After gender, transgender ideology’s most important concept is that of gender identity, which it defines as a person’s deep, inner sense of their gender, meaning their deep, inner sense of their sex. A transgender person’s “gender identity” is not, however, their identity but a contradiction of it.[3] A man who calls himself a woman still has the identity of a man because he is still a man. Thus the term “gender identity” refers neither to a gender nor to an identity; it refers to a person’s idea of what sex they are. Thus when we hear that someone is “questioning their gender identity”, this is only someone who is wondering whether they are male or female.

As Helen Joyce points out, transgender ideology asserts that we all have a “gender identity”, which in most cases lines up with our sex but in the case of transgenders happens not to. But is it true to say that we all have a deep, inner sense of our sex? I suspect that most people no more have such a thing than they have a deep, inner sense of how many arms they have. For most people, their sex is such an obvious and familiar part of them that they never think about it, still less do they see it as the sort of thing about which they might have opinions. If this is correct, the only people who have “gender identities” are transgenders, whose deep, inner sense of their sex deceives them.