Again I feel like an analogy of religion is a lot more meaningful than one of animals or whatever, because we are after all talking about something that is not biologically that outlandish. Humans are very slightly sexually dimorphic and that inherently means that all of us have traits made out of of human stuff expressed very slightly differently. And our identities are made up of not only a hodgepodge of traits but also of internal feelings, both learned and innate. You might be growing up a fundamental Christian and start feeling that doesn’t match you, and your depth of feeling and your reaction might be anything from becoming a buffet bar Christian, just keeping what you like, or you might convert to something else that you feel suits you better and participate just as deeply, or you might drop the whole idea and go in your own direction.
As for the fish raised out of water thing, I wasn’t meaning to illustrate begging the question so much as trying to illustrate that asking about the way a human’s gender identity would form naturally if they were never exposed to a rounded human community is meaningless. Humans require being raised among a variety of humans in order to naturally form human identities. If they never see a woman they can’t form an identity of being a woman, no matter what sex they are born as. The closest they can get even if everyone says they are a woman is ‘ok that seems right’ or ‘wow I hope not’
That is, it’s like wondering what language you’d speak naturally if you were raised without ever communicating with anyone.
Perhaps I haven’t been clear: I think gender identity is innate, and that it is sort of cooked up along with the rest of the personality as it learns and grows. Partly influenced by things like its early hormone levels and partly influenced by things like what it learns gender means in its community and world; how others define and relate to the genderedness of other people.
I have yet to run into anyone who is dismayed by the way women are treated in society and reacted to that by wanting to jump ship and become male. I *have* run into people that assumed that must be how trans men feel, who decades later realized they themselves were trans men. And I’ve run into people that reacted to that by cross dressing, and I’ve run into people who reacted to that by becoming feminists, or by developing other types of strong personalities. And a few who just got pretty depressed.
