PS to play devils advocate, if you want to be a IT, and you put on a cursed item that switch your gender... what do you turn out as ?, or would you be immune as you are technicaly gender neutral ?
As I alluded to in passing in my post above, I think the Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity in BG1 raises all kinds of interesting and difficult questions about sex and gender, which goes to show that just because something is designed for fun and giggles (which it surely was) doesn't mean it can't also be thought-provoking and potentially political.
For example, does the Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity basically change your body to have the "opposite" genitalia, secondary sexual characteristics and even chromosomes? If so, then we'd probably now characterise it as changing sex rather than gender. If I, as a cis woman, put on the girdle and suddenly had the body of a man, would I then *be* a man, or would I still be a woman in the body of a man, and in that case how would I be different from a trans woman? If a trans woman puts on the girdle, does she cease to be trans, and if not why not? *Would* everyone who put on the girdle (including non-binary folk) still feel as though they were the same gender as before, and if they previously didn't experience gender dysphoria would they then begin to do so, or for some people might the fact that their body changes drive a change in their experienced gender identity? Or does the magic of the girdle actually change your mind in some way so that you are comfortable in your new body? And if so does it do so by aligning your experienced gender identity with your new sex, or by swapping your gender identity as well meaning a trans person who previously experienced gender dysphoria might still experience it but in another direction? And, indeed, as you asked what effect if any would a gender identity (as opposed to biological sex) changing magic have on non-binary folk if it "swaps" your gender, rather than aligning gender with your new biological sex? Would it leave your gender identity untouched or might it impact it in complex and unpredictable ways depending on how exactly you experienced your gender? How would the public existence of such an object/curse/spell affect the philosophy and language around sex and gender in Faerun? Surely it would, as people would need to find ways to talk about those affected by it.
I'm not even going to try to talk about how such a curse might affect intersex individuals, and suspect that while considering the possibility of a Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity might work as a simple framework for some interesting thought experiments about sex and gender identity, the girdle as a concept can't support a similar discussion of intersexuality and it would be trivialising the questions that individuals with one of the variety of intersex conditions face to even attempt one.
Of course, it's not really a sophisticated enough conceptual tool to fully address questions of sex and gender either, and it would be surprising if it were given it's basically a joke item
But still, it shows that from the first Baldur's Gate game, the franchise has been raising questions about gender identity, even if it was doing so unintentionally (or was it ...?) and only in the minds of some of its players!
