Trans confusion

[johnnyanger]

I guess I was under the impression (and probably my friend too) that gender was just a social concept that mankind created. Like, a man/woman should act a certain way, do certain things, like certain things, etc. I didn't know gender identity was a whole other thing that could be determined at birth or very early on like sexual orientation. I hope I don't sound too stupid :/

No not at all - it has been one of the biggest debates in trans rights (a lot of feminists got really nasty over it cf. Janice Raymond). For a long time I was determined that social structures created gender, but I now think that social structures instead reinforce and create hierarchy out of genders.

A while back I went to a talk by a doctor on the subject and he should us a number of brain scans they had carried out and they showed, unsurprisingly, that the structural shape and mapping (I can't quite think of the terms here) matched up with gender identity. So cismen and transmen had very similar results, and ciswomen and transwomen had very similar results.