Identity

SnowAssMan · 2021-10-13T08:37:45+00:00

I think better formulations might be:

How can a body & an identity be "mismatched" (what has one got to do with the other)?

or

How can gender be both an immutable identity & an ever-changing social construct?

Male biology begets male socialisation, which begets male behavioural trends, even within the population who claim to have a cross-sex identity. I guess you could distinguish the sexed body & the resulting cultural conformity to the role associated with it as male vs. masculine, respectively, but most people think of masculinity & femininity as being limited to the superficial (the way you dress, walk & talk), even within feminism, or gender theory.

Judith Butler for instance quotes Simone de Beauvoir when talking about femininity. So at first it seems like she is using Beauvoir's understanding of femininity: the conditioning received by girls, but Butler suggests that anyone can be feminine (implying that even people who haven't been conditioned the way that girls have can be feminine), which seems to suggest she is using a colloquial definition of femininity, making her interpretation as hamfisted as Bruce Jenner's.

What is femininity? Is it limited to a glittery exterior? Is it female socialisation? Is it both? Is it even more than that? What if we extended the definition of femininity to include all of the roles women are expected to embody? In that case this new stipulated definition of femininity would also refer to things like sexual objectification & the nurturing of children, the elderly, partners, each other & anyone else who happens to be passing by – two huge features closely associated with women, but almost never associated with femininity

So if you reduced femininity down to its root (using the word femininity to refer to how an androcentric society views womanhood) it would come down to five types of objectification for male use:

a decorative status symbol for men
a fetishised masturbation aid for men
a de-clawed, domesticated, infantilised pet for men
an indentured servant for men
a vessel for men to perpetuate themselves

If that's the social construct, can it be an identity? Notice how female biology is also interwoven into femininity. If someone is inculcated with these ideas from birth, the same way men expect the above from women is the same way women expect it from themselves & each other. Every word is culturally contaminated, including woman. Within a scientific context woman is just a female adult within the human race, but dictionaries don't include connotation. If society is androcentric/patriarchal & therefore systemically sexist, then the people within it are at least implicitly sexist, which would include their view on womanhood. In this way being a normative woman & being normatively feminine are exactly the same thing.

We are all aware of sexist slurs, so there is no need for me to repeat them for clarification, but in a sexist society these are not slurs, but synonyms for 'woman'. 'Woman' is just a formal way of saying all those slurs. Some girls try to opt out of this by calling themselves non-binary & when that doesn't work they call themselves men. The word 'woman' is not the source of the sexist contamination, but as long as it is contaminated, it will continue to contribute to sexist ideas. Women have sexist notions of what being a woman means (which I have previously referred to collectively as femininity), so identifying themselves as a woman is like a positive feedback circuit of these sexist notions of femininity, influencing their identity.

The obligatory "but what about exceptions?"

Obviously almost no woman will perfectly conform to all five ways of objectification, but there is certainly a pattern of behaviour within the female population that conforms to femininity. So the questions are: are behavioural trends within a demographic the result of a shared social identity? And is identity the result of socialisation? If the answer is yes to both, then "woman" can be an identity.

DSDs:

The only way woman could be a cross-sex identity is if male biology is mistaken for female biology "from birth", by everyone including the child itself. Then the domino effect I outlined in my opening paragraph would go in the other direction. This is the case for women with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome. It could be argued that their biology can be said to be more female than male, but that would be ignoring the fact that nature produces organisms that can reproduce asexually. This "default setting" would look a lot more female to our eyes than male (even though it cannot be said to be female, confusingly, science usually refers to it as female nonetheless), bc if a human could asexually reproduce it would require primary & secondary sex characteristics that currently only exist in the female population.

censorshipment · 2021-10-13T18:02:44+00:00

This is something we butch lesbians discuss. It's really hard to relate to the majority of women... straight(+bisexual) women... because they're more gender conforming than we are and do shit specifically for male attention/affection/love/etc. So to us, "woman" (womanhood) is very connected to heterosexuality and femininity. And it tends to be other women saying we (butches, gnc women) are not women, even though we are obviously female human beings just like them, because our womanhood is connected to homosexuality and masculinity. Basically, homophobic women (including feminists) define womanhood and (socially) exclude us.

Example: me and at least 2 other lesbians were temporarily banned from a women's subreddit for how we answered questions asked by men. The mods are straight and accused us of misandry which just meant "you lesbians aren't nice enough to men... go away." We also got downvoted a lot. Just felt like the straight women didn't want us there.

I compare this to race... if you are constantly shunned for not having skin light enough to be seen as white (European), what are you going to believe? You must not be white like them. Constantly being shunned by women can make one believe I must not be a woman like them.

peakingatthemoment · 2021-10-13T13:25:29+00:00

Being a woman or man or female or male is more than an identity, it’s a physical reality, but someone can still have or develop the identity I feel like.

When I was little, I felt really strongly that I was a girl inside and was supposed to be one. Looking back, it seems like it was because my behaviors and interests that were labeled as feminine and I felt closer to girls. They were always my friends and we usually liked the same things. My parents would try to create situations where I would become friends with boys, but I didn’t like it and the boy usually wouldn’t want to play with me either. It was more confusing later when I started having feelings towards boys. Like, as an adult you can look back and be like this was just a effeminate gay child, but when you are a child you don’t understand things like stereotypes and, if you aren’t shown ways to be yourself and be a boy, the way you see yourself to make sense of it would just get stronger and stronger. I feel like trans identity for children might be more likely to develop for children who are raised religious and/or with strict ideas about gender. By the time a parent gets that child to a therapist, even if, as in my case, the therapist didn’t affirm the identity, I feel like it’s too late to really have any chance of shaking the sense of self. Or maybe the stubborn ones become transsexuals and that’s why we do. Maybe there are 9 other boys who go through the same thing and just become gay men. I don’t know, I’m just thinking out loud about it. I don’t know all the answers. I think the trans adults are more confusing because adults know more, but I don’t feel like I can say because I’d really just be speculating.

Houseplant · 2021-10-19T00:30:01+00:00

The modern understanding of identity through gender is literally a misinterpretation of the concept of identity in psychology.

Identity is ones perception of themselves but it was factual until gender wormed into it.

Nobody identified as a banker or a mother or a musician if they weren’t. Now, identity seems to refer to a collection of preferences in how one would like to be perceived, with no relationship with reality taking place.

It’s been mixed up with the sociological use of the term and is used to refer to a collection of groups an individual belongs to and presenting the group as a personality trait.

The modern idea of identity is literally a wrong answer to an ‘intro to psychology’ question and is being used as a weapon against women.

circlingmyownvoid2 · 2021-10-13T16:15:12+00:00

It just is. Identity is complicated. How about this. I know you are a mother. That’s part of your identity.

But what about adoptive mothers, someone who takes a kid in for years but doesn’t adopt them, a close older friend who cares for someone for a while, the nice lady down the block who makes sure no one on the street goes hungry and has a ride to the doctor? All these people may consider themself a mother as part of their identity. It’s not just a woman who gives birth to everyone.

Fleurista · 2021-10-14T00:13:53+00:00

If an identity is taken to mean just the summation of what or who someone or something is, if one really sees their being the opposite sex as a fact, then they would just see it as a fact. I believe that can be the case, especially for children. But that would be maybe just the idea of identifying as something. To identify with something or someone, I would think it's just recognizing similarities or feeling connection or kinship or something like that, like noticing one has more traits that seem to be common with the opposite sex--that person doesn't genuinely believe themselves to be a member of that sex.

But I think that's part of the conclusion that dysphoric children reach that Peaking touched on: as a child, you might conclude you are the opposite sex because of the similarities you see between yourself and members of that sex, or all of the stereotypes and generalizations attributed to that sex. For me, it seemed like the whole world was constantly telling me in many ways that I was a girl or supposed to be one, so that's the conclusion I made.

Why should an adult or anyone who knows or knew better identify as the opposite sex? I'm not sure. For me, it is a fact still that I was supposed to be born a girl (or so I was repeatedly told), like a matter-of-fact medical fact which I find impossible to ignore. I took the idea that I was supposed to be born a girl to mean that I am supposed to be female. Maybe it isn't true for others, or it's too general to apply to most trans people, but somehow a person must be convinced in some way that they are or are supposed to be the opposite sex (or have no sex, or be both)--and it's easier to be convinced of something if everyone is telling you or demonstrating to you that it seemingly is the case.

Affirmation seems to be the key to perpetuating and strengthening any beliefs, so affirming 'woman' or 'man' as an identity that one has that might not match their sex makes sense how even someone who never believed such a thing about themselves would grow to see that as a fact. The whole concept of 'cracking eggs' is a great, albeit horrifying demonstration of that.

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