What is gender identity?
Most likely, it’s a cognitive phase during which preschool-age kids understand that there are sex categories, and that they belong to one or the other. Those kids adumbrate the boundaries of the categories based on stereotypes, believing long hair and pink makes one a girl, or that sports shorts and short hair equal boy.
Around age six or seven, they understand gender constancy: sex is fixed, and not dependent on stereotypes.
Teaching gender identity as a “sense of your own gender” is not only nonsensical, but based on the same stereotyped vision of sex that preschoolers cling to. It makes me profoundly sad to see my fellow liberals hanging onto these ideas and lessons, rather than understanding that people transition for all kinds of reasons—most of them, but not all of them, related to sexuality. It’s trafficking in disinformation.
We don’t all have a gender identity. Some people believe in the idea of gender identity, and feel they have one. It’s a somewhat fantastical idea embedded in law and school curricula.
Here’s what some local middle schoolers are learning this week. In New York State, “gender identity” is a protected category. Hence, the Attorney General trying to force hospitals to provide adolescent sex-change procedures despite Trump declaring any organization that does so will be cut off from public funding. I don’t know how, if these ideas are still being taught as fact, we can free ourselves from endless battle.
If non-binary is someone who "doesn't feel completely like a man or a woman", than every single middle school kid is non-binary.
Everyone knows their gender identity but “Not because of their body parts”: wow, not only is the body a thing separable from the self, but it is simply a collection of parts.
We are only Mr Potato Heads.