There Is No Valid Proof of Gender Identity, And There Never Will Be

While I am glad journalists are highlighting the flaws in psychological studies about gender identity and I view this as valuable work and am happy it’s being done, I am taking a different tack here. Because even if every one of these studies were executed flawlessly and even if the results they claimed to reach were accurate, those results still would not justify the way psychologists are trying to use them. My argument is simple: It is impossible for psychology to prove that the “gender” of gender identity is real.

Gender identity believers declare that “gender is different than sex” and that our gender identity is our inner sense of what our “gender” is and represents something innate and immutable about ourselves, something core to our being as a person. But what exactly is this “gender” they are speaking of? It isn’t helpful to provide their definition because their definition of the word often doesn’t match the way they actually use it, so let me try to describe it. We start with our physical body. Okay, that’s obvious. We can see it. We can touch it. It’s material. It’s provably there. Now imagine an incorporeal something around that physical body, an aura, a manifestation of a human soul, a twirly mist, something immaterial, something transcendental. And this transcendental gender that surrounds each of us, so its believers claim, has a masculine or feminine aspect to it, or both, or neither, or something entirely unrelated to masculine/feminine. And our gender identity is our internal sense of what that transcendental gender is.

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Converting the Two-Spirit

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There Is No Valid Proof of Gender Identity, And There Never Will Be

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I oppose wrong beliefs and ideologies, not people. Had I walked in another's shoes, I might believe and do as they believe and do. I don't oppose people. I seek to persuade them. Wrong beliefs and ideologies are forever wrong, but a wrong person can choose to become right.

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