Here's a definition by a very woke person:
"Gender identity is the gender which the person identifies as. It is different from sex assigned at birth. Gender identity is how you think about yourself, how a person identifies themselves."
(Whitehead-Pleaux, Annette. "Queering Music Therapy: Music Therapy and LGBTQAI+ Peoples." In Arts Therapies and Gender Issues, edited by Susan Hogan, 22-36. New York: Routledge, 2020. p. 28)
"to self-identify = to believe or assert that one belongs to a certain group or class"
(American Heritage Dictionary of English)
So according to her definition, one's gender identity is the gender
one believes or/and asserts to have. Here, gender identity turns out to be
gender belief or
gender assertion: "I believe/assert that my gender is male/female/whatever."
A naive question: When a male person seriously believes and asserts that he
is female, isn't that a paradigmatic example of self-deception or self-delusion?
Anyway, the following shows that Whitehead-Pleaux doesn't know what she's talking about:
"This belief that there are two sexes is a fallacy as there are at least three sexes: female, male, and intersex. Sex assigned at birth is a descriptor of the person’s body, as depicted in the Gender Unicorn with a DNA icon between its legs."
(Whitehead-Pleaux, Annette. "Queering Music Therapy: Music Therapy and LGBTQAI+ Peoples." In Arts Therapies and Gender Issues, edited by Susan Hogan, 22-36. New York: Routledge, 2020. p. 27)
But I learned something from her I wasn't fully aware of until I read this:
"The T in LGBTQAI+ stands for Trans*. Trans* is an umbrella term that encompasses the many ways a person can transcend gender norms."
(Whitehead-Pleaux, Annette. "Queering Music Therapy: Music Therapy and LGBTQAI+ Peoples." In Arts Therapies and Gender Issues, edited by Susan Hogan, 22-36. New York: Routledge, 2020. p. 28)
So "trans" alone—written with or without asterisk—isn't used by woke people synonymously with "transsexual" or "transvestite", because
everybody who "transcends gender norms" in some way or other is now called "trans" by them. It follows that homosexuals are "trans" too by transcending "heteronormativity".
It's also interesting to learn—
—that…
"Some trans* people experience their identity shifting from male to female, sometimes daily or even more frequently."
(Whitehead-Pleaux, Annette. "Queering Music Therapy: Music Therapy and LGBTQAI+ Peoples." In Arts Therapies and Gender Issues, edited by Susan Hogan, 22-36. New York: Routledge, 2020. p. 28)
My advice: If you experience identity shifts on a daily or hourly basis, go see a psychiatrist as soon as possible!