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I think the way we talk about gender and sex are very ambiguous because the term gender is overloaded to the tits.
I think it’s more accurate to think of gender identity and gender roles as completely separate concepts that shouldn’t even share terminology.
Gender identity is like the sex of your brain, which can either be male or female or ambiguous / neither. Sexual dimorphism of the human brain has been observed and it’s been observed that trans people’s brains match their understanding of their own gender identity more closely than what they were assigned at birth. So with that knowledge we can assume that someone can be “male brained” or “female brained” in as far as gender identity (or gender “map”)
Then you have “sex” which when used in the traditional sense is your external sex (male, female, ambiguous / neither).
Then you have gender expression / roles, which to me is where the weasel words start to slip in. Gender expression is how one virtue signals to the rest of their tribe they are their brain (and maybe body) sex. This is somewhat personal and somewhat social, because we ultimately decide how we want to behave in the world so the world sees us for who we believe ourselves to be.
Gender roles are the rules society creates that you’re supposed to follow so everyone is playing with the same deck when it comes to understanding what you are supposed to virtue signal and what you are supposed to presume when receiving that signal.
Gender roles are 100% fake in that they’re arbitrary and if they provide no net gain we can eliminate them. But gender is 100% real in that many people do experience strongly being their gender identity. If gender was totally fake trans people wouldn’t exist. So you have to be precise about in what ways you mean something like “gender is fake just abolish gender roles and everyone’s happy” because it’s definitely used to invalidate trans people and that’s not very cash money.
Do you think we could use ethnicity as an analogy? For example, one "ethnicity role" might be that Asians are supposed to own little convenience stores like Kim's Convenience, or something. That "ethnicity role" is completely ridiculous and shouldn't exist, but ethnic identity itself should/does exist, and some people will more readily practice their ethnic identities than others.
Interesting comparison!
Exactly my point, I just find it very difficult or even impossible to put my experience of gender identity like you describe it into words