These are my thoughts about the question: what is gender identity? Obviously my feelings are very different from binary trans people in some ways. Some of my thoughts about gender identity are things I know about their thoughts. This is what it means to me to say I’m non-binary (and not a man with some characteristics that are different from average).
uh pretty big disclaimers: these are some of my personal thoughts that i’ve worked through. i’m not very familiar with other people’s thoughts (probably less than i should be). i am not trying to come across as presumptuous or hostile if read by someone who doesn’t know or understand or agree!!! i am sharing largely for their benefit <3 at the same time, i don’t want to sound like i’m trying to “teach”. i only have my personal thoughts and feelings.
what is gender/sex?
informally, the word “sex” is hardly used because “sex”, ha ha. but in academic writing, these are two different words.
- “sex” is something physical. for example the sex of any animal (including humans) might be about:
- their reproductive role (the individuals they can reproduce with).
- their (external) reproductive organ.
- their chromosomes.
- many of their physical features.
- i think i’d say “gender” is the word we eventually invented for the non-physical things we associate with sex. it’s a cultural concept. for example the gender of a human might be about:
- something they know about themselves.
- the way they want to be perceived and go through life, e.g. being treated like other people of their gender are treated.
- many of their learned behaviours (“gender performativity”), including things like the clothes and hairstyles they wear and the words they use to describe themselves.
- societal expectations and limits, such as roles like leaders, priests and servants.
binary?
sex and gender have to be some more complex overarching concepts that try to summarise the above ideas, because they are too simple to work literally:
- all of the ideas are different from each other and don’t necessarily align.
- many of the ideas don’t exactly work on their own. especially the things you wouldn’t actually know about someone, even though you do know their gender. so they can’t be what gender is.
- also, none of the ideas has a specific number of options. there is no limit to the ways people ultimately are all different from each other.
but thinking, speaking, and ultimately getting through the day would be impossible without inventing boxes to put things in. obviously something exists that differs between people, that’s how babies are made. indeed it takes exactly two different people to have a baby. in seemingly all cultures, people have invented classifications of sex and gender based on at least two of them: presumably, this fact is the origin of that. (logically, the fact there are many different pairs doesn’t mean there’s a total of two options, especially because many people are not parents at all.) so even though these boxes are not reality, they certainly are real as a result of being invented (i.e. they’re a social construct), and they’re based on real pattern recognition: the vast majority of people do fit neatly into two boxes.
this is just as true as the fact that some people don’t. while binary gender (the system of exactly two boxes) is used in many cultures, including western cultures and the cultures dominated and colonised by western cultures, other boxes are available. the English words “intersex” and “non-binary gender” are used for people who don’t fit in the binary systems for sex and gender. (there is a fairly major difference between these two things: someone’s body not fitting into a box is something a test can show or a doctor can tell them, while their gender not fitting into a box is much more of a personal journey and something they have to think about to understand.)
(the next and final sections are incomplete and contain unfinished and/or unorganised thoughts.)
Transgender
When a baby is born, it is commonly required for someone (e.g. a doctor) to choose a binary sex to write down. For most people, this is an easy choice based on a single look at their newborn genitals. For some intersex people whose genitals aren’t easily classifiable, the choice is more random, and may be followed up with unnecessary surgeries to make the choice more correct. The gender that matches that sex that was picked for them is their gender assigned at birth.
Because it is easy to make judgements based on things we can see, it is normal to assume people’s gender.
we live in a society. sex and gender are so universally and deeply associated that many of us have fully internalised the idea these are many aspects of a single strict binary classification where the words “sex” and “gender” are synonyms. in particular, sex and gender are not only assumed, but they’re also assumed to match.
(this feeling is “real” enough that it has been seen on brain scans: when seeing themselves or someone else, their brain activity is different when they recognise/relate compared to when they don’t.)
(being perceived incorrectly (misgendered) is usually associated with severe distress (dysphoria).)
what does it mean to recognise someone’s real gender? why are people with different genders treated differently anyway? why is there segregation of bathrooms and sports? should gender just be less associated with sex? can it?
some people’s internal mental body maps don’t match their physical body (like amputees having phantom limb sensations) (which is associated with feelings of distress)
what about other things and analogies and silly things people say?
“trans height”? is it possible for someone to have a height in their brain? no…! height isn’t a mental characteristic. “trans race”? actually possibly exists, idfk what race is.
i’m comparing it to identity disorders (‘multiple personalities’). is it possible for someone to have an identity in their brain? yes…! they obviously don’t have separate physical bodies, but these words don’t mean that they do.
… really?
a point that occurs to me is that a question of existence or possibility is definitively answered by a single example. trans people exist. people whose genders aren’t binary exist. people whose genders aren’t the same as their assigned sexes exist. we are right here — hello! it’s nice to meet you!
i suspect more people would understand if gender was something not associated with sex, and e.g. new words different from ‘man’ and ‘woman’ were used instead.
it’s okay not to know things. i think it really takes some thought. we use the same words for sex and gender for a reason. even though they are different, culturally they are so deeply associated. i personally think understanding this is what it takes to understand.