When I began transition, my cousin berated me with, "How can you do this to us? Don't you care about how we feel?" And then he and his family promptly separated themselves from me and my part of the family and any one of those who accepted me and condoned my "change". It didn't matter to him that I was on the edge of suicide. It didn't matter to him the conflicts and pain I faced daily simply by trying to maintain the facade of heteronormalcy. It didn't matter all the years when we hunted and fished together and shared meals at each others tables and helped raise each other's families. It didn't matter that holding up the facade had degraded the quality of my life to the point where I could no longer maintain it. My transition had shamed him and I was the one who needed to be "fixed". He chose not to accept that this was vital to me and my well being. I was more acceptable het and dead than "other" and alive. He didn't want to know or learn. He already knew everything he thought he needed to know. This is how I learned what gender is truly about -- others' perceptions of me as they wish me to be. He is still separated from us to this day. As to my own family, that's a story for another time. If gender identity is a disorder, it is a disorder of society not of the individual.

Valerie

I would define these terms a bit differently:

Sex Identity: How do I identify, physically? Am I internally oriented toward being physically male? Physically female? Or some configuration that is both/neither.

Example: Transsexuals usually have a sex identity that exists in conflict with their body's physical structures.

Gender Identity: How do I identify socially? Am I a woman, a man, or some identity that is a combination of both or neither?

Example: Suppose we have a person who is an F2M transsexual and they identify as genderqueer. Therefore, we have a person who has the physical structures of a female body, a sex identity that is male and a gender identity that does not easily fit into the commonly understood gender categories of woman or man. This person would seek to change their body's physical structures to those commonly associated with males but would identify in such a fashion that exists outside of the gender binary.

Gender Expression: How one outwardly expresses one's gender identity and/or how one expresses one's sense of being feminine, masculine, or some other gender. This can include superficial expressions such as dress. It can include one's style of speaking and one's body language. Gender expression might also be reflected in one's choice of vocation and avocation. Gender expression can also include, as a subset, one's assumed gender roles.

Example: A transsexual woman who is a lesbian might identify as butch. In this case, we have a person whose sex identity is female, whose gender identity is woman, whose sexual orientation is toward women, and whose gender expression is a form of masculinity expressed by women.

Gender Roles: How one relates to others and how one assumes others will relate to them, based upon the subject's gender identity and/or how one expresses one's sense of being feminine, masculine, or some other gender.

Example: A femme lesbian and her butch partner might engage in certain behavior patterns one commonly associates with feminine/masculine pairings. One partner might behave chivalrously toward the other partner and both partners might engage in distinctly masculine or feminine roles during sexual/romantic intimacy.

How one defines these terms depends upon whether one is defining these items from the perspective of society's expectations of an individual or from the perspective of how an individual personally identifies, regardless of whether this identification exists in harmony with or in conflict with social expectations.

My definitions of gender role and gender expression tend to focus upon how an individual identifies—regardless of social convention—whereas your definitions tend to focus upon societal expectations of the individual.

Both means of defining these terms serve a legitimate purpose, as they explore two sides of an ongoing struggle. The interface between society's definitions of these terms and the individual's definitions of these terms is the place where conflict and oppression take place.

To this I would also add Gender Attribute, how society views your gender. There are young boys who are often ID'd as girls and young women who often get ID'd as male. This can be an important aspect of one's gendered sense of onesself. Also, one's Gender Assignment (how one was assigned gender at birth) might vastly differ from one's Gender Attribute (what people think you are) and create a strong dissonance. I prefer this breakdown of gender;

-Gender Assignment (assigned sex at birth AKA birth sex)
-Gender Identity (internal sense of one's gender and what one's body for that gender should look like)
-Gender Role (societal expectations for genders)
-Gender Expression (how you behaviorally manifest your gender identity... which interacts with societies' gender roles)
-Gender Attribute (how people view your gender... it may match your gender identity or not).

To me, breaking Gender down to anything less complex than this model risks a lot of holes and shortcomings. The simplistic tautism how "gender is socially constructed" makes me cringe.

Although you have not done this, Antonia, I would add that there has been a widespread conflation of the terms sex and gender as they relate to transsexuals. For those who are not aware of the distinction between the two, the term sex relates to the physical aspects of the body, whereas gender relates to behaviors, beliefs and roles. One concerns physical aspects. The other concerns social aspects.

People commonly say that a transsexual's gender identity is in conflict with their physical sex. However, this is not entirely accurate and misses the central aspect of a transsexual's identity. Transsexuals experience a conflict between their bodys' physical sex and their internal sense of how their body should be configured. Thus, we have a dimension of identity that deals with a physical aspect of being—one's sex—rather than a social aspect of one's being—one's gender. Hence, it is far more accurate to say that a transsexual's sex identity is in conflict with their physical sex.

This distinction becomes important when one recognizes that transsexuals can express a wide variety of gender identities. Some of those gender identities conform to normative, binary expectations associated with the subject's desired sex configuration. In contrast, some transsexual's gender identities can conflict with these normative, binary expectations.

For instance, a person can be born with the physical structures of one sex, they have an internal orientation toward having a different sex, and they have a gender identity that does not fit into the binary of man or woman. For example, a person can be a female to male transsexual and identify as genderqueer.

There are also people who are completely comfortable being physically male, but identify as a woman. This person would have a physical sex of male, a sex identity of male, and a gender identity of woman. While this person would certainly fall under the umbrella term of transgender, they would not be transsexual.

I can go on with many, many more examples. Human beings are indeed a many varied species.

"Some folks think that gender is not social. Yet gender being social is about the only explanation that accounts for its variance among different cultures."
I think this only goes for gender expression and gender role. Each culture defines the gender roles it recognizes and the ways to express your fitting into one of these defined roles.
You can also express you do not fit in one of those defined roles by deviating from the culturally accepted ways of expression. (This will not make you popular.)

Your gender identity however is, in my view, not socially defined but innate. During your lifetime you find out into which of pre-defined roles (if any) your identity will fit.
In my case that meant I went through several different ways of expressing my gender until I found the way that (at the moment) seems to fit my gender identity best.

Unfortunately our culture has no pre-defined role that comfortably fits the gender expression of a post-op transsexual woman. (Unless she is prepared to deny her past and is 100% passable -- I don't call that "comfortable".)

Interesting piece - but as usual, I have a few countervailing contentions. I'll start with my own alternative taxonomy...

Toni's gender categories:

Gender Roles
Gender Expression
Gender Identity

Alternate respective designations:

Conforming Gender
Vain Gender
Assigned Gender

The underlying basis for Toni's categories seems to be what David Riesman's mid-20th-Century classic, "The Lonely Crowd," called an "other-directed" personality (or what Charles Reich, in "The Greening of America," called "Consciousness II"). But what if one rejects conformity, vanity, and social assignment as legitimate arbiters of one's identity (much as the hippies were said to reject corporate culture)?

The question of whether this is possible isn't a matter of science, or even social "science"; it's political -- in a sense that's at the very core of the notion that the personal is political. (Either one accepts this contention or not, but that determination, itself, is a political act.)

In any event, if one rejects conformity, vanity, and social assignment as legitimate arbiters of one's identity, there goes gender (unmoored from its three points of rootedness in reality).

As for scientific proof to that such a rejection is impossible, such studies can't claim validity if they've already defined as potentially "real" what one then goes on to find ostensibly existing in the brain. Heck, one could probably find a real "ego" somewhere in the brain -- but there's no "scientific" proof that what we find there isn't itself merely a part (or aspect) of the brain whose function (as Buddhism, indeed, asserts) is to generate illusions!

(Incidentally, the idea of ego as illusion - and gender as merely one of the myriad aspects of ego - doesn't imply that one who clings to that illusion [dare I risk using the term "the deluded"?] should thereby be punished or ostracized. Illusion [or delusion] in the Buddhist view is, after all, merely a function of living in this world - for almost all of us, itself a world of illusion. It challenges [and imposes suffering upon] every human being [indeed, every sentient being] that falls short of full enlightenment - anyone whose existence fails to manifest perfect awareness and unmitigated compassion. In that sense, just about all of us are crazy!)

In any event, this ain't about science (let alone merely biotech) -- just as, in the end, neither was the book _Brave New World_. It's about how one construes human identity and the human condition itself.

Toni herself, for that matter, rejects the scientistic notion that gender is in the brain - a notion promoted by some gender theorists, including other trans theorists - instead opting for the idea that gender's social rather than biological, given cross-cultural differences. Thank goodness I'm outside that debate - though I find it curious that both sides in that debate nonetheless insist that gender (whether a socially constructed or essential aspect of identity) cannot be transcended altogether.

(The truth is probably somewhere in-between, as with sexual orientation: an interaction of biological and social factors, and a fully legitimate element of volition as well. I can even accept the notion that some transsexuals have a disability that involves brain-mapping and body being mismatched - but who am I to be curious or interested, as a cis gay male?) ;-)

Something larger than gender seems to be operating here, in any event - perhaps even the illusion of mind-body duality itself.

Meanwhile, addressing the intersection of gender with sexual orientation, Toni claims, "Most of the questions that LGBT people ask as a youth are the same ones regardless of if the issue is sexual orientation or gender identity.'Why am I different' 'why do I like boys?' 'what is it about girls I find so attractive?' "

Coming to terms with my sexuality as a gay male in the countercultural context I've described above (which, if one recognizes its existence, is a context that rejects or supersedes gender), I never asked such questions: instead, I struggled to accept the fact that I was not interested in girls, and that I could share pleasure with guys as an aspect of male bonding. (I'm using "girls" and "guys" here as Toni uses "men" and "women," to mean biological sex; a jumble of "androgynous" [indeed, post-gendered] attributes trigger the attraction itself.) Note, incidentally that I said "Coming to terms with my sexuality," rather than "Coming out." I never lived in a closet, so strongly do I revile and eschew hypocrisy (a reviling that runs as deep for me as others claim gender does for them!).

I think I may be starting to understand why Toni is a sociologist, and how she once could once even have been a Republican (a fact that initially flabbergasted me)!

It's about conformity, vanity, and social assignment - all of these being aspects of identity (associated with social discipline and power relations) that I reject, and (also thereby rejecting Foucault) that I therefore have little interest in reconfiguring.
This is not just social, but in the most deeply sense, also political.

In the end, either nobody's "passable," or everybody is - as oneself, and as a human being - as far as I'm concerned, gender be damned!

Toni, maybe I'll make an anarchist out of you yet!

Indeed, this constant, compulsive,categorical repackaging...rebranding of us as a community in an attempt to present us as acceptable...or worse, 'normal' is a convenenient distraction from the work that needs to be done to liberate us from the chains of language.

This is,to me at least, a very important point. We must move beyond our self-absorbed 'minority adolescence' toward the next stage of activism. What tha stage might look like, must be a matter of group conscience. If we could agree on just one thing, and I would suggest the broadest platform of human rights, then we can move forward as a group of human beings to advance the cause of human 'civil' rights.

This ubiquitous need to define the terms of our existence through the obsessive rearrangement of the categories provided by the narrow social space into which we trans people were born is doomed to failure.

Doomed because we Trans are the gender transcendent group of people with the power to dismantle the semantical prisons into which we are born. Yet we have been socialized to the degree that we are still invested in the rhetoric of the state that insist we have an identity that can be easily marginalized.

Within this ongoing fleshing out of the terms that might somehow make TRANS pallatable, we find a perfect example of the way in which language obfuscates the essential nature of the thing it supposedly describes. Language naturally reinforces a singularity of perception. Like cumulous clouds hiding a rainbow, language works to suppress the beautiful diversity nature. To glorify the language is to glorify our oppression.

While we endlessly celibrate our oversized ego/intellect by the eternal dithering over choice of the best words to use to describe our selves and our communtiy, bad things continue to happen to us as people who comprise this amorphous, ambiguous category of gendered beings.

While we assuage our need for social identity through the application of our linguistic prowess our people continue to suffer, in the streets, in the closet, in hospitals, in prison...in the nuclear family.

I don't really care what you call me as long as it isn't perjorative. And even if it is, your bias is your problem. What you think of me is none of my business. I have enough to work on in an effort to realize what I think of me. Here is my philosophy as it applies to me.

I AM HUMAN.
KISS [Keep It Simple....Silly]

I'd like to thank the group ahead of time for NOT making it personal. NAMASTE

After reading the above, I feel compelled to copy, from another topic, a comment I've made on the mutual alienation I've seen emerging between different viewpoints - and a sense in which trans people have been generalizing and imposing their viewpoint in a way that (unbelievable as this may seem) invalidates the reality I experience as vital every day as a cis gay man.

As I've participated in the dialogue about "LGBT community" and transgender issues, I've striven to understand and accept the realities other people experience -- that to me seem patently illusory -- as real to them, just as I'm aware that my own reality (that of a cis gay man, with its evident blind spot for gender and mind/body misalignment) must seem illusory (or at least, in a manner crucial to them, blind) to such people.

Perhaps that's why I get a bit impatient when, even having reached that point of acceptance -- and after even longer ago declared that I accept most trans political demands, not because of any ostensible "LGBT inclusivity," but as prima facie issues of human rights -- I'm still accused of hatred (the most overused word since GW Bush wore "terrorism" into the ground), and presented with ostensible scientific (To mollify the scientistic among us, the scare quotes are invisible this time.) evidence that the trans version of reality is the real reality.

To be candid, I'm rapidly reaching the point where following and mouthing the endlessly proliferating complexifications of gender-centric self-definition is starting to feel to me as if I'm straining the limits of my not-insubstantial vocabulary to describe, in ever greater detail, the intricacies of the embroidery that gives such glitz and character -- such reality and... well, such PRESENCE -- to the Emperor's new clothes.

I won't use any of the language that might seem hurtful enough to renew all the allegations of hate and marginalization that have been hurled about on this site.

I'll just ask one question...

Has anyone here ever heard the simple, straightforward word "naked"?