Christian conference on transgender issues rejects the existence of gender identity

Heya everybody,

I have added about twenty studies today, and hope to do the upload soon! Before I give a short overview of the most relevant studies added, I just wanted to mention a different subject:

In a few weeks, a Christian conference on transgender topics will meet in Kentucky, USA (see here and here). It’s organised by the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors and the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

I’m not writing about this because I think this conference will have major relevance, I just want to point out what keeps baffling my mind – it’s the way some people think, and how fundamentally different it is from thinking grounded in reality. Apparently, there has been a statement last year by all the speakers rejecting that a human being could possess a gender other than the one indicated by biological sex.

There is a number of problems with this statement.
Firstly, it ignores that biological sex can be ambiguous, i.e. the body has many sexually dimorphic traits, and they can develop in contrasting directions. Biological sex is not a black-or-white issue, as people with disorders of sex development (DSD) demonstrate. These people exist, some with visibly ambiguous sex characteristics. If biological sex determines the gender identity of a person, what is the gender identity of people with DSD?
Secondly, in order for this statement to have meaning, you need a definition of what is meant by gender. I fail to see how one could define the term without relating to the psychological state of a person, i.e. the gender a person feels he or she belongs to and/or has psychological similarities with. If that’s the definition of gender, you’ll find some people claim they have a gender identity different from their natal sex. This is fatal to the claim that gender identity is always identical to physical sex, unless you can show that all transsexuals are mistaken.

We have many studies showing that brains of transsexuals and their psychology exhibit characteristics of their experienced gender and that gender identity exists and is influenced by hormones during the development of the brain.

Let’s wait and see what evidence this conference presents to support its claims. My guess is none.