[seebs]

Right. That kind of writing is super common, and totally debunked by the existence of trans people.

There is an internal awareness of self as "male" or "female" which has nothing to do with how you were socialized, and which can contradict both how you were socialized and your body type.

People ignore this. People ignore it because it only becomes an issue for a tiny tiny number of people (about one in ten thousand, last I heard). As long as your self-identity matches your socialization and body type, everything's happy.

So a lot of people have concluded that being socialized-as-masculine makes you gendered-male. But it doesn't! It's just that, nearly always, the people who are socialized-as-masculine are people who are also gendered-male, so the two are functionally equivalent.

Here's the thing. Imagine that you were to take a thousand XY non-intersexed kids, and raise them all as "girls". Consistently, throughout everything. You ensure that they get the right hormones so they develop like girls. You do surgery when they're infants so they don't have wee-wees.

If the "gender is just a social construct" meme were true, you would end up with 1000 self-identified girls, or maybe 995.

In reality, out of 14 cases studied, 8 had concluded that they were unambiguously male. And that's pretty typical.

The theory that the identity comes from socializing is a pleasant and plausible one, but it fails the key test: If we act on this belief, do a lot of people commit suicide? Why, yes. Yes, they do.