We might wonder, first of all, if we indeed can identify a gender identity by observation. And the answer seems to be that we cannot; unlike sex, race, socioeconomic status, and sexual orientation, gender identity holds no material basis beyond the mind of the identifier. (1/5)

Far from being like either sex or sexual orientation, both dependent on the material reality of sex, gender identity seems more akin to religious identity in that, as a system of beliefs, it posits a denialism of sex as material to prioritize gender identity as immaterial. (2/5)

However, even this comparison does not work, because religious identity, at least, involves the individual being part of a collective, where the individual never becomes prioritized over that collective. Gender identity seems to differ in its excessive politics of egotism. (3/5)

This prioritization of the immaterial over the material seems fatal to any feminist analysis of the subjection of women anywhere in any society. Whereas analyzing social conditions demands that we see social reality, gender identity demands that we must see only the self. (4/5)

Gender identity assumes male dominance and female subordination as inborn and innate to an individual’s “gender,” always already there, rather than seeing the complex set of relations between biological and sociological factors in the differential development of the sexes. (5/5)