this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (17 children)

Gender identity is biological, and gender is not only a social construct:

https://www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2013/10/07/book-excerpt-gender-more-performance

EDIT: this is clarified in the walls of text in my responses below, but to be clear here, I do not endorse a biological essentialist account of gender, by saying gender is not only a social construct and has biological components, I am disagreeing with a view that gender is just socialization / performance / etc., but this does not mean I endorse the view that gender is just your chromosomes / genitals / etc. Neither of these views work.

Please read the article I linked to, and for additional reading see Whipping Girl by Julia Serano, esp. relevant to this discussion is chapter 6, some of which I quoted in my responses below.

When I say gender identity is biological, I am talking about what Julia Serano calls "subconscious sex" which she also sometimes interchanges with "gender identity", which is basically that innate and unchanging sense of your sex / gender. What I don't mean by gender identity is the label you choose to identify with (or the concept that label represents).

From Whipping Girl:

the phrase “gender identity” is problematic because it seems to describe two potentially different things: the gender we consciously choose to identify as, and the gender we subconsciously feel ourselves to be. To make things clearer, I will refer to the latter as subconscious sex.

[–] Bacano 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Thank you for trying to give a well documented take on the effects of biological sex on gender identity on Lemmy lol

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

lol, thanks - hopefully I'm actually helping, I feel so far like I'm just pissing people off

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