"Gender Identity" is not a real thing
1. Empty Concepts
There are some words which denote what I call “empty concepts.” When a word denotes an empty concept, there is no definition of the word which matches the word’s use and which users of the word would agree to. An example is the concept of profanity.
Here is how the word “profanity” is used: A word is profane if and only if the word is on an arbitrary list of “bad words”. There’s no real reason why “ass” is on the bad list but “posterior” isn’t.
But people who complain about profanity wouldn’t agree to that definition. They don’t think they’re talking about something arbitrary. They (mistakenly) think that there is a real quality of profane words that makes them profane. However, people who believe in the concept of profanity are not able to come up with any definition of “profanity” that they would agree with, because there’s really no substance to the concept of profanity beyond an arbitrary list of “bad words.”
“Bigfoot” and “the Loch Ness monster” are not empty concepts. Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster do not exist, but they could exist - i.e. they’re not impossible in principle. But “profanity” cannot exist in any possible world because it is not even a coherent concept.
2. “Gender Identity” is an empty concept
Like “profanity”, “gender identity” is an empty concept. Suppose you wake up tomorrow morning and there is an evil witch next to your bed. She tells you “I just waved a magic wand and turned you into a woman!”
When you recover from your initial surprise, you ask “So, do I have a different body now?”
“No” she replies “Your body is exactly the same as before.”
“OK” you say “how about my mind? Do I have different personality traits? Will I start liking romantic comedies?”
“No” says the witch “Your body and mind are exactly the same as before.”
“So then what changed?” you ask
The witch smiles triumphantly. “Your gender identity changed!”
It seems that in this story nothing about you actually changed. Your body and mind are exactly the same as they were before. If “gender identity” is not your body and it is not your mind then it is not anything.
3. Brain Scans
Some transgenders and their advocates cite brain scans as evidence for the reality of gender identity. They claim that brain scans show that parts of transgender males’ brains are more similar to females’ brains than to non-transgender males’ brains. I’m not sure that’s true, but even if it is, it does not show that gender identity is real. Every man who likes the color pink has something in his brain which occurs more frequently in women’s brains. But a man who likes the color pink is not actually a woman on the inside. He’s a man who likes the color pink.
4. “Gender” is also an empty concept
Moreover, gender is not real either. Gender theorists created the term “gender” in the 1950s in order to distinguish gender from sex. Sex is a biological phenomenon. Gender theorists claim that in addition to sex, there is something called gender.
If you want to talk about whether people like the color pink, then say you’re talking about color preferences. If you want to talk about aggression, then say you’re talking about aggression. If you want to talk about whether someone empathizes more with men or women, then say you’re talking about whether someone empathizes more with men or women.
5. Conclusion
Women who believe that they are “really” men because they have a male “gender identity” are deluded. There is no such thing as gender identity.
People who talk about gender are either deluded, or they are unknowingly buying into the language of the deluded gender theorists. There is no such thing as gender. Up until the mid 1900s the word was “sex”. There are two sexes, male and female. Today the word “gender” has spread out from the academic gender theory bubble into wider society, and people have begun to use “gender” as a synonym for “sex”. It is probably best to embrace this new meaning of the word. Make “gender” a synonym for “sex” and explicitly disavow the mysticist and pseudoscientific content which the word “gender” originally was intended to convey.
« Biological sex classification with structural MRI data shows increased misclassification in transgender women »
I tried to check a study about those brain scans stuff. Their conclusion is not « trans brain stuff is bogus » but when you look at the data…
The Boxplot shows that the classifier still tends to correctly assign the sex even in transgender women. The vast majority of trans women in their data set were post-hormone treatment. And finally, when you check supplementary material S3, their classifier is correct 99% of the time on cisgender women and 88% of the time on men. Given that they only had trans women amongst their trans, I suspect they have somehow chosen a biased model in the first place, in order to have more trans women be classified as women. It seems biased just enough so that the problem does not appear on the Boxplot of cisgender men.
Nature is such a fraudulent journal in 2024.