🚨This is not a drill!🚨 After years in the making, my paper on GI is finally out in MIND, one of the most prestigious philosophy journals in the world, of all places. ⬇️Why this is the most important paper on gender you’ll read this week, a thread:🧵

@floral_ashes

Florence Ashley published an important and useful paper on gender identity.

What Is It like to Have a Gender Identity? | Mind | Oxford Academic

Read it for free: https://perma.cc/HAR8-FZVQ

Listen to an audio version: https://perma.cc/WS57-QXGJ

We worked quotes from the paper into our course on neurodiversity and gender. The “gender subjectivity” in the paper seems compatible with the “gender copia and bricolage” we highlight in our course.

Selected quotes from “What Is It like to Have a Gender Identity?”:

In the simplest possible terms, I propose that gender identity is how we make sense of our gender subjectivity, the totality of our gendered experiences of ourselves. Gender identity is constituted by gender subjectivity, but this constitutive relationship is underdetermined. While gender subjectivity may narrow the range of inhabitable gender identities, it is always compatible with more than one. To arrive at a gender identity, we arrange gender subjectivity like building materials. My theory helps us understand how different people offer seemingly incompatible accounts of their gender identity without questioning their authenticity or validity. They simply arrange similar building materials differently.

What Is It like to Have a Gender Identity? | Mind | Oxford Academic, Perma | www.florenceashley.com

Because the psychological synthesis of gender subjectivity into gender identity is particular to the individual, accounts of gender identity that would be stereotyping or bioessentialist if universalized remain acceptable at the individual level— voiding of all exigency the temptation to question the validity or authenticity of anyone’s gender identity.

What Is It like to Have a Gender Identity? | Mind | Oxford Academic, Perma | www.florenceashley.com

Gendered experiences are not static. While past experiences are largely fixed-though prone to memory biases, forgetfulness, and re/interpretation-they do not invariably predict future gendered experiences. Thus, someone who once disliked being referred to as ‘she’ may not feel the same in the future. While gendered experiences often demonstrate stability over time, there is no unbreakable promise against change. Trauma, among many other things, can alter one’s relationship to social norms, interpersonal interactions, the body, or past experiences (Clare 2015, pp. 143ff; Meadow 2018, p. 90). Besides chronological changes, gendered experiences may also vary situationally, relationally, or temporally.

What Is It like to Have a Gender Identity? | Mind | Oxford Academic, Perma | www.florenceashley.com

The core thesis of the paper is that people construct gender identity from an endless list of more ‘basic’ building blocks that include social messaging, bodily gender dysphoria, how they feel about pronouns, whether they feel interpellated by certain gender norms, etc.

@floral_ashes • The core thesis of the paper is that people construct gender identity from an endless list of mor… • Threads

Here’s our free and open course on Neurodiversity and Gender.

Header Art Credit: itsyagerg_zero