these are my thoughts about the question: what is gender identity? and what does my gender identity mean?
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). some of my thoughts about gender identity are based on things i know about binary trans people, but of course many of my feelings are quite different in many ways. i think my tone here is super essay, i am NOT trying to sound like argiung or teaching, but it would of course make me very happy if these thoughts help anyone to understand <3 i do think this is something that takes effort to understand. (case in point, i had occasional thoughts about my own femininity for a long time before i decided a label felt right!)
what is gender/sex?
usually, the word “sex” is hardly used because “sex”, ha ha. but in academic writing, these are two different words.
- “sex” is a purely physical thing, e.g. related to:
- their reproductive role (the individuals they can reproduce with).
- their (external) reproductive organ.
- their chromosomes.
- many of their physical features.
- “gender” is a purely non-physical thing, e.g. related to:
- something they know about themselves.
- the way they want to be perceived and go through life, e.g. being treated the way similar people 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.
so a few things stand out (to me, at least) when actually thinking about this:
- “sex” (“gender”) is kind of a complex approximate summary of multiple factors that can be different.
- combining all of the factors is necessary because none of them really mean what “sex” (“gender”) means. (the clearest example being that chromosomes mean nothing, because no one knows anyone’s chromosomes including their own.)
- there is no number of options for “sex” (“gender”). people are all different from each other.
- there is no reason to think sex and gender should match. they are different from each other.
the uh “big reveal” of this section is that gender is the non-physical thing that is culturally associated with sex: in our society, the cultural entanglement is so deep that we literally use the same words for them. going forward in this page i will favour the word “gender” where possible, as usual.
binary?
thinking, speaking, and ultimately getting through the day would be impossible without inventing boxes to put things in. in seemingly all cultures, people have invented classifications of gender based on two of them: i guess this originates from the fact it takes exactly two different people to make a baby. (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.)
many cultures, including western cultures and the cultures dominated and colonised by western cultures, historically had a binary system of boxes: there are exactly two sexes and exactly two genders. however, other boxes are available. even though 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 assumptions of a binary system are true for most people. this is just as true as the fact that most is not all.
“intersex” and “non-binary gender” are the modern English terms used for people who don’t fit in the binary systems for sex and gender since western scientists/authors have begun to talk about the fact that we exist.
(the next and final sections are incomplete and contain unfinished and/or unorganised thoughts.)
transgender
in modern western society, we put people in boxes extensively. to an extent it is normal to make judgements based on things that are visible. an important example of this happening is when a baby is born. someone (e.g. a doctor) fills in some paperwork including the baby’s gender. (for most babies, this is an easy choice based on a single look at their genitals. for some intersex babies whose genitals aren’t easily classifiable, the choice can be more difficult; this can include a doctor or parents choosing one binary gender and doing surgery on the baby to make them closer to their expectation.) the gender that was picked for them at this time is their gender assigned at birth. “transgender” is the modern English term used for people whose gender is not the same as the gender they were assigned at birth.
many cultures, including western cultures and the cultures dominated and colonised by western cultures, have historically had a binary system of boxes: there are exactly two possible sexes and exactly two possible genders, and everyone’s sex and gender matches, and is also the same as their assigned gender at birth, and is always simple and always obvious. under this system, sexes and genders get described using the same two words, man and woman. because this is not true, and because a society built assuming that some people don’t exist is harmful to them, recent western culture has been moving away from these assumptions and the language based on them.
it’s okay not to know things. i do think it really takes some thought. we use the same words for sex and gender. culturally they are so deeply associated. i personally think understanding this is what it takes to understand. 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.
i think the common way to use words now is to use ‘man’ and ‘woman’ as terms for genders (not the only ones), and to realise you are not usually talking about people’s bodies and things you don’t know.
being perceived incorrectly (misgendered) is usually associated with severe distress (dysphoria) for a multitude of reasons. 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?
i’m comparing it to identity disorders (‘multiple personalities’). is it possible for someone to have an identity in their brain? yes, that is exactly where identities are…! they obviously don’t have separate physical bodies, and it simply needs to be understand that these words don’t mean that.
… 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!
a person’s perception of their gender 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. some trans people report having similar sensations to amputees having “phantom limbs”, with their internal mental body maps failing to match their physical body (which is associated with feelings of distress)
my gender
to try to clarify, on this page i want to reflect and share what it means to me to think about my gender identity. to actually read about me, that’s over on another page.
in the society we live in, there are assumptions about men that aren’t true about me and i don’t want them to be. i communicate this by using different words. there isn’t an external factor that my feelings have to match. what i want to say is what is true. (i say this as a person who is comfortable having the typical physical characteristics of the sperm-producing sex. it’s not my fault that our culture tries to use the same words for gender and sex. my perspective of people insisting on a different meaning for words is that it is just unhelpful. it is not really even the kind of thing that can be ‘wrong’.)
i should say, obviously cis men are not all walking stereotypes. since it is a difference in feeling, i wouldn’t say there is an obvious describable difference between me and a feminine cis man. indeed it is only recently that this line of reasoning that using words is a way to tell people things made me decide to use these words — it feels good (and true) to start people off with better assumptions.