| HN Mirror

> I'm a bit confused as to why you are pretending that the word "gender" and the concept of gender either doesn't exist or is part of some very recent flimsy social construct. The concept of gender being used to categorize things as male/female/masculine/feminine is not new, and the concept of gender roles being used for general (not rigid) categorization of male and female traits is not new, either.

I said 'gender identity' not 'gender'.

Up until the early 1900s, the word "gender" did not apply to people. It applied to words. The word "libro" has a masculine gender, but obviously the object itself has no gender or sex. Rarely, "gender" was a synonym for sex, but this was generally considered to be informal or a mistake. As Henry Watson Fowler, a teacher of English usage, wrote in 1926:

> "Gender...is a grammatical term only. To talk of persons...of the masculine or feminine gender, meaning of the male or female sex, is either a jocularity (permissible or not according to context) or a blunder."

Then in middle-1900s academics began defining gender in various new ways. Money used it as a word to describe the way a person presents their sex. Other academics invented the term "gender role" to describe the things a culture associates with men and women. These academics did not believe that "gender" was some innate characteristic of a person's mind. In fact, many of them were arguing there was no difference between men and women in the head, and "gender" roles were social constructions. Even here, though, the concept of gender applied to things, not to people (eg the gender of pink clothes is feminine).

At the same, time the word "sex" began to more commonly be used to refer to coitus, and so normal, non-academics started using gender more commonly as a synonym for biological sex to avoid using the word "sex."

Then in the last thirty years, the term "gender identity" has arisen to describe one's own internal sense of being a boy/man or woman/girl in one's own mind (see the genderbread person), and furthermore the claim is that this is immutable and if there is a conflict between your "gender identity" and biology or how society sees you, it is your biology and/or society that should change. It is only in the last thirty years that people are considered to have something called "gender" that is different than biological sex.

Interestingly this new sense of "gender" almost seems to be a mutant child of the two, completely separate previous definitions of the word gender (gender as biological sex, a property of a person, man or woman and gender as ones presentation and expression more masculine or feminine).

I do not believe that "gender identity" is a meaningful concept. It is an anti-concept, it mashes together unlike things and makes it harder to think and reason about the underlying phenomena. I do not believe that someone has a fixed gender identity that can be distinguished from their biological sex. I do not believe believe that "gender" (as opposed to biological sex) is a property of a person.

"I am a woman, but I don't always like to act or dress as a stereotypical woman, my self-expression is fluid" is a banal and unobjectionable statement.

"I don't like to act or dress as a stereotypical woman, therefore I am not a woman, my gender identity is genderqueer/non-binary" does not make any sense. It is making a mishmash of concepts.

If you believe the modern idea of "gender identity" is real and valuable then you need to properly define it, explain why it is useful, and what is your evidence that it really exists.