What is “gender identity”?

Why are so many government policies based on a concept that no-one can define?

The concept of “gender identity” is the engine of a recent revolution in public health policies and school curricula, and well as guidelines for the civil service, law enforcement agencies, academia, the army, the judiciary and the corporate world. This week it was reported that the Labour government has instructed all its departments to modify its official language to use the phrase “LGBT+” rather than “LGBT”. The “+” is intended to reflect those whose “gender identity” falls outside of the standard binary of male and female.

The ramifications of wholesale policy changes on the basis of “gender identity” have been severe. We have seen rapists in women’s prisons, men in women’s sports, male patients accommodated on female hospital wards, children medicalised, and citizens arrested for failing to conform to the new diktats. Surely, given the seismic nature of these societal changes, someone in the government would know how “gender identity” ought to be defined?

Apparently not. Jacqui Smith, now the Rt Hon the Baroness Smith of Malvern and the government spokesperson for equalities, was asked this question only today in the House of Lords. Here is the transcript from Hansard:

Lord Lucas (Con): My Lords, do the Government have a working definition of gender and gender identity and, if so, could they share it with the House?

Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab): The noble Lord would be well advised to look at the Equality Act, for example. I have to say that this would be a better debate if we spent more time worrying about how we provide services and account for people’s needs, and less about how we catch our political opponents out.

Lord Markham (Con): As a previous Health Minister, I know that there is a serious health reason to have a proper understanding of the answer to the question of when a woman is a woman and needs to have treatment based on her sex. Please: this is a serious question that deserves a serious answer.

Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab): I agree – a woman is an adult female, and her biological sex may well determine what services she needs from the NHS. That is why it is important that, in statistics that are used both in the census and more broadly by our public services, we have a consistent and an agreed approach to that. That is what I have been talking about up to this point. Frankly, I was taking this seriously, and I hope that others around the House will as well.

But was Smith really taking this seriously as all? She at least acknowledged that a “woman” is an “adult female”, but that wasn’t an answer to the question. Not a bat’s squeak of a definition of “gender identity” was attempted here, which can only lead us to assume that Smith does not have one. If no-one knows what the term means, why is it the basis of any government policy at all, let alone the wellspring of an entire branch of so-called “medicine”?

It might be instructive to look at how the term has been defined by the various bodies who promote the ideology. In comparing these definitions, the reader will be struck by the similarity of the language used by each group, almost as though a set script has been distributed and ventriloquised:

National Health Service (NHS)
“Gender identity is a way to describe a person’s innate sense of their own gender, whether male, female, or non-binary, which may not correspond to the sex registered at birth.”

Stonewall
“A person’s innate sense of their own gender, whether male, female or something else, which may or may not correspond to the sex assigned at birth.”

Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD)
“Gender identity is a person’s internal, deeply held sense of their gender. For transgender people, their own internal gender identity does not match the sex they were assigned at birth.”

World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH)
“Gender identity is a person’s intrinsic sense of being male, female, or an alternative gender. This internalized sense of gender is not necessarily visible to others and may differ from the gender role traditionally associated with a person’s sex assigned at birth.”

American Psychological Association (APA)
“Gender identity refers to a person’s deeply-felt, inherent sense of being a boy, a man, or male; a girl, a woman, or female; or an alternative gender (e.g., genderqueer, gender nonbinary, gender-neutral) that may or may not correspond to a person’s sex assigned at birth.”

World Health Organisation (WHO)
“Gender identity is defined as a person’s deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned at birth, including the personal sense of the body and other expressions of gender, including dress, speech, and mannerisms.”

United Nations (UN)
“Gender identity reflects a deeply felt and experienced sense of one’s own gender, which can include being male, female, a blend of both, or neither, and it may correspond to or differ from the sex assigned at birth.”

Human Rights Campaign (HRC)
“Gender identity is one’s internal, deeply held sense of their gender. For transgender people, their sex assigned at birth and their own internal sense of gender identity are not the same.”

Mayo Clinic
“Gender identity is the personal sense of one’s own gender. Gender identity can correlate with a person’s assigned sex at birth or can differ from it. Gender expression typically reflects a person’s gender identity.”

In addition to the obvious similarities of the formulae, note how all of these definitions are circular in nature. Gender is gender. Which is to say, it means nothing at all.

So perhaps we can turn to commentators and campaigners to have a crack at this most thorny of definitions. Helen Joyce has called it “something like a sexed soul”. Journalist Sarah Ditum opts for “an immaterial sense of self”. On my show Free Speech Nation, barrister and trans campaigner Robin Moira White described it as “an essence of male or female”. Trans activist Julia Serano veers close to agreement, having coined the term “subconscious sex” to approximate the “inexplicable self-understanding of what sex/gender one should be”. “Gender identity”, then, is that which is claimed once an individual determines what their “subconscious sex” might be.

Psychiatrist Jack Turban defines “gender identity” as one’s “sense of identity in relationship to masculinity and femininity”. This, he argues falls into three categories: “the hard to put into words feeling of it”, “your relationship to gender roles and expectations” and “your relationship with your primary and secondary sex characteristics”. Make of that what you will.

Judith Butler, that doyenne of queer theory, rejects the notion of an innate gender identity entirely, and instead sees it as performative:

“In other words, acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. This also suggests that if that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority is an effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse, the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body, the gender border control that differentiates inner from, outer, and so institutes the "integrity" of the subject. In other words, acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality.”

One may as well return to the circular definitions favoured by every major medical institution in the western world. Alternatively, we could turn to Titania McGrath, whose definition should most definitely be adopted as official government policy.

It may not make any sense. But that doesn’t seem to matter, does it?

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