"Gender" Is A Mess

I want to dig into an issue that I've noted in passing in my last couple of posts, that current discussions of "gender" are something of a mess from a semantic standpoint.

Consider, to start, definitions of "gender" that turn up via a Google search for the term:

• Google's info card: Either of the two sexes (male and female), especially when considered with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones. The term is also used more broadly to denote a range of identities that do not correspond to established ideas of male and female.
• Gender Spectrum: "A person's gender is the complex interrelationship between three dimensions:"... "body", "identity", and "expression".
• Wikipedia: Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity. Depending on the context, these characteristics may include biological sex (i.e., the state of being male, female, or an intersex variation), sex-based social structures (i.e., gender roles), or gender identity.
• Psychology today: Gender-or the different characteristics that begin to define a person as masculine or feminine-consists of several categories apart from the traditional binary ends of the male/female spectrum. It's possible for someone to identify as transgender, for instance-with a gender identity that does not correspond to their biological sex-or cisgender, with a gender identity that does match up with their biological sex. Others, whose gender identity feels neither masculine nor feminine, may identify as non-binary.

I'm not holding any of these out as definitive, but rather just trying to show that, while there's substantial overlap among common definitions, there are also a non-trivial areas of disagreement. The definitions above disgree as to whether

• Biological sex is independent of gender.
• Gender is defined relative to concepts of "masculine" and "feminine".
• Gender is synonmous with, or different from "gender identity".
  

That third point, about the relation between "gender" and "gender identity", is particularly interesting. A couple of posts back I did a comparison of common definitions of "gender identity", which were all pretty much in agreement that "gender identity" is a person's conviction/personal sense/identification as male/masculine, female/feminine, or some third gender category. However, a complication arises in those instance where gender identity is treated as a component of gender: "gender" is defined partially in terms of "gender identity", which is in turn defined in terms of "gender". There's a circularity of definition which leaves one searching for firm semantic ground to stand on.
There's also the question of the meaning of "male"/"man"/"masculine" and "female"/"woman"/"feminine". For example, consider the definitions proffered by the National Center for Transgender Equality:

• "male"/"female": Adjectives referring to a person's gender identity.
• "man"/"woman": Nouns referring to a person's gender identity.
• "gender identity": A person's internal knowledge that they are a man, woman, or another gender.

So "man" and "woman" are gender designators or classes, and "gender identity" is a person's internal knowledge of which class ey belong to. Which is all you get in terms of formal defintion; there's no explicit discussion of what distinguishes the two gender classes. Interestingly, NCTE appears to accept the common understanding of these terms:

So, someone who lives as a woman today is called a transgender woman and should be referred to as "she" and "her." A transgender man lives as a man today and should be referred to as "he" and "him."

The above quote strongly implies that:

• The designations "man" and "woman" have a behavioral component ("lives as a" man/woman).
• These behavioral components are distinct ("lives as a woman" is different than "lives as a man").

Note also that this discussion is accompanied by pictures of two transgender individuals whose presentation closely matches lay notions of "female" and "male". I take all of this to indicate that the NCTE has a "thick" definition of gender (at least for "man" and "woman") that includes packages of behavior.
It's interesting to contrast this with self-identification-based definitions of gender. As I noted in my previous post, defining gender purely through self-identification ("a person is gender X if they self-identify as X") leads to gender categories which are fundamentally empty of meaning i.e. learning that someone is gender X only tells you that they self-identify as X. The more I think about this the more it seems fundamentally at odds with how people use gender terminology. Consider:

• When someone says "I'm a X" they're doing more than just making the tautological statement "I'm a member of the class of people who self-identify as X"; there's almost certainly a "thick" definition of X lurking in the background.
• Having a preference for (i.e. self-identifying as) gender X over gender Y really only makes sense if X and Y are non-trivially distinguishable.
• The concept of "transitioning" also implies that moving from one gender to another entails non-trivial changes.

Now, in truth, some people use self-identification as a heuristic rather than as a strict definition; after some reflection I believe that Hj Hornbeck falls into this category. However, there's undeniably a contingent that defines gender solely on the basis of self-identification ("Full stop", if I'm remembering a particular FTB post correctly). Which leads to this... divergence... between formal definition and actual usage and the associated tensions.
The more I think about it the more it seems that all if the issues I've noted above doom casual conversations about gender from the start; it's difficult to have a conversation about a contentious topic if you can't even agree on what it is you're actually discussing. Like it says above, it's a mess.