss concepts if there is no common understanding?

And I don’t even think there is a single cause of the confusion. Just off the top of my head, I can think of ideology, ignorance and the fact that trans terminology and concepts change at such a rapid pace as reasons why terms mean different things to different people.

It all feeds into a more fundamental issue, which is that the arguments underpinning this ideology are impenetrable and not accessible to a layperson. I have tried and failed to understand the deeper arguments behind why TWAW (by which I mean beyond emotionally manipulative obfuscation like ‘be kind’), and I’d be amazed if the average person understands it. I’m even surer that the average person hasn’t put much energy into trying to.

Anyway, I’ve seen enough permutations of questions around ‘gender’ that this is not employed in a consistent manner and people advancing the trans cause don’t fully understand/aren’t keeping up with the positions of their own ideology.

Stepping away from the real-world ramifications, there is something fascinating about how much support there is for an idea that turns what most of us previously accepted (and many of us still do) on its head while simultaneously being unbelievably intellectually complex.

Crazy that this needs to be spelled out but here we are, thanks to gender woo woo.

I think you've both missed the point.

Hi OP

We're just letting you know that we've redacted the tagged name in your opening post. It's not really in the spirit of civil debate to start a thread in this way, but we can see that you're asking a question on a wider scale too. That's why we haven't deleted it. If you have any concerns, please email contactus@mumsnet.com.

Would you mind explaining how it all works, MonkeyToHeaven?

What gender is, (is it the same as gender identity), what the biological basis is, how development pathways are involved, what sex means and the relationship between sex and gender - since you were clear upthread that you were talking about gender, not sex. Also would you please use language consistently and clearly -eg if you are talking about what we would call sex, say bio sex.

Thanks in advance.

I don't disagree with any of that, only I'm not positive there's always a genuine psychiatric problem involved. I suspect a certain amount of it to be extreme social conformity. If you run in the kind of young, woke circles where gender identity has now become the be all and end all of personal identity, where dissent about gender identity is not tolerated, you might believe that a shaky sense of your own identity must be related to gender and that you are in fact not the gender you were "assigned." As you mature and develop a better sense of who you are as a person, you would become less convinced that it has to do with gender. That could explain de-transitioning, as it never actually was gender dysphoria.

Thank you. I did not realize that wasn't permitted. I was just hoping the poster in question would join in because s/he had expressed opinions on the nature of gender which I was hoping s/he would elaborate on. No offence was intended to that poster.

All great points, @TheAntiGardener.
Without a consensus on terminology it becomes very difficult to discuss this. Maybe we should establish a set of guidelines just for the Sex and Gender Discussions threads so that regulars all know what we are referring to. A thread about that might be helpful. I've been saying clunky things like "allegedly transgender" or "transgender identifying" and would love a shorthand we can all agree upon. I really don't know what to call people who do not identify as trans. Cisgender is ridiculous, but some other term would be handy to have.

Or they can't accept gayness itself, because in an insane paradox, being gay seems to be seen as more repulsively feminine by trans activists than being transgender is. Now, instead of being accepted as gay, young men are being told by genderists that they are actually women, and sadly, some confused gay teens are believing it.

No, is the simple answer. Can you? Thanks, in anticipation of something from chatgpt.