Last time we saw philosopher Alex Byrne analyse three claims that constitute what he calls “the standard view” about gender identity. He grants the truth of the first claim, but last time we saw him refute the second claim. In the last part of his post, he focuses his critical lens on the third claim:
A mismatch between sex and gender identity causes gender dysphoria.
Remember, this is not some kind of observation or any kind of obvious truth. But it’s assumed to be the explanation for the type of suffering psychologists have named “gender dysphoria.”
But Byrne points out that this claim is shown to be false simply by paying attention to the reports of some sufferers.
If we understand “gender identity” as core gender identity — apparent knowledge of one’s sex — [the third claim, above] is very implausible. Some boys with gender dysphoria insist, and seem to be convinced, that they are girls. They therefore have female core gender identities. But some boys with equally severe gender dysphoria merely say that they want to be girls. Boys who want to be girls do not believe that they are girls and so do not have female core gender identities. It is not particularly credible that the causes of dysphoria in this latter kind of case are radically different from the causes in the former. If a boy says and believes that he is a girl, this is more likely to be an effect of distress at his sexed body or gendered social role, than a cause of it. A related issue arises from the fact that some males show no signs of dysphoria, or of identifying with the other sex, until later in life — perhaps after they become fathers. As children, they knew they were male, and so had a male core gender identity. If core gender identity changes in adulthood (and in at least some of these people it won’t), the more reasonable hypothesis is that this change is caused by late-onset dysphoria, rather than the other way around. And whether the relevant kind of “gender identity” is core gender identity or something else, the fact that dysphoria not infrequently resolves at puberty (and sometimes earlier) presents a problem.
So much for the assumption that “gender identity” as we defined it before is an immutable, essential part of a person. And so much for the thesis that the cause of dysphoria is a mismatch between one’s sex and one’s gender identity, because there are plenty of people with dysphoria who lack that mismatch.
If there is some kind of “gender identity” that is universal in humans, and which causes dysphoria when mismatched with sex, it remains elusive. No one has yet found a way of detecting its presence, and verifying that it is causally responsible for dysphoria.
