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?

What I find very interesting is gender affirming care can be anything from me getting my haircut or my nails done to trans people taking hormones. So clearly these stereotypes are a bit more pervasive in society than people are letting on

"One thing I've noticed: why don't you ever think of females transitioning?"

I can't believe you have asked this question. Young women like your sister being lead down a path to misery and life long medicalisation when what they need is mental health care is a massive motivator for many women here. They donate to crowd funders, write to politicians, attend rallies, read extensively, meet with MPs to talk about puberty blockets, lobby for bullshit organisations like Mermaids to be scrutinised.... don't say the women here don't think of TiF you have no idea. The women here have been pointing out the rise in TiFs with autism, eating disorders and histories of traumas and trying to raise the alarm with powers that be for years. We've been delighted when books like Irreversible Damage come out and hope someone with influence will pay attention and step up.

In respect of language - I don’t know if you are aware, the feminism section on here used to just be one board. Then this part got hived off so those who weren't GC could avoid the GC threads about how shittily Rosie Duffied is being treated, how should we approach our children's school to stop them teaching lies, what's going on in the latest employment tribunal that shouldn't be needed...you get the point. So yes, as a rule most women in this section do not want to be called cis and are GC. I don't care if you find it a handy term.

In answer to your question, no, I don't believe in gender identity. At best it's regressive navel gazing luxury belief bullshit. At worst it's very damaging to people with mental health difficulties and those around them, or a prop excuse for fetishism or disadvantaging women. So we can told it's unkind to object to being used in someone's fetish without consent and scolded for having boundaries and preferences for facts and safeguarding. I believe there is an innate sense of biological sex. I have heard of cases where elderly people who have transitioned and cosmetically altered themselves and had surgery have developed dementia and been very distressed at why their body no longer looks as fits their sex. The gender identy has vanished and the man is upset at having no penis and doesn't understand why. I think it was Elaine Millar who I heard speak about that but annoyingly I can't find the interview. I suspect someone else will know.

However, if a gender-affirming person were to consider this issue thoroughly, I think they would eventually come to my viewpoint,

Yes, of course you would.

The planet goes on being round, as Wendy Cope says.

Transmen only ever count to help validate or nullify the harms of transwomen. Also see children.

Otherwise they are irrelevant.

It's just more women being service humans to the demands of men.

All the tv rent a quotes bar I think one are always male.

It's quite the thing.

You are oversimplifying the science to fit your viewpoint. Sex estimation is based on probability - it's not certain. It also takes into account several factors overall (as I have been talking about), not just the pelvis. These factors - traits like hip width, shoulder breadth, and bone density - vary widely within either sex and there is considerable overlap. These are the 'physical stereotypes' (more accurately referred to as patterns or trends in this context) I've been talking about. The patterns overall resemble male and female, but the traits individually reflect masculine and feminine.

While I don't dispute that many people here are more knowledgeable than me on certain things, that and my youth don't necessarily mean my argument is weak, and experience is less relevant than knowledge here. I'm not trying to lecture; I'm trying to explain what I believe and why.

It's also about letting trans-identifying women into men's spaces. The only difference is that there's less resistance because there's less potential of harm. A men's rights movement would fight primarily for men's rights, but the aims of the gender-affirming movement and what it wants to do are the same for everyone who identifies as trans, not solely men.

The men's rights movement that does exist is quite removed from any gender-related issues.

While I loosely agree with your conception of young women who claim to experience gender dysphoria, I don't think you're right that it will pass. The validation inherent within the gender-affirming movement means that many of the women who identify as trans now will continue to identify that way for the rest of their lives. There's a considerable number of detransitioners, yes, but the majority will not detransition.

Now that’s a much better line of research.
how long does the average person transistjin for? Is this for life? Has it always been? What proportion detransition?
you could then link that to your biology and traits and see if this is innate (biological trends they all have in common) or experiences (you could do some sort of questionnaire asking when they wanted to transition, why) and see which causes people to detransition or stick.
then you could accurately predict trends over time

Sorry I read this as a repressive social construct. I think both words fit perfectly.

Think of the countries where life is built on gendered concepts. Afghanistan for example, then remember that less than two hundred years ago the situation was exactly the same here in the UK , a woman, her body, her worldly goods, and her children all belonged to her husband. I only hope it doesn’t take the women of Afghanistan as long to get autonomy.

There is a book called the Angel and the Cad about a marriage between Englands richest heiress and the Duke of Wellingtons nephew, who was a womanising gambler and got through her fortune in a few years. She then had to battle through the courts and eventually Parliament to get back some of her property, and more importantly, her children. She was the first woman to do so and it is thanks to her that legislation giving women parental rights over their children exists in the UK.

Meant to add, using gender to define how society works always means that women miss out, because the people who end up with the powers embedded by tradition, ie religion, governance, finance, education, legal status etc are always men.

Young people today who are so keen on gender identity that they invent a new one every day don’t realise what a time bomb they are carrying and how they are limiting their social strength.

I understand it's not literally a stereotype. I was simplifying it, following the example of other users here who described real trends as stereotypes too. For example, the idea that being interested in military history is masculine.

Johansson's Points of Light experiments in the 1970s and subsequent studies shown that when movement is reduced to a few dots on a screen, people can tell whether it's real biological movement or faked, and they can tell the sex of the person walking. We're actually very good at it as a species.

As for "it shall pass" - it's already on the wane compared to 3 or 4 years ago. The current cohort of high school girls are trans-identifying at notably lower numbers according to my colleagues in schools. As more and more data are available about the harm transitioning girls does, not to mention the catastrophic effect of high testosterone doses on the female body, the medical establishment will cease gender-affirming care.

(For more information on testosterone's effects long term, look at the outcomes of the poor East German female athletes who were doped with it)

Don't say stereotypes if you don't mean stereotypes. You can and should use correct terms when discussing things with us, OP. Dumbing down is not a good look on FWR. There are highly educated and well-researched posters on here who can eat you for breakfast.

No, I don’t believe this. I believe in biological sex - which is absolutely innate and unchangeable - and the idea of gender is a social construct. What matters and exists is biological sex.

This is very confused. In the human species, there are 2 sexes, female and male, and each human body is formed around the production of one of the two types of gamete, either female or male. Males are, at population level, bigger, stronger, faster, more violent etc etc. Individual variations between members of the same sex, or individual similarities between members of the 2 different sexes are irrelevant to the fact that sex itself is binary.
I know this isnt what you wanted to discuss, but sometimes the lack of understanding makes it very difficult to have a meaningful discussion at all.

I don't think that's what I mean. I don't really understand what you mean!

There are definitely traits which more males have than females. The patterns in these traits forms part of gender. For example, males are taller on average than females. Therefore, men are expected to be relatively tall and women are expected to be relatively short.

When you see someone, you use this gendered pattern to help determine their sex. Whether someone is taller or shorter is one factor that goes into that determination.

Society perpetuates these patterns, but they're true, so there's nothing wrong with that. Society also perpetuates oversimplified stereotypes like men like military history and women don't. This isn't fair to assert, so there is something wrong with it.

I'm not saying no one knows what sex is anymore; I'm saying that to determine sex, we use gender.

I agree - I think we are in a transition - pun not intended - towards a future where gender stereotypes, expectations and ‘rules’ don’t exist in the way they do now.

And it won’t happen until women are as respected as men.

It used to be a rule/expectation in western society that decent women would not wear trousers - now you wouldn’t blink at a woman in the street wearing trousers.

Men do not have the same acceptance to express their individual tastes in traditionally female clothing.

I think it was easier for society to accept that of course women would want to wear ‘men’s’ clothing because it’s practical, often more comfortable etc.

But most men would not respect another man who wanted to wear skirts because they don’t consider women as equal to men deep down so why would a fellow man want to lower themselves to wear women’s clothing?

But my point is that they don't usually "pass" as the opposite sex - we generally know, because "being a woman" is a biological reality that has nothing to do with stereotypes. We instinctively recognise people's sex regardless of how they might choose to try to present themselves. You yourself acknowledge this when you say that we can usually tell from people's faces.

I agree with you that the aim of trans people is to use sex stereotypes to "pass" as the opposite sex. That is exactly right. However, they usually fail in their endeavour because simply adopting some stereotypes doesn't actually make someone a man or a woman and it doesn't make gender real either.

The stereotypes are often wrong, and they never apply to everyone in any case. I was told at school to study biology because I was a girl and girls didn't usually like physics. I stood my ground and insisted on doing physics anyway. I didn't want to conform to that particular stereotype, but that didn't make me a boy, or less of a girl, or anything. I was simply a girl who preferred physics.

We need to move away from these damaging stereotypes, which limit people and make them feel like they're doing something wrong if they don't "fit" the accepted stereotypes for their sex. It's fine for a woman to like things which might be more commonly associated with men. It's fine for a man to like things which might be more commonly associated with women. We are all just people with individual interests, preferences and personalities at the end of the day.

Your argument seems to be somewhat circular. You say that we use stereotypes as the basis for determining someone's gender, but you've also acknowledged that gender itself is nothing more than those stereotypes in any case. So you are effectively saying that we make observations about the stereotypes that people have chosen to adopt in order to determine which stereotypes they have chosen to adopt. What does that tell us about anything?

OP, the fact that males are taller than females (at population level) is due to their male sex. It has nothing to do with 'gender'.

I'm not saying no one knows what sex is anymore; I'm saying that to determine sex, we use gender.

And you'd be wrong. Those are some of the signifiers but by no means the only ones we use.

We use that as very young children - there are plenty of experiments that show if you put a doll in a dress or in traditionally boys clothes a three year old will thing they have gone from a girl to a boy.

But as we get a little older, women in particular are very good at identifying a person's sex in real life when that person moves and speaks. Online, filters can make many "pass" but not in real life. Look at Lavern Cox and Ellen Page (can't remember her new name, sorry). Cox is obviously male with plastic surgery, Page is obviously female with plastic surgery.

Men are actually rubbish at distinguishing. It's something evolutionary, but they see boobs and go WOMAN, even when to 90% of women it's obviously a cross-dressing man. There are plenty on studies on that too.

I don't have a feminine frame I have a female frame

How is getting a haircut or having your nails done gender affirming care?

look mate. Your argument is so weak it’s practically on the floor. Human have been able to differentiate between the sexes since the dawn of humanity. Why is it only now so very very complicated. Oh yeah, cos men want access to female spaces. I hope you learn more critical thinking and debating skills at uni. So far a nine year old could wipe the floor with you.

Cos girly things innit.

The person I was responding to (I don't know if that's you) used several examples of trans-identifying people. Every single example was about a trans-identifying male. Other users have termed the gender-affirming movements as a 'men's rights movement'. It's fair to say that the gender-critical movement places a larger emphasis on trans-identifying men than trans-identifying women, even if the overall numbers are roughly equal and trans-identifying women are more common in younger generations. (This focus might be fair, given the differences in potential harm - I'm not saying that this emphasis shouldn't exist, just saying that it does.)

I am glad to hear that 'young women ... being led down a path to misery' is so motivational to much of the gender-critical movement, but this doesn't change the focus I mention above, and I think you need to consider that gender dysphoria is a genuine neurological condition. A large part of trans-identifying women will not be genuinely dysphoric in this way; 'the rise in TiFs with autism, eating disorders and histories of traumas' helps explain this. You're correct that these women need require mental healthcare.

But at the same time, there are trans-identifying women who have not been 'led down a path to misery'. There are trans-identifying women who have felt severe disgust and hatred of their bodies - their sex - from an incredibly young age, who have felt disassociation with the gender - that they are women - placed upon them, for no reason but e.g. prenatal hormonal exposure (a brain-body mismatch). The same applies to trans-identifying men.

The young women you mention, those with mental health difficulties, those with certain fetishes, the elderly who transition and don't seem to have a gender identity - they are not genuinely dysphoric and should be treated with therapy (e.g. CBT). However, there are men who have real dysphoria (not a fetish or an aim to disadvantage women) and there are women who have real dysphoria (not having being led down a path to transition), and the best treatment for them is transitioning and societal acceptance of their different gender. (That doesn't mean that males should be let into female spaces though, etc. etc.)

Exactly. And that is still modern uk Britain. Manicures are girly

I didn't know that women were better at identifying sex than men. That explains quite a lot!

To me, it's usually really obvious, regardless of how people are dressed or presenting. And it was really obvious to my dd as a child as well - I remember her being confused by trans women on a few occasions because she could see that they were in the "wrong" clothes. Obviously, I just explained that some men do like to wear skirts and dresses, and that that was fine. I wouldn't have dreamt of gaslighting her by trying to tell her that they were actually women. She instinctively knew that they were men.

Does anyone really looks at a man in a dress with make up and high heels and conclude that it is a woman? I have always assumed that we all know the truth but are playing along in an Emperor's New Clothes kind of way. But perhaps if men are really bad at distinguishing, they do actually fall for it?

There are not frames that are male and frames that are female

Of course there are.
The human anatomical skeleton is invariably recognisably either male or female.