Trying to think about how the distinction of gender identity and roles is true but its a relative distinction rather than an absolute like the ontological difference between mind and matter, because the subject is constituted by their activity in relation to a socialized world. It is how one comes to have an identity, in relation to others, even if marked by a difference.
An issue is that gender identity has little meaning if it has no relation to the gendered division of labor ie roles. That the basis of such a identity is mystified when one treats it as an internal essence as the traditional sexists did of gendered norms in their day. This is what has been criticized as not something innate to women but constituted by social relations.
So for example, the assumption of a feminine or masculine essence is actually the reflection of how people behave within certain social relations rather than something originating within one's sex.
https://pages.nyu.edu/jackson/future.of.gender/Readings/DownSoLong--WhyIsItSoHard.pdf p. 9
Consider another example showing how beliefs about sex differences cloud people's analytical vision. How often have we heard question like: will women who enter high-status jobs or political positions end up looking like men or will the result of their entry be a change in the way business and politics is conducted? Implicit in this question are a set of strong assumptions: men have essential personality characteristics and cultural orientations that have shaped the terrain of high status jobs and women have different essential personality characteristics and cultural orientations. The conclusion is that and women's entry into these positions unleashes a conflict between their feminine essence and the dominant masculine essence that has shaped the positions. Either the positions must change to adapt to women's distinctive characteristics or the women must become masculine. (It is perhaps telling that those who raise this issue usually seem concerned only with women entering high-status positions; it is unclear if women becoming factory workers are believed immune or unimportant.) The analytical flaw here i assuming that masculinity has shaped the character of jobs rather than that jobs have shaped masculinity. In her well-known book Men and Women of the Corporation, Rosabeth Kanter argued persuasively that the personality characteristics associated with male and female corporate employees really reflected the contours of their positions. The implication is simple and straightforward. Women who enter high-status positions will look about the same as men in those positions not because they are becoming masculine, but because they're adapting to the demands and opportunities of the position, just like men.
https://pages.nyu.edu/jackson/future.of.gender/Readings/DownSoLong--Persistence&Origins.pdf p. 42
Many authors have suggested that feminine personality characteristics (including a lack of drive) explain women's lack of success in climbing corporate ladders. Kantor has persuasively argued that these characteristics are really a direct result of structural conditions. Men placed in positions with no opportunities for advancement and with no effective power show the same personality and behavior characteristics as women in such positions. In the past, however, all women were condemned to occupy the positions without futures. Only men could realistically aspire to rise. Therefore we have good evidence that inequality produces differential motives to dominate weighed against no evidence of any inherent sexual difference in such motives.
http://leeds-faculty.colorado.edu/mcgrawp/PDF/Lammers.Stoker.Jordan.Pollmann.Stapel.2011.pdfAmong women who had an independent source of income (as all our female respondents did, because they were working professionals), power had a positive relationship with infidelity, and this relationship was comparable to that found among men. These findings were not likely caused by a statistical artifact; our sample was large and included similar numbers of men and women.
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Clearly, power increases infidelity among women, as it does among men. An emerging literature demonstrates that this is not an isolated finding; researchers studying the effect of (manipulated) power on participants’ attention to attractive individuals (Brady et al., 2011), tendency to overestimate the degree to which other people are sexually interested in them (Kunstman & Maner, 2011; Lerner, 2011), and sexual approach behaviors (Wilkey, 2011) have also found equally strong effects of power for women and for men. Together, these findings suggest that women in high-power positions are as likely to engage in infidelity as are men in high-power positions.
But such activity produces the social basis of concepts of men and women, when the majority of women are still primarily responsible for household work and child rearing (even though more support from men then in the past exists), it maintains the notion of women linked to such practices even though it's a structural relation rather than something inherent to women's biology. I am going to be an elementary teacher at some point, this doesn't change the average of elementary teachers being women in practice and how this is then reflected in people's ideas about the profession and gender., as well as the status as reflected in wages.
https://aifs.gov.au/publications/family-matters/issue-86/persistent-work-family-strain-among-australian-mothersIn conclusion, Australian mothers in recent decades have greatly increased their participation in the labour market. Fathers, however, have not increased their participation in unpaid household work to a matching degree. But, without equal sharing of the dual roles of earner and carer between mothers and fathers, mothers will inevitably feel the work-family tension more keenly. Furthermore, institutional and structural changes supporting mothers' increased workforce participation are few and slow coming. Consequently, working mothers faced with the challenge of reconciling family and work commitments are often forced to find individual solutions. However, work and family life balance is not a problem specific to individual families. Rather, it is a universal problem shared by many families, and as such it requires institutional and structural changes supported by society as a whole.
This is where the meaning of men and women is derived, it's not simply belief but finds its reality in social practice which is then reflected in ideals, and for the naive one abstracts the person from those social relations when explaining their behavior. Hence the scientists seek a crude materialist explanation of behavior by examining the brain or other bodily processes.
In fact, the qualities which describe feminine or masculine are a further abstraction from qualities
true to people overall, this tends to show its philosophically idealist quality in beginning with an abstraction not of some practice but of a concept assumed to explain such practices where one treats words as necessarily refering to some object, which is problematic when it comes to consciousness and abstracting elements from it
( see piece under 'Referentialism':
https://epistemicepistles.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/a-wittgensteinian-critique-of-conceptual-confusion-in-psychological-research/. To name something isn't necessarily to have a clear or even real sense of something as we have names for things which we know don't exist.
So the concept of gender identity needs to be examined rather than assume it, in the same way to ask what is
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5353517/%20mental%20illnessshows the inadequacies of its assumed biological basis when categorizing such concepts. To not take it as a given but to seek to explain what it brings out difficulties of identity formation in general. Also confusingly is if you treat gender identity independently of gendered practices, then you are indeed making nonsense of identity's relationship to the social world. This is to follow the same line as the traditional sexist who assumes a gendered internal essence that animates the person's behavior when the person's behavior is in a dynamic relationship to the world, it is the basis of their knowledge of the world and the self as the subject/object relation is a relative and integral one. To abstract the individual from the world is to make a metaphysical and mystical confusion of them, as such identity must be made intelligible through the person's relationship to the world and the practices within it.
https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1048&context=phiIt is true that actions are carried out by individuals, but such actions are possible and only have meaning in so far as they participate in sociocultural practices. There are two important questions here, Westphal suggests: (1) are individuals the only bearers of psychological states, and (2) can psychological states be understood in individual terms? Individualists answer both questions in the affirmative, and most holists answer both questions in the negative. Hegel, however, answers the first question affirmatively and the second negatively. In other words, it is only individuals who act, have 108 intentions, construct facts, and so forth. Nevertheless, such acts, intentions, and facts cannot be understood apart from sociocultural practices—their meaning can only be understood as interpreted in a sociocultural context.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/the-individual.htmAs an artefact, the person’s body mediates between the psyche and a person’s activity in the world. The person’s social activity gives reality to their ideas while being the only real basis for the formation of their knowledge of the world, the only means a person has for exercise of their agency, and the only real basis for the formation of an identity. The self-relation is of course mediated through the mirror of relations to other people, both person-to-person relations and their net result in terms of participation in all kinds of institutions and social activity.
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The issue of the human body as a cultural product raises the more general issue of culturalism versus constructivism (See Holland et al, 2001, p. 14) That is, on one hand, theories which see the individual as a passive carrier of dominant cultural values and ideology, and on the other hand, theories which see the individual as capable of freely choosing subject positions and theoretical paradigms from the myriad of narratives made available in a modern society, constructing for themselves their own biography. As suggested by Dorothy Holland et al, what is needed is a “third position” which avoids the one-sided extremes expressed on each side of these contradictions. The key to such a “third position” is a concrete investigation of the real capacity of an individual to modify the social structures and discourses constraining the development of their own practice and identity-formation. This concept is well captured in Amartya Sen’s concept of “critical voice.”
But like above, we need to find the manner in which people are identified, not with the structural and social values nor with purely individual abstracted from those relations.
The point being here is that people's identity is not wholly represented in social forms, hence even 'cisgender' people do not have a whole identification with being a man or a woman.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Something_worth_dying_for.pdfIdentity fusion refers to a person whose identity is wholly subsumed by a collectivity, whether a nation or religious community or a family or group of close comrades. A subject’s identity is fused with a group if the subject cannot see themselves apart from the relevant bonded identity group.
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Let us further recognise that identity fusion comes in degrees from slight to total.
https://people.socsci.tau.ac.il/mu/daphnajoel/files/2014/11/Joel_gender_identity_2013.pdfThe main aim of the present study was to put to test the prevailing assumption that ‘normative’ individuals have a coherent, pure and unitary ‘core gender identity’, by assessing the gender experience of ‘normative’ subjects. An additional aim was to test whether gender identity is ‘troubled’ in non heterosexuals, as has been previously suggested on the basis of theories and studies of gender identity. Our study is the first to administer a gender identity questionnaire that assesses the perception of gender identity both as a man and as a woman in ‘normative’ subjects. The most important finding of the present study is that a large proportion of ‘normative’ subjects experience themselves in ways that transcend the either/or logic of the gender binary system. These experiences are similar to those reported by trans and queer subjects as found in the present study and in previous studies. Another important finding is that sexual orientation is not a major contributor to the perception of gender identity, and that it is more related to subjects’ perception of themselves as the ‘other’ gender than as their affirmed gender. This latter finding most likely reflects the non-binary view of gender which allows for a stronger feeling as the ‘other’ gender without compromising one’s feeling as the affirmed gender.
And no one wholly identifies with gender and I would argue that it is in a sense impossible as the relationship between an individual person and such a concept as there is an integral relationship between concepts and individuals and their corresponding practices but the universal or abstract idea is never identical with the individual acting within some practice.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htmIn Hegelian philosophy, however, the problem was stated in a fundamentally different way. The social organism (the “culture” of the given people) is by no means an abstraction expressing the “sameness” that may be discovered in the mentality of every individual, an “abstract” inherent in each individual, the “transcendentally psychological” pattern of individual life activity. The historically built up and developing forms of the “universal spirit” (“the spirit of the people”, the “objective spirit”), although still understood by Hegel as certain stable patterns within whose framework the mental activity of every individual proceeds, are none the less regarded by him not as formal abstractions, not as abstractly universal “attributes” inherent in every individual, taken separately. Hegel (following Rousseau with his distinction between the “general will” and the “universal will”) fully takes into account the obvious fact that in the diverse collisions of differently orientated “individual wills” certain results are born and crystallised which were never contained in any of them separately, and that because of this social consciousness as an “entity” is certainly not built up, as of bricks, from the “sameness” to be found in each of its “parts” (individual selves, individual consciousnesses). And this is where we are shown the path to an understanding of the fact that all the patterns which Kant defined as “transcendentally inborn” forms of operation of the individual mentality, as a priori “internal mechanisms” inherent in every mentality, are actually forms of the self-consciousness of social man assimilated from without by the individual (originally they opposed him as “external” patterns of the movement of culture independent of his will and consciousness), social man being understood as the historically developing “aggregate of all social relations”.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1925/art1.htmThe difference becomes self evident if we consider the psyche of the single individual as the subject of social psychology. It is obvious that the subject of individual psychology coincides with that of differential psychology, the task of which is the study of individual differences in single individuals. The concept of general reflexology, as opposed to Bekhterev’s collective reflexology, also completely coincides with this. “In this respect there is a certain relation between the reflexology of the single individual and collective reflexology; the former aims at clarifying the peculiarities of the single individual, tries to find differences in the individual mentalities of persons, and show the reflexological basis of these differences, while collective reflexology, which studies mass or collective manifestations of correlative activity, is essentially aimed at clarifying how social products of a correlative activity are obtained by the correlation between single individuals in social groups and by smoothing away their individual differences.”
It is obvious that we are dealing here with differential psychology in the precise acceptance of that term. What, then, is the subject of collective psychology as such? There is a simple answer to this question: Everything within us is social, but this does not imply that all the properties of the psyche of an individual are inherent in all the other members of this group as well. Only a certain part of the individual psychology can be regarded as belonging to a given group, and this portion of individual psychology and its collective manifestations is studied by collective psychology when it looks into the psychology of the army, the church, and so on.
Thus, instead of distinguishing between social and individual psychology, we must distinguish between social and collective psychology.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/story-concept.htmFor Hegel, a Gestalt, a ‘formation of consciousness’, is understood as the dissonant unity of a way of thought, a way of life and a certain constellation of material culture. ‘Dissonant’ because at any given moment in the history of any given people these elements are mutually constituting, but not identical. There are laws requiring that people should act in a particular way, but people don’t act in quite that way, ideas change, clothes go out of fashion, bad laws are flouted, and so on. So we have material culture and practical activity and subjective thought all aspects of a single whole or figure, a Gestalt, but always moving, always with internal contradictions.
Here people are individuals aren't to be treated as synonymous with the abstract collection of traits shared by all people, but at the same time the individual isn't the abstraction of all similarities across individuals either, yet each and every individual is a social being in their very nature, that is they develop within social relations otherwise they'd be more akin to a child raised by animals.
So looking at the queering of identity to complicated the idea of cisgender, the difference between a transgender person and a 'normative' or cisgender person isn't based on their identification with gender roles and it's reflected qualities in the idea of gender because no one wholly identifies with them even if they in some sense replicate them due to structural and material conditions. So the difference between one person and a transgender person as far as I can tell is better situated in whether a person experiences gender dysphoria but even this is shakey ground as many self identified transgender people notice that it is a collection of feelings that anyone can have, although they are attributed specifically to the bodily form. This at least seems to be the real basis of an idea of gendered identity as distinct from the above as a partial identification with gendered practices.
And this is really where we begin to see eople in some sense speak unclearly of feeling like a man or a woman, because there is something which is thoroughly upsetting in being aware of parts of their own body that reflect sexual dimorphism of being male or female.
And this to me is the clearest basis to point to gender identity in some way although this still requires theoretical clarification on it's exact nature rather than just relying on vague self-reporting of feeling.
Particularly as this is no basis for a psychological science although introspection can be correlated with facts.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/wits/vygotsky-consciousness.pdf...the problem of the difference between phenomenon and being in psychology, what this means is that introspection may contribute something to an elaboration of consciousness, but consciousness is not given to introspection. Introspection is a phenomenon in its own right. I cannot step outside of myself and make my own consciousness an object of my consciousness.
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Just as a mirror cannot reflect image α, since a reflection presupposes a light source and α is not a light source, so introspection cannot apprehend its own thoughts. Introspection is itself an act of consciousness and a so-called state of the mind. It cannot step outside of itself to observe itself without that act of introspection
But then we're approaching something broader than say Body Integrity Identity Disorder, in which it's just an issue with body as some seem to encompass the concept with how one is treated in gendered terms and practices. This emphasizes how the relationship between body mind and social practices intersect as its treated as a psychological disposition that is at odds with ones bodies, seemingly in part because how one treats a person based on their body and appearance.
Gender dysphoria seems to be a real phenomenon but how we conceptualize it is important and isn't without political tendencies such as reaffirming a biological essence to gender identity which then affirms the sense that such a gender identity exists in all people and isn't something based within structural/social relations to ones self. Even when people try to argue gender isn’t binary they reference gender roles as related to a persons sex. So a third gender being men who participate in feminine or typically womens roles. Again emphasizing social practices in relation to the body.
Emphasizing this doesn’t make identity an easy thing to mold, to ask who am I is quite a difficult undertaking. This is where we see how an identity is affirmed by changes in appearence whether bodily or just in fashion to feel comfortable and treated how one wants in some ways. There is always material traces to infer the nature of the unobservable. At present we see the effort to explain a psychological phenomenon in ones biology. But this is vague as even biology cannot be abstracted from social influences even begging at the prenatal stage. This is quite clear in modern epigenetics.
Definitions won’t clarify this matter, we need clearer facts to synthesize
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics