Saturday, August 13, 2016

A Guide to Gender Identity (part 2)

What does 'gender identity' mean?

In part 1 of this Guide, I explained some of the ways used by activists to swell the apparent number of transgender people living in the UK. In reality, few 'trans' people have actually had surgery and rely on regular hormone jabs or hormone patches.

The impression that there are hundreds of thousands of trans people in Britain relies on convincing us that a person's 'gender' and 'sex' are two different things, and that each of us has a 'gender identity' which may or may not be the same as our biological sex. Using the terminology of trans activists, we are either AFAB or AMAB.

AFAB means 'assigned female at birth'

AMAB means 'assigned male at birth'

The truth, of course, is that we aren't assigned anything at birth. Instead our lifelong sex is identified at birth and recorded. The vast majority of people can be correctly identified as either male or female, though on rare occasions sex organs are insufficiently developed to be certain.

Trans activists say that everyone who isn't transgender should be referred to as 'cisgender' or just 'cis'.

But these same activists face a dilemma: the logic of being either cisgender or transgender breaks down as soon as we accept the existence of non-binary and a gender spectrum.

So where does that leave the controversial 'born in the wrong body' (BITWB) ideology, as promoted by BBC Children's?

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