What's a Gender Identity For?

Source image by k yamada.

Today’s understanding of gender in human beings is that we all have both a gender identity and a gender expression. Our gender identity is our inner-most sense of ourselves with respect to gender categories; a deep sense that “I belong in this group.” Our gender expression is rooted in the way our bodies are configured, plus whatever hair, clothes, and other styling we lay on top of that. Being cis is just when those two things agree on what category you belong in; being trans is when they don’t.

This distinction between an inner gender identity and an outer gender expression is not mere navel-gazing, either; it has a biological basis.

To me the interesting question about gender identity is what is it for? What is our gender identity even doing in there, tucked down into the deepest parts of our psyches? How does your gender identity spend its days? What’s it’s job? What’s its purpose?

The function of gender identity

Obviously, trans people have a very different response to their birth-assumed gender than cis people. A cis boy and a trans girl have very different experiences with respect to living as boys in the world. Likewise cis girls and trans men. Those differences give us key insights into the function of gender identity. After a good decade of listening to the stories of many trans people and thinking deeply about my own experiences, contrasting them with the experiences cis people seem to have, I think I have a handle on the function of gender identity:

Your gender identity’s job is to hang out in the background, monitoring the gender-coded things, situations, events, and experiences of your life. When it detects something that affirms your membership in the gender category that matches your gender identity, it triggers positive emotional responses. And when it detects something that disaffirms that membership, it triggers negative emotional responses.

That’s it. That’s the job. Positive and negative feelings.

Source image by Tim Green.

Take a six year old cis girl and give her a cute fairy-princess dress, and watch her love it. (And here I am remembering a girl from my daughter’s first-grade class who wore nothing but fairy princess dresses every single day.) Why? Because by that age she has learned to associate that kind of dress with femininity. She likely never saw a boy wearing a cute fairy-princess dress. But she’s seen plenty of Disney movies. A parent offering her that dress is therefore a strong signal to her gender identity that “yes, sweetheart, you are a girl!” which then responds by triggering strong positive emotions: it feels good to have that dress and to wear it. To loudly proclaim her girlhood through clothing.

But take me clothes shopping, as a six-year old trans-girl, point me at the boys section and tell me to find some stuff I like, and I’m going to have a miserable time. Why? Because being told to restrict my search to the boys section only is a strong signal that “No, honey, you’re not a girl”. Because every single article of clothing in that section—from the jeans to the sports-themed t-shirts or anything else—also carries the same disaffirming message. Predictably, my gender identity responded with a flood of negative emotions. A feeling of defeated sadness. A sense of exhausted pointlessness in the search, knowing I wasn’t going to find anything that felt good. Six years old, and I f*cking hated clothes shopping.

Or wait a few years. Take an eighth-grade cis boy who’s getting a few facial hairs, sporting that “vaguely dirty upper lip” look. (Here I am remembering a kid from my own eighth grade.) Watch him strut around the halls at school like king-of-the-world Jack Dawson on the prow of the Titanic. Watch him be absolutely chuffed with masculine glee, a new spring in his step. That’s his gender identity responding positively to male puberty, to the a solid, undeniable, tangible and final confirmation not just in his membership in the category of boys, but in the category of men.

Now take trans-girl me, in eighth grade, noticing those same hairs. Watch, as I silently freak the f*ck out about it. Watch as I go home and hide in the bathroom, plucking them out with my fingernails, hoping they’ll go away for good. Watch as what comes over me is not glee, but shame. A sense of impending doom. A certain knowledge that I cannot allow anyone else to ever know that I’m getting facial hair because… I will somehow be in trouble for it. Watch me pluck and pluck, picking holes in my face that people think are acne, because the hairs just keep coming back. This is my gender identity having its equivalent of a panic attack over this undeniable, tangible, and final-seeming rejection of my membership in the category of girls. Forty years later and some of those scars are still visible on my chin.

Gender euphoria and dysphoria

Every experience of gender dysphoria I’ve ever had fits this pattern. Every experience of dysphoria I’ve ever heard another trans person describe fits this pattern. Every example of gender euphoria I’ve experienced since starting to transition, or that other trans people have reported in their transitions, fits this pattern. Every outward signal I’ve ever seen from cis people, as regards gendered aspects of how they present themselves in the world, fits this pattern. And every clinical report about dysphoria feelings in cis people that occur with certain medical conditions (though that’s a subject for another article) fits this pattern.

It’s all the same: positive feelings for things that support your sense of identity, negative feelings for things that undermine it. Euphoria and dysphoria. That’s the function of a gender identity, and from that we can draw a number of other useful conclusions.

One: gender dysphoria is not a mental illness

Recall, there’s a biological basis for gender identity. Which means that gender dysphoria is not a mental illness, but is instead a sign of an active and healthy gender identity. A functional and opinionated gender identity that knows what category you’re supposed to belong to, and is actively raising emotional alarms to the myriad disaffirming signals that happen in a trans person’s life prior to transitioning.

Gender dysphoria doesn’t feel great, but it’s there trying to guide you away from the things that disaffirm your identity and towards the things that will bring you joy and peace. That’s a sign of mental health, not illness.

It is true that the chronic experience of gender dysphoria—the weight of countless and constant emotional alarms—can lead to mental illnesses. Notably depression, which is shockingly common in trans people. But that’s secondary to the dysphoria itself, and often resolves spontaneously when someone transitions. Why? Because the whole point of transitioning is to change the gender-coded messages you experience from disaffirming ones to affirming ones. Fix the thing that led depression and it’s no surprise when depression resolves on its own.

Two: young kids who know they’re trans

There’s a popular myth about trans people that “if you’re trans, you have to have always known it.” That’s not actually true (but also a subject for another article). Nevertheless, some trans people do become aware of the mismatch between their gender identity and gender expression at a pre-school age.

This makes sense: that’s about the same age that kids become aware of the existence of gender categories in a meaningful way. That’s when they’ve gained enough experience in the world to have learned how to read someone’s gender expression and make a conclusion about what category that person belongs to.

Put another way, that’s the age when people’s gender identity comes online and starts doing its job. Prior to that, kids don’t have enough experience with the way society gender-codes things to understand the message being conveyed when parents make them wear a dress to church instead of pants, or to cut their hair short instead of letting it grow long.

In those preschool years, ages 3 to 5, kids figure out how gender coding works and suddenly become aware that all kinds of stuff about themselves also carries “you belong in this group” messages. If those messages match their gender identity, well, fine. But if not, suddenly they’ll be having all kinds of negative feelings about it. Not only is this the age when one’s gender identity comes online, but for trans kids, it’s also the age when they start experiencing gender dysphoria.

That’s no guarantee that the kid will correctly understand what those feelings are about (I certainly didn’t make that connection for many, many more years), but some will. And those are the kids who, around ages 3 to 5, are going to start telling their parents that they “want to be a girl” or that “God made a mistake” or asking “when is my penis going to grow?” or any of the other ways kids express this dissonance between their gender identity and gender expression.

Three: feelings are evidence

Finally, if a gender identity’s function is to generate these positive and negative feelings, then your pattern of feelings is also the correct evidence for determining what your gender identity is. I.e. trace the arrow back to its source.

Every day, in just the handful of trans subreddits I participate in, dozens of people wrestling with their gender identity ask for help in figuring this out. Their questions take many forms but always boil down to “how do I know what my gender identity really is?” They may not use those words to ask it, but that’s always the core question being asked.

The answer is: look at your pattern of euphoric or dysphoric feelings about the gender-coded things, situations, events, and experiences in your life. Those feelings come from your gender identity, so the pattern reveals the gender identity itself.

If you feel dysphoria over things that seem to produce euphoria in peers of your same birth-assumed gender, then yeah, you may very well have a gender identity that’s not what your body would suggest. If your feelings are largely similar to your birth-assumed cohort, you’re probably cis. If your feelings don’t fit a clear pattern, perhaps you’re non-binary. If you don’t seem to experience any feelings about gender-coded stuff, maybe you’re agender.

Either way, for any identity anywhere on the entire gender spectrum, the pattern of feelings is the evidence.