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Antigender ideologues argue that gender identity is a phantasy and that ‘sex’ is the rock bottom of who we are. Even some feminists take a ‘gender critical’ position. These thinkers oppose phantasy to reality and hold oversimplified ideas about the embodiment of gender. I argue for an understanding of gender in which imagination plays a role, but that does not have a simple referent: gender as narrative. My inspiration is Ricoeur’s recently published Lectures on Imagination (2024) and his ideas about narrative identity (1992). Applying Ricoeur’s notion of productive imagination to gender, I argue that gender is bodily and implies the stories of others, and that it pertains to a person’s life story that may change over time. I end with asking why it are only transgender people that in therapy are asked to tell their gender story. If we would all tell that story, we would soon find out that every story differs.