I haven't replied because I don't really have anything to say in response but didn't want to give the impression I was ignoring you. I don't find the idea controversial as such, I just don't know what it means outside of the ways we currently have of looking at these things i.e biological sex, development of selves in gendered societies.
I'll do my best not to turn this into an essay! I'm repeating some stuff I've said before, but I'll try to tie it together.
Firstly, regarding the way that we may be primed from birth to search for something like gender, I think this is very likely to be true if and only if gender is something that can be shown to be universal to human societies across time and place. If it can't be shown to be universal, this priming is very unlikely to be true. If it can, I would say that it's very unlikely not to be true, because there would be a clear selection advantage for it to be there, and such priming is present where there is a selection advantage in other areas. Evolution can and does find this kind of thing. To be explicit, that would not be a priming of girls to search for 'girl' and boys to search for 'boy'. That's not the kind of solution evolution finds - just as a baby gosling doesn't know the thing it's imprinting on is its mother, a baby human doesn't know its biological sex. It would simply be a priming to search out that kind of category as something that you belong to. It would help to make sense of the mass of information being thrown at you.
I do think the answer to this question matters, because it touches on the question 'what is gender for?' We have rarely mentioned sexual attraction on these trans threads, but most people employ or respond to various aspects of gender performance in their mating rituals. Often we're contradictory, in that one part of us may dislike the performance while another enjoys the effect that it produces. The idea that we should 'abolish gender', where gender is a universal of human society, ignores its role in socialising males and females in the way they relate to and treat each other, not all of which is necessarily bad. To make a comparison to other animals, there is evidence from the traumatised populations of elephants left behind after human culls that young adult male elephants, upon leaving their family group, need the presence of older males to teach them both how to relate to other males without conflict and how to treat females and their families with respect (see the work of GA Bradshaw). This looks very much like gender performance to me.
Having this culturally learned role gives human societies a huge amount of flexibility, and even if we are primed to search for such a thing, that doesn't say anything about what its content might be, so I'm absolutely not defending the idea that we should be forcing limiting stereotypes on anybody. There is a hell of a lot wrong with the gender norms we currently have, which reflect the past oppression of women, among many other things. But we seem to be getting stuck here, comparing the desire for the 'wrong' gender to wanting to be a tree, etc.
I would suggest that in many people's minds (in mine, definitely), biological sex and gender are so entwined with one another that we do sometimes confuse or conflate the two. In language, we just have 'woman' and 'man' to represent both, assuming that they will never be in conflict. But the culturally learned aspect of that identity, gender, clearly doesn't always correspond with the biologically determined aspect of it, sex, in a neat way. And there is clearly a very wide range of experience here - from those for whom gender is unimportant to the extent that they would like to see it erased to those for whom gender trumps sex and is the most important part in explaining to themselves and to others who they are and how they feel.
I have a lot of sympathy with those who would like to see gender abolished, but I think it's not only unrealistic but also not necessarily desirable: we need ways for males to be taught how to treat females, for instance, just as much as elephants do; and gender's role in sexual attraction can't just be wished away. Acknowledging that gender is universal to human societies (if it is) does not mean you should not try to change how it is expressed. There is a pressing need to change how it is expressed. But alongside that, surely there is also a need to acknowledge the wide variety of experience here, which includes the people (both trans and cis) for whom gender expression is an important part of the way they relate to the world. Those who would wish to abolish gender are not *right* where others are *wrong*, but some gender-critical people act and write as if they were, with mean and hurtful consequences.
