@gonzo: With all due respect, your attitude is a bit too tendentious for me to accept your claim of a-normative neutrality. But be that as it may... The difficulty that I am having in this discussion is that you are not (for one reason or another) grasping the idea that 'identity' is inherently comparative and associative. when we say that someone has an identity, what we mean is that they have put themselves in relation to some sociological ideal.

@gonzo: we copy our parents, and the other adults we are exposed to; we identify with one parent or the other (in part, perhaps, based on similarities of body layout), and we begin to form our own sense of gender identity from raw experience of interacting with our parents, and other adults, and even other children.

@gonzo: To say that we have a gender identity is to say that we have built inner models of the genders, and of the roles and relationships that the genders have towards each other. and that we gravitate towards one model or another. If someone says they identify as male, that means that they have a rich set of understanding and expectations about what it means to be male, and how males interact with other males and other females.

@gonzo: if someone has a gender identity that does not align with heir biology, that means that (for one reason or another) they have gravitated towards the inner model they have of the opposite sex, with all the rich understandings and expectations of what it means to be that sex. That may have once been apathologized by psychologists, but it isn't a pathology: there's no overt harm that comes from identifying with a gender opposite from ones biological sex.

@gonzo: In psychology a pathology is defined by the crippling effect it has on the person (e.g., an obsessive compulsive person who finds it difficult to hold down a job, or sometimes even leave the house, because of the disorder). But people can live perfectly normal, fulfilling, productive, socialized lives while identifying with a gender opposite their biological sex. It doesn't cripple them at all, in itself.

@gonzo: The only thing crippling about such a gender identification is the oppressive reactions of other people. But the reactions of others is not part of some pathology of gender identification.

@gonzo: You have an unfortunate tendency towards reductionism, as though you think gender identity can be reduced to biological equipment, or neural circuitry, or maybe hormonal balances or some such. But gender identity is and identity, and that implies a rich, dynamic set of subjective cognitive structures that will not reduce to mere biology (at least not at our current level of understanding of biology).

@Ted Wrigley Thank you for your thoughtful response. You are correct that, for better or worse, I do have a tendency toward a form of reductionism, and maybe a bit of compositionalism. I am inveterately curious, and believe that that understanding the simpler elements of, say, a system [or proposition] is crucial to understanding the system itself

@Ted Wrigley That you must examine the small parts that make up a whole in order to fully understand the whole. For instance, as you know, biological systems are at their core chemistry, and chemical reactions are reducible to the principles of physics. Genes are composed of DNA, etc., etc.

@Ted Wrigley While I understand everything you say about gender identity, I am compelled to interrogate the issue further [maybe I also have a bit of a skeptical contrarian streak], rather than simply accept [on faith?] the assumptions you so cogently articulate. As I said toward the end of our former discussion on another topic. We appear to stand in one another’s blind spot. Kinda like Harris and Klein do in their discussion.