Gender identity is important because of how society functions. There is a certain level of social conditioning to how genders behave and interact. In an ideal world we would all be human and gender would be subordinate to personality and human qualities. But it is impossible to have a society completely devoid of gender identity. The best we can do is make a sincere attempt for gender equity and ending gender stereotypes.
I don't know how important gender identity really is. Many of my best friends growing up were boys. So I've been a tom boy with boyish qualities since I was a kid. I don't mind being perceived as androgynous or boyish. But at the end of the day, I'm still a girl and I do place some relative importance on being seen as a girl.
To a large extent, I think we identify with and embrace our biology and have an affinity to it. It may not be an expression of oneself, but it is one part of self expression. Gender, nationality, language, culture, race, religion, class, income, social status and a plethora of other things collectively form self expression.
Sometimes gender seems trivial, but when we see transgender children/people struggle to fit in and gain an identity ' we realize how important it really is in society. Perhaps the world would be better without so much gender emphasis ' but it's a double edged sword. Can we really strip away all these little identifiers that make who we are. Without it we would all be nothing but one carbon compound life form indistinguishable from the other.
Why is person's gender (sex) identity (male/female/others) so important to people?
Its a part of social conditioning. Other than that you could blame grammatical compulsions for it. When I refer to you in the third person should I use he/she/her/him ...? You get the practical problem faced? 😆
Lets go with the it reference, how would you address an animal 😆 And I have been recently told by someone that I am their first ever genderless friend 😉
How important is our gender identity?
My off hand response was that it hardly matters but I guess we tend to take a lot of things in our life for granted. The ordeal that an athlete who was brought up as a female had to face due to the gender determination tests she had to go through highlights the significance it can sometimes assume. For details of the case you could check here- http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/india/india-athlete-gender-ordeal
Some genetic or hormonal
conditions could get diagnosed much later in life (around puberty) and change
the whole course of a person's life. It would be quite traumatic for a person
to suddenly be told that she /he is not
the gender that she /he had believed to be all these years.
There was an article which I read some time back about a Toronto couple who hid their son's gender for 5 years. And majority of the psychology research done on that subject states that "It's hard to say whether being raised gender-neutral will have any immediate or long-term psychological consequences for a child, purely because to date there is little empirical research examining this topic." So with out any research or proof of the psychological effect on the child, he could just live a natural life, wouldn't you agree?
Is gender really an expression of one's essential self?
No, I dont think so. It is more of a conditioned response.