Culture is not nature: Against gender identity invariance

Comment published on New York Times online blog, in response to article, “Trump Administration Eyes Defining Transgender Out of Existence,” October 17, 2018:

This shows that there is no getting past identity politics.
There are only conservative and a liberal form. 

We are fated to have such identities as long as our governments are concerned to manage populations with statistical groupings as attributes based on scientific knowledge. (Cause for concern in this respect is the neuroscientific biologization of mental health). 

The concept of gender may require that its relationship to biological sex remains uncertain, only to be "resolved" politically. 

Perhaps the best solution is not to abandon such categories but divest them of some of their importance. Of course, that has happened and it too is contested. The 'gender as rigid designator' faction will market folk theories of what normal men and normal women are like. The matter is simple; go back to work. 

In social and political life, "nature" and the natural has always been a synonym for necessity. It is precisely the necessity of the social order. But what distinguishes humanity as much as anything is perhaps that for us the cultural is built on the foundation of the natural in uncertain ways. This also means problematizable. We would not have scientific inquiry at all if it were not so. 

Doubt anyone who tells you that the cultural is natural, or that nature always serves it to us perfectly pre-cooked. In fact, we are the only creatures who are born helpless, as if nature had shut itself off informationally to make room for our prodigious creativity.