It seems that we more or less agree on what gender identity is. The trouble is that that's not how gender identity is treated in the mainstream. It's treated a

It seems that we more or less agree on what gender identity is. The trouble is that that's not how gender identity is treated in the mainstream. It's treated as an intrinsic property, not a mere social construction or preference. That is, if you "identify" as a particular sex, then you "really are" that sex, in some essential sense. The idea entered the mainstream as a framework into which transgender people could fit alongside cisgender people so that nobody would have to be "abnormal". After all, if a man is "really" a woman "on the inside", then why wouldn't you treat them as one? This essentialist usage is different from the purely descriptive usage that we agree on, and it's not so much a descriptive tool as a political one - an intuition pump designed to get people to treat transgender people in line with their preferences. While this is a worthy cause, I question the collateral damage to the larger discourse about sexism.