Trans men and Trans women or Reddit, when you say you identify as a man/woman, what is it that you are identifying as? [Serious]

The phrase "identifies as" usually means "considers oneself", but gender identity is not that. If a trans man had previously considered himself a woman, that doesn't make him a former woman. He just wasn't aware of his gender identity.

What it means to identify as a man: The thing is, people often think "I identify as a man" means something spiritual or whatever. No. Gender identity, rather than being a feeling that develops randomly during life (or a decision that can be made), is in fact something that can be detected in the brain even before birth. This question refers only to a portion of trans people, but it applies also to non-binary people and cis people — gender is gender.

Why it matters: The above paragraph is already an answer to the question, but one might ask how that identity affects our lives. Well, another part of gender, which is inseparable from gender identity, is gender socialization. It is a common myth that trans men are socialized female and trans women are socialized male, but that's just that – a myth. The socialization of a trans man is, of course, much different than that of a cis man, in that they are raised as girls and pressured by society to be girls/women. However, the whole point of being trans is that the way you think, feel, act, and interact with other people, has more in common with people of your gender (the one you identify as), than with people of the gender you are assigned at birth and raised as. That's why we say trans men are men: because sex and gender expectations do not change one's gender.

On dysphoria: Gender dysphoria is often used as a requirement for being trans, even by some trans people, I guess because it's easier that way. You can just say that everyone who wants a penis is a man and everyone who wants a vagina is a woman. That's just not how it works, though. Gender is not sex; gender is social. Therefore, transness is social, not biological or medical.

(I used men as an example here. It applies to all trans people.)

Soooooooo I hope I answered the question and many of the possible follow-up questions. I don't intend to stay on this thread (I don't visit Reddit often), which is why I wrote all of this at once.

/r/AskReddit Thread