Originally a comment by Artymorty on Internal cannot be external.
When the term “gender identity” was first used, it described an individual’s knowledge of their sex as male or female.
Hmm that doesn’t seem entirely accurate to me. My understanding of the history of the term “gender identity” is that it comes from a few social-sciences branches of academia, primarily psychology (and especially its subdomain of sexology) and anthropology. And that it described a concept that was closely related to sex, but that was mostly understood to be separate from sex, though the boundaries were often hazy.
Psychologically, “gender identity” is not much different from any other cultural facet of identity: religious identity or national identity or ethnic identity, say. These are things that are measurable and that matter psychologically.
But when we try to freight those other kinds of personal senses of identity with overloaded meaning, the results are usually bad. Treating people’s internal senses of their ethnic or religious or national identities as psychologically and materially paramount, fundamental kinds of things immediately triggers red flags about fascism and racism and such. For good reason! They’re not inborn. They’re cultural phenomena. Sex, on the other hand, is obviously not the same. Hence, we call it “gender identity” and not “sex identity”: by using that adjacent-but-separate word we are inherently conceding that sex doesn’t exist on the same plane as “gender”. Sex is material and concrete; “gender identity” is not.
In anthropological contexts, “gender identity” refers to mostly indigenous or highly collectivist cultures in which people are designated into specific social roles, primarily based on their sex, but with some degree of wiggle room for outliers. The classic examples, of course, are “ladyboys” in Thailand and “fa’afafine” in Samoa. In these cases, “ladyboy” or “fa’afafine” are cultural identities, and they’re specifically gender identities because they have to do with behavioural attributes. They’re adjacent to sex but not quite the same thing. Feminine males are male but they identify in a manner that is socially in line with the female social gender role.
Sex, being a material and clearly observable aspect of the human body, is as relevant as ever, but the social facets of “gender” often take precedent in day-to-day indigenous social-culture land. In such cultures, they can see that some people’s personalities and social identities don’t map onto the typicalities of those of their sex, and they are given a special social category.
So in the anthropological sense, “gender identity” means people who are culturally shifted into a rigid social-role category that is closer in line with that of the opposite sex. But crucially: everyone can see that they’re exceptions to the rules and that sex is still there, and it’s rigidly binary.
There’s a lovely short video I’ll try to find in which a young butch lesbian in Samoa discusses how she came to understand herself and her “gender identity” as a fa’afatama (a woman who behaves “in the manner of a man”). A telling moment comes when her girlfriend discusses “coming out” to her mother, explaining that the “guy” she’s dating “is a girl”. There are telling moments throughout, in which she and her community clearly see that she’s both female and more interested in the stuff generally associated with males. They clearly hold both concepts at the same time: actual male and actual female vs. “behavour-in-the-manner-of-male” and “behaviour-in-the-manner-of-female”.
I don’t want to sound too condescending, but I find that kind of accommodation of gender-atypical people in indigenous cultures sweet and lovely, in a basic-first-steps kind of way. Hey, at least that lesbian couple has found some kind of stability and a sense of place in that culture. That kind of thing.
But I don’t dare romanticize these “third-gender” social roles as ideal. I’m an unapologetic advocate for the more modern, individualistic way of structuring society, in which males and females aren’t assigned “gender roles” in the first place. It’s more complicated, but it’s also fundamentally more egalitarian. In fact, in places like Thailand and Samoa, as Western individualism has seeped into them, rejection of the old social order of “gender roles” has begun to take hold. There are cons as well as pros to that, obviously. But my gay male upbringing inclines me to not romanticize the old rigid ways so much as sympathize with the people who feel constrained by them, and to hope they find more happiness and freedom with the new knowledge that’s seeping into their cultures.
Gay rights orgs in Thailand are particulary puzzled right now because the trend was to advocate for society to move beyond Thai society’s “gender identity” concepts of homosexuals, and to vie for more egalitarian cultural understanding of gender-outliers and same-sex-attracted people. The West’s sudden lurch back towards gender-identitarianism has thrown a wrench in that, almost forcing the Thai gay rights movement to do a 180. They’re in a strange place, indeed.
