EDIT: this is clarified in the walls of text in my responses below, but to be clear here, I do not endorse a biological essentialist account of gender, by saying gender is not only a social construct and has biological components, I am disagreeing with a view that gender is just socialization / performance / etc., but this does not mean I endorse the view that gender is just your chromosomes / genitals / etc. Neither of these views work.

Please read the article I linked to, and for additional reading see Whipping Girl by Julia Serano, esp. relevant to this discussion is chapter 6, some of which I quoted in my responses below.

When I say gender identity is biological, I am talking about what Julia Serano calls "subconscious sex" which she also sometimes interchanges with "gender identity", which is basically that innate and unchanging sense of your sex / gender. What I don't mean by gender identity is the label you choose to identify with (or the concept that label represents).

From Whipping Girl:

the phrase “gender identity” is problematic because it seems to describe two potentially different things: the gender we consciously choose to identify as, and the gender we subconsciously feel ourselves to be. To make things clearer, I will refer to the latter as subconscious sex.

[–] fracture@beehaw.org 2 points 2 days ago (9 children)

these are some pretty deep viewpoints to condense into one sentence and just drop links to, can you clarify to what degree you believe gender is biological, and how that extends to transgender / nonbinary people?

[–] RandomVideos@programming.dev 6 points 2 days ago (3 children)

If gender is just a social contruct, why do trans people want to change their gender?

[–] fracture@beehaw.org 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

i'm not really here representing a viewpoint other than "if someone wants to identify in a way that makes them happy, they should be allowed to, regardless of the basis they claim for it"

i specifically asked in this case because, especially nonbinary people, but also gnc trans people are sometimes invalidated because of the biological argument, so i wanted clarity on the commenter's position. of course, i don't know everything, and consider my experience to be fairly gender normative for a trans person, so i'm open to learning something new, as well

[–] dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Hopefully you can see that I'm not making "the biological argument" you probably had in mind, i.e. a biological essentialist account of gender. The biology totally supports non-binary people, and in fact the current evidence is that brain sex is largely "non-binary", with very few people having brains that fit into binary boxes.

EDIT: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4687544/

Our study demonstrates that although there are sex/gender differences in brain structure, brains do not fall into two classes, one typical of males and the other typical of females, nor are they aligned along a “male brain–female brain” continuum. Rather, even when considering only the small group of brain features that show the largest sex/gender differences, each brain is a unique mosaic of features, some of which may be more common in females compared with males, others may be more common in males compared with females, and still others may be common in both females and males.

The lack of internal consistency in human brain and gender characteristics undermines the dimorphic view of human brain and behavior and calls for a shift in our conceptualization of the relations between sex and the brain. Specifically, we should shift from thinking of brains as falling into two classes, one typical of males and the other typical of females, to appreciating the variability of the human brain mosaic.

Only around 1% of brains fit consistently with the binary "male" or "female" characteristics.

[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Why wouldn't they? if being withing a specific social construct makes you uncomfortable best thing to do is to change the social construct.

[–] dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

I think their point is more that if gender is socialization, then why would anyone ever have a strong and persistent sense that they are a gender other than they one they were socialized as? Gender is socialization means you are what your gender is what you were raised as. The idea is that it was the way you were raised that makes you a boy or a girl. This view absolutely has problems accounting for trans people, since trans people are generally claiming to be something other than the gender they were assigned at birth and then raised as.

[–] dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 2 days ago

A common anti-trans response would be: if gender is a social construct, then perhaps people are influenced by social media into becoming trans. This is the debunked notion of "social contagion", it assumes gender identity is subject to social influence.

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