Gender is something that is socialised into us the moment we are born, we internalise it and normalise to the point that we don’t notice it ourselves, unless we purposefully deviate or conform to a particular extreme i.e Paris Hilton vs Chaz Bono. I understand what you are communicating, and I think that probably because you don’t fall into an extreme you perceive that your gender has very little to do with your own identity- but it does. Gender incorporates a wide spectrum of behaviours, most of which you are aware of and have an opinion of. We all conform and deviate away from these behaviours to certain degrees, i.e with make-up I conform to an extreme, whereas you choose only to wear make up only on special occasions. This doesn’t mean that your identity is less gendered then mine, because we are both taught the same thing i.e. make up is feminine and we should wear make-up when we want to look nice. What we diverge on in terms of our own identity is how much we decide to conform or deviate away from this gender expectation.
It’s complex and one of the reasons I used the Angelina Jolie example was to help you conceptualise what it might be like to have your femininity compromised. Yet you seem eager to create this dissonance between yourself and gender, so I think whatever example I give like, body hair, you would give a meh kind of reply. However I doubt in real life that you are some kind of androgynous being that wears a dress on a Tuesday and a tux on Wednesday. The reason why I say this is because although you are keen to establish this divide between the ‘social’ and the ‘personal’ gender identity, in actuality there is none. Gender is the social, identity is the personal, and it is all about how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us, symbolic-internationalism calls it the ‘me’ and the ‘I’. So for example if we take you and your relationship with makeup, the ‘I’ which is your personal self, does not care about make-up, but the ‘me’, the social projection of yourself, knows that you should wear make-up because it is something which according to gender expectations makes you look nice. So you mediate between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’, and decide to wear make on special occasions. How many other mediations between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ have you made aside from make-up on special occasions?
Gender is an intrinsic part of everyone’s identity because society forces us to deal with the prescribed set of ascetics and behaviour associated with our gender. We choose how much we conform or deviate and carry on with our lives, living by rules like I only wear make up on special occasions.