Innateitude
Apparently the police in the UK have issued a new law saying everyone has to recognize everyone else’s Innate Gender Identity or else expect a knock on the door.
The police have launched their National Trans Tool Kit — a portfolio of definitions, policies and best practice recommendations developed in partnership with Stonewall, the National LGBT Police Network, and the Police Superintendent’s Association.
Most of it is about trans colleagues on the force, but some of it is about everyone.
And what is gender identity? There’s a glossary.
Where did they get that? From Stonewall.
What I want to know is, how do they think they know this “innate sense of their own gender” is in fact innate as opposed to being learned? How do they think it could be that? I could see it if children were raised in incubators with no sensory input for the first three years or so, but children raised that way are not likely to flourish or indeed survive, so that’s no help. How can people have “innate” senses of things beyond very basic sense-information like up and down, dark and light, moving and still? How, in other words, can people have a “sense of their own gender” that’s innate as opposed to learned?
This is a major crux in the whole dispute – whether or not one considers “gender identity” a real thing that is innate and can sometimes occur in the wrong body, or a social thing made up of all one has been told, explicitly and tacitly, about what box one goes in.
“the sex they were assigned at birth”
Assigned by whom – God?
Whichever totalizing servant of the state first looked between their legs.
David Evans, didn’t you know? Sex is assigned by the doctor who delivers the baby. I believe the usual protocol is to flip a coin. Heads, it’s a girl; tails, a boy. Or else the other way round. I can never remember.
Precisely. As I see it, the (anatomical) male/female dichotomy coupled with the innate/social (ie learned) dichotomy gives us four immediate possibilities: anatomical male, social male; anatomical male, social female; anatomical female, social female; anatomical female, social male. That we are XX or XY I think can be taken as a given, with rare exceptions. Anatomical males will be XY and anatomical females XX, except for some very special genetic cases. But we each have a ‘male side’ and a ‘female side’ to our makeup as conscious beings. And becoming what we are can have its difficulties.
Sexual dimorphism with its associated internal dispositions appears to have developed a long way back in the story of human evolution, and will probably have a straight-forward neo-Darwinian explanation. After all, for hundreds of thousands of years our ancestors shared the landscape of Africa and then Eurasia and the the American and Australian continents with some pretty dangerous competitors in the game of survival, and did not emerge from all that as winners until comparatively recently; by which I mean the agricultural period beginning in New Guinea around 20,000 years or so ago, and only hitting its stride in the last 5,000 years; which is only yesterday in evolutionary time.
I am really getting sick of the phrasing ‘assigned at birth’ to describe sex. The doctors/midwives/etc aren’t assigning people a sex status arbitrarily, they are observing the anatomy that over 99% of us have unambiguously. Describe, as opposed to prescribe.
Observed at birth. Sounds perfect.
A very obvious taproot of the ‘born in the wrong body’ narrative comes from the observation of homosexual activists that gay people don’t (or at least don’t entirely) elect to be that way, justified with the simple logical exercise that homosexuality has been oppressed with torture and murder and social outcasting for centuries, so if it *were* simply socially-conditioned, it would’ve been eliminated long before now…also, non-human animals exhibit homosexual behaviour, so there you go. This fact became foundational to homosexual activism in the early 20th century, specifically in between the lowpoint of Prop 8 in California and the seminal victories Obergefell v. Hodges and US v. Windsor, which likely will mark the high tide of LGBT progress for decades to come.
Trans activists have absorbed–some might even say appropriated–this logic wholesale, to the point now that they can cheerfully accuse lesbians of bigotry for averring the chance to have sex with a male-bodied person, all the while failing to recognise the irony and hypocrisy of such a stance. (And it’s somehow always *lesbians* that get the accusation tossed around, even though there are plenty of gay men who similarly decline to have sex with trans men).
In my opinion, and in my experience, sexuality is quite fluid and adaptable, and there are quite a lot more implicitly-bisexual people who’ve been socially conditioned into heterosexuality than there are entirely-straight or entirely-gay people. Seeing them (or, rather, us, since I count myself among this group) ignored (or erased?) during the late aughts and early teens was disquieting, but I never in a million years imagined people would take the ‘born-this-way’ narrative and run with it to the extent of reifying gender and yelling at women while feeling smugly progressive.
Trans people obviously exist, and transness isn’t simply a fashion, in an analogous way to homosexuals in a deeply homophobic world. But I fear we’re trying to take all the wrong lessons from the watershed of gay rights in the last decade, and rather than building a freer world where people can be authentically themselves, we’re simply giving people more rigid boxes they can try to force themselves into.
Oddly, humans have LESS pronounced sexual dimorphism than any other primate.
You can’t argue infinite ‘fluidity’ and infinite ‘innateitude’ in the same breath…unless you’re a Woman Erasing Radical Trans-activist.
That’s not quite right. Gibbons and siamangs for instance have such unpronounced sexual dimorphism that you can’t tell which is which from any distance. They’re the same size, the same build, same strength and dexterity, etc. I think there are probably some monkeys like that too, though I don’t know for sure. (I’ve worked around gibbons and siamangs.)