so i was trolling and arguing with some bigots online (hey i had some time to kill lmao) and i said something about gender and sex being two seperate things so one of them brought up john money who i had never heard of before. so i looked up john money and looked into what leftists and transgender people had to say about him. obviously the guy was a pos but the general consensus was that he was trying to prove gender was learned with the reimer case but was proven wrong and that gender is innate. which makes sense, reimer never knew he was born a man and had dysphoria from that so transgender people aren’t “socialized” wrong, that’s how they’re born. 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? like boys aren’t born liking the color blue, and so on and so forth. so is someone just born with a predisposition to be more likely to identify as a certain gender? is it a combination of nature and nurture? something else?
idk i feel like i get it but i’m simultaneously brain farting
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.