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What is gender identity?

Gender identity is not a biological or measurable fact. It is an ideological belief — without a marker, without a test, without proof — that justifies puberty blockers, mastectomies in healthy girls, and the wiping out of the category of woman.

The definition according to proponents

According to the WPATH Standards of Care 8 (2022), gender identity is a "deeply felt, internal, intrinsic sense of their own gender" (source). The definition rests entirely on self-report : there is no objective test to determine it. This contrasts with biological sex , which is determined by chromosomes and gametes and is actually measurable.

The immediate dismantling

The definition collapses the moment you touch it. "I feel X, therefore I am X" is circular reasoning : the claim is its own proof. Moreover, the proposition is unfalsifiable — no observation can refute it — and is therefore, according to Popper, not science but dogma. What remains is a metaphysical claim : a secularist, soul-like gender essence, the existence of which is postulated without any empirical foundation.

An ideology, not a discovery

The term "gender identity" entered the clinical literature in the early 1960s. John Money had introduced the term "gender role" in 1955 and used "gender identity" in 1966 in a press release about the Johns Hopkins clinic; Money also advised the parents of David Reimer to raise him as a girl and presented the David Reimer case as a success, while Reimer later rejected the female identity. The concept was elaborated in 1968 by the psychoanalyst Robert Stoller (source). It is not a biological discovery but a clinical working definition that became a dogma within fifty years. See the origin of the concept .

The damage of faith

The Cass Review (2024) calls care for young people with gender dysphoria "an area of remarkably weak evidence" (source). According to the Cass Review there is also no clear evidence for a simple biological cause of gender incongruence (para. 8.21): there is no brain marker , no genetic marker and no measurable marker . Puberty blockers in children rest on this concept; see also the research on detransition. In her foreword, Hilary Cass writes that there are few other areas of healthcare where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views (source). Dhejne and colleagues (2011) found, in a Swedish study of all 324 adults who underwent sex reassignment surgery between 1973 and 2003, a much higher risk of death by suicide than in controls (adjusted hazard ratio 19.1); the authors conclude that surgery, while alleviating dysphoria, may not suffice as treatment (source).

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