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The idea that all people have an innate "gender identity" recently has been
endorsed by many health-care professionals and mainstream medical organizations. This term commonly is defined to mean the "
internal, deeply held" sense of whether one is a man or a woman (or, in the case of children, a boy or a girl), both, or neither. It also has become common to claim that this sense of identity may be reliably articulated by children as young as
three years old.
While these claims about gender identity did not attract systematic scrutiny at first, they now have become the subject of criticism from a growing number of scientists, philosophers and health workers. Developmental studies show that young children have only a superficial understanding of sex and gender (at best). For instance, up until age 7, many children often believe that if a boy puts on a dress, he
becomes a girl. This gives us reason to doubt whether a coherent concept of gender identity exists
at all in young children. To such extent as any such identity may exist, the concept relies on stereotypes that encourage the conflation of gender with sex.
However, starting at a young age, children do tend to exhibit preferences and behaviors that we associate with sex (as distinct from gender). For example, male children display more aggressive behavior than female children. In addition, "cross-sex" behavior — or, more accurately, cross-sex stereotypical behavior — often is predictive of later same-sex attraction.
Comment: There's nothing wrong with holding industry and corporations responsible for harms they inflict on the environment. But these people are using environmentalism as a means of inflicting their ideology on the world, promoting falsified and exaggerated data. If they took their focus off of carbon and put it on to things that are actually detrimental to the environment (heavy metals, industrial pollution, GMOs, pesticides and herbicides, for example) they might actually be doing to world some good. But then they wouldn't be forcing everyone to become vegan now, would they.
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