OP
OP
theclaud
Reading around the chip
I'm gonna roll with this question, seeing as I'm at odds with both/all three dominant views, and because Paley apparently finds the thread annoying
. I'm not a believer in innate gender identity. But just because something isn't innate or isn't an objective truth, it doesn't mean that it isn't real or has no meaning, or is, to quote Aurora's weird neo-cliché, reducible to 'a feeling in your head'.The way I understand it is this. We are born into a gendered world - a society and a network of institutions and customs (the family, school, sport, marriage and relationships, clothing, social groups, religions and so on) that are perpetually insisting and teaching us that there are two different kinds of human being, each defined primarily by not being the other. For the most part this is a hierarchy, which overwhelmingly serves the interests of one group (boys, men) over the other (girls, women), whether overtly or in more complex ways - recognising this and attempting to overthrow it is, broadly, the goal of Feminism. These structures tend to originate in beliefs like Unkraut's, but the beliefs are strongly held and persist in secular forms which are constantly reinforced across institutions more various, subtle, casual and (for most people) intimate than the church. One of the most important things to grasp is that the beliefs give rise to the reality and not the other way around - in other words, if we believe that women are like X and men are like Y, we'll create institutions, relationships and customs that tend to make women more like X and men more like Y, and then we'll look at the women and men we have created and see evidence that our beliefs about the nature of them were correct all along. This is why icowden sounds pretty much the same as Unkers on the subject, God or No God.
Children figure out that they are girls or boys by piecing together the clues that are everywhere around them, and by reacting to experiences in which gender is made salient. They also come to understand that it's massively important to know which you are, because this is what the world constantly tells them. Gender is sometimes enforced violently - rape, forced pregnancy, punishment for the 'wrong' behaviours, rugby at school - but it is also experienced in ways we may not experience individually as harmful and that may be experienced as supporting or loving (maybe we like the clothes chosen for us, or feel happy if our mum reads our bedtime stories to us, or our dad takes us to the football or lets us help him fix things in his shed). Our sense of who we are, and who others are, is bound up in good and bad gendered experiences. This is related to the 'stereotypes' that Aurora bangs on about, but it isn't reducible to them, because it's the actual reality of people's lives. It goes without saying that some people, given the same gender clues, will come to different conclusions about who they are and what that means - transgender people, in other words, are an entirely inevitable outcome of a binary gender system.
This, in my view, is where we must start, rather than with some arbitrary example of an identity of which we personally disapprove. It doesn't make questions about therapy or treatment or affirmation for children much easier, and it doesn't solve questions of fairness in sport or of safety in prisons, because these questions are complicated and because we can't just get outside the gendered systems we might wish to dismantle to figure it out in the abstract.
Aurora is frequently allowed to get away with claiming she has no gender identity, which is utter bollocks. This means she has not internalised in any way the social meanings of being a girl or a woman. We can talk about feminist consciousness as a means of taking control of or resisting a gendered identity, but then we'd have to concede that there may also be other ways of doing that, whether we like them or not. And of course, if you're a fundamentalist, that would never do...
