this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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[–] dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (14 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.

[–] faythofdragons@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 hours ago

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.

Okay, but what about those of us that have never had an innate and unchanging sense of my sex/gender?

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