this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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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:
Okay, but what about those of us that have never had an innate and unchanging sense of my sex/gender?
The closer you look at these things the more complicated they become. What we seem to know from the science is that:
The science is just the current body of evidence we have, so we should expect our understanding to evolve as our evidence grows.
To more directly answer your question requires some clarification. It is unclear whether you're asking how subconscious sex relates to agender people (no sense of gender), or to gender fluid people (a changing sense), or detransitioners (sometimes changing sense), or even just any normal person, since none of us has that kind of direct access to our subconscious sex, it is implicit. If we could inspect it directly it would certainly make the whole "am I trans" or "am I a woman" question much easier, wouldn't it? Maybe someday we will have the technology, or maybe we will find that our concept of "woman" simply cannot be mapped to a complex biological trait like brain sex.
Subconscious sex is inferred, gender dysphoria and innate behavioral drives seem to give us footprints from which we can infer that subconscious sex from. Being a man and feeling the desire to wear a dress and skirt, how does he make sense of this? Maybe he assumes it's a fetish, but what if they enjoy it outside of sex, and maybe the sex when dressing up brings up so many complicated feelings (later she learns: dysphoric, even). Can it still be a fetish, can you be a crossdresser if you just want to wear a skirt around the house, but you have trouble extracting sexual pleasure from it? These are the kinds of investigating thoughts, the attempt to read between the lines. Some people might live their whole lives and never know their subconscious sex, they might successfully put off dealing with dysphoria or taking their crossdressing further. Some people have strong convictions from a young age and just know without as much ambiguity. There is quite a variety, just as the complex biology would imply.
It is also worth noting that it is a complicated relationship between something like subconscious sex or an innate brain sex and something like a self conception of one's gender. I certainly experience fluctuations in my self conception and even my felt sense of gender. Testosterone can make it much harder for me to feel like a woman. Moving through the world as a woman and being seen and treated as one by others creates a social circumstance that bolsters a psychological self conception as a woman. Neither of these things directly tell me my subconscious sex, but when the testosterone makes me feel awful, or when being treated and seen as a woman makes me feel wonderful, or when estrogen gives me mild waves of buzzing bodily euphoric, I make inferences about my subconscious sex from that.
So I don't know what you mean, but hopefully I have covered some of the ground you had in mind.
So, I'm afab and probably agender, which is where the confusion is coming from. I'm on estrogen and progesterone because otherwise my cycle is stuck to 'on', so even my relationship with hormones is complicated.
See, none of that resonates with me at all. Going off my meds makes me feel terrible, but that's from the resulting anemia. I've tried living as a man, I've tried living as a woman, I've never gotten that "yes, this is me" feeling that people talk about. I don't know what "psychological self conceptualization" as a gender means, because it's all uncomfortable for me?
It feels like what you're talking about is the university course and I'm still in primary education.
Sure, you have to realize - I spent several decades never questioning my gender and living as a man, and I certainly could have gone the rest of my life that way. It took a lot of change for me to even recognize the experiences I had were even gendered. You may actually lack the hermeneutical tools to interpret and understand your gendered experience, but it sounds like "agender" is already giving you a foothold. Feeling alienated from both genders is a thing that tells you "this is me". The evidence from the brain scans about subconscious sex shows that most people are going to not evenly fall into two camps like male and female, so why is it surprising that you wouldn't feel at home in either?
What I mean about psychological self-conceptualization of my gender: when I dream, my brain sometimes generates a "me" that moves around and does things, interacts and experiences in the dream, etc. That "me" has a gender! I think of myself as a certain way, and it determines how I interact with other people, and how they interact with me. When I am stuck thinking of myself as a man, even when I feel dysphoria from being a man, it can be distressing - but I don't have direct control over my self-conceptualization. It's like a habituated way of thinking about myself.
Sometimes in my dreams I will be interacting as a man, and then a sudden shift in my gender happens as I interact with a male stranger for example, shaking his hand I become aware of my breasts and suddenly I'm interacting with him as though I were a woman. It is a bizarre experience for me, and most of my life I never thought about my self conceptualization at all. Of course, the self concept is not just in dreams, and when I started voice therapy I realized my self-concept influenced how my voice sounded, and that I had to tackle habituating a voice partially by habituating conceiving of myself as a woman, by reminding myself over and over that I look like a woman and I need to navigate the world as a woman.
You probably have a self-conceptualization as a woman to some extent, you probably have to for pragmatic reasons. I think socialization can play a big role in that psychology, the ways we acculturate and learn how to interact according to the gendered roles. To not do so is generally not adaptive and creates friction, for example I am learning that my habit from living as a man of holding doors open for everyone is starting to backfire as I learn that men would rather die than have a woman hold a door open for them. I am violating social norms when I hold doors open, and they rush forward to take over holding the door I'm trying to hold open for them.
The socialization is still separate from the self-conceptualization, but I think they can be related in terms of the self-concept tapping into those social roles we have learned.
Good luck exploring your gender!