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Puzzle Therapy's avatar

We need more people picking apart the concepts of gender identity and asking questions. I understand how someone can have a deep, intense, relenting feeling for something they want or wish desperately to be true, in this case being or looking like the opposite sex. I can imagine how it can become a defining part of their identity. But I struggle to see how this is fundamentally different than any other deep desire for something that is so intense that it becomes the core of a person's identity, like intensely driven professional athletes who don't see losing as an option or people who define themselves by their professional success. For those people, we recognize that's it's a mixture of personality traits and environment that create that focus and drive, not a single-dimensional thing in the brain that we all have that may or may not match the rest of us.

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Susan Scheid's avatar

Thank you, Lisa, for turning that “slightly ranty tweet” into a long form article. Your summation at the end is says it all: “The problem with “gender identity” is that it ends inquiry rather than spurring it. It erases questions of etiology, and it privileges the slippery notion of gender over the material reality of sex. But this idea, rather than being questioned, has been institutionalized in medicine, in law, in education, and in the minds of a generation.” This all leads me, once again, to wonder whether clarity can only come back to us by excising the now much-abused linguistic term “gender” from the lexicon.

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