I am trying to understand if gender is a concept that gets reinforced through experience in the human conceptual system, a socially constructed composite of memories and experiences associated with people you have interacted with; or if there is an integrated and innate “sense of self” in the psyche that is actually biologically explicit, a genetically predetermined “sense of being a gender” which might come with a kind of background emotional state, an innate gender identity.
That is to say, if biological males have a lot in common with each other physically as well as behaviorally, it of course makes sense since some foundation of behavior is rooted in biology - men have more testosterone, which has behavioral effects - men and women have different physical anatomies. I believe that organs like the heart are different between men and women and I personally would be surprised if there were not physical differences in the brain, along with the rest of the body, although I read that this is contested.
One issue I see in the idea that people are born with a subjective, conscious sense of a gendered self is that a gender would be meaningless if it were not ascribed at least some characteristics. If “manliness” or “femininity” are fully unbounded, it would have no semantic implication to transition genders. In other words, we associate genders with things like behaviors, preferences, and a sort of emotional disposition. But if biological females and males have some degree of innate biologically determined behavior, it means that whatever it is about men that is rooted in biology and not socially learned or culturally relative, corresponds to an actual objective physical structure. If men enjoy play fighting more than girls, maybe it’s because they have more testosterone. It seems probable to me that behavioral difference probably also have some corresponding neurological structure.
In other words: I don’t think there can be a “gender identity” without it necessarily being a composite of internal feelings and tendencies associated with gendered behavior - certain mannerisms or affectations, wearing make up, etc. Yet each of those individual aspects corresponds to something physical.
So, I don’t think a person could be born with a prototypically male brain - with the brain structure associated with males - but also claim that their transgenderism is innate. If they actually feel more like a woman on a behavioral level, intuitively, unvolitionally, and inalterably, wouldn’t it be because some aspect of the brain governing those behaviors is present in them?
Therefore, I am considering that gender identity is a necessarily a fortiori concept - a simultaneously co-occurring multitude of independent traits happen to occur in boys. That doesn’t mean the psyche is born knowing “I am this thing, a boy.” If people naturally gravitate towards associating with people of the same sex, it’s because they feel a sense of commonality given the same range of independent traits they share.
I think it undermines the simplistic idea of a woman trapped inside a man’s body or vice versa because it does not seem biologically explainable that someone came into the world with the mind of a woman if they have the brain of a man. There cannot be a feature of the mind that is not actuated by the brain, the mind is the brain.
What seems more likely is that some people may have behavioral traits of femininity, given that there is variation in traits from person to person, and some people may have enough feminine traits and a natural proclivity towards feminine socialization that they redefine themselves on the human-semantic-linguistic-conceptual-cultural level in terms of the categories available to them, the ones they learned from their external world. Because the mind learns and integrates a sense of self, it may very well be jarring and difficult and require a process of self-restructuring to fully form that new conscious identity as “the opposite gender”. It is also possible for any reason that a man may decide they wish to be a woman and undergo the psychological process of identity restructuring, of learning and naturalizing a new self, even if they have no innate feminine tendencies. You can still learn and train new habituated norms, and take hormones to change feelings, for example.
I am wondering if to the contrary there are any arguments in contemporary psychology that transgenderism is more genetically mechanistic than I have characterized it, in that some people simply get allocated the mind of a woman in the body of a man, but the question would remain, how could the mind of a woman be determined by neurology?
