What if gender only seems to be an identity? We co create self within our extant developmental field, a field which told us that gender was both important and part of our identity. But this field also told me that people with dyslexia are thick, that being gay was evil and they deserved AIDS, that being disabled made you in-valid. If we can remove these introjected norms and see them for what they are, they quickly fall away. So, what happens if we remove gender identity from the field and see it separate from its binary narrative? If we allow this removal to take place we can clearly see, our identity has nothing to do with gender. And, gender itself ceases to require the binary polarity we have been sold. It can assume its dynamic complexity of which it was stripped; The need to assign gender ceases to be a requirement for identity. Self then is free to develop as it naturally would, without the constraints of this introjected norm. This in turn gives us the opportunity to see the self as not fixed but rather, renewed or recreated every day by our awareness and exploration of the phenomenological field we exist within. From this perspective we can understand all things are impermanent.
Perhaps self only feels like it exists because of the illusion of permanence.