Benjamin, I think you should do you. If it’s important to you to use terms like “cisgender” for whatever reason then by all means do so. I do however completely reject the idea that it is incumbent upon me to use these terms as a sign of respect. I simply do not believe in the metaphysics of gender ideology and do absolutely believe that the whole idea has done incalculable harm to countless people, including those it purports to help. I would add the inane term “sex assigned at birth” to the list of obfuscating language that has steamrolled over common sense since 2020.
There are millions of us out here who refuse to bow to this "trans" psychosis. This social contagion has saturated society.
But I think that only when an avalanche of medical malpractice lawsuits comes crashing down, and when insurance companies stop paying for these mutilating surgeries, will this insanity end.
Money talks, especially in this country, and I'm afraid money is going to be the only thing that ends it.
I am still quite unconvinced that gender identity is a useful descriptive construct. Much less an essentialist concept. Sex and Gender are the same thing - we don’t need a word to describe “better than guessing” heuristic shortcuts about how men and women tend to socially act or present. We have the gender distressed and the gender accepting - they aren't actually different gender. Male and Female is all we need for policy and people’s feelings and presentations are their own business, not the state or policy other than they have the right to dress and feel as they please without being fired from jobs or kicked out of housing, etc. But the state doesn't need to validate introspective woo. Treat it like a religion with a beliefs/believers distinction.
I agree. I feel like a woman and have never felt other than female. So? Does that mean I have a gender identity and therefore it’s a real thing? I can’t see the point; it feels like a hair-splitting distraction that is too readily exploited by the powerbrokers of TQI+, the OG autogynephiles bent on scaling and diversifying the ‘trans’ portfolio at any cost.
I am not even sure what it means when a female says "I feel like I female". I am male, am fine with that, but I don't know that I "feel like a male". I don't have any standpoint to know anything else so I can't say any particular feeling is a male one. What trans-identified people ultimately must mean is that they resonate more with opposite sex averages on some kind of socio-cultural metrics (or what they take them to be from selective attention). Its like when Christians say they "have a personal relationship with Jesus". When I was a kid and heard this in church I could see it was nonsense from a mile away. What? Are you spirit channeling like Jeane Dixon? Ultimately all it meant was they get a warm fuzzy feeling when they think about this Jesus they have constructed in their brains from dogma. Sincerity isn't etiology.
And those "socio-cultural metrics" they identify are really just stereotypes. You know, boys like blue girls like pink, boys play sports, girls play with dolls, etc...
So what they're really saying is, "I identify with this set of stereotypes rather than another." And the obvious answer to that is, "Well stop being such a sexist piece of sh*t!" Not to grant them with special rights based on their fondness for a specific set of sexist stereotypes.
Lee Jussim has shown how stereotypes are mostly true if they are taken to be "better than guessing" heuristics, so it isn't like stereotypes are made up, but they are hardly normative. And Jussim's research shows people mostly use them as just that - better than guessing in a low information environment and can easily ditch stereotypes when they get more information. That is the problem with identity politics - they flagrantly ignore the concept of levels of analysis and don't get the difference between individuals and groups. They seem to think individuals carry the disparate data for their group in them in some metaphysical way. It is truly bizarre. https://sites.rutgers.edu/lee-jussim/wp-content/uploads/sites/135/2019/05/Jussim-et-al-Prej-Handbook-2009.pdf
Also, the word gender has no specific meaning at this point. Some people are using the terms simply to describe aspects of their adpersonality. Some people means it as a synonym for sex. Still others use it to refer to their relationship with their sexed bodies. And some are strictly referring to sex stereotypes.
Except in practice, that is often untrue. For example, gender-critical people use the word "gender" to refer to social norms and expectations that are attributed to each sex, such as certain colors or behaviors being seen as more associated with males or females. Indeed, what makes gender-critical people, well, critical is that they see these norms and expectations to be often arbitrary or based on half-truths.
(And, of course, there's grammatical gender.)
"Gender identity" is the phrase that's gets wooly.
If we deny ourselves words to describe things that exist, we are lost. Many, many people see gender as distinct from sex. If we claim that those two words can only mean the same thing, then we cannot describe these people's perceptions or the experiences of people who experience gender separate from sex.
The bifurcation of gender from sex is pretty new and I am just not sure we need a word for wearing dresses or playing with dolls. I can't think of an instance where gendered is doing any work that some variation of "sexed" couldn't easily do the same work. I am not exactly arguing with the point of your piece - I do appreciate the tone of compromise on an issue that has too much nastiness and dismissiveness on the side that happens to be right which makes it harder to change minds about the important stuff (protecting same sex spaces, medicalization of youth gender distress). I just am pretty compelled by Kathleen Stock's take on the confusions that gender can introduce.
I’d like to see (or hear or read) an objective, stable, coherent definition of “gender” or “gender identity.” I’m sure it’s true that many people sincerely believe that they have a “gender identity,” but I believe (just as sincerely) that I do not. The concept of “gender identity” doesn’t resonate with me at all, and I suspect that many, perhaps a majority of Americans, feel the same way.
The norms and expectations depend on each society--and there do seem to be different *average* behaviors within the sexes for some things, but with enormous overlap. People argue about how much is biologically vs culturally determined and there, I have no idea. I see people attributing personality aspects to being male or female due to prehistoric demands....but then it turns out those "male" or "female" aspects are not even tagged as "male" or "female" in different cultures today!
There is an extremely interesting talk by Heather Heying from the 2023 Genspect meeting about what is considered male and female work across a broad range of less developed societies that I thought was very interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SVbN6tIySc
No they are not. If I lookup "sex" in the encyclopedia in my office (from 1941) it will to what we call biological sex. When I looked up
gender" it says "In most foreign languages. gender has nothing to do with sex. it is grammatical, no natural--that is, it is governed by the form of the word" The German word for girl (Madchen) is neuter in gender, because it happens to have a neuter ending; woman (weiss) is also neuter"
So in 1941, gender was a word that did not necessarily have an connotation with sex (there was an informal use where gender was a synonym for sex" Today gender has new meanings that are in use. You cannot simply assert on your authority was those meaning are. They arise out of common usage; it is how language works.
We seem to be in violent agreement. I did not state, "Sex and Gender are the same thing". Rather, I was quoting someone else saying that and pointing out why I thought it was false. Indeed, the first sentence from the first *unquoted* paragraph from my comment begins, "Except in practice, that is often untrue."
I did say sex and gender are the same thing and I argue that gender has not through "natural usage" come to me the "performances or social expectations of a sex". Only a small cohort of educated professionals use it this way. It is mostly just used interchangeably with sex and even in that small cohort of educated professionals people use it alternately. Kathleen Stock documents this thoroughly early in her book. If I ask my dad what gender is (and he is a Democrat) he won't talk about performances. And obviously performances aren't enough to make you "transgender" - it requires introspection. When a person is whatever gender they say they are, we have entered "personal relationship with Jesus" territory whereby people think they can make an empirical etiological claim from an emotional state.
My understanding when I was in college in the 1970's was that gender was cultural while sex was biological. At the same time, there also an informal usage of gender = sex, that was noted in my 1959 dictionary, and probably goes back further than that.
While "gender-critical" actually EMBRACES gender & "gender-affirming care" is KILLING @ risk youth, since we can't actually change sex (geneticist Baron Robert Winston) trans is a deceptive delusional fraud & transphobia an impossible deflection. We debate 🚹🚺🚽💩 & ignore how many women die annually because they are BORN that way.
"people’s feelings and presentations are their own business, not the state or policy other than they have the right to dress and feel as they please without being fired from jobs or kicked out of housing, etc."
If someone has had medical intervention--that is part of their medical information and should be provided to those who need to know it (e.g. this person is taking this drug or has had these surgeries). It is not how they identify that is relevant for medical care but what medical interventions are involved and, again, what their sex is (to know normal, healthy levels).
I'm not a supporter of highlighting (especially repeatedly) something about a person that they dislike about themselves (e.g. their sex if they are trans, their weight if they have body image issues, their age if they worry about that, their marital status if they are unhappy with it, their failure to achieve something they really wanted to accomplish,....etc).
Exactly. Like with religion there is just no reason to openly piss all over someone's beliefs or call attention to the way they cope with discomfort. That is just a jerk thing to do. Only necessary when they are pushing for policies that make other's validate their beliefs or believe along with them. So much gender critical stuff goes beyond insisting on sound policy and just want to promote dickishness which is a turn off and invalidates good policy around single sex spaces and demedicalizing gender distress.
> "I am still quite unconvinced that gender identity is a useful descriptive construct. Much less an essentialist concept. Sex and Gender are the same thing ..."
Depends on how you define both "sex" and "gender", and you clearly insist that they refer to the same sets of traits and properties. You're welcome to your opinion of course -- we all have them ... -- though you might at least try to consider that there are sound reasons to define them such that they refer to two quite distinct sets of properties. To start with, you might consider this old tweet from Colin Wright:
"Colin Wright; Most confusion about "gender" results from people not defining it. Many definitions are in circulation:
1. Synonym for sex (male/female); 2. A subjective feeling in relation to one's sex; 3. Societal sex-based roles/expectation; 4. Sex-related behavior; 5. Personality traits"
Would you agree, or not, that there's a distinct difference between the traits that define the sexes -- to a first approximation whether we have ovaries (female) or have testicles (male) -- and the "roles, behaviours, and personality traits" that are typical of, but not unique to each sex?
The latter -- those roles, behaviours, and personality traits typical of but not unique to each sex -- is what many reasonably people and organizations quite reasonably mean by gender. For example, the late great US Justice Anton Scalia:
AS: ""The word 'gender' has acquired the new and useful connotation of cultural or attitudinal characteristics (as opposed to physical characteristics) distinctive to the sexes. That is to say, gender is to sex as feminine is to female and masculine is to male.”
BMJ: "Sex and gender are not synonymous. Sex, unless otherwise specified, relates to biology: the gametes, chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive organs. Gender relates to societal roles, behaviours, and expectations that vary with time and place, historically and geographically. ...."
Not to give you too much of a hard time, but I kinda think their opinions and views carry a bit more factual weight and substance than yours do. As Daniel Moynihan said, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." And it's something of a brute fact that sexual dimorphism -- "the condition where sexes of the same species exhibit different morphological characteristics, including characteristics not directly involved in reproduction" -- is ubiquitous, not just in "lower orders" of animals, but also in humans:
The earth is an oblate spheroid as it turns out but it's pretty much a sphere - it's definitely not halfway between a flat disc and a sphere.
You happen to like gender performance and think it's important, other people don't. There's no special gender souls needing to be saved, just a range of different people with all sorts of different issues who present as trans, whatever that means.
This middle road view is actually you putting your own view as better than others and not actually even making a good case- it's condescending and hubristic. What scientific construct and empirical evidence allows you to posit that gender identity exists or that cisgender is a useful term? There's not even a case based on utility as we already have trans as a marker.
Cis is purely social engineering. By saying people who disagree with you are unkind you are elevating yourself artificially as better than them. It's not unkind to assert reality, this gender thing is over indexed and will morph and potentially fade away God willing. The only thing that connects us is reality, not narratives in people's heads.
People have lived as the opposite sex always, frequently only outed posthumously, it is only since trans has become for-profit industry that it has been corrupted, like tobacco, asbestos, Oxycontin & fast food before it.
Trans is a culture bound syndrome - the label means different things at different times and I think it's ahistorical to apply it to the extremely small number of documented cases prior to 19th century, of which we know little.
What evidence is there for “gender identity” besides the fact that you and many others believe in it? My neighbors believe that Jesus is the son of God, as do many others. Is it “nonsense” that I say God doesn’t exist? According to your standards, I guess so.
Is there a test to determine the existence of “gender identity?”
Is “gender identity” located in the brain (since you seem so confident in your assertion that it exists)? If so, where do you think it exists in the brain?
Is “gender identity” immutable? Chase Strangio told SCOTUS that it is not, in fact, immutable.
You do nothing whatever to prove the existence of “gender identity” and I say it doesn’t exist like God doesn’t exist. They are both spiritual concepts with zero evidence base.
P.S. I hate the term “cisgender” because I have very strong feelings about this belief system and its effects on society. However, I must concede that there has to be compromise on the gender critical side on language stuff in order for any real discussion to take place among people who disagree.
I hear you, but I have seen two recent examples of people who for years pushed gender ideology and have just started to have doubts and questions be absolutely clobbered by GC’s online. In both cases, the GC’s rage and stubbornness (which I posses myself) turned off the questioning former gender zealots and led them to say that the GC side seems just as crazy as the gender side.
We have reason to be angry but I think we forget that hostility is not helping our cause. At all.
Way to move the goalposts. Refusing to compromise on the language I use is not remotely the same thing as “clobbering” someone online, nor does it imply an expression of rage. It is entirely possible to be civil without using nonsensical neologisms.
The correct analogy here is not whether you need to recognize that God exists just because your neighbors do. It's that you need to recognize that some people believe that God exists and we need a word for them whether or not God actually exists, because this behavior of them has implications (on policy, society, etc) regardless of whether their ideology is correct. So, we use a word like "religious" or "Christian" or "believer" to designate these people, and we have words for others as well (agnostic, atheist, secular, non religious) for the same reason.
I wasn’t commenting on what language to use in my comment. I was specifically responding to BR’s writing that not believing in gender identity is nonsense. I never said not to use the term gender identity. Just that I have every right not to believe in it.
He is not saying gender identity is a true, useful or correct concept. He is saying the concept exists, regardless of whether you believe it to be true or identify with it yourself. Same thing for God, or for a better example astrology. A lot of people (myself included) believe astrology is bullshit and doesn't mean anything. But you still have an astro sign, not because astrology is true or meaningful or relevant, but because astro sign is fully defined and determined by your birthdate, and everyone has a birthdate. And people who don't believe in astrology aren't pretending they don't have a sign or the concept of sign doesn't exist when someone asks them. They usually say : I'm pisces but I don't believe in astrology. Easy!
Some people wouldn't insist that you shall not use the term God because it's part of a metaphysical construct they disagree with, so they ask you to talk about the "fictional entity identified as God" 😉
I've never heard this, though I don't doubt some unhinged atheists say this, but it's not anymore unhinged than what some people say in this comment thread. :-)
Hi Francine. Look up John Money. Who he was and what he did to the Riemer twins. That will tell you everything you need to know about the origins of “gender identity”.
Benjamin, I'm so glad Colin helped you clarify these issues.
But there are still some things I think need further clarification.
For example, you say that trans women:
"seek to mitigate the pain of gender dysphoria and live authentically by modifying their bodies to more closely resemble those of the opposite sex with which they identify."
I'm using that paragraph because it makes it clear that trans people don't simply seek to present themselves as the opposite sex but rather modify their bodies to resemble those of the opposite sex, WHICH IS THE SEX WITH WHICH THEY IDENTIFY.
Trans people IDENTIFY with the opposite sex. We could say that gender goes hand in hand with sex, that they are stereotypical forms, many of them cultural, random. But many people reject gender stereotypes without necessarily being trans or anything like that.
So why do we say GENDER IDENTITY when we should really say SEX IDENTITY, if it's sex that they identify with?
"Both of these camps are being wildly unreasonable, stubborn and close-minded".
I applaud the sentiment behind this piece, but as an academic who entered this debate thinking I could contribute to a reconciliation on at least a theoretical level (as a philosopher) I think the position you've adopted is ill-conceived. It's simply not the case that "both these camps" are to be judged equally. I offered a talk to undergraduates at my University seeking to examine the notion of "self-identification" in a neutral way and was immediately reported by colleagues as transphobic. When the University eventually allowed the talk to go ahead (with security!) around 10 people came to hear it but over 800 signed an open letter denouncing it to the Administration! My minimal intervention comes very late in the day compared with that of many women in the UK who've taken a stand on this subject--oftentimes just asking for an open debate on changes that have been pushed through without any such discussion--and have been denounced as fascists and subjected to death- and rape- threats. What our experiences have in common, however, is the continuing refusal to engage at the level of ideas. Indeed, dialogue is seen as eo ipso compromise by trans dogmatists. As you remark, sex is binary and well-defined scientifically. Consequently, the only sense in which a male self-identifying as a woman is one is that they "identity” as a woman. But since we know what "woman" connotes we can give no meaning to identifying-as-a-woman. That is the starting point, and requires no talk of "cis" etc. Where we go from there is for debate, and at the centre of that debate should be awareness of women's rights. What will hopefully be explored in that process of open inquiry will be (amongst other things) just how well-founded talk of "gender dysphoria" and supposedly medical concepts relating to the treatment of children actually are (and recall the contested history of the meaning of the term "gender identity").
I am also a philosopher who is trying to help mediate in this discussion. I I am reading this now and hopes of finding useful ideas and information. I hope I have better luck than you have had so far.
When people say that "gender identity" doesn't exist, I would think they mean that, contrary to what trans activists would have us believe, there is no innate "gender soul" that is as immutable and based in brain physiology as sexual orientation. That is not "nonsensical", it is true until proven otherwise by evidence that currently doesn't exist. On the other hand, I don't have any doubt that there are people who feel like they have a "gender identity", which is a subjective psychological phenomenon that depends on devotion to gender stereotypes, and that can be fluid and changeable, especially in children.
“And on the flip side, there are those who unkindly claim, for example, that trans women are not women in any way shape or form and have no right to be conceived of, treated as, or addressed as such in any context. ”
The truth can be unkind. This doesn’t make it untrue.
Personally, while I acknowledge the practical usefulness of the term cisgender in a number of situations, I find it offensive. I am not trans, and I am not cisgender either. And frankly, I doubt that many people are. I don't have a gender identity. I don't know a single person who isn't trans or nonbinary who does.
This is a good "splitting the difference." Those of us critical of trans ideology are going to have to accept that there is no going back to before trans ideology.
Actually multiple civil suits from detransitioners & female survivors of trans violence while incarcerated, Rowling has said this will be a bigger scandal than last century's lobotomies & false recovered memory combined.
Sure, but we also live in a world now where partial lobotomies are used in certain cases and dissociation and selective amnesia as the result of trauma are recognized phenomena.
If we agree people cannot change sex, and a person can choose to wear what they wish and behave as stereotypically masculine or feminine as they like, fair game. But this language game is designed to obfuscate that "trans women" are 100% male. And I've witnessed a convicted sex offender (100% male) gain access to a womens shelter, where he sexually assaulted a woman. My very own eyes witnessed the judge call this man "Ms." The "be kind" BS got us here. I won't comply with the lie.
Trans went from being a minuscule proportion of society, to being everywhere online, on TV, in institutional policy documents. LGB rights became dwarfed by 'trans'. Health care providers speak of 'pregnant people, people with cervixes, menstruators' yet, women- mothers- are supposed to accept this meekly, because 'transwomen are women' and to refute this is apparently bigotry. Whereas reducing women to body parts for purposes of summoning them to submit for cervical screening for instance, is totally OK. And nevermind the women speaking English as a second language who may not understand that they are 'cervix havers'. Transwomen are men who believe they are women. I'm a woman and a mother. My life experience couldn't be more different to the men claiming a female 'gender identity'. I don't believe I have a 'gender identity'. I'm just me. I've no idea what it feels like to 'be a woman'. I don't walk around considering my experience 'as a woman'. It doesn't make any societal sense to bend reality for people who insist they 'should' be the opposite sex.
The reason you don't need to say "biological sex" or "biological male" or "biological female" is that there is no other kind of sex, no other kind or male, and no other kind of female. Therefore, appending "biological" to these terms thwarts truthfulness and clarity of language by suggesting ambiguity where none actually exists.
The reason you don't need to say "cis" is that it means that the word that follows "cis" means what it actually means, and doesn't mean the opposite of what it means. If it's necessary to clarify that words mean what they actually mean by appending "cis" to them, why do it for just a few select words?
For advocates of the use of the word "cis," your article's title should be "Cis Yes, Cis We Cis Need Cis Both Cis the Cis Term "Cis Biological Cis Sex" cis and cis the cis word "Cis Cisgender," which really clears things up.
Since you use the term 'biological sex' redundantly, you might be interested to understand the biology at play.
Unfortunately, there is no gender, no 'cis-gender', no 'trans-gender', only words used to mask actual sex. The word "gender" has no meaning applied to animals, an animal doesn't have a biological sex, the animal has a sex. Likewise, when applied to humans, it is used virtually exclusively to mask actual sex.
The reason for this is simple. Some men, who approaching puberty, developed anxiety about becoming an adult male (all adolescents develop some level of anxiety about adulthood). Most men grow out of it as they finish puberty, but a small group of them develop a behavior which is 'in biology' called sexual mimicry. They develop a compulsion to imitate women. Like many compulsions, it is embedded in a strong, persistent belief of a falsehood - people who compulsively starve believe they are obsessed, people who compulsively wash believe they are dirty, people who compulsively steal believe property is in false possession, people who compulsively lie believe in their falsehoods. Some men act on the compulsion early, but it is not uncommon to act on the compulsion later in life. The rate of persistent compulsive mimicry is around 0.3% of the population (male and female).
Mimicry is a widespread natural phenomenon, with sex mimicry a more unusual subset which occurs in all complex animals, particularly where there is intense sexual selection - cuttlefish and insects, birds and fish, reptiles an mammals all have species in which some individuals exhibit sexual mimicry.
Auxiliary to the direct compulsion, arise other behaviors to maintain the illusion as long as possible, including grooming to mimic females, assuming voices they find female, taking on female names, female posture. At the extreme end, they mimic prostitutes and other hyper-sexualized females in a process 'in biology' called supernormal mimicry. Other mimics do the same - the cuckoo's egg in the host nest is larger eliciting a stronger nesting response, and the chick is louder and larger, eliciting a stronger brooding response.
A small subset of sex mimics undertake iatrogenic damage risking death, including chemical sterilization and super physiologic dosing of hormones, surgical genital mutilation and emasculation, and internal organ damage including rectum, prostate, bladder, urethra, and pelvic floor muscles. Some go further to damage the larynx sufficiently to damage the voice, as well as breast implants and pectorals damage. Only about 0.021% of the population undertakes this type of medical damage.
Aside from medical biology, one auxiliary behavior is to use the term 'gender' to mask sex mimicry, as in 'gender identity', 'gender congruence', and 'trans-gender' in order to allow a multiplicity of meanings, all of which deflect the determination of actual male sex. Along with this is the insistence of 'gender-neutral' pronoun use (the only meaningful use of the term 'gender') to maintain the mimicry, as well as a host of other behaviors - insisting on legal status of mimicry ('trans rights'), use of fraudulent identification in legal, professional and sports contexts, as well as for sexual coercion and rape victim recruitment (prison).
Male mimics also compulsively redefine sex from the basis of sexual mimicry - sex becomes 'biological sex' versus sex, ordinary gay and lesbian behavior becomes 'gender non-conforming'. Likewise, the compulsion to prevaricate creates false identification of historic personages and movements as 'actually' sexual mimics.
Compulsive sex mimicry confers at least one benefit, sex mimics die from violent male assault at half the rate of other males. Triggering a taboo against male violence towards women is very adaptive, since men die at twice the rate of violent male assault than women.
Once you understand the mechanism (compulsive sex mimicry), how it arises (evolved in response to male competition), and the behaviors associated with it to perpetuate the mimicry (language manipulation, fraud, sexual coercion) you can more clearly understand when you think about it, when you hear it discussed, and when you see legal challenges initiated by male sex mimics to enforce their mimicry.
I have a series of essays on all of these aspects, should there be interest.
An interesting idea, but we are not squids, birds or cuttlefish. Trans advocates also use similar stories about Clownfish to show that sex change is genuine and biologically real. Neither of these analogies is anything more than an analogy. They cancel each other out if you try to take either of them seriously.
> "Unfortunately, there is no gender, no 'cis-gender', no 'trans-gender', only words used to mask actual sex."
You're at least consistent -- like consistently wrong.
ScienceDirect: "Sex and gender are distinct but interrelated concepts in biology and disease [32,33]. Sex is a biological and physiological variable that is genetically determined. Gender, on the other hand, is a multidimensional cultural concept that refers to socially constructed norms, behaviors, and expectations."
We also need a word to distinguish between Americans who golf, and non-golfing Americans. Same with things like Alzheimer’s. How can I possibly know if you’re talking about an American living with Alzheimer’s if you won’t perform the simple courtesy of using the preferred term: “American living without Alzheimer’s” in daily conversation? When will people learn?
Benjamin, I think you should do you. If it’s important to you to use terms like “cisgender” for whatever reason then by all means do so. I do however completely reject the idea that it is incumbent upon me to use these terms as a sign of respect. I simply do not believe in the metaphysics of gender ideology and do absolutely believe that the whole idea has done incalculable harm to countless people, including those it purports to help. I would add the inane term “sex assigned at birth” to the list of obfuscating language that has steamrolled over common sense since 2020.
Bingo, ARG!
There are millions of us out here who refuse to bow to this "trans" psychosis. This social contagion has saturated society.
But I think that only when an avalanche of medical malpractice lawsuits comes crashing down, and when insurance companies stop paying for these mutilating surgeries, will this insanity end.
Money talks, especially in this country, and I'm afraid money is going to be the only thing that ends it.
#terfisaslur is a slur & cis ideology- J.K. Rowling (a woman, ftr).
I am still quite unconvinced that gender identity is a useful descriptive construct. Much less an essentialist concept. Sex and Gender are the same thing - we don’t need a word to describe “better than guessing” heuristic shortcuts about how men and women tend to socially act or present. We have the gender distressed and the gender accepting - they aren't actually different gender. Male and Female is all we need for policy and people’s feelings and presentations are their own business, not the state or policy other than they have the right to dress and feel as they please without being fired from jobs or kicked out of housing, etc. But the state doesn't need to validate introspective woo. Treat it like a religion with a beliefs/believers distinction.
I agree. I feel like a woman and have never felt other than female. So? Does that mean I have a gender identity and therefore it’s a real thing? I can’t see the point; it feels like a hair-splitting distraction that is too readily exploited by the powerbrokers of TQI+, the OG autogynephiles bent on scaling and diversifying the ‘trans’ portfolio at any cost.
I am not even sure what it means when a female says "I feel like I female". I am male, am fine with that, but I don't know that I "feel like a male". I don't have any standpoint to know anything else so I can't say any particular feeling is a male one. What trans-identified people ultimately must mean is that they resonate more with opposite sex averages on some kind of socio-cultural metrics (or what they take them to be from selective attention). Its like when Christians say they "have a personal relationship with Jesus". When I was a kid and heard this in church I could see it was nonsense from a mile away. What? Are you spirit channeling like Jeane Dixon? Ultimately all it meant was they get a warm fuzzy feeling when they think about this Jesus they have constructed in their brains from dogma. Sincerity isn't etiology.
Exactly.
And those "socio-cultural metrics" they identify are really just stereotypes. You know, boys like blue girls like pink, boys play sports, girls play with dolls, etc...
So what they're really saying is, "I identify with this set of stereotypes rather than another." And the obvious answer to that is, "Well stop being such a sexist piece of sh*t!" Not to grant them with special rights based on their fondness for a specific set of sexist stereotypes.
Lee Jussim has shown how stereotypes are mostly true if they are taken to be "better than guessing" heuristics, so it isn't like stereotypes are made up, but they are hardly normative. And Jussim's research shows people mostly use them as just that - better than guessing in a low information environment and can easily ditch stereotypes when they get more information. That is the problem with identity politics - they flagrantly ignore the concept of levels of analysis and don't get the difference between individuals and groups. They seem to think individuals carry the disparate data for their group in them in some metaphysical way. It is truly bizarre. https://sites.rutgers.edu/lee-jussim/wp-content/uploads/sites/135/2019/05/Jussim-et-al-Prej-Handbook-2009.pdf
Also, the word gender has no specific meaning at this point. Some people are using the terms simply to describe aspects of their adpersonality. Some people means it as a synonym for sex. Still others use it to refer to their relationship with their sexed bodies. And some are strictly referring to sex stereotypes.
Gender is a vibe. It should never appear in the law.
"Sex and Gender are the same thing"
Except in practice, that is often untrue. For example, gender-critical people use the word "gender" to refer to social norms and expectations that are attributed to each sex, such as certain colors or behaviors being seen as more associated with males or females. Indeed, what makes gender-critical people, well, critical is that they see these norms and expectations to be often arbitrary or based on half-truths.
(And, of course, there's grammatical gender.)
"Gender identity" is the phrase that's gets wooly.
If we deny ourselves words to describe things that exist, we are lost. Many, many people see gender as distinct from sex. If we claim that those two words can only mean the same thing, then we cannot describe these people's perceptions or the experiences of people who experience gender separate from sex.
The bifurcation of gender from sex is pretty new and I am just not sure we need a word for wearing dresses or playing with dolls. I can't think of an instance where gendered is doing any work that some variation of "sexed" couldn't easily do the same work. I am not exactly arguing with the point of your piece - I do appreciate the tone of compromise on an issue that has too much nastiness and dismissiveness on the side that happens to be right which makes it harder to change minds about the important stuff (protecting same sex spaces, medicalization of youth gender distress). I just am pretty compelled by Kathleen Stock's take on the confusions that gender can introduce.
I’d like to see (or hear or read) an objective, stable, coherent definition of “gender” or “gender identity.” I’m sure it’s true that many people sincerely believe that they have a “gender identity,” but I believe (just as sincerely) that I do not. The concept of “gender identity” doesn’t resonate with me at all, and I suspect that many, perhaps a majority of Americans, feel the same way.
The norms and expectations depend on each society--and there do seem to be different *average* behaviors within the sexes for some things, but with enormous overlap. People argue about how much is biologically vs culturally determined and there, I have no idea. I see people attributing personality aspects to being male or female due to prehistoric demands....but then it turns out those "male" or "female" aspects are not even tagged as "male" or "female" in different cultures today!
There is an extremely interesting talk by Heather Heying from the 2023 Genspect meeting about what is considered male and female work across a broad range of less developed societies that I thought was very interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SVbN6tIySc
No they are not. If I lookup "sex" in the encyclopedia in my office (from 1941) it will to what we call biological sex. When I looked up
gender" it says "In most foreign languages. gender has nothing to do with sex. it is grammatical, no natural--that is, it is governed by the form of the word" The German word for girl (Madchen) is neuter in gender, because it happens to have a neuter ending; woman (weiss) is also neuter"
So in 1941, gender was a word that did not necessarily have an connotation with sex (there was an informal use where gender was a synonym for sex" Today gender has new meanings that are in use. You cannot simply assert on your authority was those meaning are. They arise out of common usage; it is how language works.
We seem to be in violent agreement. I did not state, "Sex and Gender are the same thing". Rather, I was quoting someone else saying that and pointing out why I thought it was false. Indeed, the first sentence from the first *unquoted* paragraph from my comment begins, "Except in practice, that is often untrue."
I intended to reply to erb, but I maybe didn't do it right. Sorry about that. I see your comment is pretty much the same as what I said.
I did say sex and gender are the same thing and I argue that gender has not through "natural usage" come to me the "performances or social expectations of a sex". Only a small cohort of educated professionals use it this way. It is mostly just used interchangeably with sex and even in that small cohort of educated professionals people use it alternately. Kathleen Stock documents this thoroughly early in her book. If I ask my dad what gender is (and he is a Democrat) he won't talk about performances. And obviously performances aren't enough to make you "transgender" - it requires introspection. When a person is whatever gender they say they are, we have entered "personal relationship with Jesus" territory whereby people think they can make an empirical etiological claim from an emotional state.
My understanding when I was in college in the 1970's was that gender was cultural while sex was biological. At the same time, there also an informal usage of gender = sex, that was noted in my 1959 dictionary, and probably goes back further than that.
While "gender-critical" actually EMBRACES gender & "gender-affirming care" is KILLING @ risk youth, since we can't actually change sex (geneticist Baron Robert Winston) trans is a deceptive delusional fraud & transphobia an impossible deflection. We debate 🚹🚺🚽💩 & ignore how many women die annually because they are BORN that way.
'While "gender-critical" actually EMBRACES gender'
What the?! Being gender-critical is the opposite of embracing gender.
I always took gender critical to mean actually critical of the concept of gender as distinct from sex. That gender is not independent of a sexed body.
Agree!
"Male and Female is all we need for policy"
Tied with the rest:
"people’s feelings and presentations are their own business, not the state or policy other than they have the right to dress and feel as they please without being fired from jobs or kicked out of housing, etc."
If someone has had medical intervention--that is part of their medical information and should be provided to those who need to know it (e.g. this person is taking this drug or has had these surgeries). It is not how they identify that is relevant for medical care but what medical interventions are involved and, again, what their sex is (to know normal, healthy levels).
I'm not a supporter of highlighting (especially repeatedly) something about a person that they dislike about themselves (e.g. their sex if they are trans, their weight if they have body image issues, their age if they worry about that, their marital status if they are unhappy with it, their failure to achieve something they really wanted to accomplish,....etc).
Exactly. Like with religion there is just no reason to openly piss all over someone's beliefs or call attention to the way they cope with discomfort. That is just a jerk thing to do. Only necessary when they are pushing for policies that make other's validate their beliefs or believe along with them. So much gender critical stuff goes beyond insisting on sound policy and just want to promote dickishness which is a turn off and invalidates good policy around single sex spaces and demedicalizing gender distress.
> "I am still quite unconvinced that gender identity is a useful descriptive construct. Much less an essentialist concept. Sex and Gender are the same thing ..."
Depends on how you define both "sex" and "gender", and you clearly insist that they refer to the same sets of traits and properties. You're welcome to your opinion of course -- we all have them ... -- though you might at least try to consider that there are sound reasons to define them such that they refer to two quite distinct sets of properties. To start with, you might consider this old tweet from Colin Wright:
"Colin Wright; Most confusion about "gender" results from people not defining it. Many definitions are in circulation:
1. Synonym for sex (male/female); 2. A subjective feeling in relation to one's sex; 3. Societal sex-based roles/expectation; 4. Sex-related behavior; 5. Personality traits"
https://x.com/SwipeWright/status/1234040036091236352
Would you agree, or not, that there's a distinct difference between the traits that define the sexes -- to a first approximation whether we have ovaries (female) or have testicles (male) -- and the "roles, behaviours, and personality traits" that are typical of, but not unique to each sex?
The latter -- those roles, behaviours, and personality traits typical of but not unique to each sex -- is what many reasonably people and organizations quite reasonably mean by gender. For example, the late great US Justice Anton Scalia:
AS: ""The word 'gender' has acquired the new and useful connotation of cultural or attitudinal characteristics (as opposed to physical characteristics) distinctive to the sexes. That is to say, gender is to sex as feminine is to female and masculine is to male.”
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep511/usrep511127/usrep511127.pdf
And the British Medical Journal:
BMJ: "Sex and gender are not synonymous. Sex, unless otherwise specified, relates to biology: the gametes, chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive organs. Gender relates to societal roles, behaviours, and expectations that vary with time and place, historically and geographically. ...."
https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n735
Not to give you too much of a hard time, but I kinda think their opinions and views carry a bit more factual weight and substance than yours do. As Daniel Moynihan said, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." And it's something of a brute fact that sexual dimorphism -- "the condition where sexes of the same species exhibit different morphological characteristics, including characteristics not directly involved in reproduction" -- is ubiquitous, not just in "lower orders" of animals, but also in humans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_dimorphism
The earth is an oblate spheroid as it turns out but it's pretty much a sphere - it's definitely not halfway between a flat disc and a sphere.
You happen to like gender performance and think it's important, other people don't. There's no special gender souls needing to be saved, just a range of different people with all sorts of different issues who present as trans, whatever that means.
This middle road view is actually you putting your own view as better than others and not actually even making a good case- it's condescending and hubristic. What scientific construct and empirical evidence allows you to posit that gender identity exists or that cisgender is a useful term? There's not even a case based on utility as we already have trans as a marker.
Cis is purely social engineering. By saying people who disagree with you are unkind you are elevating yourself artificially as better than them. It's not unkind to assert reality, this gender thing is over indexed and will morph and potentially fade away God willing. The only thing that connects us is reality, not narratives in people's heads.
People have lived as the opposite sex always, frequently only outed posthumously, it is only since trans has become for-profit industry that it has been corrupted, like tobacco, asbestos, Oxycontin & fast food before it.
Trans is a culture bound syndrome - the label means different things at different times and I think it's ahistorical to apply it to the extremely small number of documented cases prior to 19th century, of which we know little.
There is no fair-minded, balanced, or kind way to advocate for men’s colonization of women.
What evidence is there for “gender identity” besides the fact that you and many others believe in it? My neighbors believe that Jesus is the son of God, as do many others. Is it “nonsense” that I say God doesn’t exist? According to your standards, I guess so.
Is there a test to determine the existence of “gender identity?”
Is “gender identity” located in the brain (since you seem so confident in your assertion that it exists)? If so, where do you think it exists in the brain?
Is “gender identity” immutable? Chase Strangio told SCOTUS that it is not, in fact, immutable.
You do nothing whatever to prove the existence of “gender identity” and I say it doesn’t exist like God doesn’t exist. They are both spiritual concepts with zero evidence base.
P.S. I hate the term “cisgender” because I have very strong feelings about this belief system and its effects on society. However, I must concede that there has to be compromise on the gender critical side on language stuff in order for any real discussion to take place among people who disagree.
No, there really doesn’t have to be compromise. Obfuscating reality doesn’t foster meaningful discussion.
I hear you, but I have seen two recent examples of people who for years pushed gender ideology and have just started to have doubts and questions be absolutely clobbered by GC’s online. In both cases, the GC’s rage and stubbornness (which I posses myself) turned off the questioning former gender zealots and led them to say that the GC side seems just as crazy as the gender side.
We have reason to be angry but I think we forget that hostility is not helping our cause. At all.
Way to move the goalposts. Refusing to compromise on the language I use is not remotely the same thing as “clobbering” someone online, nor does it imply an expression of rage. It is entirely possible to be civil without using nonsensical neologisms.
The correct analogy here is not whether you need to recognize that God exists just because your neighbors do. It's that you need to recognize that some people believe that God exists and we need a word for them whether or not God actually exists, because this behavior of them has implications (on policy, society, etc) regardless of whether their ideology is correct. So, we use a word like "religious" or "Christian" or "believer" to designate these people, and we have words for others as well (agnostic, atheist, secular, non religious) for the same reason.
I wasn’t commenting on what language to use in my comment. I was specifically responding to BR’s writing that not believing in gender identity is nonsense. I never said not to use the term gender identity. Just that I have every right not to believe in it.
He is not saying gender identity is a true, useful or correct concept. He is saying the concept exists, regardless of whether you believe it to be true or identify with it yourself. Same thing for God, or for a better example astrology. A lot of people (myself included) believe astrology is bullshit and doesn't mean anything. But you still have an astro sign, not because astrology is true or meaningful or relevant, but because astro sign is fully defined and determined by your birthdate, and everyone has a birthdate. And people who don't believe in astrology aren't pretending they don't have a sign or the concept of sign doesn't exist when someone asks them. They usually say : I'm pisces but I don't believe in astrology. Easy!
Genderist? That is what I call believers of “gender identity” in my home.
Some people wouldn't insist that you shall not use the term God because it's part of a metaphysical construct they disagree with, so they ask you to talk about the "fictional entity identified as God" 😉
I've never heard this, though I don't doubt some unhinged atheists say this, but it's not anymore unhinged than what some people say in this comment thread. :-)
Hi Francine. Look up John Money. Who he was and what he did to the Riemer twins. That will tell you everything you need to know about the origins of “gender identity”.
I am aware. Horrendous man.
So, it really was Money who invented that term? Wasn't it in the 1960s? The time when feminism was coming into social prominence.
Benjamin, I'm so glad Colin helped you clarify these issues.
But there are still some things I think need further clarification.
For example, you say that trans women:
"seek to mitigate the pain of gender dysphoria and live authentically by modifying their bodies to more closely resemble those of the opposite sex with which they identify."
I'm using that paragraph because it makes it clear that trans people don't simply seek to present themselves as the opposite sex but rather modify their bodies to resemble those of the opposite sex, WHICH IS THE SEX WITH WHICH THEY IDENTIFY.
Trans people IDENTIFY with the opposite sex. We could say that gender goes hand in hand with sex, that they are stereotypical forms, many of them cultural, random. But many people reject gender stereotypes without necessarily being trans or anything like that.
So why do we say GENDER IDENTITY when we should really say SEX IDENTITY, if it's sex that they identify with?
"Both of these camps are being wildly unreasonable, stubborn and close-minded".
I applaud the sentiment behind this piece, but as an academic who entered this debate thinking I could contribute to a reconciliation on at least a theoretical level (as a philosopher) I think the position you've adopted is ill-conceived. It's simply not the case that "both these camps" are to be judged equally. I offered a talk to undergraduates at my University seeking to examine the notion of "self-identification" in a neutral way and was immediately reported by colleagues as transphobic. When the University eventually allowed the talk to go ahead (with security!) around 10 people came to hear it but over 800 signed an open letter denouncing it to the Administration! My minimal intervention comes very late in the day compared with that of many women in the UK who've taken a stand on this subject--oftentimes just asking for an open debate on changes that have been pushed through without any such discussion--and have been denounced as fascists and subjected to death- and rape- threats. What our experiences have in common, however, is the continuing refusal to engage at the level of ideas. Indeed, dialogue is seen as eo ipso compromise by trans dogmatists. As you remark, sex is binary and well-defined scientifically. Consequently, the only sense in which a male self-identifying as a woman is one is that they "identity” as a woman. But since we know what "woman" connotes we can give no meaning to identifying-as-a-woman. That is the starting point, and requires no talk of "cis" etc. Where we go from there is for debate, and at the centre of that debate should be awareness of women's rights. What will hopefully be explored in that process of open inquiry will be (amongst other things) just how well-founded talk of "gender dysphoria" and supposedly medical concepts relating to the treatment of children actually are (and recall the contested history of the meaning of the term "gender identity").
I am also a philosopher who is trying to help mediate in this discussion. I I am reading this now and hopes of finding useful ideas and information. I hope I have better luck than you have had so far.
When people say that "gender identity" doesn't exist, I would think they mean that, contrary to what trans activists would have us believe, there is no innate "gender soul" that is as immutable and based in brain physiology as sexual orientation. That is not "nonsensical", it is true until proven otherwise by evidence that currently doesn't exist. On the other hand, I don't have any doubt that there are people who feel like they have a "gender identity", which is a subjective psychological phenomenon that depends on devotion to gender stereotypes, and that can be fluid and changeable, especially in children.
“And on the flip side, there are those who unkindly claim, for example, that trans women are not women in any way shape or form and have no right to be conceived of, treated as, or addressed as such in any context. ”
The truth can be unkind. This doesn’t make it untrue.
Personally, while I acknowledge the practical usefulness of the term cisgender in a number of situations, I find it offensive. I am not trans, and I am not cisgender either. And frankly, I doubt that many people are. I don't have a gender identity. I don't know a single person who isn't trans or nonbinary who does.
This is a good "splitting the difference." Those of us critical of trans ideology are going to have to accept that there is no going back to before trans ideology.
There might not be any going back, but that still doesn’t mean there is any value to adopting nonsensical religious jargon.
The value comes in bringing this tedious debate to rest, so we can talk about more important things.
You will never bring this tedious debate to rest by giving in to the narcissistic demands of the delusional.
You will certainly never end the debate if you substitute abuse for argument.
Actually multiple civil suits from detransitioners & female survivors of trans violence while incarcerated, Rowling has said this will be a bigger scandal than last century's lobotomies & false recovered memory combined.
Sure, but we also live in a world now where partial lobotomies are used in certain cases and dissociation and selective amnesia as the result of trauma are recognized phenomena.
If we agree people cannot change sex, and a person can choose to wear what they wish and behave as stereotypically masculine or feminine as they like, fair game. But this language game is designed to obfuscate that "trans women" are 100% male. And I've witnessed a convicted sex offender (100% male) gain access to a womens shelter, where he sexually assaulted a woman. My very own eyes witnessed the judge call this man "Ms." The "be kind" BS got us here. I won't comply with the lie.
Trans went from being a minuscule proportion of society, to being everywhere online, on TV, in institutional policy documents. LGB rights became dwarfed by 'trans'. Health care providers speak of 'pregnant people, people with cervixes, menstruators' yet, women- mothers- are supposed to accept this meekly, because 'transwomen are women' and to refute this is apparently bigotry. Whereas reducing women to body parts for purposes of summoning them to submit for cervical screening for instance, is totally OK. And nevermind the women speaking English as a second language who may not understand that they are 'cervix havers'. Transwomen are men who believe they are women. I'm a woman and a mother. My life experience couldn't be more different to the men claiming a female 'gender identity'. I don't believe I have a 'gender identity'. I'm just me. I've no idea what it feels like to 'be a woman'. I don't walk around considering my experience 'as a woman'. It doesn't make any societal sense to bend reality for people who insist they 'should' be the opposite sex.
The reason you don't need to say "biological sex" or "biological male" or "biological female" is that there is no other kind of sex, no other kind or male, and no other kind of female. Therefore, appending "biological" to these terms thwarts truthfulness and clarity of language by suggesting ambiguity where none actually exists.
The reason you don't need to say "cis" is that it means that the word that follows "cis" means what it actually means, and doesn't mean the opposite of what it means. If it's necessary to clarify that words mean what they actually mean by appending "cis" to them, why do it for just a few select words?
For advocates of the use of the word "cis," your article's title should be "Cis Yes, Cis We Cis Need Cis Both Cis the Cis Term "Cis Biological Cis Sex" cis and cis the cis word "Cis Cisgender," which really clears things up.
Since you use the term 'biological sex' redundantly, you might be interested to understand the biology at play.
Unfortunately, there is no gender, no 'cis-gender', no 'trans-gender', only words used to mask actual sex. The word "gender" has no meaning applied to animals, an animal doesn't have a biological sex, the animal has a sex. Likewise, when applied to humans, it is used virtually exclusively to mask actual sex.
The reason for this is simple. Some men, who approaching puberty, developed anxiety about becoming an adult male (all adolescents develop some level of anxiety about adulthood). Most men grow out of it as they finish puberty, but a small group of them develop a behavior which is 'in biology' called sexual mimicry. They develop a compulsion to imitate women. Like many compulsions, it is embedded in a strong, persistent belief of a falsehood - people who compulsively starve believe they are obsessed, people who compulsively wash believe they are dirty, people who compulsively steal believe property is in false possession, people who compulsively lie believe in their falsehoods. Some men act on the compulsion early, but it is not uncommon to act on the compulsion later in life. The rate of persistent compulsive mimicry is around 0.3% of the population (male and female).
Mimicry is a widespread natural phenomenon, with sex mimicry a more unusual subset which occurs in all complex animals, particularly where there is intense sexual selection - cuttlefish and insects, birds and fish, reptiles an mammals all have species in which some individuals exhibit sexual mimicry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_mimicry
Example of a male squid displaying female markings to a male on one side of the body.
https://www.livescience.com/21374-cuttlefish-gender-bending-disguise.html
Auxiliary to the direct compulsion, arise other behaviors to maintain the illusion as long as possible, including grooming to mimic females, assuming voices they find female, taking on female names, female posture. At the extreme end, they mimic prostitutes and other hyper-sexualized females in a process 'in biology' called supernormal mimicry. Other mimics do the same - the cuckoo's egg in the host nest is larger eliciting a stronger nesting response, and the chick is louder and larger, eliciting a stronger brooding response.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus
A small subset of sex mimics undertake iatrogenic damage risking death, including chemical sterilization and super physiologic dosing of hormones, surgical genital mutilation and emasculation, and internal organ damage including rectum, prostate, bladder, urethra, and pelvic floor muscles. Some go further to damage the larynx sufficiently to damage the voice, as well as breast implants and pectorals damage. Only about 0.021% of the population undertakes this type of medical damage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iatrogenesis
Aside from medical biology, one auxiliary behavior is to use the term 'gender' to mask sex mimicry, as in 'gender identity', 'gender congruence', and 'trans-gender' in order to allow a multiplicity of meanings, all of which deflect the determination of actual male sex. Along with this is the insistence of 'gender-neutral' pronoun use (the only meaningful use of the term 'gender') to maintain the mimicry, as well as a host of other behaviors - insisting on legal status of mimicry ('trans rights'), use of fraudulent identification in legal, professional and sports contexts, as well as for sexual coercion and rape victim recruitment (prison).
Male mimics also compulsively redefine sex from the basis of sexual mimicry - sex becomes 'biological sex' versus sex, ordinary gay and lesbian behavior becomes 'gender non-conforming'. Likewise, the compulsion to prevaricate creates false identification of historic personages and movements as 'actually' sexual mimics.
Compulsive sex mimicry confers at least one benefit, sex mimics die from violent male assault at half the rate of other males. Triggering a taboo against male violence towards women is very adaptive, since men die at twice the rate of violent male assault than women.
Once you understand the mechanism (compulsive sex mimicry), how it arises (evolved in response to male competition), and the behaviors associated with it to perpetuate the mimicry (language manipulation, fraud, sexual coercion) you can more clearly understand when you think about it, when you hear it discussed, and when you see legal challenges initiated by male sex mimics to enforce their mimicry.
I have a series of essays on all of these aspects, should there be interest.
An interesting idea, but we are not squids, birds or cuttlefish. Trans advocates also use similar stories about Clownfish to show that sex change is genuine and biologically real. Neither of these analogies is anything more than an analogy. They cancel each other out if you try to take either of them seriously.
> "Unfortunately, there is no gender, no 'cis-gender', no 'trans-gender', only words used to mask actual sex."
You're at least consistent -- like consistently wrong.
ScienceDirect: "Sex and gender are distinct but interrelated concepts in biology and disease [32,33]. Sex is a biological and physiological variable that is genetically determined. Gender, on the other hand, is a multidimensional cultural concept that refers to socially constructed norms, behaviors, and expectations."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/gender-and-sex
We also need a word to distinguish between Americans who golf, and non-golfing Americans. Same with things like Alzheimer’s. How can I possibly know if you’re talking about an American living with Alzheimer’s if you won’t perform the simple courtesy of using the preferred term: “American living without Alzheimer’s” in daily conversation? When will people learn?