A core sense of whrblgrbl
Lawyers, eh?
“No factual or legal support, just a bare assertion.”
And a very fatuous assertion at that. No, everyone does not have a core sense of belonging to a particular gender. What we have is a history of being told we’re one or the other, and a history of encountering other people who are one or the other, and a history of seeing movies and tv shows full of other people who are one or the other. Some of us may have a history of thinking and/or feeling that we should be grouped with the Other, while most of us assume we’re stuck with the “assignment” and get on with life. Calling that “gender identity” and saying we all have it is several steps too many.
That’s flatly false, and it contains a fundamental category error, equivocating — likely intentionally — “gender” and “sex.” The clause, “such as male or female,” relate in the structure of the sentence to the word “gender.” However, “male” and “female” refer explicitly to the two sexes. Even under gender ideology, the proponents purport to claim that the words “men” and “women” refer to genders, but that “male” and female” are the only appropriate words to refer to a person’s sex. Here, the gender advocates continue to purposely muddy the waters between so-called gender and sex, by conflating even the words they sometimes concede refer exclusively to sex with words for gender.
The gender dogmatists insist that there is some inherent ” core sense of belonging” to a ” gender.” There is some sort of magic essence that necessarily exists with regard to “gender”; a kind of gendered soul. Notably, the gender advocates never provide a clear definition of what they mean by “gender.”
On the one hand, they berate anyone who disagrees with them as wrongly conflating sex and gender, which must be kept scrupulously distinct from one another. On the other hand, the gender dogmatists themselves routinely and purposely treat gender as if it were sex, and berate anyone who disagrees with them as falsely accusing them of equivocating sex and gender. Tails, we lose, heads, they win.
The claim in the briefing is both false and dishonest in the structure of the claim being made.
It’s also false and dishonest in its substance. As OB says,
That’s because we are confronted by the social assumptions of gender that infect every aspect of our lives, starting from birth.
I have a slightly different take. It’s not that “everyone does not have” a “core sense of belonging to a particular gender.” I would say, rather, that
Not everyone “has” a “core sense of belonging to a particular gender.”
Now we get down to the brass tacks of defining “gender.” “Gender” is rightly understood as a social construct of the traits, characteristics, and behaviors that a particular society assigns to one sex or the other. The name for the gender ascribed to boys and men is “masculine.” The name for the gender assigned to girls and women is “feminine.”
Gender rules in patriarchal societies (which is most societies) are designed and enforced to keep women and girls oppressed, to make women and girls second class citizens (if not erased altogether).
However, the gender rules are mere social constructs. They can be challenged and changed. In modern times, we have come to recognize that not all boys and men conform to masculine notions of gender. Not all girls and women conform to feminine notions of gender. The impulse of the gender advocates is to allow for the existence of non-masculine men and non-feminine women. That impulse reflects a reality that some people dislike or reject the gender rules for their sex, and that it’s fine and doesn’t hurt anyone else if people do not confirm to gender norms.
Where the gender dogmatists go off the rails is their insistence that, if someone prefers the gender norms assigned to the opposite sex, they should be treated as if they are the opposite sex, and that they should get to claim to actually be the sex they are not. That’s counter-factual. Sex is not gender. Sex is a material, physical fact about a person’s body. So far, no one has ever been actually able to change their biological sex.
I understand completely the condition of body dysphoria, and unhappiness with the body being a particular sex. I’ve suffered from that condition my whole life. Some of my discomfort with being the sex that I am comes from the social conventions of gender — girls have to wear certain kinds of clothes, girls aren’t routinely allowed to participate in certain kinds of activities, girls are less free than boys. There’s nothing inherent in being a boy or a girl that means you must wear certain clothes, you must do or refrain from certain activities, or you must behave in this way and not that way. This is why I reject “gender,” the social construct, out of hand. I have been affected by social notions of gender all my life, because there is no society that isn’t full of such assumptions, rules, and norms. But there is nothing that is necessarily true about any gender concepts. As a logical proposition, I reject “gender.” I — and many others like me — utterly lack any such thing as a “core sense of belonging to a particular gender.” Far from it. My “core sense” is that gender is false and harmful. I have no “sense of belonging” to anything remotely connected to “gender.” I do not have a “gender identity.” I find the whole idea of ” gender identity” — valuing the social rules imposed on people because of their sex — revolting and abhorrent. There is no way in who I “identify as” anything having to do with gender.
That is not to say that I don’t have a sex. I am a physical being with a sexed body. There’s no way to avoid that. However, I don’t “identify as” the sex that I am. I have no “core sense of belonging” to the sex that I am. There’s no emotional component or attachment that I feel about being the sex that I am. I simply recognize the unavoidable fact that my body is one sex, and not the other sex. I also know that there are only two sexes.
So that’s kind of a long rant in reply to the dishonest claim that “everyone has a gender identity,” or that everyone has an inherent “core sense of belonging to a particular gender.”. I don’t. Stop telling me that I do. That’s a lie. Stop lying in legal documents.
Core (adj): like deep, a meaningless word used to say “I have no idea how to defend this claim, so I shouldn’t have to and if you insist I’ll throw a tantrum, so there!