Why does everyone think gender identity is real?

For the most part, women don't have a choice and will birth children out of necessity. It is similar for men who have no choice but to work menial jobs. Gender identity makes you sympathise with Turd-Worldists.
RadFems have a lot of ok stuff but you have to strip away all the Patriarchy theory or you get shit like "hurr men are trying to colonise women's spaces"

Please point out the error in my reasoning.

I'm not even trans. I don't do gender reassignment because doing it now won't switch around the situation from the get go. I don't give a shit what pronouns I get called, and I realize that people are most likely to do it purely based on how I dress. I just know that biology randomly assigned me a sex, and it wasn't the one I would have wanted to have. Gender dysphoria is very fucking simple to understand from my perspective. It doesn't require a magical gender unicorn social construct. It's literally just a matter of asking me the simple logical question of which sex I would rather be at this very fucking moment, which just so happens to be the opposite of the one I was born as.

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Medical research into the cause of transsexualism seems to suggest that its caused by some of the sexually dimorphic sections of the brain developing as those of the opposite gender.
Its not just a matter of someone randomly deciding to transition because their behavior is closer to the stereotype of the opposite sex, but rather its more about one's body feeling horribly unnatural, often to the point that many trannies would rather kill themselves than deal with it. I'm sure there are some people who call themselves trans just because they don't conform to the stereotypical behavior of their birth sex, and some of them may even decide to medically transition to the opposite sex, but I don't really think that's the norm and largely just a result of the increased media attention on the subject in the last few years

Literally the same argument as fundamentalist homophobes. Just because you don't perceive the process of your brain parsing words you read doesn't mean it's not there and there aren't variations that cause people problems, e.g. dyslexia. The notion that human nature is only socially constructed is maximal idealism. Most of our mind is either hard- or soft-wired. Socialization is really just about contextualizing what's already there.

Feels like trans ideology is leading us to 'female' and 'male' brains and where nothing social/historical matters.

Collective identity isn't grounded in the subject's own experiences, they are social categories.
I don't think any individual has exclusive insight into any "identity" besides their self-identity and total subjectivity, those that are independent of others. I value phenomenological insight but I question the scope of knowledge it gives you access to.
Claiming to have the mental states of a man makes no sense, both epistemologically and metaphysically. You don't have access to the mental states of other men so what makes you believe that your subjective experiences are anything like those of another man? If there was some mental state shared by all men and one woman, why would your conclusion be that the woman is not really a woman rather than the categorization of the mental state being inaccurate?

Gender isn't just nurture user. It's a interacting conglomeration of biological determination and environmental conditioning. People can't just shrug it off, since it is so deeply intertwined with their sexuality. It really isn't that much of a matter of identification, that usually is a result of distancing and abstracting yourself from your true essence, the latter becoming the big other in the process. If you don't give a shit how human society works you're just being ignorant.

You actually do share a lot of things with other man mentally, you merely experience them differently due to your specific environment (as in, have them shape you differently). I don't know why you want to try to ignore a million years of evolution.

Seems like a case of the grass always being greener to me.

I hope you don't take this the wrong way but it sounds really convenient that you found out that the cause of all your problems is something that you can't change.

You know that social behavior shapes biology through sexual selection, right? Why do you think peacock feathers exist?

Maybe that's a fair assumption to make about a species in general but it tells you nothing about an individual.

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But of course it does. Why do you think Psychoanalysis exists? I doubt that the majority of people actually "identifies" as anything, they just are.

You can NEVER find out if that was your actual problem.

Who gives a shit? Why do you care?

Why do people always blame being born the wrong gender, rather than being born with the wrong mind? Gender dysphoria could be the sort of issue that causes you to want to be the opposite of your birth gender, so if you were born a girl you'd still have gender dysphoria and want to be a man.

And also I don't know if this was intentional, but you make it sound like the reason you want to become a woman is because they have it easier than men, rather than actually feeling you are a woman. What was "shitty" about your life anyways? "Feeling like you just don't fit in"?

A lot of people talk about this stuff as if they were obviously correct but it's not obvious at all.

My identity is not collective, you have no saying in who I really am. At best you can describe me, but your judgement will be necessary more approximative than mine.

If my phenomenological insight is worthless, so is yours, which means that you have less authority to speak about my identity, even when we consider this debate on your own terms.

You don't have the insights of other men either, what you are doing is just living your preferred version of manhood. The same applies to trans people.

I don't claim to know who you really are. I'm saying that descriptors such as manhood are external to you as a subject. They only appear to you in relation to others. Could introspection ever help you find your gender identity if you had no social context at all? I don't think so, it's a collective identity.

I'm sincerely fine with people cross-dressing and so on. Nothing in their behavior bothers me, just the rhetoric surrounding them.

THats even further retarded. They arent born with the desire to change genders. They DEVELOP this mentality.

Did no one teach you about genetics in school? I seriously don't get why so many on Holla Forums find this controversial. I have balls, they produce testosterone, and it has certain physiological affects on my brain which influences behavior. People without balls do not experience this, and coincidentally most people without balls are women, who themselves have different sex organs that produce different behavior influencing hormones. While individuals may exhibit radically different behavior, the majority of the population falls within behavior patterns of those who are the same sex. We see this growing up, and we see it in population studies. Entire industries rely on consistent behavioral differences between the sexes world wide, regardless of cultural upbringing or income level.

Why is this so hard to understand?

Sexual reassignment surgery is impossible and should not be called that. Trannies are literally Jewish poison.

Because the existence of balls and the prevalence of certain behaviors don't make gender or the identities based on this random assortment of things real.

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*oops, my grammar don't real

What you're saying is that because stars exist and their arrangements can be described in colloquial patterns then constellations exist.

Algebra, calculus, and economics might describe existing processes, but they're artificial conventions placed over those existing phenomena, not the phenomena themselves.

Because it is real, it just has the misfortune of being associated with sjws and idpol.

ITT: Spooked faggots

No, a description of phenomena is not the same as the physical phenomena itself; you are trying to argue that a "fox" doesn't exist because "fox" is just a word used to describe a physical phenomenon of an organism but not the organism itself.

You're using a typical religious apologetic tactic: arguing the semantics of the word "existence" in an attempt to steer the conversation to linguistic technicalities over the actual argument at hand. If you admit that the components of what we call gender exist and have the affects on a personas claimed, then you are de facto admitting that gender exists.

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I hope that nazi flag is ironic because I agree with you.

When does Stirner imply this

When your reading comprehension is non-existent.

Marx's Stirner diss track "German Ideoloy" is the greatest and earliest shitpost ever recorded.

Stirner was spooked by his own sense of self.

t. buddhist

No it's not. A lot of my behaviors and general mindset is something that would suit a female better, objectively. I literally find being male aggravating because the way I would express myself comes off wrong to anyone who is around me since I'm not female. I know exactly what they think stuff like "Why does this guy act like such a bitch?" "He acts like a girl." etc.

It's the opposite of convenient. It's the most inconvenient thing possible. Furthermore, it would be possible to change it given sufficient medical technology, but currently it isn't, that's all. That isn't my fucking fault.

Because it isn't about having the wrong mind. It's about the behaviors I tend to express, which are considered incorrect by society or 'faggy' because I'm male and not female.

And I never stated that I think women have it easier than men. Although they do in some respects. There are upsides to being a man. There are upsides to being a woman. There are downsides to being either. But they come up in different ways. But the specific shitty aspects of my life would have not been so shitty had I been born with female biology.

That is correct.
Not really, you're just wrong.
And you just keep being wrong.

I used constellations specifically because not only do they literally not exist, they only appear to exist because of a specific point of view. The stars are physical objects that exist, but their arrangements are interpreted based on cultural imagination and perspective. That is what you're doing with gender. You see in this case patterns of behavior and physiology and then saying that these patterns are real.

To use your example of "the fox," the system of scientific naming illustrates that the very non existence of the fox. There are numerous sub types of foxes sharing qualities even within discrete populations. If you're going to say that "the fox" is an actually existing thing then there must be some essential qualities of foxness which pertain exclusively to this organism in particular to the exclusion of all non foxes. This would similarly imply not only that the fox exists, but that there must be a fox which is the foxiest fox.

If this isn't so, that qualities of foxness aren't objective, then whatever qualities are identified are being subjectively interpreted and assigned to what is called "the fox," and whatever value these qualities are ascribed in making something a fox or not are also ascribed a subjective value in what makes something more or less a fox.

So no, just because you've identified an animal and use this or that rubric of subjective qualities or patterns to describe its differences from some other arbitrarily determined rubric doesn't mean that the fox exists.

So, no, admitting that stars exist and that they're arranged in identifiable patterns doesn't mean that constellations exist.

*That these patterns are really existing things.

Yes, that is what gender is.

They are, unless you are going to deny that physiology affects the brain, and that the brain affects behavior.

Physical qualities are not subjective. Testosterone has measured affects on brain chemistry.

But if a word is defined by being those set of patterns then it exists. Gender is the habitual behavior of a sex in a population associated with the sex of the individual.

Again, you are trying to muddy the waters with analogies. Seeing shapes in stars is not the same as empirical study of association between causes and effects.

How widespread is this?
I lost touch with many friends, and after reconnecting they all this in their heads

I don't go outside too much, and now I'm scared that maybe a lot of people think this way.

I always thought it was just irrelevant tumblr drama that impacted only on netizens, but I fear that was years ago

If that is so then thank you for confirming for me that it doesn't exist.

Whatever effects these things might have is entirely separate from whether or not these patterns so identified are existing or just ad hoc, subjective associations overlaying discrete phenomena. Any physiological pattern you can identify and isolate isn't happening in a vacuum, so every biological process in the body is going to affect and be affected by every other.

If that is so, then assuming gender exists, it would be the amalgamated result of every biological process within and influence from without the body. So whence cometh gender? Even if you are to ignore all else and point to the testes or ovaries and say "gender comes from here," both organs are homologues developed from the same original organ, fulfilling similar reproductive purposes, so is it just the sperm and egg that create gender? Does such a person possessing ovaries without eggs or testes without sperm cease to be a male or female?

That is correct, by what you call these effects and the cultural value you put on them are. Aggression for instance isn't an exclusively male or female trait, and whether or not such behavior is considered masculine or feminine depends entirely on whatever subjective value you place over top of it.

Once more you exhibit your confusion. It's not words that are defined by whatever criteria, but the words that are made to describe independent phenomena.

So it's subjective and culturally determined and not some objective, existing truth. Thanks for finally seeing reason.

The only one trying to obfuscate things here is you. Maybe you're not doing it intentionally, but you're the one playing games here. You're demonstrably wrong on nearly every single level, and I sincerely hope that this drivel isn't the result of an "education" you paid for, because you've been cheated.

if you had 'no social context at all', you would be a wild ape with no concept of language. muh total subjectivity is a purely theoretical abstraction, itself grounded in socially acquired language.

If they are external, then they are so to everyone. As I said, men can't get access to some sort of hivemind that tells them what manhood is, rather they observe and conjure a personal idea of manhood.

My point is that that rethoric is not necessarily wrong: their manhood has the same epistemological foundation as yours, which is their personal intuition.

I think that's his point, that without these social mores from which to judge and contrast you'd have no basis for identity, much less gender.

Marx BTFOs Stirner and pomo idealist pedants in the german ideology.

'gender' is an religious conception, an evil phrase that needs to be vanquished from language so people can be 'free to truly be themselves'. You are circlejerking over words and labels while pretending it's somehow revolutionary.

Gender as a concept isn't the problem. The problem is that you have people saying that it is some kind of objective standard and cornerstone of society.

But don't let that stop you from feeling smug.

that was only BTFO if you're a staunch believer in "dialectical" materialism

This would make you a woman in virtue of every woman and man living up to their respective stereotype, and you fitting into the former more than the latter. But people aren't like that at all, there's variance in every possible trait from one individual to the next. Besides, those stereotypes are historically contingent.

You have reached a conclusion that you can't verify and it happens to be the conclusion that allows you to do nothing about your current situation. It doesn't leave you in a convenient spot, but retreating like that might be the least distressing course of action. I can see myself doing the same thing, I don't blame you.

Those constraints are bad and we can revolt against them. It doesn't necessitate a new 'identity' for everyone whose behavior doesn't conform to current norms.

ie. if you actually want to understand how material conditions affect your world and change them instead of congratulating yourself endlessly on your own unique uniqueness and illusory sense of complete autonomy.

I really don't understand what the arguments ITT are, but so far I haven't seen anyone disprove OP's central argument: how can you believe you're the wrong gender or sex when all you know is what you feel like, not what a female or a woman feels like? You can say "my body feels incorrect/alien and if it was of the opposite sex it'd feel right" which could be true, although I figure it'd be on the same level as body dysmorphia, but how the fuck can you say "I feel like I'm actually a woman" when you have no fucking idea what "women" feel like? All anyone knows is what they feel like, they don't have any fucking idea what their sex or the opposite one is supposed to feel like. If you're saying "I act more like a woman than a man", that might be true in the view of society, but why would you then decide to identity as a woman instead of just identifying as yourself, a unique being? Why would you want to discard your uniqueness and conform yourself to a ridiculously broad category? Because society wants you to?

instead you should base your identity completely on a minor young hegelian's ideology because the internet tells you so, even though it sounds suspiciously like late capitalist ideology or that miley cyrus interview where she talks about being a genderless ageless spirit soul. The individual can only be truly free in a society of free individuals. What if your true unique self means identifying as a woman?

Maybe you should talk to more people irl, mister namefag

I'm doing no such thing. I'm stating a simple fact that each individual is entirely unique and identifying as anything except themselves takes away from that uniqueness.
How can you identify as a woman? What is a woman? How can you know what a man feels like to know that you're not a man but the opposite? Why would you want to identify as part of a category artificially designed for the benefit of a Capitalist society? Aren't you effectively discarding the chains of your old, assigned category, and voluntarily putting on the chains of the unassigned category? Why not just discard all chains?

As another user said, a woman does not know how other women feel, and can only speculate on the similarities, for she he has no access to other experiences. This means that the idea a woman reaches is just an idea of womanhood she derives from both her society and her personal stances.
In the same way, a trans person will trie to reach his/her particular idea of womanhood/manhood, which she will derive from both her personal instincts and impressions, and from the culture s/he lives in.

OP, have you personally known any trans people? Been friends with them? Spent any time around them?

That just makes it sound like gender is arbitrary nonsense, which of course it is, but why would you go through all the effort of putting so much emphasis on something nonsensical and arbitrary?

now you are just being pedantic. categories are just tools we use to navigate the world. You won't fix anything by changing people's language. The chains that bind us are not in language, but in the material world.

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Why not liberate yourself from the social category of "liberate"? it does not objectively exist, it is reliant on social categories, it is arbitrary.

And when you have done that, why not stop speaking altogether, since the criticism of gender as a category with no objective definition, being wholly social, applies to every word, since words do not get their meaning from definitions and are entirely social in their nature.

nihilism much?

It has nothing to do with people's language, but their thinking. I'm not entirely sure what that quote is saying, but it almost seems to say that how a person thinks is irrelevant. Their are material chains, but the most powerful and prevalent are the ideological ones.

That's an incredibly conservative view of gender.

The troll part of this image is the "providing gender" and "supporting gender" right?

I'd put a dotted line between them because gender identities are much less objective than the XX/XY or vagina/penis division.

exorcising the sexual spooks

How could David Reimer do so?

Gender is hardcoded in the brain, it does not rely on "feeling how others feel like", but on self-identification and the desire to harmonize this with the social.

David Reimer was sexually abused and mutilated. He's really not a good example for anything other than what happens when you fuck up children.
Then why is gender ridiculously varied across history and cultures?

David Reimer had gender reconstructive surgery and was raised as a girl based on the same premise of OP's argument; that gender has no innateness and is purely taught. He's a good example of the results of your ideology.

Because identification, desire and motivation being hardcoded into the brain doesn't result in a necessarily similar expression of said things in all instances.

For the same reason for which you are not willing to dress like a girl: because you don't feel like it and because it goes against your istincts and will.

Only to ultra-spooked idealists who believe there is some ethereal plane of pure forms to which all humanity should conform to in order to not be "arbitrary and nonsensical".

He didn't have surgery beyond removing his genitals. He was raised as a girl when it was very obvious that he wasn't, and was bullied about it at school. His sessions with the doctor also included sexual abuse. The entire experiment was a huge fuckup and it's impossible to use it for any kind of position.
It seems like you're saying that the source of gender is just wanting to fit in with the other members of your sex. That's probably true, but I don't see how it works with your argument.

I don't dress like a girl because their clothing is usually impractical and usually fashion oriented. That's a big reason why it's normal and regular to see a girl wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

The entire point is to not conform to anything. To simply be who you feel like being without having to worry about what to identity as. Gender is one of the most restrictive identifies possible, even people who identify with their assigned gender have insecurities about properly conforming to it; it's ridiculous that someone would take off the chains chosen for them so as to add chains they chose.

but it's true that there have been gender-questioning people all through history. I mean yeah they're more visible now but they always existed.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history#Ancient_history

A rather odd point for someone who's complaint is that people don't conform to his ideology.

What is ridiculous is an ideology which defines the entirety of the social (except the ideology itself of course) as chains. There is no constitutive uniqueness which exists in opposition to the social, believing there is one only leads to a self-defeating spiral of paranoia.

I didn't know this.

It works with my argument in the sense that gender not being uniform throughout history and cross-culturally does not imply that there is no constitutive core to gender, which what the argument that gender is not uniform sets to demonstrate.

t. Dunning-Kruger fodder who knows nothing about science

no one here is saying that gender is purely socially determined you fucking retard. just because gender, a complex social phenomenon, has a biological basis doesn't mean it's all hard-coded.

additionally, sex isn't just as simple as chromosomes, and endocrinology is quite complex in its own right.

I think what idpolers refer to as brocialism is just an aversion to reading a fucking book.

Towards gender yes, but not all identity is invalid. The "titles" given are, but not the conditions.

Theres only one Gender and its David Bowie

this tbh fam

No, you do
My pocket of friends all hate that shit and we barely talk about it
I went back to uni and started seeing weird shit that I hope is not the norm

Is this the correct, leftist way to raise a child?

metronews.ca/news/halifax/2017/02/06/gender-nonconforming-kid-elliott-educate-pop-up-school.html

god fucking forbid anyone let that happen. what point were you trying to make?

Gender is a social construct. You've bluepilled yourself, mate

I think women are cool.

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Have fun repressing there, friend

I don't even know what "identifying as" something means. Does it mean anything else than publicly claiming to be [identical with] that thing?
It's clearly not the same thing as identifying WITH something.

I definitely agree with that. Manhood is not something present in each man, they have no internal sense of their gender.
It's a bad foundation and it's consistent with gender being a cultural spook in the collective minds of unique individuals.

ur gonna be an unique individual whether you like it or not.

you are outing yourself as a liberal and an idealist. The only thing you care about is language. everyone's problems would be solved if they just adopted your extremely pedantic linguistic framework, amirite? how are stirnerites different from tumblr users who obsess about 'problematic' terminology?

most humans who grew up in the consumeristic west after the 1960s are stirnerites without knowing it.

Gender is just another bourgeois spook, so people can label and divide themselves, waste time bickering over it, and consume specific products for their demographic. That much is clear. If there's a shred of sanity left in the collective conscious of mankind, this concept will be relegated to the same dustbin as phrenology, seances and Lysenkoism.

Gender is real. Conventional notions of gender are spooks.

they're the wahabites of consumerism