Is personal identity the only thing that distinguishes gender?

A few things:

1) Most poeple assume that Gender is determined by the sex organ you have. This is completely false, as "sex" and "gender" are 2 completely different things. "Sex" is the organ you have. "Gender" is how you feel as a person.

2) To answer your question, no, personal identity is not what determines gender because someone can say they personally identiy as what ever they want, that doesn't change what the truly feel inside. SO someone can be a women as a person but born in a mans body, and deny what they feel by personally identifying as male, when in all actuality, they are mentally female with a physically male body.

3) Gender is not fluid. Fluid suggests that you can feel like your a girl one day and a guy the next. No. You are either one gender, or the other, or both at once, but what you are doesn't change. Some people think that sexuality is fluid. False as well, otherwise straight and gay people wouldn't exist.

Well - my experience with women is that they mostly have v's, while men seem to predominantly have p's. Seems to create a subtle difference right there....

ADDS:-

BQ:- Are these genuine lines of study? Has somebody yet come up with an answer to the killing of civilian people in Iran or Israel, or a cure for cancer, or some solution to the current economic demise of the West, while I've been away - or did IQs suddenly drop?

Gender is ONLY determined by physical attributes like "what is going on downstairs" If you had both sex organs then it would be determined by outward appearance/amount of testosterone or estrogen present. (usually you can tell if it's a boy or girl from a ways)

Nowdays lots of people choose what gender they are by how they feel, if they have a pen*s but they identify as a woman they think they're a woman.

But to me, you're whatever you have between your legs.

People often use "gender" & "sex" interchangeably, but "gender" is not "sex."

Sex = biological sex. There are only two sexes, female & male. Intersex is not a third sex.

Humans are a sexually dimorphic species. Only females & males can procreate: with each other. Intersex people are sterile (it's genetic), meaning they cannot procreate.

In the 1970s, feminists began using the term "gender" to refer to a person's sex for two reasons:

1. Too often, sexist men in Congress made immature jokes about the word "sex" when women spoke about their rights, to be jerks, as if too dumb to distinguish between the sex people do vs. the sex people are. Switching to "gender" avoided some infantile male jokes. Unfortunately, "gender" became regarded (falsely) as a (polite) way to refer to biology: one's sex.

2. To refer to the cultural influences (patriarchal pressures, such as sex roles, sexual harassment, rape, etc.) that shape who baby girls and baby boys become. (Using "gender" to refer to nurture, vs. nature.)

Feminists observed, wisely, that while no two girls (or boys) have the exact same growing up experience, people have vast experiences in common with others of their sex, under patriarchy, with girls treated and regarded differently than boys.

"Gender," therefore, is not a product of "personal identity," but of socialization. No amount of personal belief can change a person's socialization as female or male from birth.

Socialization as f or m is not something *we* decide on. It is what *others* do *to* us, based on their knowledge or perception of our biological sex.

Over 99% of the time, a baby's genitals are consistent with her or his genetic sex (XX or XY).

Further, psychologists tell us 95% of the personality is determined by age 5, because 95% of the neuropathways are built, based on one's experiences, during the first 5 years.

So even if a boy 8 yrs old could "pass" as female, and thus be treated as female lifelong by those who don't know he's male, his socialization from age 8 onward couldn't undo the 95% of his personality formed by socialization as male through age 5 (or 8.)

People can outwardly mimic the socialization of the other sex (study and participate in stereotypes of that sex, to fool observers), but that is not the same as being socialized into that sex. We cannot choose our socialization from birth onward. Again, socialization is done *to* us by others, not our choice.

Because society is patriarchal, males and females have different and unequal socialization. Men are socialized into the dominant sex class (oppressors, at least based on sex), women into the subordinate sex class (the oppressed, at least based on sex.)

When men insist they are women, they are, intentionally or not, claiming they have been socialized into the subordinate/oppressed sex class, which they have not. A male cannot just think he's female, even before age 5, claim he is, and have this be true.

He is not female genetically, reproductively, genitally, nor via socialization. Even if he "passes." In effect, he is stereotyping females to pass (by donning the chains of women's oppression, such as makeup, clothes, heels, skirts, hair style, the mincing/apologetic body language of the oppressed, etc.), but that is not the same thing as females pressured into those via involuntary socialization; or suffer the social penalties, all too often, if we don't. In addition, girls are targeted more often for child sexual abuses than boys: a socializing factor. In fact, studies have shown birthing room doctors/staff/family begin treating girl and boy newborns differently the instant the baby's sex is announced (and probably now in the womb.)

A boy convinced he's female cannot control those experiences. Even adults cannot control how we're sex-role socialized. So the premise that a male can know what it is like to be female (or vice versa), and therefore, *be* female, or "think like a female" (a stereotype) is false, just as being biologically the other sex is false.

So there is no such thing as a person "born into the wrong body" or having a "female brain in a male body." There is nothing wrong with a person's body. If people feel limited by the sex role men have assigned to men or women (as we all do, because sex roles are patriarchal, unnatural, insulting, dehumanizing constructs), the problem needing to be changed (ended) is the sex roles, not the person's body.

However, because "trans" political beliefs/theories were developed by men, who, by definition, do not have females' experience of oppression, they did not, nor could not factor in the emerging feminist consciousness about the sex roles; nor did they factor in feminist research.