[AGTRT-BF69] In search of a theory of gender identity

Jan Bergstra & Laurens Buijs
Amsterdam Gender Theory Research Team

Structure of this blog

Introduction
Difficulties in concept engineering gender identity
What is gender identity?
The relationship between gender identity and gender categorization
Conclusion

1. Introduction

We have been asking ourselves for some time whether we can arrive at a theory of gender identity. In blog AGTRT-BF62 we noted that this concept in gender theory is currently surrounded by questions and ambiguities.

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

We argued there, as well as in blog AGTRT-BF61 on the work of Rach Cosker-Rowland that in order to obtain a useful concept of gender identity, concept engineering may be at issue, as may ICE(incremental concept engineering). ICE helps bring gender categorization (or formal gender) into focus, but also has the potential to bring the concept of gender identity into sharper focus. But how exactly would that work? This blog will show that that is not yet easy.

We first look again at Neil Messer’s paper mentioned in AGTRT-BF68. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) definition of gender identity that Messer quotes is as follows:

“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.”

If we want to apply concept engineering to the concept of gender identity, it means designing successive notions of gender identity in a series of steps that each time produce a better concept of gender identity. Still, it is not so easy to get started.

If we read this APA description this way, it is by no means clear that everyone, or at least every adult person, has a gender identity. Therefore, for FGT(Formal Gender Theory, see gender-theory.org/), here lies immediately a (possibly incomplete) set of diverse options:

Everyone has a gender identity,
Everyone develops a gender identity over time (with further ramification by age and degree of maturity),
The vast majority of people have a gender identity (and others should/can be explicitly “treated” as exceptions),
A significant number of people have no gender identity,
Cis men and cis women usually have a gender identity,
Cis men and cis women usually do not have a gender identity,
Neutral persons usually have no gender identity.

The strength of FGT lies explicitly not in that FGT helps to choose among all these options, but in being able to reason systematically about gender and in doing so to be able to take all these variants into account, for example, by being able to bring the implicit assumptions raised in a paper (by third parties) into sharper focus, and then to better understand their influence.

2. Difficulties in concept engineering of gender identity.

It does not follow from the APA description that everyone has a gender identity. It may be that someone within himself concerning gender is not a “deeply-felt inherent sense of being XXX” can discern. In that case, attributing a gender to someone is unconvincing. We hold that the gender question can have four answers: male, female, neutral, and “don’t know.”

A second issue that immediately stands out from the APA description is that “woman” and “female” appear at the same level here when a major disagreement is precisely about whether and how to make an appropriate distinction between woman and female, or gender and sex.

One wonders exactly what the APA means by “deeply felt” in the definition of gender identity. This could be as follows: “I am male (feel ‘deeply’ physically masculine) but I am (feel like) also a woman (in terms of gender).” If someone states in terms of gender identity “I am male (in terms of physical gender)” and leaves it at that, is someone for that reason also and with certainty a man? Or is it conceivable that someone has forgotten to add that “she” feels like a woman in terms of formal gender, so that an unintended form of misgendering can occur?

It seems that the APA should give a complete picture of these “feelings,” and then the question is whether someone can be girl and woman at the same time. According to Alex Byrne’s “AHF”(a woman is an adult human female) principle, it cannot be, and we see it that way. But Girl and female, on the contrary, can be someone simultaneously.

We see Neil Messer’s story as IGT(informal gender theory) and that informal aspect is also evident in the APA description of gender identity. That description offers hardly any guidance when one wants to design a convincing classification of people into male, female, and neutral with marital status and legislation in mind.

For completeness, in FGT we want to adopt a concept of gender (or formal gender) that is formal in the sense that it can be used for classification of persons into male, female, and neutral and so clear and precise that the result is usable for civil registration, passports, identification, so-called “bathroom laws,” and gender-focused emancipation policies.

Another question is whether we can determine the gender identity of a person P by asking P about it. If P then says “deeply I feel a woman” can or should P be believed, or can there be grounds for not just taking P at “her” word on that point?

A third issue is whether a person perceives P’s own gender identity as a fact of life over which P has or has had little influence, or whether a person can direct and change their own gender identity.

A striking chicken-and-egg problem arises: does a person establishing gender identity in themselves need to know and understand what notion of gender a statement is being asked about? Of course, this issue is only relevant when different notions of gender are circulating and P is asked about gender identity when P is not quite sure which notion of gender is currently at issue. But that is the situation anno 2024: hardly anyone knows how transgender law works and under what conditions you are seen and categorized as male, female, or neutral.

3. What is gender identity?

We have written in detail about gender identity in report AGTRT-13 and in the following blogs: AGTRT-BF27, AGTRT-BD32, AGTRT-BF37, AGTRT-BF47, AGTRT-BF48, AGTRT-BF49, AGTRT-BF62, AGTRT-BF63 and AGTRT-BF64. But taken together, these blogs still provide an incomplete picture.

The question is always how does gender identity relate to the other central notions from FGT: (formal) gender, physical, gender (including morphological gender and the three currently most important variants of biological gender namely chromosome-based, gamete-based and gonad-based and FMRI brain scans), gender orientation, the question is less: what is gender identity?

We as authors can start by looking at ourselves. What do we (two straight and gay cis men, respectively) think about our gender identity? Are we capable of consciously feeling masculine apart from sexual orientation and apart from our perception of our physical gender? Experiencing sexual orientation is so very obvious, as is experiencing physical gender, that it takes quite a bit to put that behind you and say now for the thread with it, where in me is “the man”?

In line with Sally Haslanger’s view (see AGTRT-BF63), do we have an identity as members of a dominant class with women as subject persons and identities? Should we seek that dominant consciousness, which does not impose itself on the eye, precisely in ourselves, so to speak? Is our gender identity a part of the subconscious of which we have become alienated and which we can bring into focus in psychoanalytic sessions? Do we assume a gender orientation (see also our report AGTRT-13) and is our gender identity our awareness of it? But to assume that would not be rational in the absence of evidence of the existence of a gender orientation.

Do we have to go through a thought experiment, for example, that we would have a different sexual orientation, or that we would have a different physical gender, or that we would want to modify the physical gender we have? Is a “real” experience of gender identity possible only in confrontation with such deeper questions in which the perceptions we initially make of ourselves are explicitly and systematically called into question?

Now suppose we find no clue in ourselves beyond sexual orientation and physical gender characteristics to a male (or female or neutral) gender identity, can we say that we have no gender identity or (in the absence of sufficient reflection on it) that we have no gender identity at this time?

The difficulty with this series of questions is that hardly any answers present themselves. Here androgyny does provide clues: do we have salient masculine or feminine or neutral personality traits regardless of whether we can also assign an overall center of gravity (dominant label) to the totality of those traits (and their gender labeling by trait)? This is then suddenly so concrete that you feel hesitation about writing about it in a public blog. We assume that these issues can be addressed separately by separating primary gender identity from secondary gender identity, with person-centered issues being addressed at secondary gender identity (see AGTRT-BF47 and AGTRT-BF48) .

What now rears its head is an overly time-bound stereotyping of behaviors you observe in yourself. So is an interest in engineering and science a male trait, or is it just completely outdated to even think so? Is there a “feminine” perception of religion that we just don’t find in ourselves (it seems to be)? In terms of caring, is there a “feminine” antenna or focus that we would have to a lesser degree compared to many women known to us? These are delicate questions, related to personality development, which one of us (Laurens) would like to try to answer in time specifically in the context of the Jungian view of secondary gender identity. We do not want to suggest that these questions are all about (primary) gender identity.

Yet we encounter a paradox: where gender theory stems from the idea that the male/female difference in society was, until a fairly recent past, overused to make and hold differences, the search for gender identity leads precisely to a focus (at risk of stereotyping) on those differences. Isn’t thinking in terms of gender theory precisely at the expense of an overly pregnant perception of differences between men and women, and isn’t gender theory precisely an invitation to abstract from the differences that are not socially essential?

FGT does not rule out these issues, FGT can also do without this notion without immediately falling into essentialism. However, if FGT wants to avoid co-essentialism and still adopt a manageable notion of primary gender identity then the obvious way to go is to adopt the following description:

The primary gender identity (of an adult person P) is
- primarily the labeling (whether conscious or not at P) (as male, female or neutral) of the subjective experience of one’s own bodily gender,
- or secondarily (and in a minority of cases), the consciously present labeling (as male, female or neutral) of the subjectively perceived as inevitable and necessary (but perhaps not as desirable) gender categorization (of P) that differs from the consciously present subjective experience of one’s own bodily gender,
- or in third instance (and in exceptional cases), in the absence of a subjective experience of bodily gender a nevertheless pronounced subjective experience of inevitability and necessity of the labeling of one’s own gender categorization.

This definition is unexpectedly “difficult” for the following reasons:

We explicitly want to leave open in the concept of (primary) gender identity the possibility that physical gender and gender identity differ from each other. It is precisely by recognizing that deviation as a possibility that the contrast between essentialism and co-essentialism comes into focus: does gender categorization now follow physical gender (essentialism), or gender identity (co-essentialism) or a middle ground (in a MotR approach as we are pursuing with FGT)?
Here we do not require (and in this we follow Elizabeth Barnes and Cameron Kirk-Gianinni) that everyone has a gender identity (see AGTRT-BF49).
The gender identity (at time T of P) may differ from the given gender categorization at that time (in our definition, gender categorization refers to the subjective (either perceived as natural or “essentially given”) gender categorization).
The obvious way to read gender identity is as desired gender categorization or subjective gender categorization, but neither is precise enough. Desired is not always an issue because one can think to be a man without wanting to be a man. The term subjective gender categorization is ambiguous because we want to refer precisely not to the subjective version of the given gender categorization, but to one’s own judgment of what the gender categorization should be (also called gender self-identification).

In AGTRT-BF49, we discuss Kirk-Gianinni and his views on gender identity. Kirk-Gianinni speaks of gender-1 (for female gender), gender-2 (for male gender) and we then add gender-3 (for neutral gender). This is done to avoid the usual connotations of masculine and feminine because the very meaning of those notions must be clarified using the notion of gender identity.

Kirk-Gianinni draws on the issue identified by Elizabeth Barnes that some individuals are not expected to be able to develop an adequate awareness of a gender identity so that a lack of inclusiveness may arise. To solve that problem,Kirk-Gianinni leaves open the possibility that in such cases others may establish gender. This “intervention” is also perfectly possible with the description of gender identity we ‘ve given above.

4. The relationship between gender identity and gender categorization.

We return again to the chicken-and-egg issue regarding (formal) gender and gender identity. In AGTRT-BF62, we discuss the “roundabout” mechanism: the co-evolution of formal gender and gender identity.

Suppose at stage K there is a notion of gender (labeled gender_K) that is enshrined in laws and rules (and fairly harsh conventions). Then (at said stage K) an adult with male formal gender (in the sense of gender_K) is male and an adult with female formal gender (in the sense of gender_K) is female and an adult with neutral formal gender (in the sense of gender_K) is neutral.

In addition to the concept of gender_K, there is also (at stage K) a more vaguely (informally) identifiable concept of gender identity_K. There is a bearable mismatch between gender_K and gender identity_K because in the last hierzienning of laws, rules and conventions (after concept engineering of formal gender resulting in the concept gender_K) a widely accepted compromise was found that does reasonable justice to the ideas behind gender identity_K.

Now a process occurs (from stage K) that we want to start calling fermentation: society continues to develop and from the concept of gender_K, which is enshrined in laws and rules and thus quite rigid, and the by its very nature more fluid concept of gender identity_K emerges (after a development of decades or perhaps many more years) an adapted notion of gender identity, say gender identity_L.

The mismatch between gender_K and gender identity_L (because gender identity_L differs significantly from gender identity_K) becomes so great (and thus socially intolerable) that a new stage L arrives and new enactment of laws, rules and conventions takes place that culminates in the concept engineering of gender_L and in the administrative enactment of gender_L as the successor to gender_K.

There is again compromise in stage L and already on day 1 there is also mismatch between gender_L and gender identity_L, but that mismatch is socially bearable and stems from the need to compromise. Now the process of fermentation can begin again. This solves the chicken-and-egg problem with, say, the concept of gender as a chicken and the concept of gender identity as an egg (or vice versa, one can also push this metaphor too far after all).

We hereby establish the following:

The circularity Bogardus pointed out is really there (see AGTRT-BF14), but it can be limited.
In the co-evolution of the concepts of gender and gender identity, transinclusiveness (a complete match between gender and gender identity) is always not achieved, but stage by stage it is always pursued.
The development from stage K to stage L does not necessarily move toward co-essentialism. A movement in the opposite direction (a phenomenon of “undoing transgender,” free from Judith Butler’s “undoing gender”) is just as possible.

It is, of course, conceivable that in time the co-evolution of gender and gender identity stabilizes and that the roundabout cycle reaches an end point. It would be so simple

5. Conclusion

The conclusion we draw is that the notion of gender identity is still in its infancy in terms of theory and the application of that notion in co-essentialism is premature. For the MotR(Middle of the Road) approach we advocate through FGT, we believe the description of (primary) gender identity given above is useful.