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thanks for the well worded response.
You are expressing the gender ideology quite precisely.
I didn’t know any of the UK/EU info .
I Actually had to go look things up some years ago when they tried to steal most of the entire alphabet.. my HS education in the 70’s didn’t cover a lot of this

“I do distinguish between gender and sex though. Gender is a social/ cultural construct. Sex is biological fact. While gender is affected by sex, sex is not gender. If boys want to wear pink dresses or girls want to dress in men’s suits, there’s no biological reason why they shouldn’t - the objections are entirely cultural.”

RE - we’ll have to disagree that sex and gender are different.sex=gender to me... that is what i was calling the gender ideology lie.Gender isn’t assigned at birth (except for rare cases when sex/gender is indeterminate,intersex people haven’t been well cared for in this country but i only recently learned that.) I don’t like having the language hijacked..If someone thinks they are in the wrong body i’d say gender identity disorder is still the correct diagnosis even tho i know its called dysphoria now.(I don’t agree with that change as that seemed very political rather than science based - Obama era)
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I do think everyone has a right to life,liberty and the pursuit of happiness so i don’t criticize individuals but do have heartburn when american activists try to push the ideology into our schools. Its not their jobs, they need to respect parents rights.No one gets to tell me or others what pronoun to call them. I/we have freedom of speech and we can decide for ourselves what we want to call them. still a good idea to understand the language u described even tho i will never use it.

Fair enough. There is no right/wrong answer here, because it’s all dependent on your point of view.

Originally the word “gender” didn’t actually have much to do with biological sex - if you think of grammatical gender, European and other languages can have a combination of masculine, feminine, neuter (English has largely dispensed with them although we do refer to ships “She/Her” which is actually an example of vestigial gender).

French - masculine and feminine.
German - as above + neuter.
Native American - as above but with additional ones like common, animate and inanimate.

So know gender wasn’t binary in the grammmatical sense - in fact the etymology of the word “gender” comes from the latin “genus”, i.e. “variety”, which implies it was coined specifically because grammatical gender is definitely not, and never has been, binary.

Why we NOW think gender = sex is actually thanks to 18th and 19th century science.

The middle and upper classes in the English speaking world had refined the concept of male and female being ‘separate spheres’, that only interacted at mealtimes. The public sphere was for Men: they went out to work, they socialised, they drank.

Thus, Gender as we know it today is only binary because society was very conformist and there were only two spheres a middle/upper class baby was ever going to be brought up in.

If you popped out a boy, you were destined for the “public sphere”. You’d be taught manly things, like how to farm, how to fight. You’d learn a profession. You’d get involved in politics, and debate.

If you popped out as a girl, you would stay at home with a governess, or go to a boarding school for young ladies, to practice one’s ‘accomplishments’. Pride and Prejudice actually walks you through what those ‘accomplishments’ were.

“A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages … ; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions...”

And this was the “domestic sphere”. These days we’re more familiar with this sphere because it’s where we got “a woman’s place is in the home / in the kitchen” from.

If the Victorians had lightened up any, then we might think it’s perfectly okay to have eight genders - four for biological men reflecting different ways they can be men in the public and domestic spheres, and another four for biological women reflecting the different ways women can act in the public and domestic spheres.

The Victorians defined two “separate spheres”, one for men and one for women, because they were SERIOUSLY uptight and literally couldn’t be having with the idea of women being family breadwinners or getting involved in politics, just as they couldn’t see men wanting to stay at home and bring the kids up.

You are right on gender ideology and the political side of it. Stonewall in the UK has pretty much abandoned lesbians by agreeing with the trans activists that self ID beats biological sex.

According to them, lesbians mustn’t deny a man with a dick if he says he’s a transwoman. That’s far away from the gender recognition legislation that effectively means you cannot get the certificate without a diagnosis of dysphoria, without making any attempt to transition socially, and without planning to complete the journey with surgery.

A man who does all that, gets breasts, has an orchidectomy and loses their penis before getting the certificate clearly won’t have done all that in order to more easily have penetrative sex with girls.

As for the word dysphoria, that isn’t political. It’s more accurate and it puts GD alongside other dysmorphias. They are part of the wider spectrum of neurodiversities and endocrine development disorders...

ADHD, autistic spectrum, dyscalcula, dyslexia, dyspraxia, muscle dysmorphia, body dysmorphia, eating dysmorphia (leads to anorexia/bulimia) are all linked by them not being “mental illnesses”.

You cannot fix hardwired problems inside the brain. But you can in some cases deal with the effects of at least train people to cope. Severe dysmorphia combined with no effective way to cope can lead to serious mental health issues, usually depression and anxiety.