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?

You guys are misunderstanding me. I’m on your side. Society is horribly sexist. Gender comes from stereotypes about what a woman is, which are still pervasive in our culture.

where we diverge is you think you’re above the brainwashing. I do not

I think the reason you’ve had pushback here is that the OP is asking about apples and you’re talking about oranges.

I agree with you that gender expectations and stereotypes are pushed onto us due to our sex. It’s real, regressive and does inform and mould what we can and can’t do. It’s something radical feminism was pushing back against for years.

Until the gender loons came along and insisted this gendered identity is innate, unchangable (such to the extent we need to change our bodies to match it) and everybody has one. Obviously gender is imposed on us, not something we just have. It’s regressive and quite stupid to assume we also have an inner innate one - even more so when countless women and very clearly saying they don’t in-fact have one and are told they are just wrong about it.

No. I cannot believe that we are born attracted to a set of gender stereotypes (specific to the culture we live in too).

The idea of a person's gender identity in the sense of something differing from that person's sex yet somehow (how?) matching or not with that sex is incoherent. So gender identity exists only in the same way as other incoherent notions such as a circle that is square, the rational number whose square is two, the set of all those sets which are not members of themselves, and so on.

That is, to put it simply, there could not be such a thing as gender identity in that sense.

What???

Um, no one thinks they are “above” it. We all experience it differently and to different extents. How it affects us depends on our personality and other aspects of our upbringing. What we don’t do is think that this external concept being shoved onto us means it’s innate somehow.

Agree! This is not innate. This is you being brainwashed into thinking you need to look a certain way to hit a stupid ideal

If that's the case, how come gendered behaviours are time- and culturally-bound? I don't see British women sporting chin tattoos, yet these are traditional for Maori women. I also don't see 20th century men sporting the amazingly decorated knee-length dresses and tights doublets and hose that Henry VIII wore. History does not record a sudden outbreak of gender dysphoria amongst Land Army girls and female welders performing "men's jobs" in "men's clothes" during WW2.

If being coerced into behaviours associated with your sex was something that caused distress to some people because of innate gender identity, those behaviours would have to be fixed for all of humanity at all times. They aren't.

Nobody has ever assigned a gender identity to me.

How did I get missed out?

Gender is a misogynist religion.
It is very modern - did not exist 20 years ago
and will hopefullg go out of fashion soon

I have never heard a coherent explanation of what gender identity actually is, so no, I don't think it exists.

And therefore I don't think it's innate.

I do however think that some people feel uncomfortable with the gender stereotypes that society has foisted upon them, and they incorrectly conclude that they have been born "in the wrong body" because they instinctively feel uncomfortable with aspects of what society tells them men/women or boys/girls should be like.

The fundamental flaw in their logic is that they assume it is their body which is wrong and not just the stereotypes.

There is a lot of discussion about this in Pacific countries where there is a social construction about feminine males and masculine females. It is noted in these countries there is less room for accpeting same-sex relationships as western countries.

From my perspecitive I think due to the sexual dimorphism in humans is what leads to gender. Males are significantly bigger/stronger than females which means that in terms of civilisation males are able to complete more physical labour than females of the same age. When this became linked to surivial that is where "gender" arose from.

Because humans have significant mental capacity where we can conceptualise individual nervous output feelings rather than react to behaviour, it would also make sense that for some people their feelings around social roles would be outside of their bodies. As some of that conceptualisation has been spiritulised then I can see why some people would consider this a soul and that soul to be strongly linked with their self.

Where I think gender ideology gets it wrong is they have taken the Descates "I think therefore I am" to an unachievable extreme. They have have created a ideologic structure permitting people to have believes that their gender is the reality, rather than their body. What they haven't done is put the guardrails up of this is my reality but it does not reflect reality for everyone else.

Most people can do this themselves, we are a social species and therefore it benefits our survial to get along. I have no doubt that most Transwomen especially are horrified at the - misogny, same-sex sports, forcing women to share spaces where they are at risk, and the transitioning children- being conducted in their name.

The people that cannot see outside of their own feelings are the people predominately on social media and in politics. There was research on narcissistic tendancies and their said that actors have a high level of narcissitc traits but that gets kicked out of them in the training and auditioning process. Influencers it apparently gets worse, making it look like the majority of trans people.

TL:DR I don't believe in a gendered soul but I can see why some people do. The issue isn't what people feel, but how they expect others to see them.

@mattala - this is the view that everyone else is disagreeing with, and which you are implicitly supporting by endorsing the idea of gender identity.

I suspect though that,.like the rest of us, you can see that this is incoherent and regressive.

Literally most men you’ve come into contact with have probably assigned some form of the Madonna whore complex onto you.
my argument is while you might not think you have a gender identity, sexism is so pervasive that how you present your sex influences how you are treated. A gender identity forms from how you interact with the world and how it forms your expectations.

I believe in gender identities. You cannot live in this society and escape sexism.
what I don’t believe this proves is it’s innate. How can you know until you raise someone outside of it? And how could you possibly do that?

No, it’s an assertion that there is a set of feelings or beliefs that define your sex better than your body does. It’s metaphysical and thus akin to the idea of a soul. IMO gender = sex stereotypes.

Broadly speaking, the sexes often differ in certain ways within a specific culture. I don’t believe that differing from those societal norms make you, in any way, closer to the opposite sex. It can’t, because what defines you as male/female, man/woman, boy/girl is not your beliefs about yourself, but your physical body.

There are many ways to be a girl, but that doesn’t include being a boy.

I think you're talking about sex.

Nonsense. There are two sexes. An infinite number of unique personslitues. ‘Gender’ is reductive and deals in stereotypes.

I don't have a gender identity. I have a sex and a personality.

i wish I was. But pretty privelege is a thing and it’s based on stereotypes about gender. You can’t control how other people treat you and you need the skin of a rhino not to be impacted.

You are talking about sexism and misogyny not gender or gender identity.
Gender is a social construct which is ever changing.
Many of us grew up with David Bowie, punk and the new romantics we rejected gendered stereotypes and still do as they are misogynistic bs.
As for womens rights you don't need to lecture the women on this board about that, many of us have fighting for them for decades which is why we are so pissed off by the backsliding of them caused by gender identity ideology.

I don’t get why gender identity harms women’s rights.
if you accept that be kind is gender identity and not innate to women, how is that not progressive?

No, I got brainwashed years ago by "progressive circles" into assuming I was agender or gender fluid or similar nonsense because my social circle all believed in gender and I had a distinct lack of any gendery feeling, and on closer examination I realised it has entirely no evidence basis and that the whole thing is sexist bollocks.

I don't think believing in gender makes any of them happier and certainly doesn't make them more progressive, just gives them a focus to obsess over that worsens their mental health and sucks them into a culture that excuses rank misogyny, reinforces sexist stereotypes and encourages a sense of victimhood whilst perversely encouraging violence from it's adherents. I dropped those friends, what they were posting online was unacceptable and I can only hope they grew up and realised what bollocks it all was before they caused too much damage to either themselves or others.

Equally you can use it to argue gender is a social construct and therefore can’t possibly be innate

I was being sarcastic.