I slept but am still somewhat affected. These spirals used to be frequent before I transitioned. Now they only really happen if something targets that directly. This wasn’t even new thoughts or good thoughts, I just came onto them when weakened from stress and tiredness and did not expect to. This day I must deal with a million things, so I need to clear this out and get back to a peaceful mode.

The argumentation threw around the usual claim that gender both “is not real” and is a social construct created by patriarchy, mixing also gender and gender stereotypes and gender identity wildly. This always boggles, why would not social constructs be real? They exist within material substrates and like all other such things can sometimes be easily altered, sometimes with more difficulty. This reasoning was paired with the likewise usual claim that “biology” is real and not malleable.

The counterpoints here then, just to reiterate: biology is no more cleanly defined than mathematics. Human sexual biology can mean any number of things – anatomy, endocrinology, behaviour descriptions, reproductive descriptions, physiology, genetics. These are each more or less fuzzy and just as physics is a social construct in that descriptions of time and space refers to reference measurements for length and duration, so does sexual biology reference a body of knowledge generation, even where the boundaries are easy to draw, someone still needs to draw them. This is not controversial. Presently, for example, I retain an XY karyotype (unlike most seen as women or seeing themselves as women) in most or all of my cells. I may or may not still have any gamete production to speak of, so reproductively I may have had but now lost the capacity of fathering? Hormonally my system is in female ranges, neurally is all mosaic but apparently changing statistically towards a female reference population (and may or may not have central parts which already was there underlying my gender identity, who knows?); same with regards to most of my anatomy. All of which emerges unto: definition of “biological sex” depends on what properties one involves and where one draws the line.

Gender as I define it, and this is a definition I wish to propagate, is the way that sexual biology (under an opt-out & opt-in framework, for we are not barbarians) is reflected in human relating, cognition, emotion and action. Thus the above _activity of_ science of sexual biology is an example of (making) gender, it is a recognition and relating to observations of these aspects of the material world. Talking of men and women, males and females, thinking of it, feeling with regards to it, classifying and making decisions or holding ideation regards to it, these are all activities that are part of the phenomenon of gender, the social construct. Gender roles and stereotypes (where gender categories are statistically accompanied by other properties in some population) are part of it. Like the physics referenced above, all is defined relative to an observer, a speaker, an actor – we can think of how a person is gendered in some context by themselves or by another.

It is important then to realize how alien it would seem to us with a world where we did not gender. It would not merely be an absence of gender stereotypes or segregation with regards to secondary properties. Since gender is the very act of recognizing and having any form of action or cognition or emotion in response to sexual biology, no world where we were aware of or ever considered for any purpose any aspect of sexual biology, would be a world “free” from gender as such. Realistically, a world without gendering would be a world without sexes. That is not to say that we cannot (or that we should not) eliminate gender roles and stereotypes, of course, and as a transhumanist, I would also welcome that world without sex distinctions. But that is for the future. Since most people instead refer (often fuzzily) to gender roles when speaking of gender, they will not think of this.

What then is gender identity? In this use of the terms, gender identity are our inclinations – learned and/or instinctual – to function more or less happily under different options for our gendering. It is whether if given a choice it is better in some regard for us to gender ourselves one way or the other, to have others gender ourselves one way or the other. In the forum thread I came onto yesterday, the claim was made that this either does not exist, or that it is a recent development. The presence of gender violating shamans in early cultures (including the gallae) would gainsay the latter, and as I have outlined elsewhere, a good case can be made from various scattered sources of observations of usual and perturbed child development and evopsych just-so stories (dirty though that field often is) that this is something humanity got from our earlier ancestors still already. I have claimed and remain doing so that gender identity is a mechanism behind homosocial processes – specifically identification – that makes the memetic transmission of gender roles more likely. Unlike mice or monkeys, our species learns gender roles, they are not hard-coded, but the tendency to look for them to learn them, under this hypothesis, is hard-coded. This is why, if we wish to eliminate them (and I for one do!), that we must ensure the next generation has role models for all useful traits with all apparent sexes/genders well-represented.

I suppose the claim that gender identity exists can still be challenged. I make much of Hines’ experiment (referenced elsewhere on this blog) where artifical gender roles were preferentially learned by children, but the full constructivist response may be that on a meta-level, the inclination to learn easier from same-sex models is in itself taught from experience. I doubt this, actually, but the claim can be made. The other side of Hines’ experiment was how a population with perturbed prenatal hormones (known to be enriched for trans men) showed less inclination for this preferential learning, they recognized gendered patterns around them but were less inclined to apply expectations on their assigned sex/gender to themselves. I suppose this too could be indirect and complex. I cannot know at this point for certain if my belief that gender identity has an evolutionarily adapted, prenatally encoded, neural substrate or not. Future science will tell us more.

All I can know is that in me and in others, it appears to be present. I really can only relate to myself fully when knowing myself as being aligned to those I think of as women, rather than those I think of as men. It has vast emotional weight behind it – certainly compounding my lived history’s impact, but still there and reflecting inclinations. Acting on this to change how I see myself and am seen causes immense and persistent improvements to my social, embodied physical, cognitive and emotional health, and as this episode shows, the dysphoria which is the negative of that improvement is still going strong. The transgender experience is probably heterogeneous much as other semi-complex neuropsychiatric states, but that does not make it just a hypersphere randomly drawn in a high-dimensional space, it is phenotype for whatever reason, and most importantly, it is one for me, whether it is something I was born with or developed into. I must be gendered female if I am gendered at all, otherwise I cannot function emotionally. So for me, gender identity evidentially does exist, and this is what most matters.

Returning to the statements made; the commenter highlighted beyond “biology” also for their definition of womanhood the shared experiences (presumably statistically) of growing up with such biology. I had not considered the placement of experiences in the above scheme; if these experiences come from outside, then they can be seen in that framework as analogous to sexual biology as something which we relate to. In other words, recognition of and action in response to and cognition and emotion around either (observation of) sexual biology of some kind, or of other experiences directly or indirectly resulting from such (including from the actions of others, which in turn also can be considered to be part of gender as social construct), these are all components and aspects of gendering. This actually becomes relevant, because under that framework we must also take into account how others treat us when they have labelled us by sex/gender, our own gendering involves our relating and cognition and emotion and action in response to others gendering us and the content of that gendering.

This is not really new either, I suppose. Though it highlights how the basis for our gendering also varies. A woman not seen as such, or grown under very isolated circumstances, will lack many of those experiences; this includes most trans women – along with lacking menstruation we lack e.g. an expectation from our surroundings to get pregnant. The sexual biology and externally imposed experience substrate of our gendering is weaker (which is why we need that opt-in, opt-out aspect in a modern, civilized variant of gender as social construct). This is also why we change these things as much as we can, dare, are able to – we try to shift our biologies, and we seek out shared experiences with other women – I loathe the touch of patriarchy but part of me craves it for validation, for I need all the help I can get to be able to be gendered female.

There is however here an interesting and principally testable hypothesis. A young trans woman, not yet out to herself or to others, an egg as it were, might it be that she is more likely than boys her age to be aware of the expectations placed on girls, with respect to control of sexuality, beauty standards, future motherhood? That is to say, will she have learned these things through model observation more readily than someone with a male gender identity will, even if she as yet cannot conceive of them applying to herself (perhaps feeling sometimes sad and jealous of this)? If we had longitudinal cohorts large enough, we could test this – understanding of and especially empathy with the lived experiences of boys and girls, in apparent boys and girls, tested as functions of later trans status. I predict there would be a difference. And to some extent, I attribute the fact that feminism always felt personal to teenage me to something like this – I did not consciously feel the experiences of girls and women applied to me personally, but I always related to them. Perhaps cis men do this to the same degree, but perhaps not. This was tangential however.

I did worry upon reading, what if I misunderstand how the feeling of sameness works? I parse it as though there exists a very basic recognition of the sex of others and of ourselves, and that this has a dimension of same-as-me, different-from-me. This is something I feel, and which I believe others do too. But what if I am wrong, and for others same-sex recognition really only is the cognitive and emotionless recognition of genital configuration and shared experiences? I suppose this would mean two things: one, that there would no be emotional or social consequences of that recognition, and two, that the recognition would not involve an opt-in/opt-out option. Honestly, I don’t believe from observation of others this is the case. No-one is fully neutral to sex classification. TERFs and bros certainly are not neutral, for them it has clear emotional and social consequences. But more to the point, I have experienced plenty of contexts where I really do feel I am genuinely accepted as a woman, by women, who are aware of my trans state and my until-recently unaltered biology. I conclude that for a lot of us in this world, we really do relate to gender (regardless of content) in this more complex manner, I honestly think there are many people who gender (even present) me correctly, because that is how their gendering is done. Might this be wrong? I suppose though I don’t think so. And if so, ultimately what matters most is how I gender myself, how others gender me feeds into this but is not the same as it. And we’ll see how far I can go, how much I’ll be able to make it easier for other people to casually gender me correctly.

Wrapping up the aspect of experiences, those indeed are there and form part of the substrate used for gendering, and those indeed are not something we as trans people have the same access to as cis people; I have no problems accepting that fact as well as its implications (in a debate about pregnancy, listen to the person who was or who might become so before the person who might not). At the same time, my need to be grouped not with men but with women remains, and the feeling from yesternight stays with me, I really will do what I can and what I must to make the world recognize that. Unlike what the commenter claims, biology is not without the potential to be reshaped, and I myself am in a line of work that aims to open up more and more of it to our reshaping. This is why I do not think my transition ever is finished – I will always hold out for the possibility to become even more like the cis woman version of myself. If gene therapy allowed the silencing of any remaining Y chromosome activity, and the adjustment of my X-inactivation patterns to match expression levels I would have had with an XX karyotype, I would go for it. One day perhaps it will. If I could have the reproductive capacities of a cis woman, side effects and all, I would acquire it (and then perhaps sterilize again, which would be my reproductive choice to make as a woman). In this regard the world is flawed, but knowing I have done all I currently can still helps me see myself as I must.

Last the commenter implied something along the lines of, the fact that those women who are not cis (because, as usual, trans men are not even considered – the same really holds even for this text, which is extremely trans woman centric, but at least I warned about that already in the blog disclaimer) have to shout at the top of their lungs to be included, implies… something. Not spelled out. Presumably that we are somehow not valid? But the fact that most women are cis is not surprising – conditions of transness, alarmists aside, are rare. Most people are cis. And as for being accepted, I am not sure if this holds. Those who meet me for the first time after beginning transition may not understand, but they are less likely at least to misgender and they cannot deadname. Habit plays an important part. That said, of course it is challenging. Gender as a social construct is not independent of sexual biology or derived experience, opt-in mechanisms notwithstanding. To increase the chance of proper gendering, I need to try my best to become a person who, besides being fundamentally me, can be understood as a woman by others, bodily and socially. To this end I may even have to wear some of the stereotypes, and thus face even more ridicule and scorn from the TERFs. But the fact of these challenges, and that they reflect the interaction between sex, sex-associated experiences and gender, that does not invalidate gender as something that can be modified, hacked, adapted, nor does it invalidate the fact that I, for whatever inborn or acquired reason, need to do that to be happy.

So there. TLDR? Yes, gender is the response not only to biology but imposed experiences. Yes, gender identity likely is inborn and ancient, and in either case, crucial to adapt to for the well-being of us where it is in trans alignment. No, I cannot be certain that it has the role I believe in creating homosocial role learning, but I expect future research will continue to indicate it has. Yes, I believe that as others perform gender in practice, that will not make it impossible for them to honestly and genuinely gender me correctly, even knowing I am trans, but even if it did, then my own correct self-gendering is possible and necessary. No, the terms biology and gender does not mean what people with limited understanding of either think they do. Yes, my experiences of sexual biology or its correlates in patriarchy are different from those of a cis woman. No, that does not change my need to be gendered correctly. Yes, that indirectly informs my drive to transition in more ways, to go as far as I can. No, it is not unrealistic that we will be accepted as who we are. We are slowly winning this culture war and I will do my part.