[AGTRT-BF64] In essentialism, gender identity is not necessarily denied

Jan Bergstra & Laurens Buijs
Amsterdam Gender Theory Research Team

We are working on a series of blogs on gender identity, a concept we previously noted that much ambiguity remains about it in gender theory (see AGTRT-BF62). Gender identity as a concept is central to co-essentialism, or the school of thought that holds that gender is determined by how people identify themselves. But what about that other school of thought on gender, essentialism?

Read more about essentialism:
Essentialist thinking about gender is often paradoxical and unreasonable, but can also be moderate

Essentialism is the view that formal gender (read: gender categorization) is entirely determined by bodily gender. To be precise, a person “by definition” has the same formal gender as physical gender. Here, physical gender is a notion we have not yet encountered in the literature (see also our blog AGTRT-BF41 and AGTRT-BF42).

Essentialism has little interest in the notion of gender identity. But there is no reason why from an essentialist viewpoint the concept of gender identity should be necessarily denied. Indeed, anyone who looks closely at the way transgender is viewed in fundamentalist Christian circles can find recognition therein for the existence of gender identity.

Read more about essentialism among Christians and feminists:
Essentialist thinking about gender is especially evident among feminists and Christians

In AGTRT-BF44 we described the TEFC ideology, where TEFC stands for Trans-Exclusionary Fundamentalist Christian. From the standpoint of TEFC, at least as professed by conservative Roman Catholics, it is seen as a duty and obligation to accept the God-given bodily gender. That task is particularly relevant when it is not obvious.

Implicitly, we can infer that it could be the case that someone has a gender identity that differs from the corporeal, but the urgent advice then is to nevertheless accept the corporeal gender also as a formal gender and to go through life explicitly with it and on that basis.

From the essentialist angle, three views of gender identity are possible:

1. Gender identity exists, and is separate from physical gender, but has no relevance to gender categorization. This position is what has already been discussed above.
2. Gender identity exists and never deviates from physical gender and never deviates from gender categorization, and thus gender identity is a redundant notion.
3. Gender identity “does not exist,” that is, gender identity is a concept from a version of gender theory that people do not support so much that that concept is not recognized either.

A curious feature of view 2 is that, according to that view, gender identity determines formal gender. Thus, the description of co-essentialism that gender identity (formally) determines gender is also valid for essentialism in the context of essentialism as described under view 2. This is somewhat confusing.

We conclude as follows:

• Conception 2 is artificial and is actually another formulation of Conception 3, and the claim that Conception 2 employs the slogan of co-essentialism (“formal gender follows gender identity,” or as Cosker-Rowland puts it, “gender identity first,” see also AGTRT-BF63) is thus also artificial.
• View 1 is the most obvious: essentialism need not deny the notion of gender identity in order to maintain the claim that gender categorization must follow bodily gender but not necessarily gender identity.
• It is obvious that, within essentialism, there is no in-depth study of the concept of gender identity; the importance attributed to it is too low.