Apparently the police in the UK have issued a new law saying everyone has to recognize everyone else’s Innate Gender Identity or else expect a knock on the door.

Most of it is about trans colleagues on the force, but some of it is about everyone.

And what is gender identity? There’s a glossary.

Where did they get that? From Stonewall.

What I want to know is, how do they think they know this “innate sense of their own gender” is in fact innate as opposed to being learned? How do they think it could be that? I could see it if children were raised in incubators with no sensory input for the first three years or so, but children raised that way are not likely to flourish or indeed survive, so that’s no help. How can people have “innate” senses of things beyond very basic sense-information like up and down, dark and light, moving and still? How, in other words, can people have a “sense of their own gender” that’s innate as opposed to learned?

This is a major crux in the whole dispute – whether or not one considers “gender identity” a real thing that is innate and can sometimes occur in the wrong body, or a social thing made up of all one has been told, explicitly and tacitly, about what box one goes in.