Yes, I’m Aware of “Sex vs. Gender.” No, I Still Don’t Agree with You.
People have different “gender identities,” no disputing that, but I don’t believe this is a valid, coherent way to classify people.
If a transgender individual says “I am a woman” to mean “I feel a certain way,” and I say “I am a woman” to mean “I belong to a certain biological category,” we are not conveying the same thing. Increasingly, the new meaning of “woman” has become “anyone who calls oneself a woman.”
This renders the category useless. Whenever I point this out, someone links me to a source explaining the “difference” between sex and gender.
It seems like the point of the link is to say there is such a thing as “gender identity,” a person’s internal sense of manhood or womanhood. Not everyone feels aligned with the category they are placed into from birth; there is a vast spectrum of variety in how people describe their identities.
Let’s assume that’s true — I’m still not convinced. How does one make the leap from “People have varied self-proclaimed gender identities” to “A woman is anyone who identifies as a woman”?
Not everyone of the same nationality has a shared national identity. Some born-and-raised Americans strongly identify as American, but others are more reluctant. They may lack a sense of connection to the nation’s history and current affairs, and may feel more connected to a different nation or feel more like a “global citizen.”
But whether one “feels” American or not, whatever that feels like, does not answer the question of whether one is American in contexts where this is relevant. I could link you to research on how national “identity,” as opposed to conventionally defined nationality, is a psychological construct that can be fluid and culturally varied (e.g. here and here), and the point still stands.
Similarly, consider contexts where it has predictive power to know whether one is a “woman.” What behavioral expectations was one raised into? How likely is one to commit rape and harassment, or be the victim of it? Could one be affected by pregnancy leave policies? What are the signs of a heart attack? What is the healthy range for iron levels in one’s blood? For none of these is some undefinable shared “identity” the main predictor. It’s being born of a certain sex.
Some may concede that while the biological category of “female” is important, there is also a social category of womanhood that doesn’t fully overlap with it, and this social label of woman also has predictive power. I am not convinced that this is something meaningfully separate.
If Xiahn Nishi, a white man who got surgery to look Asian, gets subject to everyday racism, surely that’s not evidence of a “social race” construct that makes him actually Asian in a sense. It would simply be because he is mistaken for being born of a certain race. “Social gender” functions similarly: we may not know someone’s sex, but we almost always can infer it and make predictive judgments accordingly. See these examples — can you tell who gets socially treated as “female”?
Even such subtle facial differences are significant. You know nothing of the “gender identity” or “gender presentation” of those on the left, but you know how they’d be categorized. So yes, some trans people “pass” as the sex they are not and are treated as such, but a person with blatant physical male features likely would not be treated the same as a woman, even if “presenting” and identifying as a woman. This shows that even the social category of woman is based on assumptions of one’s sex, not one’s identity.
So why should womanhood be defined as an identity? What do self-identified trans women, born and raised male, have in common with womanhood? What do self-identified trans men and non-binary people, born and raised female, not have in common with women of the same sex? It can’t be some feeling, because just as not all Americans feel American, there is no shared way to feel like a woman.
To be fair, some demographic questions do rely on self-reported identity. “Do you identify as a Republican?” “Do you identify as asexual?” But people with such identities can point to what they’re identifying with. The Republican Party platform and a lack of attraction are things that clearly exist and can be held in common with others. There is some disagreement about who qualifies as “American” (Do you have to be born here? Do you have to have citizenship?), but it still refers to a relationship with a real country, not an identity entirely in one’s head. The progressive definition of woman fails to include any objective referent at all.
So yes, people have different ideas of gender identity, no disputing that. But I hope that by now, you can see why I don’t believe this is a valid, coherent way to classify people.
