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?

Id like him to explain how telling a bunch of women all about this and how he's right and we are all wrong is any different from a fucking incel.

Both believe we are incapable of independent thought of an intellectual level of the same level or better than him.

Despite the fact we've actually passed degrees and have decades more of life experience and lived experience as women.

Personally until he's given birth he can shut up from telling us what a woman is and isn't tbh.

That makes me think of the students that get all upset in this video.

It really is.

“Considering the disputed and unevidenced claim that transitioning is medically effective for certain people”, is im sure what you meant to say, with all your totally robust and rational arguments.

This is patent nonsense. Sorry, I know you're young, and I don't want to be mean, but seriously...please just read a basic Ecology textbook, ie not even 'hard' science. Size, build etc are sex-based biological differences between males and females.

I have never seen a coherent (non-circular) description of "gender identity" and I think its application in practice has been sad for people with mental health issues focussed on their body, and problematic for the rest of us. We live in a world in which the idea has been to some extents cemented into law ( think gender reassignment) and we're having to navigate the fallout.

I worked as a clerk for a woman at a medium sized company, answering phones, setting up appointments, filing...sundry office stuff. She invited the women (3 of 10 employees) for an 'offsite' meeting once every few months for mani-pedis. She called it mentorship and an opportunity for motivation and empowerment. I cannot easily remember any business task or career development done. I don't think it was gender-affirming care.

Haven't RTFT but to answer the original question, no, I don't think gender identity exists in any objective sense, or is innate.

I do think that some people believe they have a gender identity, and maybe this is very real to them. In much the same way as some people believe Jesus Christ is the Messiah and died to save them: for such people, their belief may be central to how they understand themselves and their purpose in the world. I can't disprove it, but I don't believe it myself, nor do any of the people who I know personally who are of that faith seem to mind too much that I don't share it. We mostly don't talk about it: they don't do or say anything that requires me to affirm their faith, and I don't do or say anything to deliberately offend or goad them.

Some people believe they have a gender identity and this is very important to how they see themselves. I don't mind. So long as they don't try to compel me to affirm their faith, or use their faith to enter spaces or take resources not meant for them, that's fine and we can all get along.

I think gender is external, it's the set of cultural stereotypes, values, laws etc built up over time in any given society. I don't think it's inborn or innate. Helen Joyce calls it a 'gendered soul' and I think that's a good way to think about it. It seems very far-fetched to me that people might have a gendered soul, and like any faith-based proposition it's unfalsifiable: I can't disprove it any more than I can disprove the existence of God, but I don't believe it and there's no actual scientific evidence for it.

Yet society does determine sex using gendered stereotypes.

Not really. Stereotypes may be used to guess sex in some circumstances (small children for example), but as soon as physiological differences become visible they dominate our perception. This really struck me at one point last year when I happened to be walking down the street behind this man. Blond ponytail, short skirt, lacy top, heels, still obviously male, from 50m behind just walking down the street. Sure enough when he turned a corner his face was also unmistakeably male under the plastered on female stereotyped makeup. Obviously I can't know if he would have self-identified as a transwoman, a fetish cross dresser, a drag queen or just a bloke poking fun at stereotypes.

The end result of this, society seeing a person as male or female, is what I believe determines a person's gender as a man or a woman respectively.

This position doesn't stand up to a few minutes thought. You seem to be wanting to define a person's "gender" as what sex society guesses them to be. But society just means other people, and other people don't have a single stable view. It would depend on lighting conditions, proximity, how good your eyesight is, how many clothes they're wearing at any given moment. What are we supposed to do, take a vote to determine someone's gender? Who was that transwoman comedian who played the piano with his dick on live television? Everyone will have correctly identified him as male at that point if they didn't before.

The OP said that being pregnant is a "gendered trait", so while I genuinely appreciate his efforts to communicate his viewpoint - it's been interesting!- I think he uses "gendered" and "gender stereotypes" to refer to any physical characteristics which we'd normally attribute to sex.

It's the same old conflation of sex/gender but just shoved down a bit more.

Jordan Gray.

Sometimes, there is no point in starting a conversation/debate until the 'terms are defined'.

The big one here is 'gender'.

Is this being used as a coy replacement of 'sex', or is it being used as steretypes, or as an identity (gender identity)?

All those things are on people's faces. I tend not to look at faces. Height, size of hand and feet, and fat distribution are more telling, but gait is the critical one. As soon as someone moves you can see what sex they are. The way they sit and stand is different. I'm short sighted, but without my glasses I would still be able to tell a walking man from a walking woman. Women can. It's a safety feature.

And, since I'd don't seem to have said it on this thread, a reminder that the use of 'cis' in these discussions was invented by the deeply dodgy Volkmar Sigusch. Don't let him influence your thinking. Don't use 'cis'

grokipedia.com/page/Volkmar_Sigusch

Not by me.

I am a woman because of my sex.

I am female.

That blackbird is male because of his sex.

He is male.

That Wild arum spadix is covered in male flowers from which the hidden female flowers will be fertilised.

The inflorescence comprises both male and female parts.

Masculine and feminine are grammatical terms. they do not apply to living things.

The Arum is neither feminine nor masculine.

The blackbird is not masculine.

I am not feminine.

Gender is another grammatical term, not properly applied to living things. Neither the Arum, the blackbird, nor I , have gender.

Judith Butler is a self-serving flim-flam artist, best ignored.

NRTFF How astonishing that "identifying" as something plainly untrue, ever got a moment of serious attention, from the general public. I cannot "identify" as brown-eyed, if my eyes are brown. I cannot "identify" as a five year old, if my birth was thirty years ago. Mentally deranged people may "identify" as kings, but the non-deranged community would not dream of treating them as such.

It is bewildering that anyone in the latter group is willing to use the word 'trans'. There cannot be any such thing as 'trans': Nobody can 'transition' into what they are factually unable to be.

We must stop tolerating the invented words of the sinister cult. Indulging a fantasy is tacitly colluding.

Since gender is a made-up thing being 'unable' doesn't really come into it.

Part of my personality and the way I interact with people comes from my belief in God. That's a belief in something that cannot be proved - very widely shared with other people all over the planet and back for as long as history exists, but as 'made -up' in its own way as gender (which has only been around for a few decades). It is hugely important to me.

I don't demand that others share my belief, or that they are punished or shunned for openly stating their own atheism.

I agree with you Dean.

I think that I would have liked the OP of this thread to lay out his definitions. It might have even have helped him clarify his own thoughts, and I would have found it helpful.

I personally like plain, specific, accurate language. I actually think it's one of the things that made me not go along with 'be kind'. I also find lies really hard at a visceral level. I actually spent a lot of time thinking about whether I was wrong or not and revisited my conclusions to see if they still stood up many times. The problem I found was that the more I thought about it, the more I could see the harms. The harms to the people with trans identities themselves who identify as the opposite sex is actually what made me fully decide that I couldn't go along with it full stop.

To answer the OP's original question - I do not have a 'gender identity'. I have thought about it and I reject the idea as a modern Gnostic made-up concept. Gender identity is the rejection of the material world and reality. People who identify as trans do not have some sort of special mystical knowledge about their gendered soul (for want of a better term). I reject that this gendered soul exists at all.

Gender identity is the rejection of the material world and reality.

Well said, @CassOle

You are saying though, that ‘cis gender’ is a term for women who are comfortable with the gender norms of their own sex. No woman with half a brain is comfortable with all the gender norms associated with being female, from femininity to stereotypical likes or dislikes or ways of behaving, nor are many men. I was a teenager decades ago, in my all girls school we were told that we should be proud of our sex, should do and be anything at all and not allow social norms to restrict us. Hence more than the average number of girls from my school going into stem.
No people really fit into a gender category, even trans identifying people who try extremely hard to do just that. My heterosexual male farmer friend who reads Vogue, my female friends who have short hair and have never worn makeup, my female friends who have jobs considered more normal for men. My mother who was a young woman in the fifties, when women were being encouraged back into more traditional roles, yet who (unlike my Dad) the one who could do electrical wiring and build walls.
We are all gender ‘non binary’ but we all have a sex, that most of us accept the reality of, even though we may not like the restrictions, or the abuse, imposed on us.
The idea that women who don’t identify as trans are somehow comfortable with the current gender norms for women is ridiculous and totally lacking in understanding of how women feel about how they are treated.
There are some sexed behaviours that I feel are probably innately evolved and instinctive to some degree rather than learnt socially, mostly around children and childbirth. In my experience I’ve observed that (with individual variation obvs) women tend to have a heightened awareness of danger regarding children, compared to men. Women can have a heightened awareness of danger in general, probably from greater vulnerability in terms of strength and pregnancy. Women are not just smaller men, we will have evolved slightly differently, just as all other animals have. These differences are not the same as personality traits such as liking feminine things. We are biologically slightly different and vulnerable to different diseases, and different presentations of disease. We are more than just humans with higher oestrogen levels and lower testosterone. A man who raises the former and lowers the latter is still not the same as a woman.
I have a teenage daughter and another at university. The younger was talking about a friend of hers who is calling herself non-binary. We had a chat about this. Daughter feels that using plural pronouns for her friend is the same as using a new name, if her friend had decided to change it. She feels she being kind. I feel the opposite. Mostly though, this just makes me feel really sad. The regression from my own teenage years, my female friends in dms and overcoats, with short hair. My male friends in full face of makeup. It seems obvious to me how regressive this trend is, how it has sprung up in the US and spread, just as women were making actual inroads into equality.
So to tell us women, many of whom have lived through these shifts, birthed and brought up children, that we are “cis” is offensive. Please stop doing it. It’s as offensive as telling me I must be non-binary or trans when I think it is all regressive nonsense. It also used to be a banned term on mumsnet I thought ?

I have also noticed a tendency for people to think this ideology is progressive, simply because it is fairly new. There is this idea that we always move in a linear way in terms of progress, and that was true for British women in terms of their rights, through the 20th century. So people expect this to another positive progression. You only have to look at other countries to see this isn’t true at all, that progress for women that took centuries can be undone in a couple of years.

cis

better not used

grokipedia.com/page/Volkmar_Sigusch

I hate the term 'cis gender'.

I especially hate being told 'it just means not trans, what are you moaning about?

Its like calling atheists 'sinners' or 'heretics'. Its not a neutral descriptor. Its loaded.

Correction: "I cannot "identify" as brown eyed, if my eyes are blue" is what I meant to write. Tut tut. Sorry for my shamefully bad proof reading.