Gender identity is a branch of philosophy. That much is fact. “Gender identity,” like “morality” or “existence,” is a completely man-made and defined concept.

To explain what I mean, here’s a bit of an explanation.

Morality is clear to us, ‘doing the right thing,’ it’s a feeling we have about our actions. But when asked to define what rules govern right and wrong, millions of different people can give millions of different answers. Utilitarianism states “whatever brings the greatest good,” which is great as a broad theory but leads to problems like “should you then donate all your organs as your one life is less good that the many you could save?” Alternatively, deontology says there are fixed rules like don’t lie or cheat or steal, which again sound good until you think of situations where those can result in good outcomes. What if a government worker learns of a plot to bomb innocent individuals by their own country, are they allowed to lie and cheat to stop that bomb?

In terms of existence, we have 2 main conflicting views, existence residing in the mind, or in the body. Bodily existence is commonly brought up with the ship of Theseus; if you replace parts of a breaking ship over and over, how many can you replace before it is no longer the same ship? As such, if you replace parts of your body, how many could you replace before you aren’t you? In terms of mental existence, “you are your mind,” cases of questioning this are very real in life. If a person gets amnesia, do they no longer exist? They are still physically present, their family and friends still know and recognize them as “existing,” so surely they aren’t ‘gone’ even if their mind is completely different?

What am I rambling on about here? The short answer is this; morality and existence are concepts conceived by people. There is no fact of right and wrong in the universe, there is no fact of what determines whether you continue to ‘be’ despite changes in your mind and body. We create theories about these concepts to try to clearly define them and set concrete rules, but no matter how sound the theory, ask enough questions and pose enough scenarios and eventually you always find a situation where the theory either contradicts yourself, or makes you think “hmm, that doesn’t really make sense there.”

These completely theoretical concepts cannot be perfectly defined without contradiction or disagreement.

This brings me to “gender identity.” There are two main sides to this philosophical debate. For the sake of ease, let’s refer to them as Geneticism and Propensitism. These are the most commonly held viewpoints, and most under debate currently.

Geneticism will refer to the theory that “gender” and your genetic sex are inherently the same. A person who is XX is female, and XY is male. Your actions and behaviours don’t change whether you are male or female. This in itself isn’t incongruous with transgender people. Gender dysphoria is seen as a mental illness that affects how you feel compared to what you are in this case.

Propensitism will refer to the theory that your gender is determined by your behaviour, and is completely unrelated to your genetic sex. From the way a person dresses to the activities they enjoy, all of these contribute to your gender. Gender is not necessarily fixed and can differ rapidly. Part of this theory is also that people have an ‘innate’ sense of what their gender is.

There are many complexities to this, but for the sake of argument these are the two simplest viewpoints to discuss.

Propensitism contains a number of different facets which may or may not overlap. Some, more conservative, would still lean towards binary genders, male and female. This is where I would place by-the-book transgenders, in that they still believe there is male and female, they simply feel their gender is the opposite of that of their body. In a much more radical view, there is a gender spectrum, of which there are numerous models. The simplest of which is a scale of maleness on one axis and femaleness on the other axis. 0-0 is agendered, 10-0 is male, 0-10 is female, 10-10 is ‘genderqueer,’ a sort of gender unique to the person.

Both geneticism and propensitism face undeniable flaws but also present strong arguments in their favour.

Firstly geneticism, while there are undeniably 2 sex chromosomes, and they undeniably cause genetic sex, as well as the production of estrogen and testosterone which largely lead to feminine and masculine behaviours, we can certainly see people in society that behave outside this view. There are feminine males, masculine females, and people who ‘identify’ every which way. That said, the vast majority of people still conform to the basic binary system, they identify as male or female, cisgendered according to their sex chromosomes. It’s very difficult to get accurate stats, as many reports are out of date or don’t address much further than “transgender.” However with less than 5% of people in the US even claiming LGBT status and 0.6% claiming transgender status in the US 2017, that still puts 99.4% of people as adhering to what geneticism claims, regardless of whether they are open to propensitist beliefs. That level of evidence that sex=gender is beyond enough to rationalise believing so. In nearly any other discussion, a percentage like that would be accepted straight away.

On propensitism, the positive sides are more ‘emotional,’ for lack of a better word. There are people who believe their gender does not match the sex they were born with. Gender dysphoria certainly exists. In that case, it is ‘better’ to accept people as how they feel. It ostracises them less, denies how they feel less, and in any given person’s case, has no direct negative impact on anyone. In terms of the wider spectrum of genders, choice of your own gender, and fluidity to change genders on as much as a whim, it is still largely about acceptance but is faced with more skepticism when not discussing the obvious male/female dichotomy. However, being ‘nice’ doesn’t necessitate how things actually work. There is a direct contradiction built into propensitism. The nature of the reality of someone’s gender is determined solely by that person’s belief. It is an uncategorisable, unquantifiable, unprovable intent that somehow determines the state of the universe. How is it then that someone else’s belief, or several thousand people’s beliefs that someone is not a different gender does not have this same reality-shaping effect?

Additionally, to believe there are masculine and feminine behaviours in the first place is to attribute behaviours to the binary gender roles. If XY is not the male gender, then how can an action be “masculine” for being more commonly attributed to XY people? If everyone suddenly embraced full propensitism, and got to work determining their own genders every which way, then there would no longer be any anchored reference for what is a masculine or feminine trait or behaviour. The concept of gender itself would be completely broken down as everyone would just be ‘how they are,’ and to label anything inherently masculine or feminine would be purely arbitrary or referring to standards which no longer hold true. Propensitism cannot have a clear endpoint which follows through from itself.

There is also the question of “how can you know you’re a different gender?” Each person only experiences life from a single perspective. There is no way to know how other people feel, no way to know how a different gender feels, so the decision that you are a different gender is something difficult to rationalise, other than liking more feminine or masculine behaviours, however there’s plenty of people who still identify as cisgendered while preferring behaviours of the opposite gender roles. Drag queens are perhaps one of the most extreme cases, taking on a completely female persona, mannerisms, and an act frequently, and outside of the act are quite often very feminine, however they are not women by their own admission.

Propensitism also suffers highly from, to put it lightly, exploitation of itself. For all the people who truly believe that they are non-binary, or genderfluid, or anything else, there are people who say they are, motivated by very different reasons. By this point we have all heard stories of people who enjoy dressing differently to members of their gender so believe they are, at least in part, the opposite gender. Many of us have experience with people who have felt rejection from somebody and try to use gender identity to change their mind. For me, my experience of something like this was a girl deciding she was ‘genderfluid’ because she was attracted to a homosexual boy, and thought changing her ‘label’ to include being a boy would mean he would find her attractive. So if there are these cases where what we see is more akin to attention seeking behaviour than a legitimate belief in their gender being different, how in the world do you sort out the legitimate belief from the exploitation of the belief for an extrinsic gain?

So wherein lies the problem?

In very recent times, there has been a very large push that everyone must accept propensitism. If it makes people feel more free, accepted, and comfortable in themselves to be recognised for what they believe they are, what’s the harm?

Well don’t get me wrong, there’s certainly harm to be found. The first, and most prominent group that seems to be suffering is women. That is, cisgendered women. Through history, women have definitely had it harder than men. Women have a deep, rich history full of strength and sisterhood, fighting for rights to their own freedom, to vote, to have the simple ability of ownership. Women have been generally oppressed for centuries in terms of being allowed to live equally with men, work for the same pay, even their basic bodily functions are still kept hush-hush and behind closed doors as it’s hard for it to not be a ‘shameful’ topic. So to have reached a point like now, where if anything women are as close to men across the board as they’ve ever been, and to have a spike in the amount of born-men who want to be recognised fully as women is somewhat damaging. For the same reason as it would be damaging for a white person to want to be recognised as a different race because ‘that’s how they feel.’ It’s appropriating a culture that believes you are not one of them. It’s taking the power that they’ve worked for and saying “this means nothing because I can just be a part of it on a whim.” In radical propensitism, it can be as much as a daily feeling of wanting to wear a dress today, or feeling girly that justifies such a devaluation of the significance of gender to other people.

It applies to men as well. As mentioned before there are people who categorise a lot of their feeling by how they liked to dress and similar superficial details. I think many members of both genders can agree that it’s somewhat insulting that some think their gender is as superficial as clothing. Countless scores of women wear pants and shorts daily and it does not detract from their femininity in the slightest. Men around the world have longer, ‘feminine’ haircuts, there was even the trend of the ‘man-bun,’ but that didn’t make those men less male.

The second large group that is feeling the culture shock of propensitism is the LGB community. Many are finding that spaces created for their community are being more and more filled with people who feel they belong to those groups while missing certain elements. Lesbians in recent times have felt very threatened and attacked by their spaces being occupied by what they see as men. People, often still with male genetalia, who identify as ‘female lesbians’ who feel the right to be seen and recognised as lesbians. Lesbians and females in general have more than plentiful reason to feel threatened by men, with a culture of sexual abuse, aggression and dominance and countless other issues that don’t need going into right now, so to have a safe, female space being occupied by what some perceive as men is threatening and worrying. The same is true for gay males who find more and more ‘gay men with vaginas’ in their spaces. The issue is that these people expect to be treated the same way as any other member of those communities. The fact of the matter is that many gay and lesbian people simply do not feel attraction to them, whether it be down to their genitals, their perceived gender or traits, or even their perceived lack of connection to that gender’s history and community. Propensitism faces a divide here. The main goal of it should be acceptance, so on one side you have transgender people who should be accepted as who they believe they are, on the other you have homosexual people who should be accepted as liking a specific gender, however they define that gender, and should not be shamed for not liking something outside of that. Unfortunately, all that occurs is homosexual people get shouted down as “transphobic” for not possessing sexual attraction to someone based on their characteristics.

There is obviously no black and white solution to such a problem. The LGBT community has fought for decades for the right to be attracted to whom they desire, and not be judged for such attraction. Only recently has such attraction felt accepted and somewhat mainstream, and now those rights are being saboutaged from within with people demanding homosexual people choose to be attracted to something they’re not. It is no different to when straight people try to train out the gay and force gay people to be with opposite sex partners. It does not work. It is not acceptable. Therefore, there is no situation where both sides win.

Further in this harm is the current events of Reddit and some other forms of social media. Mass bans on anything seen as even potentially ‘transphobic,’ which for the most part, is simply people who believe in geneticism. Worse than this, anything seen as ‘right wing’ being purged under the guise of being ‘hate speech.’ Dislike people for their political views all you like, but those views are both legal and protected, and should not be censored by a private, economically motivated company. People who have been forced out of other “safe” spaces by people appropriating their identity, who have now been banned from having spaces that are reserved for them.

Categorically, it is not transphobia. This is not a targeted attack on people who are not cisgendered. This is a collision of two belief systems that are incongruous. While propensitism may make you feel more correct in yourself and you may hope others follow the same set of beliefs, there is no fact of the universe which makes the line of thinking more correct than geneticism. Targeting and persecuting “the majority” for a belief system grounded in reason, the belief system which has been accepted and taken for granted for millennia, is more hateful than the ‘hate’ you perceive to be happening. More than that, telling people they aren’t allowed to think differently than you, and forcing them out of places for thinking differently will never change things positively for you. You simply ostracise yourselves from those people more, and are more likely to cause them to harbour resentment towards you for such actions. Hate breeds hate in return.

 

TLDR:

So my conclusion is this. Carry whichever belief system makes the most sense to you. Both are valid in their own ways, both have shortcomings. Where possible, allow people to operate within their own belief system as long as it does not impose negatively upon you, and avoid imposing your own views on others. You do not have the right to tell people what they are allowed to think, what they are allowed to feel, who they are allowed to be attracted to, and their doing so in opposition with what you would like, is not ‘phobia’ towards you even if it is not in line with your beliefs.

And lastly, on what I see as a sadder note, don’t let yourself be an excuse. Don’t take pride in being the scapegoat for a political agenda that in the end, will probably toss you aside as soon as they’ve got what they wanted by ‘supporting’ you. Look around you at the people who stood by you in the past under the same political ‘wing’ that are being treated as unwanted now. Don’t be naïve and think the same can’t happen to you.