What have you learned in your ten years of development? Let's hear more about this theory. I'm sure you have plenty of material to copy-paste
A big thing I learned was, gender is a kind of representation. Behaviors represent gender. And this is interesting because behaviors are representations unlike concepts or sensation. They are actual concrete material processes that embodied persons carry out. Thus, Butler's theory, though constructionist, is a materialist one. What complicates the picture is that Butler claims that bodies materialize language. On her performative theory of gender, even our verbal utterances count as behaviors understood in a social context. Thus bodily behaviors represent our characters just like our lingusitic statements do. Butler believes that all reality is mediated by categories. This means that we only have indirect knowledge of nature. But, contrary to popular belief, this does not mean that Butler denies the reality of science. If anything, science is just another way of interpreting matter, just like culture is, and both interpretations have their own different theoretical virtues and vices. It's worth noting that Butler firmly takes the side of culture when it comes to the nature/culture binary. But she doesn't have to. Although she lacks a theory of science, she leaves the door open for one. Certainly we don't have to reduce biological sex to behavioral gender like she did. We can just affirm two independent, irreducible interpretations of the human body: sex and gender.
But let's return to the topic of representation. A big problem for Butler is establishing the persistence of a person's identity. See, if behaviors define gender, then my gender lasts as long as my behaviors do. How then, do I know I exist as, for example, a man, if I act feminine all the time? Sure I don't have to prove my masculinity, but the deeper question is, what reliable indicator do I have that any underlying self exists below my phenomenal behaviors? My solution to this problem is to posit an actual intuition that represents the gender I most identify with. It may seem very weak to claim that a mere feeling establishes the continuation of an individual's gender identity across time, but it should suffice to say that this intuition is one of our most strongly and authentically felt feelings, and only the individual possessor of a gender-intuition can say what the truth is about their gender-intuition.