There's gender identity (innate, cannot be changed, can only be repressed with frequently catastrophic consequences) and there's gender presentation (learned, subject to cultural norms, can be changed just by buying a skirt). The two are not the same, although they, and biological sex, interact in all kinds of ways with each other that you usually have to be trans to become fully aware of, because for cis people they mostly align with each other and it becomes really hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. But if you're trans, you inevitably and constantly wind up in situations where gender presentation and biological sex characteristics are completely at odds with how you understand yourself, the way you want to be perceived and the body you want to inhabit.

Gender identity is how you understand yourself and the dialectic between your identity and the rest of your life. When i, as a woman, love another woman, i realize that to be a lesbian feeling, not a straight feeling. When i do stereotypically feminine things, i often find that they either affirm my gender identity or that i reject them because i find them to be mysogynist stereotyping. When i do stereotypically masculine things i either feel put off by the dudeness of them or i claim them as something i do in spite of being a woman, in an act of emancipatory appropriation. It's a societal expectation that girls like to wear nail polish and that boys like to play with guns, but how i relate to the fact that i like both nail polish and guns revolves around my innate sense of self, the psychological depth structure my personality rests upon. Because putting on a nice coat of nail polish helps me to feel girly and pretty and i like how people compliment me for it. All of that gives me a nice, healthy glow of being a girly girl inside. And when i handle a weapon, i like to cast off the notion that women should be weak and docile and rely on a man as their protector. In both cases, it doesn't only matter how the behavior is coded socially, it matters that i relate to that coding from a woman's perspective, and it's irrelevant if that relation is affirmative ("i'm fine with this gender stereotype, it's harmless and fun") or rejecting ("i want to break with this gender stereotype to empower myself").

If i was a man with the exact same preferences of liking nail polish and guns, then things would be completely reversed - the nail polish would be something i do in spite of my gender and shooting would be something i do because of my gender. And there could ofc also be men who don't like nail polish and guns, and so on. But they'd all have their own dialectic between their preferences for gender presentation and their gender identity. How they'd be able to relate to such social constructs would be up to them, but it would always be grounded in whether they understand themselves as men or not.

I think people really need to get past the idea that something being socially/environmentally constructed means it isn't real, valid nor fundamental, or that we understand the mechanism of influence and/or it can be easily changed.

When you hear that something is environmentally constructed you need to hear it not like we're talking about an opinion, but whether you think your ethnicty's cuisine tastes good, or whether you take joy in playing basketball or whatever. Like these aren't things you can really change about yourself, they are part of your identity and what makes you you.

white people like to be named John Money

The Reimer case proves that you should not take away options from kids, let them choose their own genders, jfc

Probably a bit of both imo. i think trans people are on some level probably innately like this, but we all have to live with gender as it's been constructed. i could debate whether i'd still be trans without current gender norms but that's a question entirely removed from reality. There's also a difference between aligning with certain gender performances and preferring to have a certain type of body. The latter probably has something to do with proprioception if i had to wager, but anyone actually looking for it right now is a bastard.

but what i’m confused about is isn’t gender a social construct and aren’t the social roles, etc, all learned so how would it be innate?

This is a bit tough to answer because we don't know to any great detail what innate gender is, mechanically speaking. We can only infer characteristics of it by observing the results: the most concrete thing we can say is that at the most basic level it involves processing sex hormones and has an expected hormone balance more or less dialed in innately, such that deviating from that general range causes distress, but also that this isn't the complete picture. For the more social and self-image aspects, I believe the cleanest answer is that it's tied to how people filter and internalize socialization, that somehow the brain is dialed in to automatically say "yes, this bit of culture here is for me, and I am drawn towards it" or "this bit of culture is not for me, and it makes me uncomfortable to take part in it" in a gendered fashion and that it's also probably fuzzier than just aesthetics or stereotypes (that is, that this filtering isn't rigid or absolute nor is it necessarily even a conscious understanding of socialization, but rather just enough pressure to create broad categories), and over time this builds up into a collection of things like self-image that's informed by gendered cultural aesthetics, gendered mannerisms, and internalized gender roles.

That sort of fuzzy filtering also lines up with how a lot of individual pieces of gender dysphoria related to actions are more like a pinprick of anxiety, while gender dysphoria relating to self-image is much more distressing. For personal examples: playing a male character in a video game is just a little unpleasant, but just the thought of cutting my hair starts up a panic response.

deleted by creator

No conclusions can be drawn from the case beyond "abusing children is bad." Seriously. Ethics in science matter, and unethical "experiments" should be dismissed completely. He didn't prove that gender identity is innate or that it's learned, he proved that when you abuse children it fucks them up, and that's it.

Scientific ethics are not just a polite suggestion, there are actual reasons why they're important, even from a sociopathic standpoint of only caring about the truth. An experiment like this cannot be replicated and it cannot be peer reviewed, and we cannot take David Reimer as representative of most people because the vast majority of people were not subjected to the same kind of abuse. It's possible he identified as male because of something innate to his brain, and it's also possible that the trauma he endured influenced his identity - especially since that trauma was associated with attempts to make him identify as female.

Whenever unethical experiments are conducted, obviously the most important thing is the harm caused, but it's also virtually guaranteed that the experiment will be contaminated by the "researcher," because if they're abandoning scientific ethics then they're probably fucking up all sorts of other practices, and ofc since it's illegal they have to keep it hidden, so you're left with nothing but conflicting testimony and dubious evidence of what even happened, less like a laboratory procedure and more like reconstructing a crime scene, which, to be clear, it is.

According to Money's biography cited on Wikipedia about this:

Money's rationale for these various treatments was his belief that "childhood 'sexual rehearsal play'" was important for a "healthy adult gender identity"

And in his own words:

If I were to see the case of a boy aged 10 or 12 who's intensely attracted toward a man in his 20s or 30s, if the relationship is totally mutual, and the bonding is genuinely totally mutual, then I would not call it pathological in any way.

For Money to be proven wrong about gender being learned, it would mean that he conducted a successful experiment, that produced different results than he expected. If your "experiment" involves the equivalent of grabbing a bunch of random chemicals and throwing them in a beaker, then it doesn't matter what it is you were trying to prove or disprove because your methodology is shit and there's nothing to learn from it.

A social construct can build up around a real thing. And then, subsequently, that social construct becomes real. Gender isn't imagined, but it is social. And because it is social does not mean it is completely invented, though some parts of it are.

For example, there are differences between boys and girls, men and women,* that are essential beyond just physical equipment. Any elementary school teacher can attest to the differences in children, as a whole. Also, societies have always had a division of labor between the sexes, even in matriarchal and egalitarian societies. There are differences that extend beyond construction or even our physical understanding of sexuality or gender, such as in the Reimer case where administering hormones and socializing did not change him into a woman. In a way the example of the Reimer case proves our point, because it shows that a kid who identifies as trans or enby can't be forced to assume a gender that they don't feel is what they are. That a kid who was AFAB who says they are a man, or a boy, or who says "I don't really know but I'm not a girl," and needs to do some experimenting and learning can not be changed into a gender that they are not.

So the argument just comes back around to conservatives don't think that a gender can be anything other than sexual assignment at birth. They are comparing the Reimer case where a little boy underwent some terrible traumatization due to a doctor's hubris, with an AMAB girl or young woman who has enough experience to recognize that she is not a boy, was never a boy, and actually feels affinity for femininity, not masculinity, as a core component of their identity. They're still saying that a kid, or even an adult, can't decide whether they are a boy or a girl, man or woman. At the end of the day they view children as property.

*and non binary, I have a lot of nb friends and relationship history and there is clearly a difference in attitudes and socialization, from my experience

** sorry if anything here is inaccurate or crudely stated. I'm not an expert on gender issues, but it's clear where the fault and prejudice in the chud arguments come from

deleted by creator