As a child of the 1970s, I can still recall the trauma of watching Elvis Costello jab his finger at me as he sang “Called careers information; have you got yourself an occupation?” My dreams of becoming an astronaut had already evaporated by then and I feared I needed to make a hasty decision before I was conscripted into Oliver’s Army — or worse.
A generation later, the stakes are far higher for our kids. Today the refrain might be Called social media; have you got yourself a gender identity?
It is remarkable that, although we spend so much time talking about gender identity these days nobody can define it without recourse to either circular reasoning or sexist stereotypes — and usually both. Even legislators are guilty; the State of Massachusetts, for example, defines it as “a person’s gender-related identity, appearance or behaviour, whether or not that gender-related identity or behaviour is different from that traditionally associated with the person’s physiology or assigned sex at birth”. Which doesn’t exactly sound very progressive.
Layla Moran, the Lib Dem MP, may have told Parliament that she could see souls during a debate about trans issues, but all we can actually see are bodies and they have a sex rather than a gender. Which leads us to the deeper question: why do we need a gender identity?
For generations we have known about sex: there is female and there is male and we need one of each to produce the next generation.
Society devised different restrictions and expectations according to our sex, and while most people complied, some of us found them so excruciating that they crushed our mental health. That used to be called “gender identity disorder”, an identity problem relating to gender. When people objected to being labelled as “disordered”, the language was changed to gender dysphoria, but from the original terminology grew the notion of gender identity.
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