Do you feel that gender identity exists and is innate?

[FairHippopotama]

In progressive circles, there's the concept of 'gender identity' where everyone has a gender (not necessarily corresponding to their sex) that is unchangeable and inherent to them as a person. Do you agree with this? Why or why not?

Most of the “rights” claims are men wanting access to spaces for women.

I think I see where your misunderstanding comes from. This is not the difference between sex and gender.

Gender comprises the stereotypes which are supposed to be typical of men/boys or of women/girls. People don't 'have' a gender. They have a set of stereotypes which are imposed on them because of their sex, which they may or may not comply with. The gendered expectations apply to everyone according to their sex, and nobody can opt out of them whether they comply or not, because they are externally imposed.

Sorry, the conversation has totally diverged away from my post.

I think I agree with the other users here that gender identity is not some biological reality; it's essentially short hand to describe the ideal state of people who identify as transgender.

The disagreement now seems to be over what sex and gender are and how those apply to the terms 'female' and 'woman'. I argue that gender describes the (stereotypical) norms, roles, and expectations associated with either sex. A transgender person 'passing' is them taking on enough of these characteristics to be determined as being (biologically) the opposite sex. At that point, they have changed gender.

You can infer from the above that I believe these norms, roles, and expectations are used by society to determine people's sexes.

Actually there's no middle ground between fantasy and reality.

S-o-c-i-a-l c-o-n-t-a-g-i-o-n has a fucking long history in this age group of females.

Gender is essentially a bunch of stereotypes. That's why many people are gender abolitionist, recognising that you don't have to be masculine to be a man nor feminine to be a woman.
The debate lies in what does being a man or woman actually mean if they are genders and genders are defined by these stereotypes? Gender-critical people, at least as represented by others on this post, seem to advocate for men and women being defined by their sex. Gender-affirming people would presumably say that men and women are those who identify as such, who are associated by society with the stereotypes around one sex or the other.

You said this earlier and I wouldn't disagree, except for the potential weasel-words of 'being defined by their sex'. I am going to be charitable and assume you mean 'man only means something if it means male' and same for woman/female.
(Not 'an entire person's identity should revolve around what sex their body is' - GC people aren't saying this at all).

The gender-affirming movement at the moment is a movement for the rights of these females too. In due time, it will be more a movement for females than for males. It's not a 'men's rights movement'.

It's a movement for anyone that believes strongly that stereotypes dictate what sex we say we are or what our bodies should look like. How does that help female people? Both sexes are harmed by gender stereotypes.

And that's not even going into the fact that they are demanding the abolition of single-sex spaces and sports, which disproportionately harms female people.

OP what would YOU say is the gender-affirming(?) view of the distinction between men and women? Can you specify one thing that would make someone a man or a woman under the GI belief or are the terms so wide as to be meaningless?
I'm still (sorry) not clear on what point you're trying to make, and the fact you hadn't grasped the 'cis' issue makes me think you're not quite there.

Edit- seen that you have clarified to some extent - thank you! I'm off to catch a train now.

It's not a 'men's rights movement'.

Oh my sweet summer child...

Yes, transactivism is a men's rights movement - it's always about letting trans-identifying men into women's spaces.

Transmen aren't a threat to women or to men. They won't enter men's sports and cheat their way to medals, they won't pose a physical threat in the slightest. They aren't placing men at risk if they use the men's facilities. They are extremely unlikely to traumatise male users of facilities in the way transwomen traumatise many women by entering our safe spaces.

Men are a risk, however they identify. So any bid to replace sex with gender is a men's right movement.

(This will pass for young women. It's a social contagion like self harm, and it will end eventually, leaving behind a lot of damaged and wounded detransitioners. Those poor girls.)

You say 'female'; you mean 'feminine'. There is not one single female frame. There are not frames that are male and frames that are female. It is perfectly possible for a man to have a frame that more resembles that of a female than a male. You were able to tell she was female based on gender stereotypes.

(Also, consider that there's a survivorship bias. When you are out walking, you are not able to recognise that you don't notice that someone is transgender.)

OP is confusing sex stereotypes such as woman have long hair with physiological differences between males and females such as different pelvic structures

I believe that the 'set of stereotypes which are imposed on them' is a person's gender. Whether they adhere to those stereotypes or not does not change their gender.

Whichever stereotypes are applied to someone is because of what sex society believes them to be, and society uses stereotypes itself to determine that.

No she means female. My femaleness is inate. Femininity is a set of socially created stereotypes

I'll freely admit I don't always know what sex some people are and even if I guessed, I wouldn't be able to check how accurate my guesses were as I'm not going to walk up to someone and ask their sex.

I can't see how that's relevant in any way to someone's sex, gender identity or whether society should be ordered around one or the other? Perhaps in the case that we all agree that sex means sex and a smalll number of people might 'cheat' unnoticed by everyone...? But that's not really my big issue.

My main issue is people insisting that women aren't female people, they are anyone, male or female, who have unnamed character traits or interests or skills or anything else. Then others using that to harm or disadvantage other people.

You say 'female'; you mean 'feminine'. There is not one single female frame. There are not frames that are male and frames that are female

Your pelvic girdle says otherwise. Every single skeleton is male or female and a glance at the pelvis tells you which.

There is not "one single" female frame, there are countless billions of female frames and they all share these traits.

And no, I didn't mean "feminine". She presented in a very masculine way. But gender presentation can only do so much to disguise the sex differences.

You're younger than my children so I'm trying to have patience with you on the grounds of your youth, but lecturing women who have far more knowledge and experience than you is quite the "male socialisation" tell.

In that sentence, 'gender' means 'sex'. So you have said 'A common definition of "Woman" is "The female sex"', though that misses out the "adult" part; it is unusual for a girl to be called a "woman" before she is (a) sexually mature, and (b) legally adult, though of course there is the ill-defined "young woman".

Woman was certainly not commonly used as an "adult social noun" when I was young. It just meant female and (usually) adult and human, just like hen or mare or doe for other species. The attempt to redefine woman as a social category is a part of a social movement which has had the effect (in my opinion mostly deliberate) of allowing men to claim to be women and women to claim to be men, all while blurring the definitions of sex, gender, woman, man, boy, girl, lesbian, gay, etc.

The attempt has come close to success in organisations and in law, but it is not accepted throughout society, and many of us realise what has been happening once we have reason to think about it in any depth. We can all see the negative effects on women's sport, and some can see other negative effects, including women's safety, dignity and opportunities.

Just to say, the use of 'thought to be' and reference to societal expectations here show a lack of understanding of ecology. For clarity, males are different from females at population level. That has nothing to do with stereotypes or expectations. So for example, it is a fact, not a stereotype, to say that at population level, males are bigger, stronger, faster and more violent than females.

ohhh ok I think I grasp what you're trying to say:

When we come up with stereotypes for men and women, we're really only coming up with stereotypes for people that already fall into two stereotypical groups, because we have no way of knowing if they're actually male or female.

So we, as a society, are perpetuating stereotypes by mistaking 'tall strong masculine' people for male people and applying the stereotype 'male people are tall, strong and masculine'. And you're saying loads of these people could be female and we're all mistaken because they're tall, strong and masculine...?

Therefore sex stereotypes are unhelpful and wrong?

Am I anywhere near? I mean, I disagree with the assumption that none of us know what sex anyone is and are just categorising people by height etc, but I'd agree with the conclusion. It's just a very odd way of getting there.

@FairHippopotama
You can still challenge and question a male who acts in a voyeuristic way even if they identify as trans. Using the pronouns they request isn't mutually exclusive with that. You can, for example, deny this male access to the female bathroom but still call him a woman and use she/her pronouns. You can deny that a lesbian must consider this male in regards to dating. Acceptance of pronouns is not acceptance of the entire gender-affirming movement and everything that implies.

Read this, which explains the problem with pronouns.

Pronouns are Rohypnol • Fair Play For Women

I think someone posted the link earlier, but you obviously haven't read it.

There are not frames that are male and frames that are female. It is perfectly possible for a man to have a frame that more resembles that of a female than a male.

These two sentences fascinate me.
How could you state the second one if you assume the first to be true?

No it illustrates that you dont know what the word 'stereotype' means.

Yes, your interpretation is what I meant - I should have made it clearer.

You're right that the effect of any harm disproportionately affects females, but that is irrelevant to the aims of the gender-affirming movement and whose 'rights' it actually fights for. Simply put, it fights for the rights of people who identify as trans, male or female.

The gender-affirming view of the difference between men and women is very complicated. A lot of them refuse to define 'man' or 'woman' because they fear (a) using social stereotypes would invalidate trans-identifying people who don't fit them and (b) using sex would invalidate trans-identifying people as a whole. There's not much else you can use. They might say 'a man/woman is whoever identifies as such', but that's obviously circular reasoning. Sometimes, gender-affirming people thus believe there is no difference, or any difference is meaningless.

However, if a gender-affirming person were to consider this issue thoroughly, I think they would eventually come to my viewpoint, which is that a man describes someone who has the norms, roles, and expectations associated with males applied to him, and a woman is someone who has the norms etc. associated with females applied to her. In that way, my perspective on this specifically is on the gender-affirming side.

n.b. you put a question mark next to 'gender-affirming'. I'm just using it as the opposite of 'gender-critical'. It sees common use in medical contexts, e.g. 'gender-affirming hormone therapy', but I think those of the gender-affirming movement would rather frame it as the 'trans rights' movement, and most people here tend to refer to gender identity, identity politics, 'the gender brigade', etc.

Quite.

And again, just to clarify: you are getting muddled. There absolutely is a (as you put it) 'male frame' and 'female frame'. At population level. In the same way as humans are bipedal. This is not a 'stereotype'. It is ecology.

Your femaleness is innate, but that you may have a feminine frame is not.

Have I misunderstood the meaning of 'frame'? Skeletal structure?
How is a person's skeleton learned and not innate i.e. they're born with it?!

I've identified a distant red deer as a goat. It remained a red deer despite my mistake.