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Origin of the concept

Gender identity is not a discovery in nature but an ideological belief that has been concocted over fifty years based on a clinical working definition. Its genesis runs from Hirschfeld's first experiments via Money's fraudulent David Reimer case to Stoller's untested postulate — and ends as a dogma that justifies puberty blockers, mastectomies in healthy girls, and the erasure of the category of woman.

Early roots (1910–1950)

The earliest outlines can be found with Magnus Hirschfeld , who in 1923 used the term "transsexualismus" for men who believed themselves to be women. Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Berlin, 1919) experimented with the first medical interventions — without evidence, without follow-up. In the US, endocrinologist Harry Benjamin took this up starting in the 1940s and continued the medical-technical line that still influences WPATH.

Money and the fraudulent Reimer case (1964)

The term "gender identity" was introduced by John Money in 1964 within his work with intersex patients. Money tested his hypothesis on David Reimer, a biological boy who, following a botched circumcision, was raised as a girl on Money's advice. Money published the case as successful "nurture over nature," while Reimer never felt like a girl, reverted to male at age fourteen, and took her own life in 2004. The scientific literature only received the true story through Diamond & Sigmundson (1997). A foundation of fraud—which remains in textbooks to this day.

Stoller (1968): postulate without proof

Psychoanalyst Robert Stoller established the term in 1968 with *Sex and Gender* , in which he proposed "core gender identity" as an unchangeable inner given that forms in the first years of life. Not a measuring instrument, not a biological marker, not a falsifiable prediction — an untested postulate that is presented as a fact half a century later. That the assumption rests on circular reasoning and is unfalsifiable has never been refuted since then, merely dismissed.

Activist escalation (1970–1990)

From the 1970s onwards, activists such as Virginia Prince linked the term to crossdressing and launched the broader term "transgender." In the 1990s , Judith Butler established a radically different line with Gender Trouble (1990): gender as a performative act of speech . Both traditions—the medical-essentialist of Money/Stoller and the constructivist of Butler—coexist simultaneously within activism today, despite the fact that they are logically mutually exclusive. See essentialism versus constructionism .

From clinical working definition to dogma

What began as a hypothesis to categorize transvestism and transsexuality has been inflated into a creed upon which puberty blockers are prescribed, healthy breasts are amputated, and the legal category of woman is broken open. Patrick Hruz points out in his analysis ( The New Atlantis, 2017 ) that an untested hypothesis here acquired the status of an established fact. Criticism of it is dismissed as hatred; doctors who raise the issue are silenced. The Cass Review (2024) calls the evidence "remarkably weak" — which in plain language means: the core concept is empty. See also the dissemination since 2010 and detransition research .

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