Every time I start thinking about gender I slip into thinking about social constructs like old fashioned gender roles or male and female clothes. I've basically realized that if you take away those things, I have NO IDEA what constitutes gender identity. Ideas?
Gender identity is you, hoe you like to be percieved, if your inner being, the shape of your soul, your home and wellbeing, how your soul feels, your core, it cant be changed, when people address you from your core (pronouns) it makes you feel at home Somethin' like that, speaking from experience. I can say Im NB, but I can describe my gender as a place for myself, a void with smooth elastic walls… even if my likes, my friends, my personality changed, it would still be the same. My gender is rigid and firm.
It's... Your soul. For lack of a better term. Deep down, how you feel. How you want your body to be. How you want to be addressed socially. And when you find the right term, you'll know it. When you finally figure out who you are, you'll just know it, to find out what was missing all along.
Men and women are different, using the binary simplification. It's just hard to tell what is conditioned and what is innate. However, trans people are conditioned to be of their sex and still feel connection with other gender(s) thus proving there is some innate quality of male/female spectrum. It is simply not (yet) researched enough, because all humans went through cultural conditioning and it is impossible to make innate/cultural separate to study the details.
Well, All these people state what gender is. From my experience, what many people would call gender is far to individual to be defined. Personally (and this is no more right or wrong than any other definitions given) gender isn't natural. You spoke about gender as a social construction and if you accept that then is that not saying that gender is not innate? That we are just a product of our environment? If you take that away then there is no gender. In my mind that is gender. Nothing more. I just say "The Danish Girl" (which by the way I thought was fantastic) and in it the characters spoke of there being two people Einar (Assigned male part) and Lili (true female part). But also there was a third not-person, the character themself. I see this manifested as "we are all humans under the many layers of society we wrap have wrapped around us." For me gender is not innate but rather a layer society uses to define people. Anyone agree or disagree? I'd love to hear why.
Explain body dysphoria if gender is not a thing. I mean, if it was just a social role, you could have happy feminine guys, and no trans women, right? There are some differences to how emotions are perceived and how the brain works... and those hints pop out across different cultures. Saying gender is just a construct feels like making trans people freaks - because it is not just about social role, this is more subtle - and that subtle thing is gender identity. Elusive and hard to study, but consistently showing hints of its existence.
I feel the same exact way, and I find it easier to think of myself as genderless. "Other people feel something that I don't feel...not related to gender roles, they're feeling something else" fits better into my world view compared to "why do other people care so much about gender roles? Gender roles don't deserve that much attention" Many people agree that gender roles suck. I've been told that gender identity has nothing to do with stereotyped gender roles ...and I can believe that, if I think of myself as genderless. They are feeling something that I don't feel.
For me, it's just how I want my body to be and how I want to be seen. The idea that my "soul" is supposed to feel a certain way is completely incomprehensible for me and is useless to me as a definition. I'm sure it works for other people, but it's meaningless to me. I don't think there's any one feeling all guys or all girls have, and I'm pretty sure gender as we know it now would completely cease to exist if there were no gender roles or stereotypes, so I rely on physical and concrete definitions that would exist regardless of whether our society did or did not have gender roles and stereotypes.
The less conservative a nation is, the more stereotypical (statically) gender division becomes. Go figure. From all the reaserch I read in my life, gender identity would be subtle differences in brain mechanics. If it would just be gender roles... there would be no transsexuals, just people dissatisfied with their gender role. I mean, check this out. You could look at Laura and ask... why the hell would she even transition? She's no different than her former pretending to be male self. That's the source of my confusion too, I fit in by large to male gender role and yet I feel female. Sort of. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFz_uWapX_0 She's being in stereotypically male gender role, has more male clothing, and generally does what girls aren't encouraged to do. And yet, she transitioned. That's because gender identity is more subtle than gender role, and the two are not the same.
Its what you want your body to be, your soul, if you are religous think of it as the way God see's you
I would suggest to stop viewing gender as something minor and insignificant. Gender is at the core of our selves and being, it is the framework on which identity is built and our sense of self is heavily dependent on having a gender that aligns with our body. From when we are born, immediately, every single word said to us, every action that others take is influenced by our gender. People who are cisgender struggle to understand what it means to be transgender because gender is such an important part of their lives, that trying to imagine their lives without it is not something that a person can really do. It's a huge void at the core of our being that can't be filled, something that is deep down missing that leads to a life of pain and misery. This has nothing to do with gender roles and expression because they are nothing compared to what gender really is. Part of the reason why transphobia is so prevalent is that people are afraid to imagine a world where their gender might not align with their body. Why do parents feel such a huge sense of loss when they are told that their child is trans? It's because gender is a huge part of their memories and innate understanding of their child. They deep down do understand what it means and that is what disturbs them to the core of their being. In other words, yes, someone cisgender does know what gender means, they are just afraid to accept that it is possible to have their gender not align with their body and they search for other meanings that will take away their sense of discomfort. They tell themselves that it must be a mental disorder, or a narrative or anything else because they are afraid. So they adopt the narrative that gender roles and expressions are the reasons for someone identifying as trans because that would make it easy to cope with. We must be simply people of the gender we were assigned at birth who are non conforming, some even embrace the idea and look up to people who are trans for fighting against social pressures and being themselves. However, the truth us so much darker and accepting it is much harder than that... ask yourself, what is making you try to convince yourself that we've got it wrong, why do you care? That's gender, the thing that you are trying to show us that we are wrong about... The discomfort that you feel when you try to perceive a person that has the body of a man as a woman. If gender was so insignificant, why would this even be hard?
Same here. I don't know what to do with expressions like "inner truth", "soul" etc. Good luck and respect to everybody who works that way, though What's gender identity for me, though? I'd say it's somewhat a mixture of those aspects of my life and self: - being raised as female and my struggles of coping and conforming with that - my learning what women can be and do outside of gender roles - my inability to be comfortable with even the most liberal and empowering options for feminity - all the inner troubles and dialogue with the outside world, the carving-a-space-for-myself after coming out as trans - my process with my body - my process with my sexual and romantic orientation - my insecure and awkward stance towards masculinity [presentation-wise] as an alternative option Gender for me is mostly something I do. Something that does me, more like. Not something I just am, deep down or anywhere else. Thing is, that doesn't make it any less important, traumatic, true. Just because I believe it's a construct that doesn't mean it doesn't hurt, as a lot of cis and trans people seem to think. :icon_sad:
If that's a construct, then why am I not comfortable as male, and I prefer transition over just being a feminine guy role? If it was just a construct, there would be no need to transition, merely choice to express one's self the way we like. It is a medical fact that there are differences in how male/female mind works, and that it is a spectrum not a binary. Those differences are not as obvious as conservatives would like them to be, they are more subtle, but on an individual level they affect one powerfully. This is not about "soul" or some other ideological concept. This is about subtle differences in the mind. And the more I research how dysphoria feels for others... it's not really about feeling "male" or "female". It's more about a detachment from your body, from what it represents. The feeling that you perceive the world like it is described for the opposite sex, from which connection arises (and is then named feeling male/female). Sometimes your mind is somewhere else on the spectrum, more "hybrid" in nature and that's where non binary identities come from. There isn't really something of a feeling male/female. We say it this way because it's easy to convey what we mean. Fact is, we define our identity in relation to others and if we find more common ground with people possessing different genitalia, we start developing dysphoria. Feeling male/female would imply there is some universal quality to being either. In reality both are merely a colection of certain brain mechanics, and a sufficient number of those qualities makes one happy wit their sex. If you have more of a mix, there is a non binary identity for that. And if your individual mix contains much more of the opposite sex, it means your mind is of the opposite gender than your body suggests. It is really not a construct. The only construct that exists is the one where men/women "have to" behave in certain ways. Existance of such obligation is a construct. The way mind works is not. Bottom line is... It is not easy to say what is conditioned and what is innate, but there are more than enough clues to clearly prove that male/female spectrum is a biological/psychological fact even if we can't say with certainty which traits are undoubtedly innate and which are undoubtedly conditined.
This original question is something I've been struggling with a lot recently. I've come to the point where I don't think that it is completely social but I also feel that you can't simply omit the social aspect. For example, I feel body dysphoria (non-social) and I feel connected to the terms he/him rather than she/hers (social). For me, both of these issues are important parts of understanding my gender identity. Ultimately, what gender identity means and how you perceive it is different per person. I wish I had more to say to try to help others with this question, but I'm on the end where I still have a lot to learn and understand.
"Social construct" doesn't mean "not real" or "insignificant". A social construct is something that wouldn't exist without people there to define it (e.g. language), but it doesn't change the fact that it becomes very real and important once it has been constructed. Gender has a social construct aspect to it. The terms "man" and "woman" as social roles would be completely meaningless if we didn't have gender roles and stereotypes, but unless we are able to completely abolish gender roles and stereotypes, they will always have real and significant social meaning. Even if gender were 100% a social construct, there would still always be people who felt so strongly that they did not fit under the label "man" or "woman" that they would need to transition to the other or find a new one. It actually isn't a medical fact that men and women have inherently different brains. It is a fact that brain scans show that men and women often do have different brains, but it is also a fact that brains are incredibly elastic. Did you know that London cab drivers have structurally different brains? Their brains physically change because of all the memorization of streets and addresses and directions. So it is entirely possible (and fairly likely) that men and women have different brains because their socialization means they are expected to excel at different things, and their brains change physically in response to what tasks they have learned to do best. The currently accepted theory of how physical dysphoria works is that the person has a brain map (your brain's inherent knowledge of what limbs, body parts, etc. you have) that doesn't match up to the body they actually have. Still, limiting the label "trans" to only people who have this mismatch of brain map and body is not currently feasible because the socially constructed aspects of gender are incredibly significant in our society, whether we like it or not. So unless we are able to 100% destroy the social ideas of gender (which I don't think we will ever be able to do), it is necessary to be accepting of those who don't fit the brain vs. body mismatch definition. There are lots of people who feel in their soul or their heart or wherever else that they just aren't the gender that they were told they are, and whatever that means to them individually, it should be accepted. Some people have physical dysphoria and still feel their gender is based in how they feel in their soul. Some people don't have physical dysphoria and feel their gender is based in how they feel in their soul. Some people have physical dysphoria and have no sense of feeling their gender in any way. It isn't fair to say that any of these people have the right or wrong definition of gender identity. I'm not trying to call you out for what you've said. I just noticed that we seem to come from similar perspectives (focus on the scientific basis of transness), and wanted to share my specific views.
I also had no idea. Everyone here makes excellent points. I think that it is difficult to say and very individual to each person. Personally I identify myself as a female, mainly because that is what I was assigned to at birth, and I have never experienced grnder dysphoria about being female. However, I don't feel uncomfortable with the idea of being a male. I think I would be equally ok with being male or female to be honest. (like objectively, I have obviously never experienced being a male) I think, Juno14 you should continue to explore ideas of gender until you are comfortable with what suits you. I don't think you need a label, but totally ok if you do. I know some prefer labels and some don't prefer labels good luck
