[AGTRT-BF68] Informal Gender Theory (IGT) makes gender a matter of how you feel, and not how another should see you

Jan Bergstra & Laurens Buijs
Amsterdam Gender Theory Research Team

Gender identity is a central concept in gender theory of the last 30 years, and to a slightly lesser extent also of FGT (Formal Gender Theory, see gender-theory.org/) as the authors have been developing it since early 2023. We are working on a series of blogs to explore how the concept of gender identity can be strengthened, and what role FGT can play in this (see blog AGTRT-BF62).

Read more about our search for the concept of gender identity:
The concept of gender identity still provides more questions than answers, but concept engineering offers perspective here as well

How is gender identity actually usually defined? The American Psychiatric Association (APA) defines gender identity as follows (APA Guidelines p. 862):

• Gender identity: a person’s deeply-felt, inherent sense of being a boy, a man, or a male; a girl, a woman, or a female; or an alternative gender (e.g., genderqueer, gender nonconforming, gender neutral) that may or may not correspond to a person’s sex assigned at birth or to a person’s primary or secondary sex characteristics.

In Dutch:

• Gender identity: a deeply felt, intrinsic belief of a person to be a boy, a man, or a male person; to be a girl, a woman, or a female person; or an alternative gender (e.g., genderqueer, gender non-conforming, gender neutral) that may or may not correspond to the sex assigned to a person at birth or to a person’s primary or secondary sex characteristics.

This is the first definition in a line of descriptions in the article Can Science Inform Christian Ethical Reflection on Gender Identity? (2024) by Neil Messer. This is an informative paper that we will take as a starting point for now. That set of definitions includes parts that we from FGT do not support. Here we repeat Neil Messer’s entire series of definitions, and also give them a Dutch translation.

• Gender incongruence: a mismatch between a person’s gender identity and their sex assigned at birth or their primary and secondary sex characteristics.
• Gender dysphoria: the psychological distress sometimes, but not always, associated with gender incongruence. “Gender dysphoria” replaces the older term “gender identity disorder,” now widely rejected as stigmatizing.
• Gender transition: the process by which a person changes their gender presentation to align with their gender identity; it may, but does not always, include gender-affirming clinical interventions such as surgery or hormone therapy.
• Transgender or trans: an umbrella term used to describe the full range of people whose gender identity and/or gender role do not conform to what is typically associated with their sex assigned at birth. The term “gender nonconforming” is also used as a similar umbrella term.
• Trans(gender) male: a person whose sex assigned at birth was female, but who identifies as a man. The term female-to-male (FtM) is also sometimes used.
• Trans(gender) woman: a person whose sex assigned at birth was male, but who identifies as a woman. The term male-to-female (MtF) is also sometimes used.
• Cisgender or cis: an adjective used to describe a person whose gender identity and gender expression align with sex assigned at birth.
• Non-binary: an umbrella term to describe individuals who do not identify solely as male or female. ‘Genderqueer’ is also used in a similar way.
• Gender-affirming therapy: a clinical intervention (such as surgery or hormone therapy) intended to align a person’s physical characteristics more fully with their gender identity.

In Dutch:

• Gender incongruence: a discrepancy between a person’s gender identity and their sex assigned at birth or their primary and secondary sex characteristics.
• Gender dysphoria: the psychological distress sometimes, but not always, associated with gender incongruence. “Gender dysphoria” replaces the older term “gender identity disorder,” now widely rejected as stigmatizing.
• Gender transition: the process by which a person changes gender presentation to be in line with gender identity; it may, but does not necessarily, include gender-affirming clinical interventions such as surgery or hormone therapy.
• Transgender or trans: an umbrella term used to describe the full range of people whose gender identity and/or gender roles do not match what is typical of their sex assigned at birth. The term “gender non-conforming” is also used as a similar umbrella term.
• Trans(gender) male: a person whose sex assigned at birth was female, but who identifies as male. The term woman-to-man (VnM) is also sometimes used.
• Trans(gender) female: a person whose sex assigned at birth was male, but who identifies as female. The term male-to-female (MnV) is also sometimes used.
• Cisgender or cis: an adjective used to describe a person whose gender identity and gender expression match the sex assigned at birth.
• Non-binary: an umbrella term to describe individuals who do not exclusively identify as male or female. ‘Genderqueer’ is also used in a similar way.
• Gender-affirming therapy: a clinical intervention (such as surgery or hormone therapy) intended to bring a person’s physical characteristics more fully in line with their gender identity.

There is a big difference with FGT. Gender transition refers to the transition to another gender also in the formal and legal sense: man becomes woman or woman becomes man or man becomes neutral or woman becomes neutral. Here is a crucial difference. If transgender is only a matter of presentation and not of more generally binding categorization then any bottom falls out of transgender legislation as we now know it in a number of countries.

We describe the views that emerge from Messer’s definitions as Informal Gender Theory: gender is a matter of how you feel and is not about how another should see you. In “informal gender theory” (IGT), gender transition is already present in gender incongruence (and sometimes gender dysphoria), because the moment a person changes gender presentation there is already a different gender identity. In other words, “gender first” is a useful starting point for IGT.

The informality of IGT lies in the fact that (formally) gender does not have the hard meaning of gender categorization. Gender categorization under legally established rules determines who is male and who is female and when culpable misgendering occurs. These notions remain out of the picture at IGT.

It is further notable that none of the names we see as starting points for FGT are mentioned by Neil Messer. We mention on the intro to gender-theory.org/ in this context: Elizabeth Barnes, Alex Byrne, Robin Dembroff, Tomas Bogardus, Sandra Bem, Katharine Jenkins, Mari Mikkola, Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini and Talia Mae Bettcher.

This shows that the definition of transgender in informal gender theory is not firmly grounded, and that has consequences that are unreviewable. The weaker the meaning and impact of “transgender,” the greater the influence of gender identity on the notion of transgender (that is, on whether or not certain gender transitions are accepted) may be.

We see that co-essentialism involves the combination of FGT and “gender identity first.” If FGT is replaced by IGT then co-essentialism is much less powerful, because then it is no longer about “who is a man?” or “who is a woman?” or “who is neutral?” at all, but only about “who feels like a man, who feels like a woman and who feels neutral?

Finally, it is notable that Androgyny-Based Gender Theory (ABGT, see gender-theory.org/) fits IGT more easily than FGT, because ABGT is also quite informal. But because the political controversies surrounding gender are precisely related to FGT and remain out of the picture in IGT, we also want to think through the connections between ABGT and FGT as best we can so that ABGT can also be used to unravel these political and ideological controversies.

How can IGT respond to the various possible outcomes of the current gender wars, or battle between essentialism and co-essentialism (see gender-theory.org/)? This battle is about the following questions: who is a woman, who is a man and who is neutral?

1. If co-essentialism “wins out,” IGT can remain as it is. Gender takes on the meaning of gender identity, that degree of freedom IGT has.
2. If essentialism wins then IGT can remain as it is with the understanding that gender now takes on the meaning of physical gender, that degree of freedom IGT also has. Additional note can be made that a gender transition is not relevant to the population register. After all, that is where physical gender and not gender identity is stated. Because essentialism does not recognize gender transition there is no mismatch regarding the use of that term.
3. As a MotR (middle of the road)-notion of formal gender becomes dominant then the adaptation of IGT to that situation is more laborious: a concept of gender (new to IGT) then arises and this determines the meaning of gender transition which is less common with a MotR notion of gender than with IGT (which follows co-essentialism). A mismatch of terminology arises, and the terminology of IGT needs to be changed because the MotR version of FGT (in the adopted situation) is consistent with the legal frameworks and thus “stronger” than IGT.

Consistency in all three scenarios can be achieved if one speaks of IGT transgender (or something similar) from the outset within IGT. In that case, no misunderstanding of the meaning of transgender arises in any of the three scenarios. In the case of outcome 1 above, the simplification is then possible to replace IGT-transgender with simply transgender. In the case of outcome 2, this simplification is also possible but confusing because essentialism excludes gender transition precisely. In the case of outcome 3, IGT transgender is retained.