Why is gender so central to identity?

[aisha]

That is a very good point K8, oftentimes I wonder, is it really gender that this is about, or does it come from an even deeper place, for which we have no words, to express this, it seems like a chance game of using the right symbols at the right times, plus things like luck... It seems like nothing will ever change, but if you keep doing that it might, what stops you from just doing it?
We come to really know that we have no idea where we stand or what our divisions mean, or if they are in fact real. Sometimes it just seems to appear, but its like you can't have one without the other, unless you dont think about it that way

[Alexie]

I agree.  Cis-gendered people take their gender for granted and don't think about it.  Most of the time it isn't important to them and they can't really imagine being other than they are.  (Gender is important to those who struggle for gender equality, but they are aware only insofar as they want their rights as humans.)

If you are born with pale skin in a land where most people have pale skin and pale-skinned people have more opportunity than dark-skinned people, you may not think about your skin color unless dark-skinned people start demanding their rights as humans.

If you are very rich you may just assume that is your rightful place in the world and you deserve it and those who aren't very rich deserve their fates and that's why they live on the poor areas.

If you are male and are happy being male, you don't think about being male.  When another male "decides" to switch teams and become female you assume he/she is crazy because why else would anyone not want to be male?

Gender is important to us because of the disconnect between our inner and outer selves.  Generally, gender is not important to non-TG people because their inner and outer selves are aligned.

- Kate

I couldn't have put it better myself Kate.

It is so unbelievable refreshing to know their are others out there that understand why gender is so inextricably connected to identity. I suppose it's a bit like saying a person missing a hand understands better than somebody who has both hands, just how important having both hands is. Because I live as a male, my female self is hidden and effectively missing. My real identity has been forced to hide and I now realize why I never feel complete, no matter how much I try and convince myself I'm male. As I've said in earlier posts, gender is the very core of my being. As a TS I know vastly better than a non TS what gender identity is all about. I think about it every day!

Love Alexie.

[Alyssa M.]

I think that gender takes on a far more critical role for many of us than for other people, they don't see it as part of their identity, but as part of their being.  What they identify with is their social/economic class, and its not being with a different gender, or even the taking on of differing gender roles that bothers them, its being outside of that class that confuses/scares them.

I only half agree. I don't think most people consider gender to be critical in defining their identity in the same way that they don't consider being able to see or hear or walk as being critical -- visual artists, musicians, and hikers, respectively, notwithstanding. But take it away and it becomes critical. So to that extent I agree.

But gender definitely plays a pretty big role for a lot of cisgendered people I know (by no means all, but still a lot of them), and it certainly plays a major role in how people live their lives, albeit smaller than it once did. People aren't uncomfortable with switching gender roles mostly because they never actually have to do it. And being in circumstances dominated by the other gender tends to be problematic too: Most men I know would feel rather uncomfortable getting a mani-pedi with the girls; most women would (and do) feel uncomfortable working in a department (office, lab, shop, whatever) with no other women, to give some stereotypical examples. Certainly some don't care, but a lot of people really do.

[tekla]

I think there is a huge difference between something that is a part of your identity, and those things that are - more simply - a part of your being.

[K8]

I think there is a huge difference between something that is a part of your identity, and those things that are - more simply - a part of your being.

Aren't those really the same but different in degree?  Perhaps it is just a semantic difference?  "Identity" implies it is surface or added on, while "part of your being" is more essential and integrated into what makes you you.

I am a healthy, physically able, pale-skinned person of European heritage.  I usually don't think about those things (except my health when I'm sick), but they are essential to who I am.  I agree that they aren't my identity as we usually use the term, but in a way they are because they help define who I am at some sub-conscious level.

Even though I have the remnants of a male body, I identify as female.  It seems to be an essential part of who I am.  Perhaps as my body becomes more female, my femaleness will be more integrated into who I am and no longer be my identity?

Aargh!  My head is starting to hurt.  Don't follow me into this semantic rabbit hole!  Beware!

- Kate

[aisha]

my head hurt  yesterday. I think identity is very different from being. Identity does imply that it is on the surface and added on, while being persists in every situation, it is just the base feeling, or spark. I believe the moment you are conceived, and even before, you do have being, because nothing that essential could be created or destroyed. But you do not have identity.

I think its like the big bang, when everything was all packed into that tiny little ball, it had being, but none of it had any form, it just was and that was it, there wasn't even space to seperate pieces from eachother.

And now all that energy can be distinguished, and we are aware of elements and stuff like that, we can identify them.

You can be without having identity, but you cannot have identity without being.

Identity is not essential to who you are. I feel like this because I don't really know who I am, but I still get along well enough. Unless my identity is person who does not know who I am. Sometimes I feel like just awareness, sometimes I feel like a dragon, sometimes I feel like a deer. Recently I realized I must come a little bit of all things things, maybe its that I am really everything or nothing.

In all of this, I still can't really say that I am this and this, I would never argue against a statement I am not anything or do not really know who I am, but for no reason I prefer to be identify as this or that. Its what everyone else does, and it does come from our being. Does it really have anything to do with us though? The elements, I would imagine do not know themselves as copper, iron, sulfur, mercury, its just people who call them that. I don't know myself as anything but its just the outside world that calls me something, which shows you how close the inside and outside world is, I could even be 'alone' and still thinking I am someone.

But in that case who would know? If I really am no one, thinking I am someone, I am no one and I cannot really think, so there must be someone else 'there' in some meaning of the word who can actually think that there is someone and even two people, even though there is only one, possible none.

[Alyssa M.]

I think there is a huge difference between something that is a part of your identity, and those things that are - more simply - a part of your being.

... which is precisely the distinction I was making.

[aisha]

... which is precisely the distinction I was making.

I don't think there is that much of a difference, because it's all being so I agree.

[june bug]

I agree.  Cis-gendered people take their gender for granted and don't think about it.  Most of the time it isn't important to them...

That's not been my experience in the slightest!

I mean, how many ways can one see themselves as a "man" or as a "woman".  Even between the big "gender divide" there are an infinite variety of ways to define oneself as either / or.

If anything, have a gender-specific identity hyper-intensifies one's "gender identity" as you begin to compare yourself to "ideals" based on that particular gender.

I can't tell you how many times I've had guys and girls say "I wish that we weren't expected to do such and such or be a particular way."

I think this is one of the strange blessings of being trans.  You are forced to have to see gender from an angle most people don't realize is available regardless of what body you were born with.

So, I think what you said was right to a certain degree, but has to do more so with the fact that they don't realize there are other options, even within their own gender identity. 

[Vancha]

Gender roles have always been a part of human civilization, whether or not we want to admit to it.  In the past, these roles were flexible and based primarily upon convenience; males were generally stronger, and were better suited to hunting - females, being that they gave birth, were generally better suited to doing delicate work and caring for the children.  There were always variations, of course.  It's likely that gender-variant people existed as far back as that.  Gender is, in most people, an innate thing.  It is not physical, it is simply a state of "being", but it has always been tied to physical sex.

As children, we gather information about the world, and can later form identities based on it.  As someone has said, when we are conceived - or, for my own purposes, when we are born - we have being but we do not have identity.  Sex is "being"; gender is "identity".  We cannot have identity without being.

Although we would be the same people regardless of our sex, that sense of self is generally rooted in one sex or another - and its resulting gender role - because after observing our world as children, we discover where we belong in it and form our identities.

Our world has always been a gendered one, it is simply much more fixed than it has been in the past.  Along with this sense of self being innately gendered (with androgynes being the exception, of course), it is gendered for a reason: there is something about the brains and development of transgender people that separates us from our assigned sex.  Essentially, we feel a need to express the roles of - or the strong sense that we are, in the case of the transsexual - the opposite sex.  The gender roles just follow.  I suppose that requires that we go back to traditional thinking in only one way.  To assume that sex is tied to gender on the very foundation, and that there is something very biological that makes us want to express a gender role other than the one that coincides with our assigned sex.

Essentially, if gender is so inherent, that would explain its massive importance in our lives.

But I am deathly tired and probably not making an ounce of sense. 

[PanoramaIsland]

Gender is a socially constructed class and cultural system; it matters for the same reason that one's membership in other socially constructed categories, like race/ethnicity, matters. If I lived in a vacuum, without any human contact, I doubt that it would ever occur to me that I have a "gender."

Another way of saying this is that gender is something that occurs between people; it is only through a lifelong process of participatory social construction and conditioning, starting at birth, that certain traits are gendered and assigned a place and value in society. Some genderings - and some gendered characteristics - are ingrained much more deeply than others, and it is these most deeply ingrained gendered characteristics that are most obvious us in our everyday functioning. Thus, gender - and gendered characteristics such as sexual orientation - are perceived as both very important and very permanent.

I think it's important to stress how culturally specific gender - and gender-related constructs such as sexual orientation - can be. It's not as though we moderns work with universal concepts of gender and sexuality which translate to every other culture throughout history. Gender and sexuality constructs from culture to culture can be remarkably idiosyncratic, and they are ultimately important because we make them important, not because they really have some earth-shattering significance in the larger universal order.