The European Institute for Gender Equality argues that gender identity is “[e]ach person’s deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the sex assigned at birth.” Gender, for its part, is redefined as the result of one’s gender identity and one’s sex-assignment at birth. If my deeply-felt experience of my own gender identity is as a male, and I have been assigned, by my parents, hospital staff, and community at large to the sex “female,” then I am a transgender male; if I have been assigned to the sex “male,” I am a cisgender male. If I am unsure of my gender identity, this obscurity is present in the term signifying my gender — I may be genderqueer or genderfluid depending on my definitions of the terms.
This schema has been implemented by liberal governments because it allows people to speak of gender without giving priority to any single group of people, most obviously “cisgender” or “non-transgender” people. These individuals are no longer defined as a “natural” or “proper” articulation of the gendered human person — they occupy one possible position among many. They are those kind of beings whose gender identity happens to match the sex they were assigned at birth, and nothing more.
The goal of political liberalism is to strip the world of any social hierarchies beyond that of the individual under the State. This is obvious in its persistent reduction of the family from a genuine source of authority to a reproductive/ productive and taxable unit under the State; it is obvious in its relativizing and destruction of the authority of the Church to that of the State; it is obvious in our growing cultural horror over any acts of justice, obedience, or vengeance that are not mediated through a State-sanctioned police force. Gender identity is another instance of this levelling process. Instead of “man” and “woman,” the world is redescribed as a field of pre-sexed units undergoing various moments of “gender- ing” through a combination of what others says about them (sex-assignment at birth) and what they say about themselves (gender identity). Even as it redescribes the world in terms of an infinite number of genders, the theory assures a rigorous sameness at the root of all them — we are all that x which is gendered.
This is not a new idea. In his study “Androgynous Democracy: American Modernity and the Dual-sexed Body Politic,” Aaron Sheen argues…
