Originally Posted by
SweetIonis
I have thought about this all day, and this conceptualization is just very flawed. For one to assume that there is a core identity that is basically male or female or some gradation between the two, WITHOUT PROVIDING A WAY TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN such identities is just plain sloppy intellectual work. The second thing is that when you actually try to distinguish between such identities, you can't do so without reference to desire, which implies that DESIRE IS MORE FUNDAMENTAL. The third thing we are still left with the question of WHO POSSESSES THE IDENTITY. And related to that, lastly, that conceptualization makes no provision for the state of sentience, i.e. cognition, the state of being aware.
A conceptualization that would accommodate a discussion of gender identity that avoids all these difficulties is to assume that there are fundamentally two things that we cannot break down into anything more basic, desire and cognition. Furthermore if we assume that cognition is under the influence of an identity THAT IS ATTRIBUTED BY DESIRE (for example like heat is an attribute of fire), then everything else flows in a natural way. This conceptualization neatly deals with the question of "who is desiring" as a well as "who possess the identity". And it allows us to create a taxonomy to classify this identity in terms of male, female, or gradations in between. This was severely lacking in the above conceptualization.
