this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
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I think what they often imply is that for them gender is just a way to refer to male and female sex, and not really a stereotype. If someone is female/male then in their eyes they are a woman/man regardless of what they look or how they behave, because it's not about social stereotypes for them. Even if a man looks and behaves like a stereotypical woman, it would not stop being "a real man" because for them gender isn't about looks, behavior or feelings of identity.
However, the trans community sees gender as something that relates to what stereotype (social construct) a person identifies with, and this makes gender independent of sex, because you can identify with a gender stereotype that does not match the stereotype that you might typically associate with your biological sex.
I don't think "identifying with social stereotypes" is really an accurate representation of what being trans is.
Sure, there are some people who transition and identify as stereotypical members of their desired gender, but there are also people who transition and are gender nonconforming after their transition, but still identify as binary trans.
Identifying with social stereotypes also doesn't account for physical dysphoria, which is very real for a lot of trans folks. Some trans folks change little about their presentation when they transition but still want hormones and/or surgery.
What I said is that for a trans, "gender relates to what stereotype (social construct) a person identifies with". I did not say their gender matches a particular stereotype, but that it relates to it.
Someone who does not identify with a typical stereotype and believes that this makes them be of a different gender, is defining their gender based on whether they fit (or don't fit, in this case) a specific social stereotype.
However, someone who does not believe gender relates to stereotypes at all would not see that person as having a different gender because that person's gender (for those people) would be unrelated to whether they match (or identify themselves with) a stereotype or not.
I think your take is reductive. Gender isn't about stereotypes. I'm sure that for many trans people, part of their trans discovery was not feeling like a stereotypical member of their sex, but there's more to it than that. You can say that gender relates to a lot of things. Gender is ultimately an internal experience that means different things to different people, and isn't necessarily related to identifying or not identifying with any given stereotype.
Bioessentialism in turn reduces people to genitals, and sort of refuses to address intersex people because something something "outliers don't count". At best it says sure, you can dress up however you want, but it's super important that everyone know What You Really Are so they can put you in a box and appropriately segregate society.
It's reductive if you see "stereotypes" as something simple. Imho, stereotypes are very complex (or perhaps another word would be "archetypes", if the word "stereotypes" has too many secondary connotations for native speakers, maybe).
To me the "stereotype" (or "archetype", or "social construct" like I pointed in my first comment) of a "woman" includes every characteristic or aspect that could make someone identify a person as a "woman". Not all aspects might manifest in all women, the more aspects match, the more confidence the person would have to identify the other as a woman. Same for "man", in fact, it could be a person matches both stereotypes/archetypes at an equal amount. Also there can be other gender stereotypes outside those two, because as long as you are using a word to describe a category of people you'd often have a complex set of properties that people would use to define whether it fits that category or not.
I agree that putting people in a box is just contributing to segregation, but I did not choose that, I'm just trying to understand how people are using the words other people invented. It's almost inevitable, even the word "trans" is in some way a category, and there are even super and sub categories... like say "LGBTQ+" or "non-binary".