musings on gender identity

 the concept of gender identity is very new in our societies, and it is new to me. i don't recall the term being used at Crossdream Life when i first joined the forum in 2011. now it often features on the national news.

i can well understand people 'thinking "a woman with a penis"? don't be ridiculous'. to them i would certainly not reply 'you are a transphobe, which is as bad as a racist or an anti-semite - you must be banished from the inclusive society'. rather i would reply 'i understand that it seems bizarre, but there are reasons why people seriously believe it is beneficial for society to regard it as the case that someone with a penis can be a woman. i encourage you to listen further before you dismiss the idea'. 

in the society in which i grew up a woman with a penis was an oxymoron, not so much a weird joke as a logical/conceptual impossibility. even someone who had a sex change - their sex changed when they their genitals changed.

how differently would my perception of my gender have developed if i had known as a child that one can have a gender identity that is not the same as biological sex? yet it's an empirical truth that throughout the world, throughout history, there have been many people whose gender identity has not matched their biological sex. society can respond 'well, they are wrong', or 'they are an exceptional few, for everyone else gender is clear-cut' or 'lets open up this notion of gender identity some more'.

it is hard to eliminate the sense of 'as if' from gender identity. you feel as if you are someone who was born with a female body, you would like to live like someone with a female body. we can't reasonably occlude the body, when the very terms of gender identity (recent concoctions apart) are those of biological sex - male and female. transitioners (nearly all at least) desire female bodies.

yet still it is not an absolute truth that gender is determined by body (such determination does not entail binaries - intersex bodies are non-binary). there is no absolute truth about who is what gender; it is for society to determine. there is no wrong or right answer to 'can a woman have a penis'? society can allow or disallow the possibility. when considering which, it should consider the experiences and feelings of all the many people, past and present, whose gender identity has clashed with their biological sex. the evidence points to it being a matter of minority rights, not of licensing harmful delusion. this doesn't mean that the qualms of feminists who seek to change attitudes to gender within a retained construct of biological sex determining gender, whose constituency is those of female biological sex and female upbringing, should be derided.

and for me - how would my own gender self-perception have been different, had i known from an early age about gender identity as something that can be different from biological sex? quite differently i think. maybe that would be a case of a misguided society giving me misguided ideas. but i don't think so. rather i think it was a case of a society which misguidedly occluded the possibility of gender identity at variance with biological sex that misguided my own gender perceptions, suppressed instincts and thwarted possibilities.