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No, it doesn't assume that. A norm is literally that which is deemed normal. Eg: Men are stronger than women, so it is natural that society would deem it normal that men do jobs which demand physical strength. There is no reason at all that gender norms should be arbitrary. But they can be nonarbitrary, yet nevertheless change, as when they take more extreme forms, such as "women can't be lumberjacks" or "men don't cry" or "married women shouldn't work."
And, feel free to suggest a different term, if you don't like "gender." We would be having this same discussion, regardless.
Feminists who still understand gender as the roles you mention are fringe today and labeled TERFs. Yes, originally gender studies was about these roles and women's place in society etc, but today's woke gender concept is something else. The whole point was that these gender roles are something you are pushed into by your social setting, not something you choose based on your unique snowflake personality quirks. The original goal wasn't to tell people "hey, you don't like the roles/social expectations put on you? Then you aren't actually a woman/man!" but to allow women and men more flexibility in shaping their roles to their personality and temperament without anyone denying that they can live like that as women/men.
Interestingly enough, a significant chunk of the Hungarian left (including a massively popular leftist YouTube show) are also with that earlier definition and are woke-critical/gender-critical. It would be worth a post sometime I think.
I don't think that's the intention, but when you start putting all sorts of prescriptive political, moral and aesthetic judgements on these things....
What they hell did they think was going to happen?
The problem was a lack of self-criticism where they never realized that trying to allow men and women more flexibility in terms of personality and temperament was always in conflict with the political goals of more freedom for women, or at least how they went about it focusing on universal socialization and the Blank Slate.
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I think that is an issue that is orthogonal to the one I am raising. I am merely saying that the concept referred to as "gender" is different from the one referred to as "sex." How a person who does not conform to current gender norms should or should not respond is a separate issue.
Is your gender the social expectation from you or is it your inner feeling?
Does someone who doesn't conform to "current gender norms" have a different gender then?
No, It does not make sense to say that someone "has" a gender in that sense, because, as I said, gender is a set of norms, etc. You can conform to the set of norms assigned to your sex, or not, and based on gender norms, you can identify with your sex, the opposite sex, or in the case of those who identify as nonbinary, neither.
Identity is, by definition, an inner feeling. Whether a given identity should be recognized by others is a different question, but even ethnic identities are manufactured to some degree and are a function of beliefs/feelings. See, eg, the literature on the development of Scottish ethnic identity, and of course arguably almost no one identified as "Palestinian" pre-1948, but plenty of people do today.
“Arab”, “lawyer”, “millennial”, and “criminal” are identities; are those just inner feelings? If not, why not? Or are they not identities, per your definition? What are they then?
Those are categories. Whether someone identifies with one of those categories, and hence whether that is one of his identities, is a feeling. Eg I am a lawyer, but I don't particularly see that as part of my identity (as opposed to being a baseball fan. If I am on a dating app, I feel much greater affinity for someone who is a baseball fan than for someone who is a lawyer).
Identity = a belief about who you are, where you belong. So, yes,it is by definition a feeling.
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I realize that this is a popular claim on the left. I reject it, and this is one of the central points of debate between the woke left and everyone else. You do not get to assume your preferred conclusion and get away with it.
Certainly, everyone has a self-conception, which generally is highly colored by feelings. But everyone also has a social identity, which is separate. The claim on the left is that this social identity is subordinate to self-conception--that you have some right to dictate how you are perceived by others. You do not. You may, through your actions, influence how others see you--and everyone does this--but that identity is...socially constructed.
Honestly, identity doesn't mean anything at all. It's just used as a way to say 'X is very important', and then just ... claim it's important by virtue of being important (which is meaningless), instead of pointing to some other justification. And maybe that thing is important, but it has nothing to do with identity. Goes for here and when the far-right claims 'white identity' is important. Even if the 'white race' is very important, it wouldn't be about 'identity' (bantus also have that, if whites do), but something else like iq, temperament, whatever
And yet, it seems to be a point of considerable debate, which is why I was seeking to define some working definitions below. If you don't believe the debate has value...please don't participate?
I believe the debate over 'whether identity exists or not' is worthwhile, in a similar sense to how an atheist might, upon finding a catholic vs protestant debate, interject that 'god no real'. In terms of engaging in it, I did so at length elsewhere
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I think you are conflating two different things: 1) whether identity is an inner feeling; and 2) how others must respond to that identity. Although there are disputes between left and right re #2, I do not believe that #1 is a claim of the left; white identity is a thing, after all, and of course immigration issues are tied to claims about identity.
Your comment looks confused to me, and not particularly related to what I wrote.
A person has what might be termed a "true identity." This is an objective list of that person's qualities, experiences, associations, everything. Examples are hard because objective accuracy is hard.
He also has a "self-conception." This is his own perspective of his true identity, and usually is flawed in various aspects--perfect self-knowledge isn't really a thing people do well, though some self-conceptions are closer to truth than others.
He also has a "social identity." This is an aggregate of what other people think his qualities, experiences, associations, etc. are--it is literally a social construct. It can and does vary by context--my family have a particular view of me derived from years of personal interaction, but the posters on The Motte likely have a different view of me derived from the posts that I've written.
Nothing that I've written here has anything to do with "how others must respond." I am not conflating anything; I am distinguishing various aspects of what someone might mean when he's talking about a person's "identity."
Edit to add: It only occurred to me after posting, but there's a local term for what I'm doing here--"tabooing your words." In this case, I'm tabooing "identity" in order to tease apart the various mottes and baileys people use around the word. I am trying to rigorously define terms. If you don't like my definitions, propose your own.
What? Is it part of your 'true identity', for instance, the value of the wavefunction (ik that's not really how that works) at each planck volume of your body - 65 liters times (planck's constant 1 / 1.616255×10⁻³⁵ m) ^ 3 (that's ... a lot of values, 10^100 float32s)! Except you specified 'assocations' - those have something to do with the outside world, so do we need to include, say, the volume of the earth, too? How do you distill all those atoms down into an 'objective list'? (the problem of knowledge-as-a-list-of-facts is extensively discussed by western philosophy, and is at any rate mostly nonsensical - which facts?). And - there isn't really anything else in the sense of 'qualities' or 'lists' ("materialism" is separate - if people have souls or experiences distinct from atoms somehow, it isn't a static list of associations and experiences). So I don't think this really means anything. Anyway, "true identity" here just seems to mean ... physically everything, every fact or idea that could possibly exist in the universe in total. If you're a physicist, and you're 20, and at age 40 you discover general relativity ... i guess that's part of your true identity? It's an association, after all.
Do they, though? Let's say you're about to eat a new kind of meat. You don't know, in one sense, that the meat is gonna taste good - yet in another sense, the potential to know it (i.e. the configuration of taste buds, experiences, etc to taste it) is already there. Is that part of your identity yet? And - does it even make sense to say that every association and quality is an 'identity'? I probably had some kind of cereal for breakfast 5723 days ago. Is that part of my identity? It is part of my 'experiences, associations'. This can't really be what we mean. Similarly, the fact that my 'perspective on' eating that cereal is 'flawed', in that I don't remember it - seems fine? And since an 'identity' covers ... every relation and association I have, is it an "imperfection in my self-conception" that I can't quite prove a particularly complicated theorem without looking in a textbook right now, despite doing it before? ... I don't think 'self-conception' or 'identity' really mean anything at all. Anything that are either of them are just complex relations people have to things that exist, that they're trying to understand or accomplish, and have precisely as much to do with a 'self' or 'identity' with what I had for breakfast today.
What exactly is aggregating them? If Joe thinks i'm an evil fascist nazi and Tom thinks i'm cute and valid, what precisely is my social identity?
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Well, then, I was referring more or less to what you call "self-identity," which others here seem to think does not exist. However, I don’t agree that it is helpful to say that people can be "wrong" about that. What group a given person identifies with is an empirical fact. How others should respond to that, including whether that identification is delusional, harmful, etc, is a different issue.
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