>>14728155At least in America, the boundaries between racial groups are fluid and seem to change radically over just a couple generations. An Italian-American today is considered white, but in the 1800's, the idea that everyone from Europe was automatically white was laughable.
A descendant of the first wave of Italian immigrants would have grown up in a world where "Whites," "Italians," "Irish" etc. would have each been their own mutually-exclusive categories. There was no "internal experience of whiteness" that Italian-Americans had and wanted recognized. On the contrary, efforts to assimilate immigrant groups into wider Anglo culture were met with backlash because some felt it would erase their cultural heritage. The point is racial categories are not fixed, and often change shape to fit the political necessities of their time.
Gender identity on the other hand, is fundamentally different in that it stays more or less the same across cultures and over time. The way masculinity and femininity are expressed changes, sure, but 99% of people fit neatly into the category of "man" or "woman" and are happy with that. This is the case even in societies that recognize genders outside this binary, like two-spirits in some Native cultures for example.
If it's normal for people in those cultures to identify with their gender assigned at birth (man for biological males, etc.) or as two-spirit, then we should expect to see overall equal amounts of men, women, and two-spirits. But this isn't the case. Why? There must be some internal drive separate from culture that points about half of people towards manliness and about half towards womanliness. So it seems to me that gender identity is not a social abstraction the same way race is. There has to be some intrinsic essence that makes a man a man and a woman a woman.
