No concept of "gender identity"?

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Hi... I'm new here, and this is a question that's been puzzling me for some time. I go to a "hipster-hippie" kind of college, and everyone seems OBSESSED with sex, gender, LGBT stuff, "queer" culture, etc.

They tell me I'm ret*d/rude/oblivious/prejudiced when I don't understand. But I swear it's true, I don't have a "gender identity," and don't recognize it in other people. I am female because I have female body parts, I am attracted to females with attractive female body parts... it's biological, I suppose. I can't recognize an "abstract" sense of the word. I stopped attending LGBT events at school because of this, because to me girls who dress in men's clothing for the sake of it are just silly looking (they say I'm anti-feminist though if I point out that their clothes don't fit) and I kept offending people when I spoke to them because I couldn't recognize what "gender" they were trying to be (to me, a male in a dress is... a male in a dress. No matter what he's wearing it won't alter his skeletal structure, which is what I'm looking at...)

I could go off on a huge rant right now about specific words and confusing usages, but I'm trying very hard not to...

Anyway... is this related to Asperger's somehow? Are there actually social cues and internal identities which I am lacking/not recognizing? Does anyone else have these problems?

Or am I just stupid?

I should add that my mental image/concept of myself is androgynous. I'm often surprised and annoyed by my real body (though that's for many reasons!)

I have problems with people's ages as well.

Maybe. When I see someone dressing up as the opposite gender (or dating the same gender), I honestly don't get the slightest sense that something like that is taboo (not that I don't understand that it is considered such because that's what people have pretty much told me to think.) I am almost entirely blind to the concept though, and it angers me when people tell me I must act a certain way or think a certain way because I am a man.

My mother wouldn't let me buy a pair of women's socks once when I asked her for them. I think that's pretty silly.

Same here. I'm pretty androgynously-minded, so my gender presentation is kind of all-over-the-shop.

For the sake of diplomacy it is best to just take a person's word for it, whatever they claim their gender to be.

Or their sexual orientation, or their neurotype, or anything else that is personal to them and not necessarily obvious from the outside. We are our own best experts. Denying someone the gender that they feel the closest connection to is like denying autism to people who can speak.

Last edited by tSunshineLove on 04 Aug 2011, 11:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Thank you for this. You definitely worded it in the way I felt but could not describe.

That being said, I personally struggle a great deal with my identity. I realize that biology has a great deal of influence but I still feel that my biology ≠ me as an entity. I have a lot of respect for people who publicly challenge those societal norms.

Then again, ASD are biological. :/

well gender identity that you recognize you represent in your brain. Some people feel more masculine then feminine the reason why aspergers people would have difficult knowing what this means is because we think very black and white for starters and also because we do not understand social exceptions and boundaries and how the roles of gender have anything to do with society because we aren't exactly social. So gender identity are represented by many things. Males are thought of being more systematic in their thought process whereas females are thought of being more emotionally directed in decision making. this is also represented in clothing choices and things like that. Like a male would choose clothing for warmth whereas generically a female would choose clothing because of feelings. This is the reason why gender identity for aspergers people i feel are a bit more male than female because until we think systematically researchers like simon-baron choen have said that we have an influx of testosterone and there was a study that said that we are more sensitive to sex hormones...etc... although the autism spectrum are in reality a lot more complex then that because on the chromosomes they have also proven that it covers a lot of sections which makes certain parts of the brain activate more than other and behave differently to neurologically typical people... clearly i could go on forever. Although some of these researchers are probably doing this for weird reasons.

There also seems to be a trend for people with Asperger's to have their own issues with gender identity. Perhaps because of the association with "masculinity", many female Aspergians have more of a male gender identity. However, I know many aspie males who are much more feminine than the societal norm. One of my friends (jokingly?) decided his gender IS aspie.

Hi WRT,
This is something which I have been thinking about lately as well. Are you familiar with the idea that those with Asperger's may lack a "sense of self?" Here's an article (EDIT: the forum software won't let me post a hyperlink because I have not yet made enough posts on this forum to do so. Do a Google search for the phrase "sense of self autism" without the quotation marks to find multiple articles about the study I am talking about and the concept of the diminished "sense of self") that describes a study done in 2006 and the hypothesis that those with Asperger's lack a so-called "sense of self." I think that if it is the case that those with Asperger's lack this "sense of self," then I would expect those with Asperger's to have trouble understanding the concept of gender identity.

I suspect myself to have mild Asperger's, though I have not sought out any official or unofficial diagnosis from a qualified professional, so I can't be sure. But I feel as if I may be lacking in a "sense of self" as described in the article I attempting to link to above. I, too, feel as if I lack a gender identity. The concept of identifying as a gender just seems silly to me. Perhaps there's nothing specific about the concept of gender identity that we have trouble understanding, but rather we have trouble understanding the concept of gender identity because we have trouble understanding the idea of identity in general.

I'm having trouble articulating my thought process on this matter and the fact that I have had a couple drinks tonight has not helped. But please let me know if you can relate to my experience/thought process as described above. Perhaps a discussion of this topic can reveal some insight as to how our minds work, and maybe we will even to able to formulate a succinct explanation of why the concept of gender identity is difficult for us to understand, which could help us to educate others in the LGBT community about our predicament, hopefully resulting in an increased level of acceptance and assimilation into this community.

I have some more ideas about this topic but for the time being I am going to get back to drinking and lurking

Ha, it appears as if there was a recent thread about this topic in this forum titled "No Gender." Other members on this forum has described experiences similar to ours in that thread, I encourage to read it if you have not.

No, I hadn't read it, I just joined up so I haven't seen a lot of recent discussions. I'll have to go look at it now.

This is all very interesting! I'm glad there are others like me - when I say this to my friends they tell me I'm crazy, or any of the other things I listed above. There may be something to the idea that the self is thought of differently. I've noticed this in different instances, I mean, when asked to describe myself I never know what to say. I think I have a very strong sense of self, but, my identity is AS ME. If asked if I identify as male or female or this or that or whatever, my reaction would be to say, I'm female, I'm this, I'm whatever, I identify as a Meghan. Does that make sense? It's biology that's WHAT I am and then WHO I am is me. It's like the "black and white" thing I suppose, you don't see the subleties and societal rules that others see and accept as concrete?

Maybe I'd be more coherent after a couple of drinks

And I probably come off as having problems with gender identity to other people, now that I think of it. I mean, if I don't think of myself as particularly female, and I do things/wear things I want without any regard to gender roles. I'm currently wearing boy's clothes and reading the Fannie Farmer Cookbook, I've started using the word "gender-queer" and ungendered (I think I had to say trans once even) to describe myself because nobody else understands when I say I just don't understand!

Though I would say my sexual orientation and whatever is different about my mind is obvious from the outside to anybody who spends any time with me. I could ACT girly or boyish or whatever, I'm sure, but I can't act "straight" or "NT" for any length of time because those aren't things you can "become."

I apologize if I've gone off-topic or am repeating myself

By my reckoning, there are at least five indicia of sex in most humans:

1) Genetic sex. The vast majority of people are either XX (genetically female) or XY (genetically male). A small (but significant) part the population are intersexed, with different genotypes. (For example, XXY or X-).

2) Morphological sex. This is the sex of your physical body. If you have boy parts, you are physically male, if you have girl parts, you are physically female. Again, a small number of people are the exception, displaying ambiguous physiology. There are people whose genetic sex and morphological sex are different. This can occur naturally, for example, in XY dysgenesis, a foetus will have a Y chromosome, but a defective gene that fails to produce the homones necessary to develop male sex organs (all foetuses start as physiologically female, and genes on the Y chromosome alter that). A child with XY dysgenesis will look to all intents and purposes female, and will have no atypical presentations until she fails to enter puberty. It can also occur artificially through sex reassignment surgery.

3) Sexual identity. A person may be genetically male, and morphologically male, but have a female sexual identity. A common term to describe such a person is "transsexual," although some people prefer to restrict that term to people who have begun the process of sexual reassignment.

4) Sexual orientation. Sexual orientation is not predicated on genetic sex, morphological sex or sexual identity. There are transsexual people who are heterosexually oriented in their morphological sex (e.g. a physical male who is attracted to women) who become homosexually oriented after sex reassignment.

5) Social sex role. In cultures where there are permeable boundaries between physical sex and the roles that people undertake in their communities, the public perception of people's sex changes. This isn't just about the woman who is perceived to be, "less of a woman," because she seeks to take a combat role in the armed forces or the man who is a stay-at-home caregiver. The most restrictive social sex characteristic is dress.

In society, we rely almost entirely on morphological sex and social sex characteristics as determiners of how we classify people. That person has a beard, therefore he is male. That person has breasts, therefore she is female. That person is wearing a skirt, therefore she is female. etc. We are beggining to erase the restrictiveness of social sex presenetations, embracing more ambiguous forms of dress, personal presentation and roles in society.

But for people on the spectrum, we generally have only the external characteristics to go by. You may see a person who is morphologically female and that is sufficient to classify that person. Those of us who are mind-blind may never consider the internal decision making that has led that "female" person to adopt an ambiguous or masculine outward appearance.

(The next time a woman accuses you of being anti-feminist for pointing out that her clothes don't fit, you can turn around and call her out for her failure to embrace your neurodiversity! )

Thank you for the explanation! You explain this better than my textbooks do

"The next time a woman accuses you of being anti-feminist for pointing out that her clothes don't fit, you can turn around and call her out for her failure to embrace your neurodiversity!"

I'm looking forward to going back to school now... I'll do some norm-challenging and mind-opening right back at them!

I have an aspie friend who would get yelled at by feminists because she couldn't relate to problems all women are supposed to have, like being catcalled or worrying about being fat. They told her she was in denial. She wasn't saying that stuff never happens, just that she was different. She's not trans but her appearance is butch enough that sometimes people mistake her for male. Personality-wise, she isn't particularly butch, though.

I really feel the same way that you do.

If I'm aware that someone is trans, though, I wouldn't make remarks about it. And I think that most of the time I can tell what bio sex a person is and what gender they identify as.

But like you say, I don't view this in abstract sense at ALL, and I'm, glad you used that word.

I can't understand how a man in a dress is anything more than man in a dress. I understand that he identifies as female, but it will always be a man in dress, to me.

I don't have a strong sense of gender identity, myself.

I do enjoy dressing as a woman, and a relatively feminine woman at that.

But I don't *feel* female, never have. Androgynous, leaning toward male.

I respect trans folk. My inability to PERSONALLY understand the thought process doesn't dictate how I treat them.

FWIW, I find that a lot of people on the spectrum actually are trans. I can see why. I suppose I *technically* am, as I have a low (male) 2D-4D ratio.

*shrug*

I believe people have a right to define themselves. If a person's gender identity doesn't match their physical sex, I shrug and accept their self-identity. I don't "know better" when it comes to their internal thoughts and feelings.

There are no such thing as "girl's clothes" and "boy's clothes." Clothing is made from cloth and therefore lacks chromosomes, brains, and genitals.

Anything else is just a silly social convention. Why should I be required to wear heels just because I have a vagina?