Gender Identity (via gendered socialisation) is Real

I have noticed a lot of trans activists arguing against the socialisation of gender. I have also noticed that the author’s of the sentiment in question show a clear misunderstanding (perhaps a deliberate one) of what socialisation is.
However, I have also noticed many feminists claiming that gender identity does not exist, or at least that they don’t have one.

In this article I’d like to clear these misunderstandings up. What does science say about socialisation and gender identity? There will be a summary at the end of the article.

In the nature vs. nurture debate, where all behaviour is either biologically or socially determined respectively (usually, it’s a mixture of the two veering more on the side of nurture) sex is nature and gender is nurture.
Socialisation is the form that nurture takes.

The fact that men have deeper voices on average is an example of biological determinism (nature, sex), but there is a lot more to voice than pitch. Even voice is gendered, as these trans-men discuss in a reddit post about speech therapy for trans-men to sound more like men and less like women.

Most of our primary socialisation occurs in the period between the ages of zero and five, by the end of which 90% of a child’s brain has developed.

“Despite increasing recognition of the entire life course, childhood (including infancy) certainly remains the most important stage of most people’s lives for socialization and for the cognitive, emotional, and physiological development that is so crucial during the early years of anyone’s life”.

The aforementioned critical period of brain development has permanent effects on a person’s life. Anyone familiar with the Abecedarian Project knows that.

Now for the obligatory mention of intersex individuals that always seems to plague these types of discussions: intersex women were socialised female and behave in accordance to their gendered upbringing, despite being male internally. Shouldn’t be surprising since there are no exception, even among trans people, to this rule.

Socialisation is something done to us, without our consent. It’s how society, including our parents, sees us while treating us accordingly. We have:

• no choice

• no immunity

• no way of reversing it

Our culture is gendered and so too is our upbringing, otherwise the societal construct of gender wouldn’t exist.

As a demonstration of gendered socialisation, here is an example of the differences between the socialisation of boys vs. girls:

“Adults respond differently to communicative efforts of boys & girls. A study of infants aged 13 months found that when boys demand attention — by behaving aggressively, or crying, whining or screaming — they tended to get it.
Conversely, adults tended to respond to girls only when they used language, gestures, or gentle touches; girls who used attention-seeking techniques were likely ignored. There was little difference in the communicative patterns at the start of the study, but by age 2, the girls had become more talkative while boys more assertive in their communicative techniques”.

This is what is meant by socialisation. It’s not something that can be undone in adulthood and re-done a different way, not that any attempt in that regard is ever undertaken by anyone who transitions. “Transition” is superficial, cosmetic.

The example I gave also explains the reason why members of the male sex are more assertive and overrepresented in the public sector like media, while members of the female sex are underrepresented, regardless of self-identification.

Not only have trans-womxyn recieved a male socialisation, but they also lack a female one.

Socialisation determines gender identity, according to sociology, psychology and other related disciplines, so not only are trans-womxyn’s unambiguous sex male, but their gender identity is also male. Hence why they have to train themselves to not act, move, walk, talk, sound like men. They have to try really hard to impersonate women, while being men comes completely naturally to them. And they never 100% succeed at passing behaviour et al-wise.

The fact that it’s trans-womxyn who are always in the limelite and never trans-men is a form of “not passing”. A surefire way to find trans-men online, without trans-womexyn spamming your results is to do a search for ‘detrans’. The majority of detransitioned people are female. This is a women’s issue that can’t be raised because it’s “transphobic”, along with every other fact, benign or otherwise.

What the trans cult refers to as ‘gender identity’ is not the same gender identity axiomatic within sociology et al.

What the “trans-women are women” crowd are talking about is actually just self-identification, preferred sex, preferred gender. They call it “gender identity” to make self-identification with the opposite sex seem more legitimate than it actually is.

Non-binary is part of trans ideology, so even if the sub-culture can convince itself that a trans-woman’s male sex is compromised by HRT, their male socialisation is compromised by trying really hard to pass, their male privilege is compromised by the fact that they passed once, briefly, from the back — they’d still only be non-binary. They can never fully (fully, lol not even half-ways) erase their maleness and certainly never replace it with femaleness.

Their best bet is to argue that gender is a spectrum and that they are “non-binary”.

Thankfully, there are trans-women who accept that trans-women are a type of man, not woman (Debbie Hayton being one such reasonable individual). The belief that a literal man is a literal woman if he says so, is not inextricable to being a trans-woman.

To recap:
Gender identity is a social identity which is determined by socialisation. So even though there is a difference between sex and gender, sex determines your socialisation, which determines your gender, meaning that sex and gender can never be mismatched (except in the cases of feminine socialisation of infants with CAIS or penile ablation). Trans-women are socialised according to their sex, not according to their preferred sex.

Trans-women have a preferred gender and a preferred sex mismatched with their gender and sex respectively (not “assigned”, that’s intersex terminology).

Just because you don’t experience “gender euphoria” (who does?), or are non-conforming doesn’t mean you lack a gender identity. As long as your sex was known to your parents you have a gender identity.

It is not transphobic to say that trans-women are men, despite a very vocal group of people who insist otherwise, just as it is not anti-feminist to recognise that gender identity is real.