Is Gender a Social Construct?
This is not a rehash of any previous gender thread. This thread is meant to specifically question the theory (an assumption for many it seems) that gender is a social construct. It will deal with the logic of the theory and any case studies that either provide evidence for or against the theory that gender is a social construct. As a logical debate, logical fallacies should be kept to a minimum (no ad hominems because then you'd just be trolling).
Let's first start with where this theory originated. Dr. John Money was a sexologist and is recognized for developing the theory. Dr. Money tried to show that gender was a social construction in his (in)famous John/Joan experiment.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/dr_money_prog_summary.shtml
https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/david-reimer-and-john-money-gender-reassignment-controversy-johnjoan-case
As you can see, the experiment ended tragically for David Reimer and his brother, not to mention Dr. Money's theory. David exhibited male traits despite Money's forced transition on him, both physically with hormone treatment and psychologically as raising him as a girl. And this doesn't say anything about the questionable things that Dr. Money had the brothers do to each other as part of his experiment, which is nothing short of sexual abuse.
So how did Money's definition come to be used today? Money introduced the terminology in 1955 and it wasn't until the feminist movement embraced it in the 1970s that it started to become more widespread. So, the motivation to propagate this theory was political, but not scientifically sound, as Money's tragic experiment showed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender
Some other flaws with the theory are the inconsistent way in which it is defined and how transgenders use the term. How can someone like a transgender claim gender to be innate if gender is a social construction?
Well, you might ask, if not for pink over blue, how does a person determine their gender? If gender is a social construct, then the only way for a person to determine their gender is to choose one’s gender based on gender stereotypes present throughout a culture.
And if gender is a social construct, then does that not mean that transgender is a social construct?
Here is some scientific research that shows that gender is not just a social construct.
https://qz.com/1190996/scientific-research-shows-gender-is-not-just-a-social-construct/
Based on this is it logical to assume the idea that gender is a social construct?
Let's first start with where this theory originated. Dr. John Money was a sexologist and is recognized for developing the theory. Dr. Money tried to show that gender was a social construction in his (in)famous John/Joan experiment.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/dr_money_prog_summary.shtml
https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/david-reimer-and-john-money-gender-reassignment-controversy-johnjoan-case
As you can see, the experiment ended tragically for David Reimer and his brother, not to mention Dr. Money's theory. David exhibited male traits despite Money's forced transition on him, both physically with hormone treatment and psychologically as raising him as a girl. And this doesn't say anything about the questionable things that Dr. Money had the brothers do to each other as part of his experiment, which is nothing short of sexual abuse.
So how did Money's definition come to be used today? Money introduced the terminology in 1955 and it wasn't until the feminist movement embraced it in the 1970s that it started to become more widespread. So, the motivation to propagate this theory was political, but not scientifically sound, as Money's tragic experiment showed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender
Some other flaws with the theory are the inconsistent way in which it is defined and how transgenders use the term. How can someone like a transgender claim gender to be innate if gender is a social construction?
Well, you might ask, if not for pink over blue, how does a person determine their gender? If gender is a social construct, then the only way for a person to determine their gender is to choose one’s gender based on gender stereotypes present throughout a culture.
And if gender is a social construct, then does that not mean that transgender is a social construct?
Here is some scientific research that shows that gender is not just a social construct.
https://qz.com/1190996/scientific-research-shows-gender-is-not-just-a-social-construct/
Based on this is it logical to assume the idea that gender is a social construct?
Comments (200)
There's nothing to debate, really. People can feel they are different than their biological sex says they are, especially in relation to the social norms that become associated with biological sex. It's handy to have a term for that. The term we use for it is "gender."
"How can someone like a transgender claim gender to be innate if gender is a social construction?"
Re what I just wrote:
"Claim gender to be innate" = feel they are different than their biological sex says they are
"If gender is a social construction" = especially in relation to the social norms that become associated with biological sex.
The fact that you'd expect anyone to abide by them just because you claimed them is comical.
And if someone is going to respond like a jerk, I'd much rather they didn't respond at all.
Okay. You should probably keep responding to me then.
My understanding is that transgender people don't all have the same understanding. Some think they were born the wrong sex (relative to their brain) while others think they experience gender dysphoria for other reasons and believe transitioning was the best option which would make them happy.
Some people call themselves non-binary and genderfluid. So I guess those guys think gender is socially constructed and they can swap as they want.
Gender is clearly NOT a social construct, I think far, far less is socially constructed than many people assume.
I agree that the incentive for socially constructed gender was philosophical and people would be drawn to it whether science was with them or not.
If there's no social norm element to it, it's not clear how anyone would feel that they're different than their biological sex, because however they feel would be an upshot of what their biological sex happens to be.
It's penis/vagina logic; because homosexuals exist doesn't abolish the reproductive status quo.
Homosexuality is the abstract case, I don't care how sugar coated the topic is for their social security.
Penis's/vagina's are opposites that work in harmony, and this is gender.
Being honest, Baden, it's a stupid topic.
:lol:
Gender is by definition a social construct. Sex is biology. There may be some behaviors that are related to sex, but by and large everything we socially identify with gender is just constructed. Like skirts. Men in other cultures anf throughout history have worn skirts (kilts, togas, etc.). The color for boys used to be pink/red cause it symbolizes power and strength.
The social experiment you link to is interesting, but it's just one case and thus not really proof of anything. It's impossible to tell what of his problems were due to the experiment itself, the tension of the experiment in relation to societal expectations, or just his own brain malfunctioning indepently of all that.
Claiming that gender is a social construct doesn't imply that individual gender identity is not based at least partially on biological factors. It just means that the traditional binary distinction between genders doesn't accurately reflect biological factors.
Quoting Harry Hindu
The phrase "gender is a social construct" refers to the binary gender system. The criticism is that it excludes transgender people, who feel they should not have to conform to either traditional gender role, but instead their "innate" gender identity.
Quoting Harry Hindu
No, since transgender is a term for people not properly represented by a binary gender system. It's not an independent system.
Or "individual", assuming there are literally an infinite amount of genders that people can identify as. At that point you might as well acknowledge that if you categorize and quality literally everything that no two people are exactly alike and we can just see everyone as individuals and throw away all of the nomenclature I've seen thrown around over the last half decade integrating anything from temperature to animals into gender terms and phrases. At that point, at least to me, it's getting out of hand and quite frankly silly.
All of the above can be ignored if we're going to stick to two, or at most, a few different types of gender.
Neither does the claim that people have 10 toes, because some people are born with less or more. There's almost always exceptions to rules relating to this sort of thing, I don't see why this case is any different.
For the vast majority of people the genders do accurately reflect biological factors, most men and most women are wired differently.
What does 'gender' mean then? And can you give some examples of it?
I think gender roles, or gender stereotypes, are at least partly socially constructed. But I don't think what gender people feel they are is predominantly socially constructed. What one feels oneself to be and the roles one adopts in society are logically distinct things.
Sure, all categories are ultimately constructed. But whether or not I am a human with 10 toes does not carry many consequences, being considered male or female does.
Quoting Taneras
I think you're overstating your case a bit, in the absence of any reliable numbers. Sure many people get along with two genders just fine. But it's not just transgender people that get pigeonholed by gender roles. You can probably find people who don't fit into common gender roles in every classroom.
I'm somewhat persuaded (not going overboard) that our behavior is largely genetically directed. Since we have apparently exhibited cultural traits for a very long time, I think we can safely say that "some sort of culture" is a biological trait. The detailed expression of culture, though, is learned and can be innovated. Use of language is ancient and genetic; book publishing is a mere 700 year old innovation.
Genetically directed sex-role behavior is ancient; the ink hasn't dried yet on the up-to-the-minute cultural innovations in gender theory. The various "gender categories" (numbering in the dozens) suggests that a lot of the ink of gender thinking is not only still wet, but that a lot of it is also malarky. Yes, with hormones, costuming, and surgery a man or a woman can carry role playing to an extreme.
Technology, business practices, trade, corporate power, and so forth have lowered the economic value of individual human beings. As individual value has decreased, irrelevance has increased. The unpleasant fact is, that whether one is a male human or a female human is just less important than it used to be. Outside of being consumers, a lot of people have no economic utility at all. It just doesn't matter much which "gender" they want to play at. They are free insofar as they as they serve an economic function.
Biology plays a long-run game. The details of culture are just daily news. Oliver is now Olivia. George is gender fluid. Amelia wants to be a Navy Seal. It turns out that the serial killer called the Cannibal King is Emma Johnson.
That's not social construction.
Nor are people with genuine gender disphoria, as far as I understand, in a position to freely choose what gender to identify with, any more than gay people choose to be gay.
I already gave some examples. Others might be who cooks, cleans, and likes pretty things versus watching sports, working outside of the house, etc.
Gender doesn't feeeeel like anything. And neither does biological sex. That's like describing what it feels like to have blue eyes or brown hair or ten fingers.
These are activities, not genders.
This seems absurd to me.
No duh. And they are associated with gender roles. Hence the entire case for calling gender a social construction and sex biological.
Well, "absurd" isn't really a counterargument. I'll be here when you've got some explanation as to what gender "feels" like rather than just a knee-jerk dismissal.
They're not though. Gender roles are key to gender.
Sex is independent of all that though.
I'm not sure what it feels like exactly for others, as one only ever really feels one's own experiences. But I think it makes sense for me, for example, to say what it feels like to be male. I have some feelings, experiences and responses to stimuli which are very much a consequence of my being male. That seems uncontroversial enough.
I would say that's extremely controversial, actually. And it's easy to point into the abstract nebula, but how about some examples?
Of course, women may also have all these experiences, but I very much doubt if they have them at the same frequency as men. I have never known a woman to mend a puncture on a bicycle. I have even shown women who profess to wish to be independent how to mend a puncture on a bicycle, and I still end up mending it for them. They leave the bike in full view with a flat tyre until my impulse to fix it overrides any other consideration. They are fundamentally not interested in mending bicycles, but they know I am intensely interested in doing so. They want functioning bicycles, but do they want to fix them? They do not, sir. Not while there is a man about.
Out of curiosity, has anyone on the forum ever know an bicycle puncture to be fixed by a female? Has any woman on the forum ever fixed a puncture?
Does that reflect what's going on in the heads of the relevant folks, though?
Most people do think they are correctly gendered to their sex and they know that intuitively, of the people who don't (which is a very small percentage), "most" transgender people think they have been misgendered which means they intuitively understood their gender is not the same as their sex.
Either this is a mental disorder or they're correct, either way it's not an argument for saying gender is socially constructed. The percentage of people who think their gender is non-binary is very small, smaller than 0.001%. These people are mere ideologues and are comparable to people who think they were born the wrong animal and so on.
So when I am talking about gender being "socially constructed" that means gender is created through social engineering. So I think that your gender corresponds to your sex, however, how exactly that plays out is impacted by social and cultural influences.
I only really posted in this thread to clear up the fact that not all or very few transgender people believe gender is a social construct.
Your position could be 10%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 95% or 100% of gender is socially and culturally constructed. There's a LOT of room for interpretation but once you start going above 50%, to me, that's just not really worth debating. Either you're focusing too much on superficial things like toys, dresses, colours and other crap like that or you've been educated by philosophers about science and that's just a really bad idea.
That seems like a false dichotomy.
We can and do simply use the term for a psychological notion, which has obvious influences from social norms.
You clearly haven't been educated by good philosophers at all, or you'd know not to open a conversation where you're going to dismiss a whole leg of the argument out of hand with no real logical/valid reason.
I am not arguing gender is 100% biologically informed. I am saying people don't gender themselves based on whether they played with trucks or ponies as a child.
Quoting NKBJ
Sorry but I find this whole topic boring, I also wouldn't discuss it with someone who agreed with me. This is a scientific question and I would need to do a sizable amount of research to demonstrate to a sufficient degree proof of my claims. I would need to do enough to show I'm not cherrypicking or demonstrating confirmation bias. That seems like a lot of work to gain nothing, there's nothing a person who thinks gender is socially constructed can teach me on the subject and I don't want to be taught worthless philosophy that goes against science and evidence.
IF they are 25 miles out, have a pump, have a patch kit, and don't want to walk 25 miles, they had jolly well better fix it. I've known a woman with a broken chain (on her bicycle) to take out a de-linker, shorten the chain 1 or 2 links, and ride on home in a high gear (because the chain was now shorter and the high gear sprocket is a smaller diameter). (Note to young philosophers: People have not always had cell phones.)
The women at the Hub Bicycle Coop in Minneapolis not only fix flat tires, they do complete bicycle overalls--dirt, grease, solvents, and all. So do the men. Ovaries or testicles just depends on what worker is next up.
I am a male, I know how to fix tires; I have fixed many flat tires. I can't do it any better than a woman with similar practice. I don't carry a de-linker. I know how to shorten a chain, but it's a son of a bitch to do if it is raining ... I'd end up walking.
There are almost an infinite amount of qualifiers one can add to any comparison. Heck, you could even make an apples to apples comparison an apples to oranges comparison. They fell from different trees. They have different weights. One came from the side of the tree that got more sunlight.
At the end of the day its true that for the vast majority of people, their gender, socially constructed or not, matches their biological sex. Whether or not there are social consequences because of that is a different conversation.
Quoting Echarmion
By definition it has to be only transgendered people. Trans/cisgender is a dichotomy. Your gender identity either matches your biological sex or it doesn't.
Less than .1% of the population identifies as transgender, meaning the other 99.9%+ identify as cisgender (their gender identity matches their biological gender). Sure certain social media platforms might make it appear as if its more than that but it's not.
The problem I generally see with what you've said is that many people who push for more than two genders see gender identity/roles as very rigid. If you're a male you have to like all sports, fast cars, beer, young women, big houses, grilling meat, cigars, fancy watches, etc. If you like all but one of those well sorry you're not actually a male, you're somewhere between the male and female spectrum. Most people do not see gender identities as that rigid. And before you suggest that there aren't any reliable numbers for that just look at the 99.9% of people who are cisgender but don't fit the ken/Barbie doll check list for male and female.
You probably could just considering strength differences. My wife can change a flat tire, I still had to assist her a few weeks ago because she didn't have the grip strength to get the large plastic wingnut that secured the spare tire to the bottom of her SUV's trunk.
I'm sure the greater strength would also net you a faster tire changing time (could jack it up faster, pick up/mount the tire faster, etc.).
Sure some women are stronger than some men, but the vast majority of men are stronger than the vast majority of women.
It's not Top and Bottom, masculine and feminine - go back to grindr.
Quoting bert1
The improved sentence: "I can be anything I want to be!" is socially constructed egotism.
Quoting bert1
Homosexuals and heterosexuals, metrosexuals, ambisexuals, ultrasexuals, desexuals, male feminists (aka eunuchs in the haram), those with gender euphoria, dysphoria, and especially those with gender dysphasia*** are all free to IDENTIFY with whatever gender they want. Hell, they can identify with whatever species they want. They just can't really BE any sex or gender they want.
***Gender dysphasia is a relatively recent disorder in which supposedly intelligent people with intact brains spout all sorts of unadulterated nonsense about gender. There is no known treatment, but gagging and handcuffing people with gender dysphasia can help everybody else.
Just because Superman was the last person to tighten the plastic wing nut on the spare tire shouldn't be taken as a strength deficiency. Maybe your wife just hasn't had to deal with enough wing nuts in her life. (Or maybe she has,) I've been outfoxed on a number of occasions by nuts and bolts,
Then why are you wasting our time commenting? Troll.
I was discussing what transgender people do or don't believe. Then I responded to your comment which quoted me and told you I'm not interested in talking to you. Get over yourself.
A) I was politely responding to some points you made first. In this thread. Thus opening the conversation.
B) You decided to first make your counterpoint, and then rudely say that discussing anything with anyone who doesn't believe exactly your version of things is not worth talking to. Seems like you're the one who needs to get over yourself.
Homosexuality is alternative genetalia usage, usually a result of abstract reality, such as man-made civilization on a solar-made planet. Homosexuality is an abstraction of heterosexuality, more specific than sex for pleasure; it's sex, with the same gender, for pleasure.
That's definitely a malleable physical trait:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/15/todays-men-are-nowhere-near-as-strong-as-their-dads-were-researchers-say/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0dd4f4c09cf9
Not only are men becoming wimpier:
"To look at it another way: In 1985, the typical 30-to-34-year-old man could squeeze your hand with 31 pounds more force than the typical woman of that age could. But today, older millennial men and women are roughly equal when it comes to grip strength."
That is a deeply philosophical topic. Robert Pirsig dedicated a whole section of 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' to the phenomenon of stuckness, starting with its application to frozen nuts and then expanding to its occurrence in life in general.
That section brought me great solace in the seventies when I sometimes had to spend whole days trying to remove stuck cotter pins (sometimes one had to drill them almost out of existence before they would give way, and they were very drill-resistant). In my view cotterless cranks were the best invention since the wheel, but in the seventies, only the more expensive bikes had them - beyond my meagre budget.
Haha... when you mischaracterize me to this extent, it is hard to think I should change. Anyway, enough of this.
:roll:
And its also a trait that's heavily tied to biological sex - which was my point.
Yeah, I get your point. MY point is that biology is not always destiny.
This is also a very misleading summary of the results.
98lbs to 75lbs is roughly equal?
So why is the seventy something cents women are supposedly paid to a man's dollar considered to be so horrible if its "roughly equal"?
It's not roughly equal. It's about 33% stronger.
Are you referring to this passage:
"Millennial women between 30 to 34 actually squeezed much harder than their forebears did, coming in at 98 pounds of force compared to 79 pounds in 1985."
?
If so, read carefully.
If 75 was the overall average, but 30-34 averaged 98, how much lower than 75 was the sub 30 group? That suggests a larger difference between women in their early 30's and 20's than women and men in general.
But if gender is socially constructed, then gender isn't something that they have a choice in swapping for themselves. It would only be within the power of society as a whole to swap their "gender", not based on their own personal choices.
This is probably the result of your limited and subjective understanding of reproduction. Reproduction is more than just sex. It also takes the rearing of the child to a viable reproductive age. If the child doesn't survive to be able continue the existence of the species, then have you really reproduced (in the evolutionary sense)? Natural selection would promote any behavior by any member of it's species that improves the successful outcome of the propagation of the gene pool, which might include certain males or females abstaining from sex and instead focusing on the rearing of the children in the tribe. This not only promotes the survival of subsequent generations but also helps to minimize competition between heterosexual males or females for sexual partners.
Quoting kill jepetto
That is your opinion. Others obviously don't agree with you. No one is making you participate.
Yes, yes. We've already moved past that part. This is the assumption that the OP challenges. It is now up to you to move the ball forward with a new argument that addresses the logical inconsistencies that such a definition entails.
Quoting NKBJ
Wow. Just, wow. If I had posted anything like this about transgenders, my posts would be deleted and I'd be called a "bigot". You can take David Reimer's word for it if you'd like. He specifically blames Dr. Money for his problems and his gender dysphoria. Here's the link to the documentary that the BBC article summarizes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUTcwqR4Q4Y
So where is the consistent benchmark that we use for determining the validity of someone's feelings and claims as evidence for the gender or their confusion as to what their gender is? Is a transgender's brain malfunctioning?
Yet their innate gender identity is conforming to the binary gender system. I pointed this out in the OP.
Quoting Harry Hindu
As a determinist, I don't see us being controlled by our genes, or trying to transcend our genetic coding. What we do or think is determined by our genes and development. Human beings are a highly intelligent social species. This is basically saying that human beings are a cultured species.
I would agree that our "wants" are socially constructed, but our "needs" our biological. In a sense, our wants are really cultural manifestations of our biological needs.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Yes, language acquisition is culture that has infiltrated our biology. In the previous Nature vs. Nurture debate I dropped the idea that the nature vs nurture debate is a false dichotomy, and is something that the scientific research article link I provided in the OP mentions as well.
Social influences or construction are actually a biological event. Our response to environment are biological, always have been.
The Nature vs Nurture dichotomy was misleading form the very beginning. There are not biological vs environment causes. All biological causes occur in an environment and are subject to its influences. Any environmental influence impacts upon a life form though reactions of its body. All social/environment influences are biological. Any biological effect is a product of it environment (i.e. there was not an environment which prevent that effect or caused biology to behave different).
In most modern context, at least when you get into the people who study the subject, "socially constructed" does not mean "caused by a social force rather than a biological force." Rather, it means where dealing with a certain sort of biologically/environmentally caused state of a social environment or interaction.
With sex or gender, this state of the social environment, the "social construction," is a concept/categorisation/language used to relate to people. It's not a distinction of a biological influence as opposed to a social influence, but an analysis of the sort of state (no matter its biological and environmental causes!) in question.
I'd like to expand on this part a bit.
If gender is a social construct, then a gender's binary, ternary, decimal, unitary or sexagesimal quality is just another social construct. At any point a citizen of some culture could revolt and claim yet another "gender", but if it's not recognized by the culture, then it isn't what society defines as "gender". In essence, the individual would be non-gendered, or not part of that cultural heterosexual game that heterosexuals play. That isn't to say that they are unequal.
A comparative example would be the identity of "uncle". "Uncle" can refer to the biological relationship between a male and his sibling's offspring, or could refer to the socially constructed idea of a male mentor, or role model, for a young person. If a male doesn't engage in the act of the socially constructed version, does he reserve the right to redefine "uncle" for his own purposes and declare that the term needs to be redefined to suit his own subjective idea? No. Of course not. In essence, they would be a non-uncle, or non-participants in that cultural construction.
Then why is it that some people want to focus on culture as the primary source of one's gender and focus on changing only culture. I have yet to see anyone make the claim that we also need to make changes to our biology to get to a gender-neutral "utopia". Is this what you are suggesting? What part of our biology would we change?
It's not a question of source at all.
The argument is that gender and sex are themselves social states. Here a distinction is being made between states of the body (e.g. penises, vaginas, chromosomes, etc.) and the state of belonging to a gender or sex (e.g. "This person is male, the person is female, etc"). People are distinguishing a difference between the facts of the body and the facts of how someone is categorised under a sex and gender.
The point isn't that gender or sex has a cultural source. It's, literally, that gender or sex categorisation is a cultural state itself, an act of a person using a certain language/category to describe someone else, rather than a biological state.
And that's why no-one argues we need to make change to our biology to reach a gender-neutral "utopia." The fact of sex or gender, a social categorisation of a person with a body, is different to the fact of having a certain body. Changing one's biology, one's body, would have no impact on the sex or gender one belongs to, since the sex or gender one belongs is not given by the fact of a body.
This seems to equivocate how one knows X with what X actually is.
Suppose that I am categorized one way or other, and we agree that the "categorizing" is a sociological phenomenon, it still seems possible that sex differences between men and women exist and that these biological differences pertain to the brain structure of the species. If this is the case, then sex differences lead to behavioral differences (at least average differences) between the species.
What happened in that case? The social fact of sex and gender categorising failed David. Instead of "constructing" an understanding of David as he existed/as he belonged to sex and gender categories in himself, Dr. Money "constructed" the opposite. He got everyone to understand and treat David as something he was not. Instead of creating social states in which people understood David's sex and gender, he did the opposite: created states of misunderstanding David's sex and gender.
David was failed because people built up the wrong idea about his sex and gender. People failed to build the concept of sex and gender which understood him. He was harmed not some notion of sex or gender's origin, but a failure of people to form an understanding which reflected him. Dr. Money build David a spike pit into which he was repeatedly thrown whenever sex and gender came up. He should have David a house to live in (i.e. watched David, noticed his sex and gender identity, and instead build the idea he was male despite lacking a penis).
The fact that David resisted these social forces is evidence that our gender identities are rooted in our brain's structure.
P.S. I also think transgenders feel that they are born in the wrong body because of their brain structure as well. I am very skeptical of the social environment hypothesis.
Maybe, but I'm not interested in the ad hoc "just so stories" of evo psych preachers here. You don't go to the Flat Earther for an account of Earth in 3-dimensions.
I'm interested in people who are studying the subject in question, gender and sex, in relation to individuals, identities an society.
There is male, female, combinations of, or neither male or female, genders determined by genetic make-up; some have penises called boys and some have vagina's called girls.
As distinct from girls and boys, are transexuals (an abstract case - sugar coated), who identify as a boy when genetically a girl, or vice versa.
Needless to say there was hardly any gender identification before gay pride took over; seems like a con intended on improving the social security, of abstract sexualities. It's slandering family-oritentated men and women by educating stupidly to their children and social groups.
What I'd like to bring to topic is that I believe gender identity doesn't exist; and that gender is referring to something real, not based on a person's want to be noticed as a certain type of thousands, such as squirtle pokemon.
You have bodily difference between people, sure.
They just cannot be said to be sex difference, as they are not determined by a fact of sex categorisation, but by the facts of the bodies. Those bodies could be categorised in all sorts of different ways.
It's actually the "X is X" equivocation which this is avoiding. Since it distinguishes the fact of body from the fact of social categorisation, no longer can people make the equivocation between sex/gender and the body. If someone talks about "a male," I can no longer just assume they necessarily have a certain bodily trait. I have to actually to the work of describing their body, if I want to deal with it.
I think this conflates genetics with brain structure.
One hypothesis for why there are transgenders is that there was something in the prenatal environment that leads to a brain structure that closely mirrors their gender identity. This means that one can accept those genetics reveals that one is biologically male or female, but those genetics themselves do not lead to one being male or female.
You can no longer assume a male is a human with a penis?
- gender is a spectrum of male and female (combinations/neither).
All that is necessary for there to be sex differences is for the human species to display average differences in sexually dimorphic traits. Men are, on average, taller than women, and this is a sex difference within the human species.
I think that society does have expectations between men and women and I can accept that those social standards are just social standards, but I don't think it makes any sense to deny what seems so obvious from an evolutionary standpoint. There are sex differences between men and women and this includes differences in regards to our brain.
Bodies, it's a difference in bodies. On average, some bodies with a certain traits (e.g. penises, testes, etc.) are taller than some instances of other bodies with certain traits (e.g. vaginas, breasts, etc.).
This is certainly not a sex difference in the context of an individual. Some individual woman are taller, on average, than the average of men. To be taller or shorter is not a sex difference with regards to an individual woman and her sex.
Can you explain your reasoning?
The issue isn't with a dimorphic difference in bodies or describing that. If we are dealing with a large group of bodies and their differences, we can describe that perfectly well. There is no barrier to doing that within the context of any species. One just looks at the bodies an describes them.
Sex, however, is not a description of bodies. It's a categorisation of the individual. The moment sex enters the frame, we cease to be just be talking about a large aggregate of bodies we've seen. We start talking about an individual, where they belong and what we can expect of them.
Using dimorphic description of bodies, myths are created about who individuals with a sex are and what they might do.
Instead of looking at how the body of an individual might exist, we start making assumptions based on a dimorphic generalisation to the individual. We mistake dimorphic description of aggregate bodies for an account of any given individual with a sex.
It's an outright failure of description. We are mistaking description dimorphic masses for an account of an individual with a sex.
No, we say she is a tall woman.
Men are on average more proficient at mathematics than women. Whether that is nature or nurture is uncertain, but the observation is robust. When a woman is better than the average man at maths, do we say she 'has a male brain' or 'is like a male mathematician'?
No, we say she is good at maths.
The majority of men are sexually attracted only to women and the majority of women are sexually attracted only to men. When a woman is only sexually attracted to women, do we say she has 'male sexuality' or is transsexual?
No, we say she is a lesbian.
In all these cases we just act according to the basic principle that it is the norm to deviate from the average, and averages contain very limited information.
What properties are there that have significant difference between male and female averages, or are more commonly possessed by one or the other sex, that cannot be dealt with by this common-sense approach (a woman that likes fixing bikes / a man that likes interior design), other than those that are physically shackled to biological sex, like ability to bear a child, or ability to produce sperm?.
If so, then we can agree.
More than that, I'm saying it means they are not really sex differences. The context in which sex categorisation gets applied is the individual. Such averages are never relevant to describing the individual at all because you are dealing with one rather than the aggregate. As such, the presence of sex is no reliable guide to describing the individual at all.
At the individual level, all sorts of traits occur in all sorts of combinations. Dimorphic trends in masses bodies or concepts we might use as proxy for that (i.e. sex) cannot be trusted. Sex differences are dissolved because at the individual level, traits aren't exclusive to people of one sex or another.
If gender is socially constructed then that means it's a learned behaviour which means you can unlearn it.
There are couple of levels in which Ramier could be or was affected by socialisation.
First, there is a possible surface level cause that Ramier’s aggressive socialisation into a female gender role might have affect his sense of self. If Ramier identified with behaviours associated with the male gender role in his environment, then he might have been driven to despise the female identity he was given. I don’t think it’s likely, but it is possible social influence.
Secondly, and far more interestingly, is the constructing sex and gender categories themselves. Children don’t start out with an understanding of gender and sex categories. We have to teach them. In this respect, David Ramier was absolutely influenced by our social constructions of sex and gender.
To even think of oneself as male or female, especially with respect to certain sorts of behaviours or bodies, one has to learn (or imagine) specific concepts of bodies and what it means for categorisation. David Ramier didn’t just, for example, think he was fine with a gender/sex of female and just take issue with his body (e.g. “I am female but my body is wrong”). His body was bound up with an particular idea of what being male of female entails, an concept, a “social construction” state of categorisation applied to bodies. He was deeply influenced/constituted be the social construct of sex and gender.
The lesson to take from the Ramier case is not that people are immune to social influence, but that much of the world is beyond a social influence we might which to impart. (be that David Ramier resisting female identity or a trans person resisting a cis identity that Harry Hindu wishes to enforce.
To trans people, the world is full of Dr. Moneys, all trying to make them into the cis gender person they are not).
The alternative hypothesis that I presented is far more parsimonious and is able to explain why even transgenders exist.
I'm not sure what you think I'm saying here. My description here works with whatever hypothesis you want to propose. I'm talking about the social fact belonging to gender and sex.
Regardless of the specific biological or environmental causes, any one who thinks, for example, that having penis makes them male, is constituted by a certain social fact.
If they had, for example, instead been taught/imagined that having a penis meant they were not male, then their experience would be a lot different. They wouldn't think they needed to become male. If the had a sense of a body with penis, it would be about becoming that not male body.
My point here are not to explain why people are trans or not, but to point out our identities have been built out of social influence, regardless of any specific causes which make anyone present one identity or another.
The classic "born in the wrong body" idea of a trans person, for example, is built out of our social expectations regrading bodies and gender/sex. If one body's didn't matter to gender/sex, there would be no need for someone to switch identities because of their sense of body. A person with a penis and dysphoria, for example, could go through a body changes, have SRS, yet have no need to become "female."
When is a difference in height between humans of different sexes a 'sex difference' and when is it not?
Height is a sex difference if no other variable but biology can explain why height differences between sexes occurs. Your question is flawed; there is no line that determines when a sex difference is a sex difference at all- there are only average differences that persists when environment is controlled for.
Yes, which shows that categories, like gender, are always somewhat arbitrary constructions.
Quoting Taneras
So you say. But it seems to me that there are rather large movements that disagree.
Quoting Taneras
If your claim is true "by definition", it's also circular.
Quoting Taneras
Isn't the fact that "most people" (I think we need some serious qualifiers here) think gender roles are not rigid evidence that gender is constructed? Gender roles are obviously shifting. In western countries, they have by and large become much more permissive over the last decades. This would not be possible if they were simply a result of biological changes, since biology does not change that quickly.
If "most people" were truely comfortable with binary gender, why has the notion of gender changed so much?
Quoting Harry Hindu
I don't see how that follows.
Quoting Harry Hindu
No disagreement here. Calling something a "social construct" is not a criticism in and of itself. Constructs can and should be judged on their usefulness and consequences.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Being a nonparticipant in a social construct carries consequences though. Which is why non-uncles may have legitimate reasons to campaign for amendments to the construct of an uncle.
Quoting Walter Pound
You are going to have to explain why "sex realism", for lack of a better word, requires fewer assumptions than sex as an assigned category.
No gender identification, no gender rules before gay liberation? Not so. "Appropriate sex roles" for men and women have been in place and 'policed' for quite a long time. The language changes over time, that's all.
I don't know how old you are, but I was on the scene when "gay pride took over" (granted, in the backwater of Minneapolis).
You've heard of Christine Jorgensen? -- first (famous American anyway) transsexual -- that was in 1951. Transsexual surgery was enough of a thing before 1951 for him to have heard about it before he became her at a hospital in Denmark. In the late 1940s homosexuals were quietly struggling to be merely tolerated, if they were doing anything political. Pride was a ways off.
There have been what were/are called 'gender-benders' in the homosexual community -- drag queens, basically. That was so in the late 1800s, early 1900s homosexual community in Chicago, for instance. It's still the case.
There were a few transsexuals around when gay pride took over in 1969-70. Where else would a transsexual hang out if not at gay bars? They were not tolerated in most places. So, they were absorbed into the gay movement, whether they really belonged there or not. Maybe transsexuals are just drag queens taken to the logical extreme.
Gay liberation is a piece of social change; I wouldn't claim too much credit for it -- or blame either -- for the social changes that have occurred in the last 50 or 60 years. There are too many other changes in process. Women's liberation, black liberation, (and various other ethnic liberations), huge economic changes, and so on. If one takes a Marxist view, economic and technical changes are the foundation for social change. The Pill is a prime example. A new drug enabled huge changes in sexual behavior, because fertility became more easily managed.
Geographical mobility and omnipresent media are two other economic, technical changes that have brought about many changes -- some foreseen, many not, some desired, many greatly regretted, Look how cell phones have changed social behavior.
This is why I think the discussion is important. I have a feeling that a lot of sex changes, surgeries etc. comes down to social constructs and norms about "what is normal". Even today, even in the most progressive nations of the world, the woman/male norm of identity is still so strict within the collective mind that even if all laws about your gender identity says that you can be whatever you want and judging you is considered close to hate speech, the individual who's confused about their gender will still be confused.
Laws and general public acceptance of people who view themselves like this are not enough to welcome people into the norm of society. And when media keep trying to include them as a normal part of society, it airs much more like broadcasted freakshows than inclusion. Like the parent with outdated norms who try to act normal when meeting their son's new boyfriend.
The last 20 years have been a great push to improve societies inclusion in order to make better norms that respect everyone. But there's been a backlash in the form of conservatives fighting back. It's as it is always when political movements move faster than expected; the backfire is more complicated because the norms of society move slower. I don't think that there's any question that the fast progressive movement of many nations around the world due to internet and social media has caused a large backlash from conservative views and that's why we've had growing populist, racist, anti-LGBT and hate crime problems.
It's also not healthy that we have an entire narcissistic selfie-generation who goes so far as to do plastic surgery in order to look like a snapchat-filter (true case). This focus on the body, perfection (according to media and porn preferences) is seriously damaging on kids, teens and especially those with a confusion of their gender.
I don't think there's any point to debate whether or not these things and issues exist, they do. The question is what to do about them, how to improve society in order to keep mental health issues down. Because those issues are on the rise due to all this pressure everyone has on them and especially if you don't "normally" fit in with societies norms, you are in serious risk of depression and harm.
No one is saying that gender and biological sex are the same thing. The whole point is that they're not the same thing. They can differ. You can feel differently than what your biological sex is.
Sure, but if social norms don't factor into it at all, why wouldn't any way you feel simply be what your biological sex is like?
You are conflating social construction with personal choice.
Here's the definition of social construct per Merriam Webster:
an idea that has been created and accepted by the people in a society.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/social%20construct
Wikipedia says:
Social constructionism is a theory of knowledge in sociology and communication theory that examines the development of jointly constructed understandings of the world that form the basis for shared assumptions about reality. The theory centers on the notion that meanings are developed in coordination with others rather than separately within each individual.
There is no "maybe" about it. The claim that sex is a social construct undermines centuries of scientific knowledge (and I was lambasted for questioning the status quo).
It seems to me that in order to keep defending this position, you have to get even more extreme. But lets deal with the logic of your argument.
If sex is a social construct too, then what is the difference between "sex" and "gender"? The distinction that was made between "sex" and "gender" was that "gender" was a social construct and "sex" is biological.
If sex is a social construct, then what about species? What is your benchmark for deciding what parts of reality are socially constructed and what parts are socially-independent (or what some might call "natural")? The difference between humans and apes could be socially constructed.
Quoting Echarmion
You said that transgender people feel they should not have to conform to either traditional gender role, but instead their "innate" gender identity. I pointed out that they do adopt either role - the one opposite their "innate" one. They end up reinforcing the gender stereotype with their behavior, even to the point of changing their sex so that they feel more comfortable engaging in those socially constructed roles (their bodies (which TheWillowOfDarkness now claims is just another social construction)).
Quoting Echarmion
Wouldn't you say that it would be useful for cisgenders to be able to recognize each other without having to look down people's pants (before getting to the bedroom) - maybe even more so now that we have this sexual/gender flux?
Quoting Echarmion
Being a non-uncle has no consequences apart from your own choice to not participate, which is why I chose that as an example of how we should view non-gendered people, which was the whole point of my argument.
I'm not going to go into a debate about the details of the study. Suffice to say that you should be open to changing your mind when presented with facts or at least indications that you may be wrong or at least misguided. Maybe you are, but you're coming off as simply stubborn.
In any case, even if your criticisms of the study are valid, it doesn't change my actual point: biology is not destiny. Just because most males have the potential to be stronger than most women, doesn't mean lifestyle (influenced by societal pressures) can't override that. Example: If a guy just spends all his days all day playing on his computer and never exercises or moves much, he's just not going to be as strong as an athletic girl who works out regularly.
for ex. some gay people don't feel attraction to the female, because she looks like a female and males look preferable.
females are in different gender category to males, get with the picture and momentum.
you really wanna flair up this category then fine but I see it's stupid.
You're not reading carefully. My point is that there is no logical inconsistency, but that people need to carefully differentiate between biological sex and constructed gender. When you do that, there is no logical inconsistency.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I've seen the documentary, thanks though.
And save your indignation. You can flag me if you want, but somehow I don't think any moderator is going to delete my post for questioning whether we can take a single person's word as THE TRUTH without serious inquiry.
David Reimer can blame anyone he wants for his mental issues, that doesn't mean he's right about the source of them.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I don't think you CAN feel a certain gender. You can like certain ways of talking, acting, and looking more. But that's not a "feeling" in the sense of identity. Like, if I dye my hair, it's not cause I "feel" like a brunette, it's cause I like to look that way.
I don't think all trans people have mental issues, but I do think the whole concept is metaphysically confused. Saying that gender is a social construct actually frees me to say that they can perform whatever gender or mix of genders they want to and it doesn't matter.
Also, I think some do have mental issues that they then attribute to their sex/gender.
No one (at least in the broader, conventional conversation in society) is claiming that. The whole idea is that gender is distinct from biological sex.
Quoting Terrapin Station
TheWillowOfDarkness claims that sex is just another social construct.
The logical inconsistency is in how you are conflating social construct and some personal preference. I provided the definition of social construct above. Another inconsistency is the transgender's preference to participate in those stereotypes. If gender is a social construct and a stereotype, then abolishing those stereotypes effectively abolishes gender. Gender would then be a non-existent thing.
Liking something is a preference and a feeling. Your preferences are part of what define you.
Hence why I wrote "(at least in the broader, conventional conversation in society)"
Quoting Harry Hindu
Where am I doing anything like that? What I said was "People can feel they are different than their biological sex says they are, especially in relation to the social norms that become associated with biological sex."
That's not a conflation of the two. It simply mentions a relation between the two.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Yeah, I've commented a few times in the thread now, in response to people who seemed to be denying the social aspects, that the idea of gender (re a way that someone feels) wouldn't make much sense if there weren't social norms about behavior in relation to this stuff.
Okay, so you can claim anything that you want but that doesn't mean you are right. Isn't that why we have things like evidence? Doesn't David provide that? Where's yours?
So, does that mean that you disagree with TheWIllowOfDarkness?
I haven't read any of Willow's posts in this thread. I'd have to go back and read them. But I'd at least disagree with the idea that biological sex is a social construct, if that's something that Willow is claiming.
For a transgender, how they feel (gender?) is in direct contrast with social norms (gender?), hence the stress that they report in being treated unequally. How a cisgender feels is in congruence with social norms. The discrepancy can only be explained by using two different terms, and how they relate to each other. On one hand we have people referring to a feeling as gender, while on the other we have people referring to a social construct as gender. It doesn't make sense to say that gender is a relation with itself. Either some feeling is gender, or some social construct is gender, and then we have either feelings or social constructs (whichever one gender isn't) that either have a relation of opposition or congruence with gender.
Great, go find someone who disagrees with you because I do not.
And yet you kept arguing :roll:
There's nothing arbitrary about it when less than one tenth of a percentage of the population identify as transgender.
Quoting Echarmion
It's been my understanding that the transgender movement is pushing the idea that gender is a social construct, not that the vast majority of people aren't cisgendered. A simple poll could solve that (and has).
Quoting Echarmion
Sorry, I'm not following. How are public polls and definitions "circular"?
Quoting Echarmion
I'm not sure it has changed so much. Maybe we're speaking about different things... This probably isn't a great example but hopefully it'll at least give you an idea of what I'm speaking of.
Look at football, I think its safe to say that it's generally seen as a male sport. Why is football seen that way? Is it a male sport because of the shape of the ball? Or because touchdowns are worth 6 points? No, its because you need a high level of aggression to play the game well and higher levels of aggression are much more common in males than females. Lets say that football is becoming less popular (it sort-of is) and video games are becoming more popular (it certainly is). If more and more boys/men are playing video games instead of football, is that a gender role shift? I happen to like both (football and video games) and, for many video games, at a competitive level, aggression is just as necessary as it is in football. I'm a huge League of Legends fan, there's a large element of risk taking and aggression if you're playing that game at a high level (professional). Those traits are much more common and also are much larger in males than females.
So what do you mean by the idea that gender is changing so much? If its just activities/hobbies it might not be changing all that much.
You're correct. I'm new to this forum so I'm still learning everyone. Next time I see you trying to drag me into an argument like this I'll just ignore you.
Drag you? That's hilarious.
While my wife certainly isn't very mechanically inclined she knew how to get the nut off. She just didn't have the strength. Sure, there are some women who could easily have gotten it off but she's not one of them.
Despite what a lot of people think, many guys who sit at computers all day still have a stronger grip strength than many female athletes.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0113637
Looking at men and women in their 30's, the lower 90th percentile of men are about as strong as the upper 10th percentile of women.
This study was of 50,000 people so the population size is large enough to be reliable.
Species is indeed a social construct. The act of understanding that one body belongs in one catergory is identity or another is a social state.
This doesn't mean there are no differences between the beings and bodies we catergorise as one species or another. Many differences abound between these individual bodies, just as there is great variation between bodies within a singular species.
As outlined in an earlier post, the use of "social construct" doesn't mean a social cause as opposed to a biological cause, but rather refers to a certain kind of state: the state which is our act of thinking about the catergorisation. Differences between bodies are not being rejected at any point. All that's being pointed out is the presence of a body is not the same state as those bodies being of a sex and gender catergories.
In terms of differences between sex and gender, they are two different states of social catergorisation itself. Both are "social constructs" which amount to someone being of the given catergory. One may have sex. One may have gender. One may neither. One may have both. In any case, to have sex or gender just means to belong to the catergory of that sex or gender.
All that I was driving at was that sometimes bad design makes things difficult. Three of us spent 90 minutes trying to figure out how to detach the battery from its case on a VW Golf, and two of us were very mechanically inclined. "Devious" and "obscure" are the words that come to mind for VW's placement of the fastener.
It's not just about differences, but also about similarities. If every organism had a completely different form, and nothing looked similar, then I would totally agree with you. But that isn't the case. Similarities exist as well and we group things together based on their similarities as much as we separate things based on the number of differences vs. similarities.
Biological sex is based on a combination of traits:
- chromosomes (in humans, XY is male, XX female)
- genitals (penis vs. vagina)
- gonads (testes vs. ovaries)
- hormones (males have higher relative levels of testosterone than women, while women have higher levels of estrogen)
- secondary sex characteristics that aren’t connected with the reproductive system but distinguish the sexes, and usually appear at puberty (breasts, facial hair, size of larynx, subcutaneous fat, etc.)
Using genitals and gonads alone, more than 99.9% of people fall into two non-overlapping classes—male and female—and the other traits almost always occur with these. If you did a principal components analysis using the combination of all five traits, you’d find two widely separated clusters with very few people in between. Those clusters are biological realities, just as horses and donkeys are biological realities, even though they can produce hybrids (sterile mules) that fall morphologically in between.
If sex were purely a social construct, sexual selection wouldn’t work: males would look identical to females. That difference itself suggests that there’s a biological reality to sex, and that this biological reality—the correlation of chromosomal constitution with reproductive traits and with secondary sexual traits—is what has caused both behavioral and morphological differences between the sexes. If sex were purely a social construct, then male deer wouldn’t have antlers, male peacocks wouldn’t have long tails, human females wouldn’t have breasts, etc.
Biologists from different cultures agree on the hierarchical categorization of life, of which each sexual species reproduces in a similar way as opposed to asexual species.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Yet we have our own personal categorizations based on personal experiences that can come into conflict with the socially constructed ones. How do you determine which ones are based on personal experience vs being programmed by culture?
If you are using society or culture as the reason for the existence of some mental category, then you are essentially saying that it is the cause of some mental category. There is no difference between some state or some cause. Every state is both a cause and effect.
If gender is socially constructed (i.e. not determined by the individual) then it's subjective and CAN be determined by the individual. If it is biologically determined then it is the way it is and cannot be determined by the individual.
It's the same as not being able to decide what age you are but being able to decide whether you "act" your age or not.
Form is an epiphenomenon. Our similarities or difference in form never explain anything. All casual events are achieved by difference of existence/body. In the case of any entity, any similarities or differences in form are achieved through the difference of their own existence
If a person is to have a similar form of body to another person, it is achieved through the existence of their unique body. The fact of bodies having similar form can only be achieved by the difference of a person’s existing body. For two people to have testes, for example, it the existence of the different bodies which obtain the fact. Only the unique existence of the other’s body can present the similarity of form. Form is only along for the ride of what the different bodies are doing. Bodies are doing the causing.
In describing the presence of states of bodies, such as the presence of certain chromosomes, genitals, gonads, hormones and other bodily characteristics, like facial hair, breasts, larynx size, subcutaneous fat, etc., there is absolutely no problem. There are states of biology present in the first instance.
The trouble is these states are not sex. All those biological states are so regardless of how they get sorted into social category like sex and gender. The trans person body does not change when they take on a sex or gender different to what some people expect.
This is true of anyone. If everyone got up tomorrow and understood they just didn’t have sex or gender, their bodies wouldn’t be altered at all. The social fact of being categorised as one particular gender or sex has no impact on the body. The biological reality has no concern for how it is categorised.
Since descriptions of selection, differences in behaviour, trends in properties of bodies across mass populations are actually descriptions of states of the body, they are unaffected by which, if any, social categorisation of sex is present or not. If we, for example, do not understand deer to have the sex of “male” and “female,” there biology will be unaffected. And we will still be able to describe all the differences in the bodies we encounter. We would still see bodies with antlers fighting each other, other bodies which give birth to baby deer living in herds and reproducing with a victorious body with antlers.
Biology does not care for which category, if any, you put it in. It is itself and does what it does.
There is a great irony to all this handwringing over sex being a social construction.
Who is thinks biology is a social construction? Certainly not the person who distinguishes biological states from the social fact of sex and gender categorisation. They hold biology to be immune to impact from the social facts. Bodies are bodies, they say, no matter how we categories them. Those deer wth antlers will still be fighting each other, whether we think them male, female, sexless or anything else, for they are biological bodies doing so.
For the person panicking over sex being a social construction, the opposite is true: they think the biological facts depend upon the presence of the social fact of sex and gender. Supposedly, the very existence of deer with antlers fighting each other depends on the understanding/categorisation they are “male.” Just as you did here, they try to claim biology is somehow impossible unless there is a social fact of a particular sex category. They are literally arguing that the very existence of biology (deer with antlers) depends — they are actually the ones who think biology is constructed by a social practice of sex categorisation— on a fact of it being categorising a certain way ( “male” ).
There no such distinction. All our personal experiences are affected by culture because the language and concepts we learn and develop are done so within the context of our culture. At the very least, for example, a person's personal experience is going to be formed in or in context of the language of their culture.
No he doesn't, actually. He just claims that his depression is caused by the experiment. He can't prove it, though, because it's impossible to know what his life would have been like without the experiment.
For which of my claims would you like me to provide evidence? That gender is a construct? I already provided ample examples of constructed elements of gender performance that are malleable.
Your preferences can change over time. You can learn and unlearn preferences. What I liked ten years ago is not the same as what I like now.
Transgenders are claiming that there is something out of their control about them that defines them as the opposite gender, and that they can't change it.
And I don't think anyone is merely defined by their preferences.
In theory, yes we could get rid of gender.
But until we stop performing it, gender exists.
Each Conscious reality is their own. Communicating information to each other and society is the goal.
Therefore any identity or social construct that increases information transfer between individual realities is supported. As long as it does not distress the sender and result in information loss.
This is not true for all transgender people though, there are those who feel like they're a genuine mix. There is also of course an interplay between their personal gender identity and the social roles they know.
Quoting Harry Hindu
You mean assess each other's reproductive status/abilities? One could ask, I suppose, though it is of course awkward. But it's not like there aren't crossdressing people right now, so I am not sure how the problem could get worse with more genders. Wouldn't you get more information about others if there were more genders?
Quoting Harry Hindu
But being outside of traditional gender roles does have consequences, so I am not sure how your thought experiment is relevant.
Quoting Taneras
Excluding one tenth of a percentage is not arbitrary, then?
Quoting Taneras
It's not just the transgender movement though. As was pointed out in the OP, the idea is also supported by parts of the feminist movement.
Quoting Taneras
Things are never "true by definition", unless you think definitions can be true or false. If your argument is "true by definition", it just means your constructed your definition in a way to preclude the conclusion - i.e. your argument is circular.
Quoting Taneras
The behaviors that are acceptable expressions of masculinity / feminity have changed a lot over the past, say, 50 years. If you want to look at sports, look at the changed status of female leagues in many traditionally masculine sports. Association football in Europe is one example. 20 years ago, noone cared about the female teams, now at least the international tournaments garner significant media attention.
The position of women in politics has also changed dramatically. So has the status of "stay at home dads" and in general the role model for fatherhood.
Well, I've asked twice now how you determine the distinction between what is socially constructed and what is natural, but you avoided the question both times. I can only assume that there is no difference for you - that every "independent" thought that we have isn't really independent at all, but is shaped by culture. What you are essentially describing is the lack of free will of individuals in a society. What you are proposing leaves no room for transgenders or homosexuals to realize and choose their own gender/sex. If gender/sex is a social construct then how can a person in a society even come to the realization that they might be something different than the social construct?
Another problem is how your argument leads to an infinite regress of social constructionism. I'll tell you what, let's take a ride down that infinite regress and see where it leads.
If everything is a social construction, then the distinction between culture and nature is a social construction. The theory of evolution by natural selection proposes that humans and everything that we do and create, are simply natural outcomes of natural processes. Culture itself is a natural process. So what humans like you are doing is projecting their anthropomorphism onto reality as if reality (their mind) is a product of society, not nature. Your own theory inexorably leads to that conclusion and the science supports it. Maybe you might want to take a look at evolutionary psychology which proposes that natural selection (a natural process) shapes the mind, and culture is just another aspect of nature, or an environment.
So, in your view, does nature precede culture? If not, then how do you prevent your theory from falling into an infinite regress?
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Wrong. I said that biology is impossible if not for the differences and similarities. If there aren't just two sexes, then why don't humans have a wide range of features? Why don't some of have trunks for noses, tails, or some other organs that we might or might not refer to as sexual, or gender? Here's the quote:
Quoting Harry Hindu
Why are these five traits occurring together in such large numbers as to create these clusters of biological realities?
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
If differences between bodies are real, then how is it that doesn't determine "fate"?
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Our similarities or difference in form explains the differences in behavior. Can you lift a large fallen tree with your nose? An elephant can.
If social constructionism isn't a cause, but a state, then what is it that you propose to change (the cause) that leads to a new effect (gender-neutrality)? Also, how is it that you have come to realize any of this on your own if your ideas are simply the result of cultural constructionism and the culture you grew up in constructed a binary concept of sex and gender?
Did you even read the definitions I provided? If you want to claim that it is subjective, then it can't be a social construction. It would be personal - a personal choice - that could actually go against the social norm. A transgender rejects the social construction. How can something that is socially constructed reject a social construction?
So where is the evidence that a man actually feels like a woman, or vice versa? You seem to accept ideas that have no evidence that support your political viewpoint and reject other ideas that do have evidence because it doesn't support your political viewpoint.
Seems more like psychology than politics.
You probably want to read the previous exchanges between NKBJ and I to understand the context of what you quoted..
Does psychology precede politics in your view? In other words, do you need to explain someone's psychology in order to explain their political views?
You're very needlessly aggressive.
Also, I do not think that there is any evidence that suggests any man feels like a woman. I think it's impossible to feel like a man or a woman.
So first of all, I don't claim gender is subjective. I share your views that it is biologically determined what gender you are and personally I think transgenderism is for some a mental disorder and for others an ideological idea - like the example in OP.
However, I disagree with your distinctions.
Culture is socially constructed, you cannot change the culture by yourself but whether you continue to subscribe to it as you get older is up to you. You can change the culture you subscribe to. Within a binary perspective, in so far as gender is concerned, that means a man can choose to become a woman rather than continue being a man.
In a non-binary perspective, society has limited perception of gender into two categories but this is, in fact, wrong and many people don't fit into those categories. Therefore they posit gender is actually a spectrum and many genders exist within that spectrum.
There are transgender people who think gender is biologically determined, that gender is socially constructed and that gender is non-binary.
You have acted like transgender people have unified views on this subject but they don't. That's the only thing I am trying to get across to you.
Right, which would't be a social construction. If different people believe in different things then that isn't a social construction. It is personal preference based on personal experience. It is only when a group of people adopt a shared understanding of something that it becomes a social construct. God is a social construct in which different versions exist within the American culture (freedom of religion). There are many subcultures that can exist within a culture, and if culture itself is a social construction, then that throws a wrench in to how we define culture. In essence, culture ceases to exist, and all is left is our real biological differences and similarities that lead to real differences and similarities in behavior.
This is very confused per what I'm saying and per the conventional views of this.
Gender is male/female/etc. conceptually. Concepts are mind-dependent.
Biological sex is male/female mind-independently--per genetics, (nonmental) physical structure, etc.
There are social norms with respect to gender conceptually. Basically, this is ways that individuals think about gender, where that gains some social traction via others agreeing on the conceptual divisions, and then that's reinforced via social behavior, social expectations, etc.
An individual can become aware that those social norms with respect to gender don't capture how they feel--they don't match their psychological reality, in other words.
So we're not referring to two different things by "gender" re social interaction and individual feeling. It's just that two different conclusions are being reached about gender. The social norm and the way and individual feels. An individual feels they don't fit the social norm. Thus they consider themselves a different gender, relative to the social norms.
Biological sex is irrelevant in all of this, aside from the fact that the social norms are at least to some extent correlated with biological sex a la the gender concept of "female" being attached to female per biological sex, for example. And then some individuals who feel they don't fit the gender social norm decide to change their biological sex to the extent that they can--which involves changing some aspects of physical structure. They want their biological sex to match their gender as much as possible.
I'll agree with the last part, but not the first. In regards to the last part, do you agree that minds themselves are independent, and do you consider a social construct as group-think? Is there a distinction for you when it comes to independent thought and group-think?
Quoting Terrapin Station
Okay, you answered my question. Gender is an individual concept, or feeling, and then there are social norms that can either support or reject one's individual feeling of gender.
If biological differences are real then how does that not lead to real differences in behaviors and expectations of others. Females seem to have this need to keep the male around to help rear the children rather than her doing it all by herself while the male wants to be promiscuous. Is this a social construction, or natural behaviors stemming from natural (biological) causes? It seems to me that marriage is a social construction that limits a males natural inclination to be promiscuous.
Definitely there are some physical or behavioral differences statistically, most not universally, correlated with biological sex, and that definitely influences gender concepts, but that doesn't amount to gender not being conceptual/mental. What we're referring to by "gender" conventionally is something conceptual.
(Just noticed another typo in my post above, by the way--"enforced" should have been "reinforced.")
Something being socially constructed means it is an invention or an artifice of a given society. What's your definition?
How is this not a contradiction?
Yeah, I don't get what he's saying there, either.
Isn't it useful to recognize and be knowledgeable of the statistics, especially when it's as high as 99.9% for the topic we are discussing - the real differences between sex/gender? If not, then why have statistics?
Because "gender" hasn't been defined consistently as something other than sex, I consider sex the same as gender.
You are right in the fact that there are behaviors that different cultures expect the different sexes to engage in. The fact that these behaviors are a characteristic of a culture, that is to say that it is part of the identity of that culture, and vary from culture to culture, is evidence that these aren't behaviors that are indicative of one's sex. They are simply human behaviors that that are expected by a particular culture, based on one's sex, and vary from culture to culture.
So, for someone to say that they feel like a woman when they were born a man, what are they actually saying - that they feel like a social construction, or a biological sex, or something else entirely (and if so, what)?
If someone is able to make a personal decision about what gender is AND that decision can run counter to the expectations of the culture they live in, then how is it a social construction?
Wait, are you saying that something statistically unusual isn't real?
Quoting Harry Hindu
Re that, you can do that, of course, but you're just not going to understand a lot of what people are talking about in that case. It would be as if you're intentionally courting confusion on your part re what a lot of people are talking about.
No, I asked if it was useful to recognize and be knowledgeable of the statistics. It was a question, not a statement.
Sure. Why wouldn't it be useful to be familiar with any factual info? Among the factual info that it's useful to be familiar with is the fact that there's a popular convention of using "gender" to refer to a concept that's different from, though correlated with, biological sex, the fact that there are social norms with respect to gender, and the fact that individuals can feel at odds with gender a la the social norms.
I added this to the previous post, by the way. I should have just posted it at the same time:
" Because "gender" hasn't been defined consistently as something other than sex, I consider sex the same as gender. — Harry Hindu"
Re that, you can do that, of course, but you're just not going to understand a lot of what people are talking about in that case. It would be as if you're intentionally courting confusion on your part re what a lot of people are talking about.
They're saying that relative to social norms with respect to gender, as correlated to biological sex, they feel the social norm doesn't match their psychological reality.
Again, your post doesn't take into account the rest of my post. I would again, suggest readers to go back and read my post prior to the one TP replied to here as a response to this post.
Tell me what in the rest of your post is relevant to what I said, and if I agree, I'll paypal you $1000
Re this, for like the third or fourth time now, what I said was: "Psychological and social, yes. Different from biological sex. There's nothing to debate, really. People can feel they are different than their biological sex says they are, especially in relation to the social norms that become associated with biological sex. It's handy to have a term for that. The term we use for it is "gender."
Quoting Terrapin Station
Ah, so you finally read the whole post and created a whole new post to respond to the same post. All this does is make it more difficult for readers to follow.
So now the distinction is between psychological and biological factors? This leads us to a metaphysical discussion about the difference between mind and matter where I say that there is no distinction. Evolutionary psychology is a scientific theory that posits natural physical processes shape our minds and how they function. The causal relationship between our minds and the rest of the world shows that mind and world aren't different types of things, just different kinds of things.
Not only that, but if you are saying that one's psychological reality is a social construct, then you are essentially saying that we engage in group-think all the time. Do you believe in the uniqueness of one's individual categories, or are they all social constructions (the product of group-think)?
Quoting Terrapin Station
That the definition they are using is inconsistent. You owe me $1000. Bitcoin?
Therefore, gender identity is a social construct.
Sounds like it is all personal thought processing to me, based on one's own individual experiences. Are you saying that if a cisgender or transgender moves to a different culture, they would have a different gender, or not?
The rest of the post had nothing to do with the bit that you claimed needed the rest of the post.
I don't need to respond to everything someone writes, and I'm not going to do that if they're ignoring stuff. Quoting Harry Hindu
So now? So now?? I explained this to you in the second post in this thread. The very first response you received.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I agree that there's no distinction between mind and matter. What's there's a distinction between is properties of matter. Not all of it "behaves" just the same way. Hence why you don't smear jelly into battery compartments to make a battery-powered device operate.
Quoting Harry Hindu
If only I'd said anything even remotely resembling that.
Quoting Harry Hindu
What's P in the contradiction?
So then "gender" only refers to that group of people that feel that their biological sex is different than how they feel (I thought the term for that was "transgender"), or to the relationship between transgenders and the social norms, but not the relationship between cisgenders and social norms? Which are you actually saying? You seem to be excluding cisgenders as a gender.
How does it feel to be a woman or a man?
Didn't I write, and didn't you respond to this?
Gender is male/female/etc. conceptually. Concepts are mind-dependent.
Biological sex is male/female mind-independently--per genetics, (nonmental) physical structure, etc.
They would have a different gender identity, not biological gender. But gender as it's used in language and culture rarely focus on the biological, except for within medicine and biological applications. So if we are talking about a cultural approach to gender, how it exists within a society, how it is referred to, how it affects social interactions etc. gender in that sense has nothing to do with biology and all about the construct society formed around the biology.
As far as I know minds only exist in individual heads on a particular body with a particular sexual characteristic. Are you saying that society has a mind?
Minds have a particular sexual characteristic--you mean that in terms of mental content, there are characterstics associated with biological sex F, and other particular characteristics associated with biological sex M?
Then wouldn't you say that is what it feels like to be a man or a woman?
I'm asking you a question. Why would what I say it feels like to be a man or woman be a question?
http://www.health.am/gyneco/more/brain_memory_modifies_wiring_during_the_female_menstrual_cycle/
If this is the case, then when a man claims to feel like a woman is it the case that he has some kind of wiring difference in the brain that is in contrast with the rest of his physical sexual characteristics. If so, aren't we talking about biological factors, and not social?
Do you disagree that our different levels of estrogen and testosterone make us feel different?
What happened to the fact that I just asked you a question (that you haven't bothered to answer)?
So we're back to one thing at a time, because you're ignoring stuff.
I asked you what it feels like to be a woman or man first. Stop evading.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I have been addressing the contradictions (they are numerous) in virtually every post.
No, you didn't. "Then wouldn't you say that is what it feels like to be a man or a woman?" was in response to the question you're not answering.
What was the first sentence, or part of a unique phrase, in the post in question?
I responded to that. I wrote: "They're saying that relative to social norms with respect to gender, as correlated to biological sex, they feel the social norm doesn't match their psychological reality."
Are you not reading my posts?
So "gender" is a cultural characteristic - something that is part of the identity of a culture, not an individual, and "gender identity" is one's perception of one's self relative to this cultural characteristic of a particular culture? So, in essence one isn't changing one's "gender" when moving to a culture with a different "gender". They are changing their "gender identity".
So when someone says that they feel like a woman, they are referring to their gender identity, not their gender. Gender is a social construction and gender identity is not. Gender identity is a personal view. Is this all correct?
Nope.
Quoting Echarmion
Be that as it may, the transgender activists, whatever labels they place on themselves, at least based off what I've read, push for transgender rights. They do not push for the idea that a lot of cisgendered people out there are actually transgendered, which is what you need to escape the idea that the vast majority of people's gender identity matches their biological sex. That's the base of my argument, there's certainly a biological aspect to gender roles, that's why you see a 99.9% overlap between the two. You're not going to get that sort of overlap with just socialization.
Quoting Echarmion
Without getting too far off into the weeds, the "by definition" was describing the true dichotomy created by the terms transgender and cisgender. You're one or the other. If you're not one, by definition you're the other. If you're not married by definition your single and vice versa. The fact that so many more people, "so many more people" being over 1000:1, admit that their gender identity matches their biological sex should tell you all you need to know about how society views sex, gender, and gender roles.
Quoting Echarmion
As there are outliers with toe counts, whether or not people's gender matches their biological sex, there are outliers with typically male and female traits. Given a large enough population you'll find enough extremely competitive women who have whatever traits are needed to accel at soccer (not too familiar with the sport, especially at a professional level) to create enough teams for competition. But the existence of such a league isn't a reflection on the female population as a whole, that's not evidence of some sort of social shift where women are becoming more and more competitive, or whatever other trait that's traditionally not associated with females.
I understand there are bell curves, and at the extremes you'll see more masculine women and more feminine men. I don't think claiming that gender roles are largely biologically based necessitates ignoring those extremes.
I hadn't read every post. Why were we bringing up the biological correlation to gender concepts anyway?
Nature does not precede culture. Environment and culture are part of nature. Any time a body causes anything, it interacts with its environment. There is no biological cause without an environment. There is no impact of the environment without the affected person's biology. The Nature vs Nurture dichotomy is a myth.
Let's say a person has gene which causes them to have a trait. The genetic effect cannot occur without the environment a person interacts with. They present with this genetic event only if the environment allows. If they were in a different environment, one which would alter the gene/what the gene produces, a different trait would have been caused. Genes cannot have their effect without an impact of environment. No genetic event occurs without its suitable environment.
Similarly, an environmental or cultural impact on someone's behaviour or traits cannot occur without their genetics and wider biological. A human, for example, can only be influenced to learn a language or cultural practice because their body/biology responds in a particular way. If human biology was different, if we didn't generate these sorts of experiences in response to social environment, we wouldn't be subject to a cultural influence. If my body didn't respond to hearing people speak by learning language, no-one would be able to teach me their language. To be socially influenced, I need my particular body, my biology.
There is no infinite regress because biology and environment were never isolated. SOmeone who exists is, at all times, a product of both biological and environment states. There are no causal events which are the body or environment isolated. Every single state of a person is a product of biology and environment. There is never one without the other.
I know that... but you equate those differences similarities with the social category of sex. Unless those differences are categorised as "male" and "female," you claim these traits are impossible.
But these traits are not a classification of male or female. They are the existence of bodies. When these bodies exist, they will be so regardless of how they might get categorised. These bodies could be in any sex category, or not in a sex category at all, and they wouldn't be any different.
In any case, the existence of the given body is why a particular body with traits exists. The mule is not a sterile body because of how it's parents were categorised in terms of sex. It is so because the two bodies in reproduction produced this body of a mule which is sterile.
If you mean "fate" in the sense of many different ways a biological entity comes to exist, it absolutely does (in conjunction with its environment, of course). The real differences of body just aren't sex classification. Bodies will be doing their thing regardless of whether they are categorised as male, female, sexless or anything else.
A penis is penis, whether of a male person, female person, intersex person a sexless person.
They do not. The elephant can life a tree with its nose (unlike me), but not because of form. It can do so because it has a body/nose strong enough to lift the tree. The elephant can lift this tree because it is a state(s) with a nose strong enough to do so. Explanation is in the presence of the body not the form. Change the existence of body in question, say a elephant with a weak nose or a human with a strong one, and the opposite behaviour will be true. Existence accounts for our behaviours, not ideas.
A change is achieved by developing a certain understanding of gender and it relationship to our behaviour, identifies and bodies. It's a question of engaging biological and environmental influences to produce a new gender-neutral culture. Like any culture change or new understanding, one teaches it with a variety different biological and environmental influences.
States of "social construction" are caused by a variety of biological and environmental influences. The fact social construction is a state doesn't mean it isn't a product of other things (e.g. biology, environment, cultural states, etc.), it just means to be a "a social construct" is to be one type of state rather than a cause.
My ideas are a result of my biology interacting with the environment I've lived in over my life. There is no separation between "realised this on my own" and "a result of the culture I grew up in." All my ideas, even my entirely original ones (if their are any), are a result of the culture I grew up in. My culture was the environment which interacted with my body to produce my ideas. Culture does not have to representationally insert an idea (e.g.someone teaching me what a word means) into my head to be a cause. My culture just needs to be an environment " that didn't cause my body to have a different idea" to are an influence in forming my ideas.
A lot of ideas are also formed in relation to those in my culture. This very discussion and my augments about sex and gender, for example, are a product of the binary concept of of sex and gender in my culture. Trans people, gender neutrality as opposed to a binary, etc., are all concepts formed out of the gender binary. If I lived in culture without a gender binary (and didn't I imagine it), my argument would be totally different and I probably wouldn't even understand most, if anything, people were talking about in this thread.
But because of the inseparable interplay of biology ans culture, what constitutes masculinity and femininity slowly changes over time in terms of social roles.
I think there will always be a way to point to a masculine-feminine spectrum in society, but it would be foolish to try to nail down for all time how to define its attributes.
I think the most crucial concept in these nature-nurture gender discussions, and the hardest for traditionalists to grasp, is the somewhat threatening idea that biology can shape brain function in such a way as to produce in each of us a particular gender-based style of perceptual engagement with the world. And furthermore, that there is no such thing as a biological body outside of behavior. Behavior is embodied and the body , designed as it is to behave, to move , to interact in a world, can only fully be understood in the way that it is animated. If the body cannot be properly understood as a slab of meat disconnected from behavior, then it is meaningless to point to a strict two category definition of the biological body in terms of male vs female chromosomes. Behavior dictates the gender of the body in terms of how we move it, how we walk and talk, etc. that means that two heterosexual males are differently gendered, bodily as well as psychologically by subtle differences between them in masculinity-femininity.
I am referring to different stages of an individuals life, I'd say, if you were assigned a gender at birth you're powerless to argue against that until you're at least eleven.
It is not my argument, I think gender being socially constructed is a ludicrous notion. I don't think you are representing your opposition as well as you could but I don't feel like arguing further about this.
Good luck arguing against those who think gender is socially constructed, I've given up on them.
First, thanks for your participation in the thread.
Second, it was never my intent to try to change those that have a political agenda to push because they're irrational and that would simply be a fool's errand. They aren't interested in logical truth. Political agendas often ignore the bad science they are based on. I'm more interested in reaching reasonable people who enjoy skepticism and are willing to question the status quo and and be open-minded. I'm a scientist at heart and abhor politics and politicians who almost always lie or warp the truth for their own ends.
This seems like a contradiction. Nature does precede culture as nature is the amalgam of all states/environments.
Nature is reality - what is real. Like you said, the biological differences and similarities are real, meaning that they are natural, and a product of natural selection.
Culture is a kind of environment. An environment is a part of nature. An environment applies pressure on genetic fitness. Culture - as an environment - can apply environmental pressure on our genetic (evolutionary biology) and psychological/behavioral (evolutionary psychology) characteristics.
Organisms, as part of the environment, act as part of natural selection by becoming selective pressures themselves on other species. Predators and prey create selective pressures on each other, in a special relationship that evolves each species in special ways. Culture can be thought of as the selective pressure from the ideas and behaviors of a particular group of organisms on the physical and psychological aspects of individual organisms (I'm using "organisms", not just "humans", because aliens could have culture too).
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Yes! This is what I've suggested before in this thread and in others. The science article in the OP mentions this idea as well. Could it be that we are beginning to see eye to eye - that gender isn't just a social construction?
Quoting TheWillowOfDarknessThere are genes that are influenced by the environment - sure. This is a natural process and is has a scientific name for it - epigenetics. Another field of science that I mentioned - evolutionary psychology - posits the idea that our minds are affected by natural selection as well.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarknessAgreed. Like I said, you can't lift a fallen tree with your nose and you also can't teach an elephant English.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
There's no infinite regress now that you've admitted that everything isn't socially constructed, not because biology and environment were never isolated - which is just wrong. Biology is a recent state of affairs in the universe - an exponential increase in complexity in this corner of the universe - one that came about thanks to the sustainable energy the sun has provided over the past 4.5 billion years. Environments have always existed since the Big Bang. Biology has not. In other words, nature precedes all, as everything is part of nature.
So, it seems to me that we agree mostly, and maybe are just disagreeing on terms at this point?
Yes, biological gender doesn't change, but their perception of their gender identity may change. However, it's more likely that the culture they grew up in become their definition of gender. If someone grows up in a place which has a strict idea about what it means to be a woman, they will view those ideas and characteristics about "woman" as the norm of what it means to be a woman. Even if they move to a new place, they will not be able to easily erase their "programming" and they will view women in the same way. Which is why people who moves to another country with a vastly different culture, will have a hard time mixing well into that culture, it might take years or never at all.
Quoting Harry Hindu
The perception of gender is the social construct and that social construct informs how we view our gender identity. If a culture has an idea of how a man should be and you are a woman who feels like your identity fits more with the construct of a man in that culture, you might become confused as to why you biologically are a woman, but every aspect of your feelings and psyche points to the idea of a man. When you then come into contact with other people in that culture, they treat you like a woman because that's your biological gender, but you feel awkward like you don't belong in that category, that all the ideals of being a woman don't apply to you.
In that case, you might start thinking about things like a sex change and acting out like a man instead of a woman, because that is what you feel is right for you in that culture. The social construct of how genders should act and behave put your identity into a category that was in conflict with your real biological gender, so you either try to deny your gender identity or you go ahead and accept your own identity where you feel at home.
I think this is like anything really. We have something physical in front of us, but we experience it by perception. Our bodies apply to this as well, we have a perception of it and it has a physical existence. Perception and physical existence don't always play hand in hand.
Perception of gender in terms of how we move our bodies, how we process perceptual information, how we perceive others in terms of sexual attraction, is not simple socially constructed. If I were to take you in a time machine back to when you were still in the womb and flood your brain with certain sex hormones , your brain physiology would be altered in terms of gendered perceptual-affective processing(such studies have been done on lab animals). I could steer you in more of a masculine or feminine direction. I'm not saying that the definition of masculinity and femininity is fixed, though. It changes throughout human history as a consequence of the interaction between biology and culture, but there is an underlying brain physiology basis that is independent of culture.
I also get that some of our unique gifts, interests and talents are determined partly by biology and partly by interaction with environment, culture, significant others (including family, teachers, etc.).
But is it really helpful anymore to categorise any of them along gender lines?
Ideally, a child’s genitalia (and therefore their gender) would not factor into identity until puberty, although they would hopefully have had opportunity by then to explore a range of social roles and to ‘dress-up’. At this point their physical strength, body shape and brain function might begin to limit some of their career/hobby/sporting options, and they will start to have some idea of their sexual attraction preferences.
I guess from this point it would be helpful to describe attraction along the lines of masculine/feminine physical attributes, preferred sexual behaviour or activities (including procreation), etc that would allow one to find an ideal sexual partner, either casually or romantically. But I’m trying to rack my brains to determine what else ‘gender’ is useful for anymore...
I understand that life would not be quite so simple if we couldn’t operate in a male-female binary, especially in terms of language and pronouns - but surely we’ve worked out by now that real life is not as binary (or as simple) as we once imagined it was.
I’m also conscious of the 0.1% of people that we so easily dismiss as an anomaly because they don’t fit into our neat categories. In a population of 6 billion people, that’s still 6 million human beings who right now don’t fit into our categories of what a human being can be - not to mention subsequent generations. We may not ever meet them personally - but, I’m sorry, I tend to find that level of dismissiveness unacceptable.
This is straw-manned. Of course not everything around sexuality is a social construct, but how you act on the biological impulses and emotions you have and what is creating those feelings externally is very much a construct. Everything around you, how you navigate the world is based on what you've learned and experienced so far.
Quoting Joshs
Yes, but you are missing the entire point. Did you read the previous posts with the of back and forth arguments? If you did that, it's exactly what I'm talking about. If you have emotions and biological drives that don't comply with the norms of society and that's why you lean towards another gender concept, you try to fit in within that social construct as there are no concepts in our social construction of a person that is balancing in between. People want to fit everyone else into boxes with labels, this is how we process the world around us. If someone doesn't fit in either box with labels "man" and "woman", people will behave like they're from outer space. Read my earlier posts.
Quoting Joshs
You counter-argued your own argument here since it's exactly what social construct is. The culture is the construct and the clash between biology and culture creates our gender identities. I don't know why it's difficult to juggle the two concepts at the same time? Gender identity is a construct as it relates to the perception of the biological gender, which is our biology.
The clash between the perception of our biology and our biological drives is the basic things we have tried to control ever since society was created in human history. And that is culture, which is a construct, we have constructed ideas about men and women, different in different cultures. Put any child with any type of hormonal makeup into a culture and they will grow up within the confines of that construct. It will affect how they act, process the world and process their own emotions. If you remove the construct and have two people: a man and a woman just existing together without any previous culture, they will spot the biological differences they have between them and then start constructing behavior around it. If you have three people as a starting point, one who in our culture would be unsure which gender they belong to, they wouldn't ask those questions in a tabula rasa culture, since there are no constructs to measure against. There would just be three people without any demand to put them in two boxes, they essentially exist in three boxes without labels. As that culture grows, it may be that such a culture then has three labeled boxes for their basic understanding of gender.
Everything around you is a social construct. From the time you wake up to when you go to bed, you navigate through societies construct. Built up through thousands of generations each changing small things about how we should handle our biological drives and impulses.
Think about this every time you have an impulse or a thought of doing something and you don't, why didn't you? Do you think that's biology? No that's how we've reasoned around our biology, that's the construct that programmed you not to act on that impulse; "oh, if I did that, people would think I'm crazy" or "I can't do that, it's stealing" ...or "I can't do that, it's not what a man should do". That is a construct.
You'll notice that I focused on the underlying perceptual processing level of gendered psychology. If we fully appreciate how globally and primordially psychological masculine-feminine 'brain physiology' shapes our experience of the world, maybe you can agree that for those on the far ends of the 'brain physiology' gender spectrum, the effects of brain function on gendered behavior work at a level well below the ability of someone to mask these effects, or in many cases to be even aware of them. Thus, the situation where everyone else knows someone is gay before they do, even if they don't pursue anyone sexually.
It may be a stereotype, but it is still useful to look at the list of feminized attributes that are associated with gay men on the far end of the spectrum. Limp wrist, feminine walk, lisp and often higher voice, interest in what are generally considered girly activities like playing with dolls,throws like a girl, choose fashion and color and hairstyle that are considered feminine, even when they aren't aware of it.
The point is that there are so many tendencies to perceive and to act that can be associated with the far end of the gay male (and lesbian) spectrum due to brain wiring that it is impossible to control , or even be aware of all of these, and many families will point out that such behaviors became noticeable from a very early age. That's why there has always been a category throughout cultural history, in diverse societies, for highly feminized males, those who cannot disguise their perceptual gender. The only effect of culture on these individuals is an indirect one. They have has to be careful of whom they were seen having sex with in order to avoid punishment, but otherwise made their way through society as an 'other', despite their most desperate attempts to fit in.
Most of the discussion around controlling and choosing psychological gender pertain to those near the middle of the spectrum whose brain wired gender doesn't make them stand out in relation to the binary category their chromosomes put them in. these individuals have always been able to 'pass' as normal relative to whatever social conventions dominated if they so chose.
Transgender as a category is multifaceted, overlapping but not mirroring issues pertaining to brain wiring. Some feminized biological males may feel they were born in the wrong body, and others may not. and some males toward the middle of the brain wiring spectrum may want to to change their physical gender identity. This can sometimes result in a situation of a female-appearing , masculine-acting transgender identity(Caitlyn Jenner?).