What's interesting to me is that these boys are raised as girls but feel like boys, which means that there's something physical that makes us "feel our gender". Although, the article doesn't really mentions whether there are many boys who go the other way, who resent a penis growing because they liked being girls.
Well, I wonder about that. Maybe it's more like all children wanted to behave like "the boys" but girls were discouraged and put in dresses, etc. I wonder if the "normal" girls also didn't feel that way-- wanting to go play with the boys.
But it were the case—if every young (apparent) girl felt the same unease about their gender—one would assume that the people in the town would have already acknowledged that.
What's so wonderful about being a boy? As someone who is somewhat introverted and nerdy, for lack of a better term, all the boy stuff seemed insufferable to me, even as a child. Wrestling, fighting, being aggressive, being tough, being overly competitive, etc is not something I wanted or related to and that attitude most likely kept me from forming the typical male bonding boys and teens develop. I fell deeper into books, computers, games, etc while they were out doing 'boy' stuff. I remember envying girls because they weren't pressured to constantly play sports and being bookish and a voracious reader was perfectly acceptable for them but 'weird' for a boy.
As a parent I see my son's female peers and very few of them are remotely interested in boy stuff, even when offered. Even in toddler stages there's a marked difference in personalities with girls being calmer and more passive and boys wanting to do rough and tumble theatrics. Its obviously innate, at least to me.
>but girls were discouraged and put in dresses, etc.
Well, in the article that's exactly what happened but the males mistaken for girls complained. There's no evidence all girls complained.
"A final interesting observation that Imperato-McGinley made was that these boys, despite being brought up as girls, almost all showed strong heterosexual preferences."
> What's interesting to me is that these boys are raised as girls but feel like boys, which means that there's something physical that makes us "feel our gender".
Transgenders are real, is what you are concluding. That's not really news.
Very much so. Have people not heard the line "gender is entirely a social construct"? That is mainstream thinking where I'm from. Also referred to as the blank slate hypothesis.
I never understood the "X is a social construct" argument. People seem to use it to dismiss ideas out of hand in my experience. Freedom of speech, rule of law, and consenting to sex are similarly "social constructs" as in they aren't fundamental laws of the universe but they seem to be pretty good ideas. What is intended to be inferred by this argument?
There's a large group of people who believe that gender is a natural force in the world -- you are either a boy or a girl, because that's the way genetics is. I have had people tell me that boys like trucks and girls like dresses because of chemical differences in their brains.
The gender is a social construct argument is the voice that believes the opposite -- that gender roles and expression are learned behavior in our society. Our parents and peers teach us what it means to be a boy or girl from a very young age, and what is socially unacceptable for those genders. (They also commonly teach us, here in the US, that there are only two genders.)
You are talking about gender, as opposed to biological sex? But then, what is gender by that definition? If it is a social construct, what does it even mean to number them - they would be intangible constructs in the first place; it's like arguing there are only X canonical Marvel universes..
Isn't it possible your biology gives you a natural tendency towards certain interests or activities and that these are reinforced and strengthened by society?
>I have had people tell me that boys like trucks and girls like dresses because of chemical differences in their brains.
In regards to gender differences I find some of the primate evidence[0][1] rather compelling. This doesn't mean that I believe any gender should be treated differently than the other of course but it seems rather obvious to me that some differences exist outside of any conditioning that human societies may provide.
Note that the primate evidence showed that the girls played equally with the stuffed animals and the wheeled toys.
This reminds me of colour preference, where girls are more likely to say they like pink than boys and so people conclude pink is for girls and blue is for boys, yet if you ask what their favourite colour is, the top pick for both sexes is blue.
So the evidence on trucks doesn't support the claim you replied to, but maybe they'd be on firmer ground if they said boys had proportionately less interest in stuffed toy animals than trucks.
Not all instances of playing with something are equal. In terms of total interactions the females played with both the same number of instances but they also played with the dolls a significantly longer period of time.
It seems the duration shows the same pattern as counting the number of interactions:
"males interacted for a greater total time with wheeled than with plush objects while females did not differ in the duration of interactions with the toy types"
There is a book call the Social Construction of Reality and, exactly like you're saying, everything in our society is a social construct. Schools, legal systems, states, money, war, debt .. they only exist because we believe they do. You can choose not to exist in something like the police and law, and go murder some people, but enough people believe in those constructs that they'll lock you up, or at the least, put you in a mental institution. There are people who have trouble understanding society with mental illnesses, and many of them end up on the streets. Hallucinations, bi-polar, schizo-effective people often have trouble working within the social constructions the rest of us take for granted.
This wasn't really meant to answer your political issue, but just to provide a context of what is and isn't socially constructed.
But consider something like the lower representation of women in math. If it happens because of genetically different altitudes/interests then it's inevitable, and there's no use complaining about it. If it's because of society discouraging women, that's just plain dumb.
(Btw: your examples are highly debatable. You can argue that consent and freedom of speech are social practices which respect objective moral/ethical facts).
> If it happens because of genetically different altitudes/interests then it's inevitable, and there's no use complaining about it.
That's not actually true. Even when something is the expected outcome of certain biological factors, that doesn't make it inevitable. With the right kind of intervention, very little is completely biologically determined. That's what medicine is all about. In many ways, culture is also about overcoming the limits and defaults of human biology. There's no reason to suppose that differences between the sexes can't be influenced into a direction that appears more desirable.
That makes sense. I just wanted to point out that a purely cultural difference should be presumed guilty, whereas if there were genetically driven ones, they might not be. The real meat of the point is that a culturally driven difference in this realm is a bad thing.
> Freedom of speech, rule of law, and consenting to sex are similarly "social constructs" as in they aren'
t fundamental laws of the universe
This varies across philosophical traditions. Common-law traditions do, in a sense, hold these sorts of rights as part of the origin story of the universe.
I don't know what idea your statement is supposed to express.
Let's start with this - what is gender?
I know what biological sex is, roughly; I thought gender was a synonym for it(this may be a translation/communication barrier).
From googling the topic, it appears that gender is defined as "the expectations a society places on an individual of a given sex", which makes the "gender is entirely a social construct" statement tautological.
I read about the "blank slate hypothesis", and it seems to be about something else entirely - it seems to be pretty vaguely referring to the "knowledge" and "experience" a human being might have from before they were born vs after. It seems rather naive to be aware of all the other biological differences between men and women but demand that they have no effect on "the mind", or more appropriately, on the expressions of will that a human being exhibits. I'm not an expert though, so maybe there's a deeper truth out there somewhere.
"Gender is distinct from sex" is a scientific hypothesis. It could be true, false, or true with qualifications. The second of those three options appears to be pretty reliably refuted by the evidence we have. Unfortunately, it is a politically problematic to say this in "progressive" circles. Sound familiar to some other hot-topic science debate we've discussed on HN before?
You don't need to be familiar with or pay attention to this stuff, but you can't both reserve the right to ignorance on a topic and take a stance on the same topic.
If you don't want to pay attention to what's going on with transgender people, then go on and live your life — that is 100% your prerogative. If somebody tells you they're a woman, you can just let it pass without any burden on yourself — you don't have to think about the validity of their statement or the implications or what they've gone through in their life.
But if you loudly proclaim your lack of knowledge about transgender people while also loudly proclaiming that they should be treated disrespectfully, I don't think the transgender people are the ones being unreasonable in that situation.
> ...you can't both reserve the right to ignorance on a topic and take a stance on the same topic.
Sure I can. My stance can be "I don't want to know very much about this topic and if you keep trying to bring it up ahead of much more important topics, then I will have to ignore you more loudly."
> If somebody tells you they're a woman, you can just let it pass without any burden on yourself...
That alone is certainly is not a burden on myself. The burden begins when the issue of societies behavior towards transgender people continually eclipses more important issues. I feel sorry for people whose issues get used to polarize people for political theater.
> ...if you loudly proclaim your lack of knowledge about transgender people while also loudly proclaiming that they should be treated disrespectfully,...
I don't know who is "loudly" doing anything or where this argument is coming from. Did I say something loudly? Is that the same thing as just saying the words "I don't care about this topic and please stop telling me about it...?"
All I said is - why should I care? If you say "because they're people", then I would say "we have more important types of people to worry about". For instance, who is doing anything about the sociopaths and psychopaths that seem to gravitate towards positions of power? Where's all the attention for that?
I agree that there are more important issues in the world, but it doesn't make this unworthy of attention. You don't have to care about it, but if you're going into threads about transgender people trying to convince other people it doesn't matter, that's way past not caring and into the territory of "actively opposing."
Personally, I have many causes I support. This doesn't have to be one of yours, but all I'm saying is, just because you want to spend your time on more important things doesn't mean you should spend your time telling people how unimportant transgender issues are.
I think redirecting peoples attention is probably necessary. Perhaps pointing out how unimportant transgender issues are to me is not the best way to do that. But really, I'm just commenting about my thoughts on this (frankly, off-topic for this site) article because HN is my backyard. I'm not heading off to LGBTQ+ forums to harass people or searching for Transgender articles elsewhere on the net, so I don't feel that I'm actively opposing your issue.
You and I are actually on the same side. We both wish people didn't care very much if anyone switched genders. Beyond that, I think we all want to live in peace. In my opinion though, our common enemy are the very rude, petty and unintelligent people on both sides who turn social issues into a circus and present extreme narratives that make people fight and go to more extremes. That makes things hard for everybody on both sides, right? This article does not do that, but the reason it was posted (i.e. I feel a constant battle going on over the perception of the Transgender issue) does annoy me a tad bit and I talk a lot.
I once read that travelling helps people to be more accepting of foreign cultures. Too bad the Internet couldn't have done that instead.
It's not that we political conservatives believe transgender people are faking it. Transgenderism is real. We conservatives acknowledge some folks are born with a sincere belief or feeling they are the wrong gender.
I personally sympathize with such people; it must be torturous and painful to be a particular biological sex, with hormones and chromosomes of one biological sex, but feel and believe you are a different biological sex.
Where we differ with leftists is how to view the transgender phenomenon. This article, for example, states that this "girl" became a boy due to a "rare genetic disorder occurs because of a missing enzyme which prevents the production of a specific form of the male sex hormone - dihydro-testosterone - in the womb." It was a genetic disorder; a birth defect.
Thus, this "girl" wasn't a girl at all. Biologically and scientifically speaking, he was a boy with an undeveloped penis.
So it is with transgender folks in the West. We see transgenderism as an outgrowth of the medical condition known as gender dysphoria. Folks suffering with gender dysphoria should seek help, whether that be a medical sex change operation or counseling.
There is also the issue of language policing, which confuses the issue; As a political device, some demand trans-women be called women, which confuses discussion of the issue. There are times that I think this might be the aim - to shut down rational discussion so only the emotive appeal remains.
A whole other issue is segregated bathrooms; I have yet to see people get past the label-flinging stage to ask the fundamental question: why are bathrooms segregated (hetero/cis M/F) in the first place?
why are bathrooms segregated (hetero/cis M/F) in the first place?
I think a much better question would be "Why aren't they all private?" If you create individual bathrooms with lockable doors, you just label it "rest room" and you don't need to assign a gender or make a private matter a public issue.
Why should trans individuals have to deal with the question of which bathroom they "belong" in? What's next? Questioning which bathroom gay people belong in?
Making private individual bathrooms the norm would also eliminate many other issues. The line to the women's room tends to be longer than to the men's because using a urinal takes less time and the use of urinals is more space efficient, so a men's bathroom sometimes has more toilets plus urinals than a women's bathroom has toilets. This has caused some people to decry this as yet another form of sexism that they would like redressed.
Meanwhile, the men's room can have a long wait if you need to have a bowel movement. Lots of urinals is great if everyone just needs to pee, but problematic if that is not the case. Small public men's rooms often have only one toilet, the rest urinals. What if two men are traveling together and both need the actual toilet?
Historically, men's bathrooms tended to not have changing tables, reinforcing the expectation that only women change diapers. Individual bathrooms also eliminates that issue.
The list of problems it would solve is no doubt much longer, but you get the idea.
> a much better question would be "Why aren't they all private?"
I think that just skips the original question by assuming the answer. Why is there no convention for privacy from other members of the same gender? You have to consider the economy of providing totally private bathroom facilities too.
> Why should trans individuals have to deal with the question of which bathroom they "belong" in?
Because everyone does.
> This has caused some people to decry
If those people have good arguments, let's hear them.
> The list of problems it would solve
But are we forcing establishments to provide these facilities? It's easy for Google to spend another million on individual cubicles to impress its employees; not all small businesses will find it so easy or rewarding..
Many small businesses already go this route. Any place that only provides one or two toilets fairly often already has it set up as gender neutral, individual restrooms. Cost would only be an issue for establishments that need to provide multiple toilets. The burden could be eased by grandfathering in existing establishments and applying the new rule to new construction and major renovations.
> This has caused some people to decry
If those people have good arguments, let's hear them.
So, you are open to hearing these arguments, but out of hand dismissing my solutions.
> Why should trans individuals have to deal with the question of which bathroom they "belong" in?
Because everyone does.
But it isn't some big burden for most people the way it is for trans people. Trans people are a little bit like platypuses: they defy our established categories and don't readily fit our little boxes. That fact will never really change. But it doesn't have to be some big problem wrt bathroom use if we just have more private restrooms in public spaces.
I was homeless for nearly six years. I got off the street earlier this month. Private bathrooms allowed me to do things like brush my teeth without being thrown out. There is very much a classist double standard in what is socially acceptable use of a public bathroom.
Traveler brushing their teeth in a public bathroom? Totes fine. Homeless person doing the same thing? Excellent excuse to ban them from the premises.
Muslim washing their shoes and feet before praying in the hallway on a college campus? Totes fine. Homeless person washing their shoes or feet in the same bathroom? Misuse of the facilities and we need to ask you to leave.
There are lots of ways in which public bathrooms are burdensome for anyone who does not readily fit in with whatever the social norms happen to be. Some of the groups for whom it is burdensome lack the means to make their problem part of the public debate. Other than me occasionally commenting on it in public forums, I am not aware of anyone advocating for the rights of homeless people where it comes to public bathroom use.
There are old TV shows where, for example, cross dressers have to decide which bathroom to use. If someone is successfully passing for female socially and not trying to sleep with me, I gives a damn what bits are between their legs and I don't see why we need a public debate about their bits and bathrooms. There is an available robust solution that could make it a non issue.
Why is there no convention for privacy from other members of the same gender?
Most people are not actually comfortable pooping or dealing with their period, etc, in a public toilet with other people around. There are some people who cannot make themselves poop in public.
In private homes where we share bathroom facilities with our closest people, such as blood relatives or a spouse, the convention is that bathrooms are private and the door gets closed. Most folks don't want to use the toilet with witnesses, even when those witnesses are their most intimate friends and family.
So, I really fail to see why anyone would give push back on this idea. Most people do not actually like using public bathrooms to begin with and public facilities create undue friction for the most marginalized people, like homeless people and trans people. If private bathrooms were the default, we wouldn't even be having a public, nationwide debate about which bathroom trans people should be using. That wouldn't solve all their problems by any stretch of the imagination, but it would remove one burden from their life that is excessive and that unnecessarily sets them apart from other people.
If you think it is not excessive, try spending the day just not using the toilet at all. Most people use the toilet multiple times per day and cannot hold it for eight or ten hours straight. Unless they work from home and basically live as shut ins who get all groceries delivered, etc, this will be a ni...
Would the sinks still be segregated? or installed inside toilet cubicles?
> So, you are open to hearing these arguments, but out of hand dismissing my solutions.
What do you mean? What "out of hand dismissing"?
> But it isn't some big burden for most people the way it is for trans people. Trans people are a little bit like platypuses: they defy our established categories and don't readily fit our little boxes
Are many (pre or none op) trans-women refused entry to male toilets? The controversies I hear are of the opposite nature.
> If someone is successfully passing for female socially and not trying to sleep with me, I gives a damn what bits are between their legs
Again - why are bathrooms segregated in the first place?
If it's to protected women from predatory men, is the suggestion that trans-women are not predatory?
> Most people are not actually comfortable..
This doesn't answer the question though. Why are toilets not totally segregated within the same sex already?
Would the sinks still be segregated? or installed inside toilet cubicles?
I have seen parks where toilets were in individual little rooms and sinks were outside and public. I have also seen arrangements where each little room had both a sink and toilet. They both work okay, though it is nice to have the sink be private as well. I don't see any reason why we can't work on coming up with new standard patterns to try to address issues like cost and space efficiency while improving privacy.
As for the existing toilet situation and why it is the way it is, my suspicion is that it was something that worked reasonably well historically when more than half of all people were rural residents. Sometime in the lifetime of my children, we crossed the point where more than half of all people live in cities.
Things that work reasonably well in a relatively homogenous small community or rural area don't work so well for highly diverse big cities. Times have changed. The ongoing national debate about bathrooms makes it clear that our current setup is now problematic.
I fail to grasp why you are so hung up on this detail. Historic precedent is very often a matter of "it was what they could afford in a poorer society than modern America" or "it was the first thing someone thought up without really studying the problem space in earnest." The fact that this is the status quo in no way whatsoever suggests that it is some kind of best practice that we should dread altering.
When I was growing up, I lived on the edge of town. In one direction, there was more housing, plus shops and businesses. In the other, there were wooded areas. It was really common for men to relieve their bladder on a tree somewhere while out and about. I also learned to relieve myself in the woods, though it is less convenient for a girl.
In a situation like that where it is logistically feasible and socially acceptable to just pee on a tree, there is less need for public toilets. But that does not translate well to the big city. You don't have sufficient privacy nor sufficient greenery. Peeing on a tree occasionally in a wooded area is not a threat to public health. The tree will consider it to be fertilizer and it will not cause the spread of disease amongst people.
But in the big city, if lots of people pee and poop on sidewalks or in alleyways, this is a public health hazard. There is currently a hepatitis A epidemic in Southern California that is killing people. It is related in part to large numbers of homeless people relieving themselves exactly that way.
Public toilets are just less of an issue in rural settings. People routinely just pee on a tree. In some parts of the world, population densities reach small city levels, but they are too poor to build the kind of infrastructure for modern bathrooms. People continue to relieve themselves in a nearby field. One result: Women get raped and sometimes murdered while trying to pee and poop.
Bathroom facilities are a real need in highly populated areas in a way that they just are not with fewer people. We now have 7 billion people on the planet. This is unprecedented. It should be no surprise at all that it leads to unprecedented problems in areas that no one would have ever expected.
Women in Victorian England campaigned for their own bathrooms because they wanted a safe and private place to do their business. Originally there would be a single public bathroom with no gender marking, but what that really meant was that they were men's bathrooms, and women would wait to go at home. This was a pretty big damper on their ability to participate in the public sphere because it limited how much time they could physically spend in public. Gendered bathrooms followed later in other countries for similar reasons. They exist for the same reason that trains in Japan have women-only cars, why there is a women-only rideshare app, etc.
> Thus, this "girl" wasn't a girl at all. Biologically and scientifically speaking, he was a boy with an undeveloped penis.
Actually, scientifically speaking, a different developmental path than the one to which you are accustomed happened. There are real differences that conflict with a desire held by some that people fit in neat categories that do not exist as the clean, platonic ideal they want it to be.
I think "we" should accept the reality that gender is not binary rather than using the political process to harass people who are living proof of that fact.
>> "Actually, scientifically speaking, a different developmental path than the one to which you are accustomed happened."
His delayed sexual development doesn't change the scientific reality that he had, and still has, male hormones and male chromosomes. Biologically, he is a male.
As your article states, that woman has a condition called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, or AIS, producing a person with a vagina but with XY chromosomes.
That isn't normal & healthy development, any more than blindness is normal & healthy. Rather, AIS is a medical condition, a syndrome that causes suffering.
I think you're making my point for me. You appear to be more interested in categorization and distinguishing what is and what isn't normal and healthy than simply acknowledging that gender is not binary, whatever medical category might be applicable to a particular person.
People exist who do not fit into either-or gender boxes. It is just reality.
> Thus, this "girl" wasn't a girl at all. Biologically and scientifically speaking, he was a boy with an undeveloped penis.
The thing is, many of these young people had a strong sensation of being a "boy" despite societal pressure otherwise.
This notion of an internal representation of gender identity is backed by science, and this isn't even the only example.
So there is no argument here that these people are anything but boys with a different developmental path. But is suspect most could have told you that, despite what a non-invasive examination of their body would tell a biological essential-ists.
> Where we differ with leftists is how to view the transgender phenomenon.
Yeah, conservatives want to make it illegal or at least economically infeasible to be transgender. The irony here being that this type of developmental path would rock many conservatives in America to their very core if it happened in their family.
>> "This notion of an internal representation of gender identity is backed by science"
My claim, backed by science, is that this child was a biological male: he had male hormones and male chromosomes. His delayed development didn't change that scientific reality.
> My claim, backed by science, is that this child was a biological male:
This is actually a nice way to reinforce my prior statement, so thanks. You're claiming someone was "biologically male" but hey that person didn't even express a penis until age 7-12. They're not even really intersex people, it's just the traditional definition of "biologically male" is comically incapable of dealing with this.
What's more, before that change most (there is other documentation of this) of the people you would have lectured about being biologically female felt a very strong affinity to the male identity. By happy coincidence, their hormonal cycle gifted them with anatomy they felt more comfortable with.
> he had male hormones and male chromosomes
Well, he specifically lacked some hormones, but...
Look, trans advocates for the most part don't disagree that a trans man and a person born to the traditional definition of men are exactly the same. They're obviously not precisely the same. What trans people want is an opportunity to be trans people without violence, discrimination, and fearmongering.
Trans activists tend to object to the biological essentialism argument not because it is founded on an observation of scientific facts about DNA (which, btw, a lot of people get wrong). They object to it because it's often used to justify acts of violence or discrimination by appealing to defending a biological norm that needs no guardians.
Politics in this context is heavily influenced for the need to simplify concepts into more binary states. The problem is that nature isn't binary.
For example, something is a "disorder" has historical been used as a bit more value neutral word for variance, but the more it is used the more it has become synonymous with disease. Similar for "medical condition". For example, we don't call left handed people to have some form of mental disorder, as that would imply today that there is some form of problem rather than simple variance. It also don't match at all those people who are ambidexterity.
If we found a genetic marker for handedness, it would likely also not be called a genetic disorder. If the variance cause additional problem, then the additional problems would be the disorder and the handedness a simple side effect.
One could argue that gender is more important than handedness, but then we enter values and believes into the mix and that would definitely be political in nature.
> Where we differ with leftists is how to view the transgender phenomenon.
To be fair: There ain't unified views on this on any side, I consider myself a pretty "leftist", never voted conservative in my life, yet I take great issue to the way the political left has picked up identity politics like it did.
At times it feels like they are demanding an unlimited right to "self define", spawning cultural oddities like "headmates" in the social media sphere, which basically normalize mental illness as something that shouldn't be treated but merely seen as being "different".
People identify as a pansexual muffin collectives and society is supposed to accept that "identity" with all seriousness, complete with "feeling" insulted when people don't use the "proper" made up pronouns to address them.
Yes, that's an example from the rather extreme end of this issue, but they do exist and to me they exemplify where this kind of "everything is made up, I am whatever I wish I am" thinking will ultimately lead.
Regardless of what you think of people identifying as muffins(??), it's pretty unreasonable to equate such a flight of fancy with transgender people. There's a growing pile of evidence (such as the OP) that mental perception of gender is at least partly biologically based and independent of outward presentation, and twin studies suggest that whatever causes identification as transgender similarly has a biological basis (identical twins are more likely to both be transgender than fraternal twins are). So it doesn't seem like transgender people are saying "everything is made up" — they're probably accurately describing a real phenomenon.
> Regardless of what you think of people identifying as muffins(??), it's pretty unreasonable to equate such a flight of fancy with transgender people.
It's not me doing that equation, that equation happened when you pick up the banner of "identity politics" and all kinds of weird folks rally under it to celebrate how weird they are. [0]
> There's a growing pile of evidence (such as the OP) that mental perception of gender is at least partly biologically based and independent of outward presentation
The OP, while being mostly anecdotal, is pretty much evidence that this whole "gender is 100% a social construct!" idea can't be the full story. These biological boys were misgendered by society, as a result society educated and treated them like girls, yet the boy from the story turned out to be.. a boy and feeling just like that.
If anything it's evidence for the exact opposite of "gender is a social construct".
> So it doesn't seem like transgender people are saying "everything is made up" — they're probably accurately describing a real phenomenon.
Actual transgender people, with mismatching biological gender and brain chemistry, most likely are nowhere near as prevalent as some circles pretend. While it is an issue that society should come to a resolution about how to deal with, I fail to see why it became one of the cornerstones of a whole political movement.
It seems like in doing so, the left has gotten a lot of bycatch in the form of mentally ill people suddenly having a justification for why they are not "mentally ill" but rather it's society's fault for not accepting them for their mental illness.
This might sound harsh, but I'm saying this as somebody with mental health issues himself who knows very well how difficult it can be to "fit in" and the doubts about if one should actually aspire to "fit in" or instead simply declare one owns "oddness" as a character trait and run with it.
It's not easy and imho everybody has to deal with this to a certain degree, regardless of how "normal" or "odd" they are, it's simply part of the experience of living as an individual in any society.
As far as I can tell, nobody in this thread "picked up the banner of identity politics," and I can't find anyone arguing that "gender is 100% a social construct" either. Those seem to have been brought up exclusively as an out-of-left-field criticism of transgender people. What I'm saying is, at least in the context of this thread, it seems like a straw man argument that associates the idea "transgender people are real" with other ideas that literally nobody here is claiming.
I agree there probably aren't that many transgender people, but the best estimates I've seen suggest that there are probably a little over a million in the US. It is a tiny fraction of the US population — less than half a percent — but on the other hand, cities with that many people are considered a pretty big deal. It seems like an issue worth considering — not the cornerstone of a political movement, sure, but I don't think it is the cornerstone of one, unless you're considering "trans rights" as a political movement of its own (in which case, that's kind of tautological).
> As far as I can tell, nobody in this thread "picked up the banner of identity politics," and I can't find anyone arguing that "gender is 100% a social construct" either. Those seem to have been brought up exclusively as an out-of-left-field criticism of transgender people.
Where did I criticize "transgender people"? I merely pointed out how identity politics, which is not just about transgender people but covers a whole field of people, has been pretty much been the sole focus of "leftist social politics". Probably because there ain't actually that much left it could pick up to rally behind, which in itself is already a success.
Nothing of what I said was intended as a direct reply to people making claims here, but rather as a discussion of the general phenomena which does include the claim of "gender is a social construct" but also includes plenty of people who normalize mental illness in the course of said discussion.
Look, my goal is not to make people who don't fit the mold "undesirable", this isn't an especially easy topic to discuss because there are no clear-cut answers and it can be very touchy for some people.
Somewhere in there, there is a very valid issue hidden of how do we deal with mental health issues. Do we consider them part of the course and accept people living with them affecting everybody around them?
Do we consider them "broken" and "not compatible with society" and try to change their personality?
These issues seep into the general issues of psychology and sociology not being very hard sciences, so science can't give us any clear answers about what to do. In that regard, I find it disingenuous how the left, with the help of gender studies, tries to construct a consensus that ain't there and most likely won't be there for the foreseeable future.
> At times it feels like they are demanding an unlimited right to "self define"
I think it's a bit more extreme than that. It's not just they want to be able to self-define, but they also want to command others to accept those definitions. There are really two kinds of personal identity: the identity you apply to yourself and the identity that another person applies to you. They aren't the same, and are unlikely to align if the self-applied identity is unconventional.
I don't think self-perception and outside-perception align very often for anybody, mostly because we are incapable of perceiving ourselves without bias and we can't control other people's subjective impressions of us.
In a way, their behavior could be interpreted as "revolting against categorizing humans by inventing ridiculous new categories", which might be a nobel and idealistic cause (as categories are often the source of prejudice) but it's also unrealistic because it denies certain biological realities of which none are subjective in any way.
It's not news, but it's still fairly new and developing information. We have mounting evidence that gender identity is somehow deeply encoded in the brain, but we don't know how or why — this is just more evidence to suggest that it is.
It seems to me that gender (at the extremes: XX v XY) is the byproduct of a mutation (read: variation). In that context, it makes sense that there are degrees of variation (if you will). That is, it's in the best interest of the species to experiment (if you will) with other (genetic) possibles. The fact that people identify as something non-binary is natural, and (imho) expected.
There's likely more variation than we've previously realized due to social constructs.
If you consider a gender to be the distinct set of behaviors that achieve the highest genetic fitness for their matched biological sex, then there is likely to be much less variation than current political discourse would suggest.
Why would that lead to less variation? What would cause hormones to not (say) bell curve? And hormones are just one piece in the puzzle.
There are, for example, a diversity of hair color, and that changes over a lifetime. Why would DNA's natural "experiments" with regards to gender be any different?
Except it is to many people. The "gender is a social construct" crowd is very prominent, if not the current consensus in academia.
I have a boy and its obvious gender differences are innate, not learned. It was somewhat eye-opening as I was raised with the "gender is a construct" theory even though I was fairly skeptical of it. Other parents I've spoken to have noticed the same thing.
I think we're going to look back to this period and think "wait, did people really think gender was 100% social" the same way we think back to things like, say, phrenology or classifying homosexuality as a mental illness.
Conflating these seems a bit disingenuous. It seems plausible that you can innately know your sex, and that this comes with some behaviour. It's not the same as saying that girls being associated with the colour pink isn't a social construct.
Well, that's taking it to an irrational extreme. You can cherry pick stuff like "There's no genetic code for liking lace bras and makeup," but there is most likely code that's about adorning and beautifying yourself as a woman. Or code about being attracted to the aesthetic of beauty and beautification thus having a favorite color or color palette, thus the fashion industry standardizing on a handful of palettes considered feminine. Even if the colors are arbitary, just the concept of acceptable and fashionable colors, per season, per fad, etc is highly feminine. Men, often, can wear any color in any season and not have it bother them or have other men criticize them for it. Nor have women consider it unattractive.
the concept of acceptable and fashionable colors, per season, per fad, etc is highly feminine. Men, often, can wear any color in any season and not have it bother them or have other men criticize them for it. Nor have women consider it unattractive.
That the fashionable seasonable colors is associated with the feminine gender is true, but it says nothing about whether it's an inherent trait, as you imply, or something created by society.
I have to say I'm quite suspicious of inherent genetic traits that only reveal themselves when the textile industry appears and has to find ways to get people to buy more product.
Look at sex differences in animals. There are many, many, cases where one sex does the searching for (colorful, lots of adornment) and the other is the searched-for (drab, no adornment).
It is entirely reasonable to assume that there is a biological basis for the sex differences in men and womens fashion. There may not be proof that the sex differences are innate, but it's reasonable to propose that they are innate.
By the same token, it is unreasonable to deny that these sex differences are innate, until such time as proof is offered.
> I have to say I'm quite suspicious of inherent genetic traits that only reveal themselves when the textile industry appears
There's also every reason to believe that people were modifying their appearance before textiles were around. See scarification, use of colored clays / paints, etc. Even something like singing can be used as a way to attract mates. There's no reason to pick textiles as the sole use of fashion.
We're in complete agreement - I don't deny that it's possible, I'm just suspicious.
Regarding the example, I was picking on one given, particularly on the seasonable part. I realize people were adorning themselves before the industrial revolution. But then again, people of all genders were doing that.
It seems like there's a middle ground here, which is that there are innate propensities or drives that are then molded and directed by our cultures, in both healthy and unhealthy ways.
I mean, I don't trust the processed food industry either, and will readily admit that they do everything they can to manipulate human desires for profit. Do people have an innate desire for Coke and chicken nuggets? No. But looking at what the industry does, and then using that to conclude that (most) humans have no instinctual tendency towards sugar and high fat foods seems mistaken.
Both prepositions can be true. Imagine a society where adults under 5'5" were called Shorties and had to wear green clothes all the time and greet people with "Halloo!" It would simultaneously be true that height is biologically determined, but being a Shortie would still be a social construct.
Things tend to happen for a reason. Why green? has the world gone mad? We're actually subservient to our genetics much more to our culture. Maybe green gets those people more mates, thus its been standardized. Maybe greeting others in a friendly matter means a larger social circle and more dates.
We're not terribly removed from animals and the mechanics of evolution control our culture, just like we see with animals. There's some wiggle room but for the most part is not arbitrary nonsense.
The same way many cultures, even ones with no connection, have standardized dresses for women, typically. A dress is a clever garment. Varying the hem determines how revealing and sexy it is thus a young woman would have a short hem and an older one not looking for a mate might not. On top of the design naturally showcasing the bust and the ability to trivially modify it to show more arms, back, and cleavage.
Silly perhaps, but fair. Humans break on tribal lines at the drop of a hat/naqib/dreadlock, and the genes for height in the above example could easily be replaced with the genes for melanin production, where each of presence and absence of the latter has funky social effects that vary from place to place.
Going back to the story, gender is, in humans, a complicated mess. Probably is in other species too (it's not just male dogs who try to hump your leg… although is that a sign of trans male dogs or just reusing an existing behaviour for multiple situations, the female canine behavioural equivalent of male nipples?)
Yes, some things happen for a clear reason, but sometimes the reason is "that's not a harmful mutation".
The wearing-green detail was actually deliberate. We have pink and blue for girls and boys, respectively, but there's no good reason for it. In other times, pink has been the boy color and blue the girl color. Has the world gone mad? I don't know, but we definitely have some arbitrary gender norms in our culture.
you're correct that they can both be true, but advocates of the constructivist position frequently consider the suggestion of determinism offensive if not outright immoral. see for instance, the recent google/damore drama.
>>> I have a boy and its obvious gender differences are innate, not learned.
There are a few gender differences that I find quite obviously to be social constructs.
Things like pink/blue or dresses/pants? There's nothing innate about those preferences, we're obviously taught "x is for boys" and "y is for girls" about a lot of things.
I think most parents would say that you have the causality backwards. Children are not taught the "x is for boys and y is for girls". Instead, they figure it out on their own, because they are driven to distinguish themselves along gender lines.
The specific colors are irrelevant. They are an accident of history.
What I'm saying is that the assumption that gendered color preferences are pushed on children is, IMO, faulty. Most parents I've talked to have the same experience as me: their children identified their own gender, figured out what people of that gender do by looking around at the world, then started imitating that.
You're assuming that gender roles are pushed onto children. My experience (and the experience of most parents I know) is that parents are too busy to really care about trying to indoctrinate their children into the proper gender role.
>>> figured out what people of that gender do by looking around at the world, then started imitating that.
Well of course. I'm not saying babies reinvent gender roles every generation. I'm saying the opposite. Society is the one who defines gender roles and teaches the kids what's expected of them. Like in the article.
>>> What I'm saying is that the assumption that gendered color preferences are pushed on children is, IMO, faulty
I never said pushed. But the fact that pink is seen as a feminin colour or that boys don't wear skirts because reasons is entirely made up. There's nothing innate about it.
>>> You're assuming that gender roles are pushed onto children.
Typically you want to avoid referring to people by the adjective that describes them.
Why? It's reductive -- you are replacing a trait with the trait. A 'transgender person', for instance, refers to a person who is trans (among other things.) A 'transgender' focuses on a specific, singular trait of a person, while removing the 'person' from the discussion.
Socially, we typically use adjectives to refer to people who we don't like. Look at media coverage of 'the reds' or 'the gays'. It's a tool for making a combining a group of people and making them a homogenous 'other'.
> we typically use adjectives to refer to people who we don't like
but do we typically refer to people who we don't like using adjectives?
Also, the semantics change by using "the gays" as opposed to just "gays".
> It's reductive
Or just efficient. Is it not understood that "transgender" refers to a person? Do I need to refer to every red sox fan as a "red sox supporting person" now? The "homogenous 'other'" stuff sounds like cynical lib-pop psychology.
"Fan" is short for "fanatic" (noun) and not, for example, "fanatical" (adjective), so this statement seems to advance the point you are purporting to refute.
> Also, the semantics change by using "the gays" as opposed to just "gays".
Who says that?
I hear, "gay people", "our gay brothers and sisters", "the gay community", "the LGBTQ community", etc. But I only hear "the gays" from people who use it in an uninformed and disparaging way.
So again, you're making the point you're trying to refute.
That's kind of a tangent. It's easy to com up with other examples - e.g Engineer vs engineering trained person, scientist vs scientifically qualified person etc..
However, to focus on this point; Given the word fan is considered neutral, and people uncontroversial refer to themselves as others as fans, to me refutes the idea that you can derive the meaning of language from narratives around their origins..
> Who says that?
me, with as much authority as your original assertions
> But I only hear "the gays" from
but isn't that cause vs correlation?
> you're making the point you're trying to refute.
I don't follow your logic. I didn't supply the example your feel refutes my point. Plus, your example is biased by whatever circles you happen to run in - who gets to judge who is/isn't informed? Can I guess the people you are talking about (as uninformed) are also an outgroup relative to you?
...or just that there is a strong connection between sex and gender. The fact that there are (a small minority of) people who feel "intense, persistent gender incongruence" (gender dysphoria) does not mean that it should be simply considered a "normal course of life" any more than clinical depression is a normal course of life. While legitimizing transgender identities through legislation may help to reduce negative social stigmas (a good thing), it can also be harmful to individuals experiencing those feelings.
I don't like to use the word "disorder" in this context (or any context where people can be easily offended) because it does have some negative stigmas attached to it. However, in this case, it's important to identify some feelings (however real they may be to the individual) as signs of a disorder, simply because they cause real distress for that person, and they don't match the normally congruent relationship between sex and gender.
A person with schizophrenia may imagine and feel things that aren't strictly real, but are nonetheless "real" in terms of what they experience. In that case, it would be harmful to legitimize those things, and it's important to help the person distinguish between what feels real and what is real. In no way am I equating transgender feelings to schizophrenia, but those same principles should apply.
Gender reassignment surgery. John Hopkins stopped preforming the surgery for years. There are pretty prevalent trans women, like Kate Bornstein, have acknowledged that she couldn't really consider herself a full woman afterwards; that she couldn't experience periods, pregnancy and many of the other aspects of being a woman.
This is a very touchy subject so hear me out. Anorexic can be caused by a type of body dysphoria; meaning you always see yourself as fat -- a disconnect between who you are and what's in the mirror. Same goes for people who feel like they need a part of their body amputated in order to be complete. Some surgeons preform amputations on these people, more out of fear that they'd try to preform amputation themselves. But is this healthy? This gets into a very complex discussion on what is health/mental health.
I'm totally for people changing their gender roles or adding things from opposite gender roles. Throughout history we see major roles associated with either men or women change. From the Greeks to the Sumerians to the Romans, the idea of what men and women do in society can change quite a bit. Today we might acknowledge it's more fluid and we don't have to be locked into these social constructions. We redefine gender as the social construction and sex as the biological XX/XY chromosome types.
When people throw around "mental illness" with "transgender" it is never to uplift, but almost always to denigrate. It's a conservative thing and it's terrible. If they are having trouble identifying with themselves, and want to change their bodies drastically, essentially mutilating themselves (to quote South Park, "You mean I'm just a man with a mutilated penis?") we should ask ourselves .. is that a good thing? Maybe you can look and act and be like a woman/men, but accept what you were born biologically as a man/women.
I wish there was a way to talk about body dysphoria in a way that was helpful and not hateful, and maybe talk about how progressives can be for gender role fluidity and transgendered individuals, yet also acknowledging that reassignment surgery may be a bad thing and a sign people's view of themselves may not be in line with reality or beneficial to their overall well being.
I care only about one thing: Ten years after the surgery, are the people who underwent sex reassignment surgery happier than they were before? To my knowledge the answer is not conclusive- partially because it's difficult to find the folks for the follow-up survey.
The APA, AMA and other APA all seemed to find enough evidence to pass very clear resolutions calling for sex reassignment surgery to be considered a clear and effective medical intervention.
I know we are on Hacker News where everything must be done from first principles with whatever knowledge happens to be rolling around in the head of the person writing the comment, but this stuff is pretty settled folks.
Chemotherapy is a "clear and effective medical intervention". It doesn't mean that there are no meaningful repercussions or that it is right for everyone equally, unequivocally, and unconditionally.
The long-term implications of sexual reassignment surgery are far from settled.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. I can imagine a wide spectrum of comments from worried family members "Are you sure you want to put yourself through this? Maybe you should just let nature run it's course." to trolls intentionally prodding the insecurities of the cancer patient.
What you're describing is the traditional view of gender dysphoria, and the thing is that treating it that way has been a massive failure in much the same way as gay conversion therapy. The data presented above suggest an explanation for why it's that way — because being transgender is not a mental illness like depression, but is instead a mismatch between your mental gender and your outward birth sex. It's true that SRS is pretty drastic, but at the moment it seems to be the best approach we've found to minimize transgender people's dysphoria.
Transgender people have an alarmingly high suicide rate. It appears that about 40% of transgender people attempt suicide, while anorexia results in death for about 4% of those afflicted.
Note that suicide attempts and death are not 1:1. I expect the rate of suicide deaths is still higher than 4% in transgender people, but it isn't the same as the attempt rate.
Johns Hopkins got taken over by McHugh, who had a very clear (and stated) agenda to shut the clinic down. The evidence he compiled to do so was very sketchy - it didn't look at things like happiness or suicide rates. It looked at things like having heterosexual relationships (in the new sex) vs having homosexual ones. Nobody can quite figure out how it was scored and it overall feels very much like cherry picked junk statistics.
Also, not everyone who is trans needs or wants SRS, and many are happy without it. There used to be a lot less understanding of this, and it made things more difficult for a lot of people.
And ultimately? Yes, it would be great (and possibly change my own desire for it) if SRS was better, and allowed you to be fertile. This is true of most transgender treatments. It doesn't mean we should stop doing the not perfect things we have and stop pursuing better surgical options.
Too few chromosome types. And you need to factor in testosterone insensitivity syndrome where the chromosomes won't be easy to tell from the outside. And the situation of the people in the original article. And brain dimorphism. And other phenotypic and genotypic variation. Sex is quite complex.
Also, if an individual, for good or ill, cannot be trusted to make the permanent decisions about their body - who can?
> When people throw around "mental illness" with "transgender" it is never to uplift, but almost always to denigrate.
This is a form of survivorship bias - people who have meaningful things to say don't bother to speak on such a politicized topic. The same kind of reason freenet is full of criminality.
There is not the slightest implication of this. My meaning is very narrow and completely independent of the original parent: what you posted is not on topic for this website and violates its guidelines.
What kind of transgenderness do you see in this case? I mean, identifying with the biological sex doesn’t seem trans at all.
Edit: I guess that even though in this case there is misassignment at birth one could make the case that the transgender label applies. I don’t really have an opinion but one could also consider that intersex is something different:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
Doesn't "birth sex" mean "biological sex" as opposed to the sex "assigned at birth"? As in "what you are born as" with the assumption that a newborn child is totally unconditioned.
What I'm suggesting, is that "birth sex" is a synonym for "chromosomal sex". I'm not sure how you conclude this point implies that "there's no biological basis for people who feel transgender".
This seems to be the main issue of confusion here. It seems like maybe people aren't reading the full article? I didn't see anything that suggested that these children were transgender (biologically speaking)? (Or am I wrong?)
In general, the word transgender is used to describe people who internally identify as a gender other than what they were assigned at birth. In this case, the people described in the article grow up to identify as men despite being assigned female at birth.
The definition is admittedly a bit weird when dealing with intersex people, but there you go.
They quote one of them saying they were never happy as a little girl... before puberty I don't know how else to describe someone who appears female but feels wrong in that gender assignment. That's transgender.
I think a lot of transgender people would describe themselves that way.
It is not uncommon to hear of transmen who talk about always knowing they were male and were really confused when their penis didn't grow at puberty.
The point is the parts you're born with don't match how you feel. Just because the exact cause can be identified in this case doesn't make it invalid for others. If you had one of these kids at age 8 insisting they were a boy, but they still had a vagina... they'd be as trans as any trans man.
There is a biological basis for the feelings trans people feel.
Yes, I imagine the experience these boys had would be very similar to that of a trans man.
It seems with trans people, they are assigned the correct sex (technically) but wrong gender at birth. We don't have a way to know the correct gender at birth and just assign it based on biological sex. This works well for most people, but obviously not all. Maybe someday we will understand these things in greater detail.
I suppose we could have a society that does not assign gender norms to kids until they reach a certain age. However this would be a massive overhaul to our entire society.
I'm saying that for a lot of people the "technical" definition of sex is really blurry.
You could look at chromosomal sex, but even that can get weird. You have Kleinfelter's people (XXY), people who are XX but male because they have the SRY gene on one of their X chromosomes (XX Male/ de la Chappelle syndrome). You have people who have a Y chromosome but develop female because of androgen insensitivity.
You can even have people that are chimeras that literally have both XX and XY genes in their body; there is a report of somebody who was 94% XY giving birth.
There's a whole spectrum of intersex possibilities and ambiguous genitalia. Historically, doctors would pick which sex was surgically easiest to assign to the baby if their genitalia were ambiguous, and that was kind of disastrous because it's not just a societal construct and not just something you can flip at birth.
Biologically speaking the presence or absence of SRY is kinda the closest thing to technical that you can get; that is the gene that causes the ovotestis to develop into testicles and start secreting testosterone and anti-mullerian hormone. Pretty much all the other changes in sexual development are keyed by levels of sex steroids.
But as mentioned even if you have that, all kinds of things can cause that go weird; from your body not making testosterone, to it not being responded to correctly, to the womb environment introducing other chemicals that alter brain development.
And especially with brain development, we don't really know how it works. There's studies that look at - if you take a baby mouse, and remove its ovaries/testes, and give it hormone X, then it acts this way towards other mice that looks more male or female.
However, humans aren't mice and a lot of our sexual behaviors are pretty unique to the species (like face to face sex), and even then, our brains are way more complicated and complex. The difference between gender and orientation is almost impossible to see in an animal model (usually they look at things like, does the mouse try to mount female mice when they are receptive, does it exhibit lordosis posture, etc).
> However this would be a massive overhaul to our entire society.
Depends on the age involved but it really doesn't change anything the first few years. We'd have to get over the obsession with blue for boys and pink for girls and painting the rooms and gender reveal parties... but not much else. I mean historically (young) boys and girls wore basically the same clothes (just so more didn't need to be made/bought) and were treated the same because it really doesn't make any difference.
Bathrooms are kinda the first thing but really what other difference is there? Especially before puberty?
And let's not forget that even then, you're always going to have people who are ambiguous or fall between the cracks. Gender nonconforming, genderfluid, genderqueer - people who just don't feel one label fits them all the time. Even within the two-gender framework you have effeminate gay men, tomboys, and all sorts of other perfectly valid identities.
"It is not uncommon to hear of transmen who talk about always knowing they were male and were really confused when their penis didn't grow at puberty." Slap me with a citation, please. I had no idea what was awaiting me at puberty.
How do these cases prove that – a genetically male person feeling like a male, proving that the exact opposite is true? That conclusion has absolutely no substance if you give it any thought at all.
The main issue is that Mental Illnesses are subject to political thought.
The DSM is useful, don't get me wrong. But among the subjects of mental illness include Orgasmic Dysfunction and other such... "illnesses".
Being Homosexual was considered a mental illness in the 1970s. Today, it isn't, because we've all figured out that the thoughts behind it are messed up.
What's he's implying is that the faddish claim today that "gender is a social construct" is false, or at least that this provides strong counter-evidence.
What if all children are naturally inclined to "feel like boys", whatever that means. But then society dictates that some are "girls" and are put in dresses, hair plaited, and told to behave a certain way? Why wouldn't they feel uncomfortable with their assigned gender role, regardless of what's coming for them in puberty?
But it were the case—if every young (apparent) girl felt the same unease about their gender—one would assume that the people in the town would have already acknowledged that. They seem quite comfortable discussing gender.
On the other hand, if there was a clear way to distinguish the guevedoces from the "permanent" girls before puberty, then they would presumably raise them as boys, not girls, because they would know that the penis is going to eventually come in. But their descriptions of discomfort with girlhood don't sound that much different than the ones I had, and so the parents can't tell them apart from any other persistent tomboy. Traditional girlhood is not a positive experience, it is designed to shape children for a subservient adult role. It is not strange or unusual to hate it and it's not evidence that someone is secretly a boy.
This is exactly the point I wanted to make and was the anecdote I was hoping someone would share.
Funny how once their penises start growing they're accepted for the boyishness, but the "real" girls are stuck in their shitty gender role, and few people note the hypocrisy.
Yeah, we treat girls and boys drastically differently from birth, mostly without noticing, and then people say it must be hardcoded that they act so differently. It's a puzzler to me. I hated being forced to wear dresses when I was little, too. They were scratchy uncomfortable and it made it hard to run around and play because I had to worry about whether people could see my underwear. I had to sit in a ladylike way with my legs closed, for the same reason. So given that I was regularly forced to wear a dress, which also forced me to sit a certain way, involve myself less in active play, get used to wearing uncomfortable things because they looked nice, how can anyone think that the fact I lean more towards these feminine habits now, compared to someone who was not forced to do these things, is a natural outgrowth from my biology? To me that seems to have been pretty obviously trained into me. Even in cases where I wasn't explicitly forced to adopt feminine habits by my parents, there is a lot of lateral socialization that goes on between kids, who have also received gendered messages from parents, media, society and other kids. Boys often didn't want to let girls play the boy games with them, so if you wanted to make friends as a girl, you had better be up for playing the girl games.
The indoctrination starts young, and it sucks. And the majority of role models in society reinforce it. People in general seem to lack the self awareness to realize what's going on and chalk it up to the natural way of things.
Oh sure, read up about the case of Doctor Money and the Boy With No Penis. It's a horrendous tale of criminal medical misconduct. Dr. Money is a repulsive fuck. Rough story is that twin boys were born, parents took them to get mutilated (circumcised), it went wrong and one of the boys lost his penis. Dr. Money swoops in and says 'its OK, raise the child as a girl, everything will be great'. Everything was not great. This did not stop Dr. Money from writing books and travelling all over the world lying to other psychologists about how great the case was going. Around 11 or 12 the child attempted suicide for the first time. The parents finally gave in and told them the secret at that point. Dr. Money, when he got back from his globe-trotting, was incensed and talked them into going back on it, forcing the child to continue to live as a girl, and aggressively advocating for hormone treatments. Eventually after more unpleasantness (including, according to both the child and their brother, 'treatment sessions' during which Dr. Money forced the two to disrobe, compare anatomy, and engage in sex acts in order to 'convince' the uncertain one of their gender) the older child in late adolescence was finally able to break away from the clutches of Dr. Money and tell their story. Dr. Money was taken to court, and it was discovered doctor-patient confidentiality apparently goes both ways. He refused to produce any of the recordings of the sessions he had made even when the patients insisted. Dr. Money was mostly ruined, and I think spent some time in jail. Both of the boys killed themselves in early adulthood.
There's certainly a biological component to sex. There are chromosomes, hormonal differences, morphological differences in genitalia, brain dimorphism, and several other ways in which things can go. And they can generally be mixed and matched any which-way. I've never understood why people who don't actually have an interest in human biology want to demand a simple picture. If they want a simple picture, there is the simplest one available: Let people do what they want. Don't let it bother you. End of story. If you want to get into human biology, dive right in! It's amazingly complex and will surprise you at every turn! Everything you think is 'this is always how it is' goes wrong at some point, and we've seen most of it! (Speaking of which if anyone knows any case studies involving a person with no working mirror neurons, I'm interested.)
Huh... I wonder if there could be some sort of intervention therapy that could keep them a girl, in that case, or if it's really set in stone that they will transform.
If so, there could actually be a sort of "third sex" on the horizon. It's been explored quite a bit in sci-fi tropes, but amazing that it's actually (kind of) real!
Imagine if you literally got to choose your sex, with no preset arrangement... you were just a "third gender" type, then elect to go through either male hormone or female hormone therapy depending on your druthers.
But it looks like they really aren't girls. This seems to be the delayed development of biological structures in a classic xy male. In an animal population this might be an advantage, hiding potential future rivals from older dominate males. We dont call girls a third sex simply because thier breasts dont develop until puberty. We call that normal. But perhaps all children are the "third sex" until they show all the classic structures.
Well, the idea is that boys and girls are actually anatomically identical in the womb and then various hormones / enzymes / whatever make the various base structures develop into what we'd recognize as either male or female sex organs.
So imagine if there was a simple way to delay that process until adolescence, when children could choose for themselves whether they wanted male or female anatomies.
Maybe they could choose anatomies. But they can't choose the part they play in reproduction later. If they choose an anatomy discordant with their genetic gender, it can make reproduction tricky.
Assuming you could get a pair of working ovaries with male chromosomes... what would happen? I really don't know enough about biology or genetics...
Or is the issue that with male chromosomes it's "tricky" to get working ovaries?
But what if it's not the typical transgender surgery, but actually having the gonads and tubercle turn into ovaries and clitoris instead of testicles and penis?
> Assuming you could get a pair of working ovaries with male chromosomes... what would happen?
I imagine it would produce about half X-ovums and half Y-ovums. X-ovums should be normal, Y-ovums might not be viable at all.
If they were, Y-spermatozoons could probably not fertilise them, or in any case it would fail rather fast without developing into a viable embryo. X-spermatozoons could fertilise them to produce male embryos.
Producing working ovaries with male chromosomes is the most unlikely step, but otherwise it seems like it should work provided the biological machinery is there to support pregnancy.
I strongly suspect that Y-ovums would not be viable at all. There's a lot on the X chromosome that is pretty vital. How Y-spermatozoons get away with it I'm not quite sure.
Genetic males have an X chromosome, so they have everything necessary to make ovaries. The issue is that the Y chromosome has the SRY gene [1], and that single gene is more or less responsible for kicking off the whole process of developing male genitalia in a fetus. That gene can get displaced off of the normal Y-chromosome and onto an X-chromosome resulting in XX Males [2] or XY Females [3]. Both conditions invariably result in sterility, though outwardly they appear mostly normal (XX Males externally look male, XY Females externally look female).
That said, the fact that one gene seems to have so much effect suggests it's plausible that in the future we might be able to do something to make those individuals fertile, or to enable genital reconstruction surgeries for transgender people that enable new fertility.
Note that much of this may be oversimplified, so any experts can feel free to apply some pedantry to the finer details.
I remember reading in a book (I can't remember which one) that they had penises albeit smaller than average. It makes sense because a normal penis goes through two growth spurts and this one doesn't benefit from one of the two.
Good point. But I don't think most people realize that if it weren't for the way adults decorated their children, their sexes would be wholly invisible.
People seem to generally be more comfortable when they can put a label
on things...
Well, they're not wholly invisible, but close enough to it that they can typically share clothes as a practical matter. You can expect in about 99.5% of cases that your child will identify with the gender corresponding to their sex, so people dress their kids up in miniaturized adult clothing matching their likely gender, in anticipation of adulthood. This seems to have started with the rich, and as societies get more generally rich, more people typically start wanting the same things.
The sexes are quite visible before puberty in terms of behaviour, just not so much in external development.
I'm not much against gender roles, I don't see the problem with them. From a practical perspective, it seems like people will do better if they are familiarized, from an early age, with the role they'll almost inevitably seek to fill to at least some extent. Worst case you find out you've been somewhat wrong at around puberty, and you adjust from there.
I'm not much against gender roles, I don't see the problem with them. From a practical perspective, it seems like people will do better if they are familiarized, from an early age, with the role they'll almost inevitably.
I am a woman who was one of the top ranked students of my graduating class. I see lots of problems with it. An awful lot of the social construct of girl's lives only works if you "marry well" and if marrying well is the only thing you want out of life. You run into a fuckton of serious friction between that social construct and wanting an education, making your own money, being gay and on and on and on.
As just one side of the story. I also did not want my sons to grow up and not know how to, for example, feed themselves properly. This has serious health consequences and just fundamentally should not be someone else's responsibility.
> An awful lot of the social construct of girl's lives only works if you "marry well" and if marrying well is the only thing you want out of life.
To the extent that this is the expectation on women, it is the expectation on men to be husband material. Straight women in western society are legally and culturally responsible for choosing a husband if they want one (and most do).
The majority of women (and men) want to have kids, either ASAP or eventually, and the best way to raise kids is in a stable marriage. When people encourage you to do this, entirely at your option, they are reinforcing very reliable advice.
If you want an advanced education, great! Nobody has the right to stop you, and nobody should have the right to force you either. Anyone who feels they have the determination and desire to contribute to science or business, and is so passionate that they are willing to forego or delay their personal development, should feel the full support of society.
> I also did not want my sons to grow up and not know how to, for example, feed themselves properly.
Cooking food, especially staple meals, is not gender specific. Every man I know can cook local staple meals (pasta and sauce, omelettes, chili, chicken and vegetable soup, [sometimes soy sauce based vegetable soups, depending on social group]), I see no difference in general adherence to common dietary advice except that the guys maybe like red meat more.
Mere adherence to a gender role is not a moral good in and of itself; but that shouldn't turn people off of them. They give structure on matters that you don't feel all that passionate about.
You are cherry picking. In social settings where gender roles are pretty strictly enforced, men are actively discouraged from learning to cook. It is "women's work."
Also, while I generally agree that a stable, healthy marriage is best for raising kids, one of the problems here is that people are living longer and having fewer children. Even if a woman marries well, after her kids are grown, there are very real problems for her and other people to expect her to remain confined to certain caretaking roles.
The fact that people are living longer and child mortality rates are down inherently creates social pressure to handle things differently than in the past. I think you only escape this by erasing a great deal of progress that led to both of these positive outcomes.
> You are cherry picking. In social settings where gender roles are pretty strictly enforced, men are actively discouraged from learning to cook. It is "women's work."
Fair enough, I would not advocate for nifty fifties or rural Iraq style forcible/near-forcible gender roles. The extent to which force is involved is the extent to which they are wrong.
If you take force out of the equation, you get a useful mental model; put force in, and you get a repressive system.
> The fact that people are living longer and child mortality rates are down inherently creates social pressure to handle things differently than in the past.
This is definitely true, but it seems this question is already answered for us: people continue to want to have kids at nearly the same rate (after the initial decline), but typically trend toward or below the replacement rate in terms of the typical number of children per household.
That does not answer the question of what women will do with their lives. Women who have been socialized their entire life to pick up after others and cook for them and take care of them don't readily have a path forward for how to spend their time constructively. The logical outcome is that many women wind up with paid jobs that mimic the wife and mom role. But paid jobs that involve, for example, cleaning up after others tend to be shit jobs that no one actually aspires to. People do not typically dream of being the maid.
I was a homemaker and full time mom. I also was an excellent student. I have found it quite challenging to develop a serious career. I feel strongly that gender expectations are a big factor in that problem.
So, it is a thing I think about a lot.
I agree that there is nothing inherently wrong with having a useful mental model for "this is how to act." But I think we face substantial challenges in teasing out how to separate masculine and feminine expression from the raft load of problems that cause the trend known as the feminization of poverty.
> I agree that there is nothing inherently wrong with having a useful mental model for "this is how to act." But I think we face substantial challenges in teasing out how to separate masculine and feminine expression from the raft load of problems that cause the trend known as the feminization of poverty.
Yeah, among the elderly, marital status is the largest determining factor in poverty rates; and among the unmarried elderly, sex is the next major factor [0]. That said, I don't see a trend in the data I've seen on this, but that could just be for lack of samples.
I will say that this definitely touches on your earlier comment (which I'll quote)
> Even if a woman marries well, after her kids are grown, there are very real problems for her and other people to expect her to remain confined to certain caretaking roles.
This is basically the conclusion of a major, life-altering decision.
Option a) Optimize for "feminine" roles, be able to have and raise kids in an optimal manner, and attach yourself to your husband's naturally greater earning role so that you can maintain your lifestyle into old age.
Option b) Optimize for general/economic roles, choose a difficult and time consuming career which nobody else will appreciate you for, because you may not have a family in your 30s to care about how much you earn. Live out the rest of your days on your own dollar (albeit with nobody around who wants you to cook for them or support them emotionally, which even to me as a [fairly young] man who cooks for others seems kinda lonely). Statistically speaking, this route goes poorly for both sexes, but especially poorly for women (that "never married" category on the SSA fact sheet).
At a glance, it seems unfair that these are the two main choices for women, but I don't see how you could expect much different.
The difference can be largely attributed to the unique maternal relationship, and the fact that it is a career in itself. The uniquely paternal part of child rearing is more of a job than a career, and part of the gig is to have other work anyhow.
It seems like a very difficult decision, and I sympathize with it. Young and foolish as I am, I think that if I had a straight daughter, she has a better chance of achieving a likely life goal (having [a] kid[s]) and remaining above the poverty line if she is at least well equipped for the "feminine" role. I would have no trouble encouraging her to work on that while also getting a proper professional education.
There are so many many more options than that. Why does having a career somehow doom me to be alone and unloved and eating cold chili out of a can? I have a career and a husband and even friends and other family, too. We don't want our own children. We have pets and we dote on our nieces, and that's how we like it. My work is appreciated mainly by my coworkers and clients, so even if I were single it would still be appreciated. Neither of us is Julia Child but we both cook. It's really not that hard to learn to cook to a level where you can put a decent dinner on the table. So call that option C, I guess. Families with a stay-at-home dad option D, families where one or both parents work from home so they can be around for the kids options E, F, G. Taking off a couple years from work and then returning once the kids are at school option H. Having someone other than the parents be the primary caregiver, like a grandmother or a nanny or a day care. Arranging work schedules so that theres always a parent around when the kids are at home. Adopting children later in life (when retired or FIRE). These are not all perfect solutions but they are more realistic alternatives to homemaking than your option B.
Also if cooking and being emotionally supportive are part of the female role, does that mean that you wouldn't raise your sons to be capable of doing those things? Where are their wives getting their emotional support from, and what happens if the husband/wife unit is split up for a time because of work or family obligations? Is the husband just going to eat McDonalds and canned spam for three months because the wife is across the country caring for her dying mother? To me, cooking and being emotionally supportive are not "important skills for women", they are important skills for all adults, especially if they are at the point of settling down with a partner.
Thank you for engaging me in good faith. A meaty debate or discussion with someone who is not being an asshole about it is always a good thing and, sadly, not very common.
Just to be clear, I do not agree with the title as a concept.
I would like it if you avoid associating me with that statement. I deliberately avoid speaking on what people "deserve" or "don't deserve". I make an effort to avoid ascribing moral categories like "bitches" based on people's personal lifestyle preferences.
I'm glad to have had a conversation in good faith on this matter, but associating me with the disgusting statement "unmarried bitches don't deserve to eat" is a manifest breach of good faith.
There was no intent to associate you with anything. Your statement here will have to be sufficient for clearing up any concerns about that matter. I am not going to change the title of the post.
I was homeless for nearly six years. I got off the street earlier this month. I was quite open on the internet about my struggles in trying to figure out how to come up with enough earned income to eat. It garnered me damn little sympathy or support and there were an awful lot of people who were quite ugly to me and accused me of things like trying to panhandle the internet.
If the title makes people uncomfortable, well, that is the intention. Maybe you should stop and reconsider your view that gender roles are no problem if you feel so deeply offended by having it put baldly to you that a position that it is fine for women to be groomed to be a wife (from birth) is one that actively makes it difficult for most women to meet their basic needs at some point in their life.
I would imagine they would be infertile in any case, and probably not have periods or significant breast development; there'd be no ovaries to produce estrogen in the required quantities, and the anti-mullerian hormone they have would prevent development of the normal female reproductive system
not actually normal, its still a deformation, for example; they cannot bare children ("Although the external genitalia can sometimes be completely female, the vagina consists of only the lower two-thirds of a normal vagina, creating a blind-ending vaginal pouch.")
If someone finds an animation on this, please share. I'm so interested in seeing how this change looks like. Apparently, the real world trumps the limits of my imagination.
This article appears to have triggered HackerNews disassociated curiosity. I wonder if the opposite is true, where some cultures in Afghanistan treat little boys like girls for sexual purposes?
This article appears to have triggered HackerNews disassociated curiosity. I wonder if the opposite is true, where some cultures in Afghanistan treat little boys like girls for sexual purposes?
I don't understand this comment. What are you trying to say?
And what do you mean by "sexual purposes"?
Also this article doesn't describe a simple culture construct. It's about a real biological change that causes apparent girls to develop into boys through puberty.
There's a documentary on Netflix (9 months that made you) 3 episodes that covers this for those curious about more details. The episode were this was discussed was either in 1 or 2.
"disorder"? Sounds like an evolutionary advantage. There isn't any use for a penis before puberty. Just is something that can get infected or damaged as a child. Plus smaller prostrate as adult means less chance of prostrate cancer and maybe some other diseases.
I think you are merely complaining about semantics, but there are plenty of disorders (abnormal conditions) which have an adaptive advantage in some contexts; sickle-cell anemia is a well known example.
a person who receives one defective and one healthy allele remains healthy, but can pass on the disease and is known as a carrier or heterozygote. Heterozygotes are still able to contract malaria, but their symptoms are generally less severe
I've been reading The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. And assuming that Earth is super overpopulated eventually (moreso that now), sterilazation, DNA altering, and other radical changes in mankind such as homogenous relationships worldwide may be one of the few ways mankind can persist in he universe ...
It's a good book. I recommend it. I guess my point is that sometimes when something is different Now, it's hard to grasp it's significance and pros and cons because maybe our viewpoint is skewed to our current perceptions (which is a theme throughout the book, it has alot of time travel).
So, not to be a troll, but can anyone actually vouch for the legitimacy of this? I don't really doubt it's legitimacy, and it's nice to think that gender is not just a psychological spectrum but a biological one too, but this article is completely devoid of sources.
I was a tortoise until age 7. Being a reptile is a bummer, and my tutle penis didn't develop until age 45. Most people born in CA are like this... Just sayin'.
Not sure why nobody want to admit that these children are male at birth. They have a Y chromosome. One out of all of the many biological triggers due to a Y chromosome happens to not trigger until puberty time. Scientifically, what about this makes the children female beforehand? Did they possess developing female genitalia?
This line. The idea that diversity, strange, or abnormal may not be beneficial to society doesn't make sense. Innovation can literally be anywhere.
“By a quirk of chance Dr Imperato’s research was picked up by the American pharmaceutical giant, Merck. They used her discovery to create a drug called finasteride, which blocks the action of 5-α-reductase.
“It is now widely used to treat benign enlargement of the prostate and male pattern baldness. For which, I’m sure, many men are truly grateful.”
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[ 16.6 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadBut it were the case—if every young (apparent) girl felt the same unease about their gender—one would assume that the people in the town would have already acknowledged that.
They seem quite comfortable discussing gender.
As a parent I see my son's female peers and very few of them are remotely interested in boy stuff, even when offered. Even in toddler stages there's a marked difference in personalities with girls being calmer and more passive and boys wanting to do rough and tumble theatrics. Its obviously innate, at least to me.
>but girls were discouraged and put in dresses, etc.
Well, in the article that's exactly what happened but the males mistaken for girls complained. There's no evidence all girls complained.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34290981
And provides this interesting line:
"A final interesting observation that Imperato-McGinley made was that these boys, despite being brought up as girls, almost all showed strong heterosexual preferences."
Transgenders are real, is what you are concluding. That's not really news.
The gender is a social construct argument is the voice that believes the opposite -- that gender roles and expression are learned behavior in our society. Our parents and peers teach us what it means to be a boy or girl from a very young age, and what is socially unacceptable for those genders. (They also commonly teach us, here in the US, that there are only two genders.)
In regards to gender differences I find some of the primate evidence[0][1] rather compelling. This doesn't mean that I believe any gender should be treated differently than the other of course but it seems rather obvious to me that some differences exist outside of any conditioning that human societies may provide.
[0]http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/09/101220-chimp... [1]http://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-29418230/monk...
This reminds me of colour preference, where girls are more likely to say they like pink than boys and so people conclude pink is for girls and blue is for boys, yet if you ask what their favourite colour is, the top pick for both sexes is blue.
So the evidence on trucks doesn't support the claim you replied to, but maybe they'd be on firmer ground if they said boys had proportionately less interest in stuffed toy animals than trucks.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/
It seems the duration shows the same pattern as counting the number of interactions:
"males interacted for a greater total time with wheeled than with plush objects while females did not differ in the duration of interactions with the toy types"
This wasn't really meant to answer your political issue, but just to provide a context of what is and isn't socially constructed.
But consider something like the lower representation of women in math. If it happens because of genetically different altitudes/interests then it's inevitable, and there's no use complaining about it. If it's because of society discouraging women, that's just plain dumb.
(Btw: your examples are highly debatable. You can argue that consent and freedom of speech are social practices which respect objective moral/ethical facts).
That's not actually true. Even when something is the expected outcome of certain biological factors, that doesn't make it inevitable. With the right kind of intervention, very little is completely biologically determined. That's what medicine is all about. In many ways, culture is also about overcoming the limits and defaults of human biology. There's no reason to suppose that differences between the sexes can't be influenced into a direction that appears more desirable.
This varies across philosophical traditions. Common-law traditions do, in a sense, hold these sorts of rights as part of the origin story of the universe.
Let's start with this - what is gender?
I know what biological sex is, roughly; I thought gender was a synonym for it(this may be a translation/communication barrier).
From googling the topic, it appears that gender is defined as "the expectations a society places on an individual of a given sex", which makes the "gender is entirely a social construct" statement tautological.
I read about the "blank slate hypothesis", and it seems to be about something else entirely - it seems to be pretty vaguely referring to the "knowledge" and "experience" a human being might have from before they were born vs after. It seems rather naive to be aware of all the other biological differences between men and women but demand that they have no effect on "the mind", or more appropriately, on the expressions of will that a human being exhibits. I'm not an expert though, so maybe there's a deeper truth out there somewhere.
There are way more important things for society to deal with. This issue is a complete distraction for all but those who it affects directly.
I don't support making major changes to society in order to benefit an infinitesimal minority of mentally ill people.
If you don't want to pay attention to what's going on with transgender people, then go on and live your life — that is 100% your prerogative. If somebody tells you they're a woman, you can just let it pass without any burden on yourself — you don't have to think about the validity of their statement or the implications or what they've gone through in their life.
But if you loudly proclaim your lack of knowledge about transgender people while also loudly proclaiming that they should be treated disrespectfully, I don't think the transgender people are the ones being unreasonable in that situation.
Sure I can. My stance can be "I don't want to know very much about this topic and if you keep trying to bring it up ahead of much more important topics, then I will have to ignore you more loudly."
> If somebody tells you they're a woman, you can just let it pass without any burden on yourself...
That alone is certainly is not a burden on myself. The burden begins when the issue of societies behavior towards transgender people continually eclipses more important issues. I feel sorry for people whose issues get used to polarize people for political theater.
> ...if you loudly proclaim your lack of knowledge about transgender people while also loudly proclaiming that they should be treated disrespectfully,...
I don't know who is "loudly" doing anything or where this argument is coming from. Did I say something loudly? Is that the same thing as just saying the words "I don't care about this topic and please stop telling me about it...?"
All I said is - why should I care? If you say "because they're people", then I would say "we have more important types of people to worry about". For instance, who is doing anything about the sociopaths and psychopaths that seem to gravitate towards positions of power? Where's all the attention for that?
Personally, I have many causes I support. This doesn't have to be one of yours, but all I'm saying is, just because you want to spend your time on more important things doesn't mean you should spend your time telling people how unimportant transgender issues are.
You and I are actually on the same side. We both wish people didn't care very much if anyone switched genders. Beyond that, I think we all want to live in peace. In my opinion though, our common enemy are the very rude, petty and unintelligent people on both sides who turn social issues into a circus and present extreme narratives that make people fight and go to more extremes. That makes things hard for everybody on both sides, right? This article does not do that, but the reason it was posted (i.e. I feel a constant battle going on over the perception of the Transgender issue) does annoy me a tad bit and I talk a lot.
I once read that travelling helps people to be more accepting of foreign cultures. Too bad the Internet couldn't have done that instead.
It's not that we political conservatives believe transgender people are faking it. Transgenderism is real. We conservatives acknowledge some folks are born with a sincere belief or feeling they are the wrong gender.
I personally sympathize with such people; it must be torturous and painful to be a particular biological sex, with hormones and chromosomes of one biological sex, but feel and believe you are a different biological sex.
Where we differ with leftists is how to view the transgender phenomenon. This article, for example, states that this "girl" became a boy due to a "rare genetic disorder occurs because of a missing enzyme which prevents the production of a specific form of the male sex hormone - dihydro-testosterone - in the womb." It was a genetic disorder; a birth defect.
Thus, this "girl" wasn't a girl at all. Biologically and scientifically speaking, he was a boy with an undeveloped penis.
So it is with transgender folks in the West. We see transgenderism as an outgrowth of the medical condition known as gender dysphoria. Folks suffering with gender dysphoria should seek help, whether that be a medical sex change operation or counseling.
A whole other issue is segregated bathrooms; I have yet to see people get past the label-flinging stage to ask the fundamental question: why are bathrooms segregated (hetero/cis M/F) in the first place?
I think a much better question would be "Why aren't they all private?" If you create individual bathrooms with lockable doors, you just label it "rest room" and you don't need to assign a gender or make a private matter a public issue.
Why should trans individuals have to deal with the question of which bathroom they "belong" in? What's next? Questioning which bathroom gay people belong in?
Making private individual bathrooms the norm would also eliminate many other issues. The line to the women's room tends to be longer than to the men's because using a urinal takes less time and the use of urinals is more space efficient, so a men's bathroom sometimes has more toilets plus urinals than a women's bathroom has toilets. This has caused some people to decry this as yet another form of sexism that they would like redressed.
Meanwhile, the men's room can have a long wait if you need to have a bowel movement. Lots of urinals is great if everyone just needs to pee, but problematic if that is not the case. Small public men's rooms often have only one toilet, the rest urinals. What if two men are traveling together and both need the actual toilet?
Historically, men's bathrooms tended to not have changing tables, reinforcing the expectation that only women change diapers. Individual bathrooms also eliminates that issue.
The list of problems it would solve is no doubt much longer, but you get the idea.
I think that just skips the original question by assuming the answer. Why is there no convention for privacy from other members of the same gender? You have to consider the economy of providing totally private bathroom facilities too.
> Why should trans individuals have to deal with the question of which bathroom they "belong" in?
Because everyone does.
> This has caused some people to decry
If those people have good arguments, let's hear them.
> The list of problems it would solve
But are we forcing establishments to provide these facilities? It's easy for Google to spend another million on individual cubicles to impress its employees; not all small businesses will find it so easy or rewarding..
> This has caused some people to decry
If those people have good arguments, let's hear them.
So, you are open to hearing these arguments, but out of hand dismissing my solutions.
> Why should trans individuals have to deal with the question of which bathroom they "belong" in?
Because everyone does.
But it isn't some big burden for most people the way it is for trans people. Trans people are a little bit like platypuses: they defy our established categories and don't readily fit our little boxes. That fact will never really change. But it doesn't have to be some big problem wrt bathroom use if we just have more private restrooms in public spaces.
I was homeless for nearly six years. I got off the street earlier this month. Private bathrooms allowed me to do things like brush my teeth without being thrown out. There is very much a classist double standard in what is socially acceptable use of a public bathroom.
Traveler brushing their teeth in a public bathroom? Totes fine. Homeless person doing the same thing? Excellent excuse to ban them from the premises.
Muslim washing their shoes and feet before praying in the hallway on a college campus? Totes fine. Homeless person washing their shoes or feet in the same bathroom? Misuse of the facilities and we need to ask you to leave.
There are lots of ways in which public bathrooms are burdensome for anyone who does not readily fit in with whatever the social norms happen to be. Some of the groups for whom it is burdensome lack the means to make their problem part of the public debate. Other than me occasionally commenting on it in public forums, I am not aware of anyone advocating for the rights of homeless people where it comes to public bathroom use.
There are old TV shows where, for example, cross dressers have to decide which bathroom to use. If someone is successfully passing for female socially and not trying to sleep with me, I gives a damn what bits are between their legs and I don't see why we need a public debate about their bits and bathrooms. There is an available robust solution that could make it a non issue.
Why is there no convention for privacy from other members of the same gender?
Most people are not actually comfortable pooping or dealing with their period, etc, in a public toilet with other people around. There are some people who cannot make themselves poop in public.
In private homes where we share bathroom facilities with our closest people, such as blood relatives or a spouse, the convention is that bathrooms are private and the door gets closed. Most folks don't want to use the toilet with witnesses, even when those witnesses are their most intimate friends and family.
So, I really fail to see why anyone would give push back on this idea. Most people do not actually like using public bathrooms to begin with and public facilities create undue friction for the most marginalized people, like homeless people and trans people. If private bathrooms were the default, we wouldn't even be having a public, nationwide debate about which bathroom trans people should be using. That wouldn't solve all their problems by any stretch of the imagination, but it would remove one burden from their life that is excessive and that unnecessarily sets them apart from other people.
If you think it is not excessive, try spending the day just not using the toilet at all. Most people use the toilet multiple times per day and cannot hold it for eight or ten hours straight. Unless they work from home and basically live as shut ins who get all groceries delivered, etc, this will be a ni...
> So, you are open to hearing these arguments, but out of hand dismissing my solutions.
What do you mean? What "out of hand dismissing"?
> But it isn't some big burden for most people the way it is for trans people. Trans people are a little bit like platypuses: they defy our established categories and don't readily fit our little boxes
Are many (pre or none op) trans-women refused entry to male toilets? The controversies I hear are of the opposite nature.
> If someone is successfully passing for female socially and not trying to sleep with me, I gives a damn what bits are between their legs
Again - why are bathrooms segregated in the first place?
If it's to protected women from predatory men, is the suggestion that trans-women are not predatory?
> Most people are not actually comfortable..
This doesn't answer the question though. Why are toilets not totally segregated within the same sex already?
I have seen parks where toilets were in individual little rooms and sinks were outside and public. I have also seen arrangements where each little room had both a sink and toilet. They both work okay, though it is nice to have the sink be private as well. I don't see any reason why we can't work on coming up with new standard patterns to try to address issues like cost and space efficiency while improving privacy.
As for the existing toilet situation and why it is the way it is, my suspicion is that it was something that worked reasonably well historically when more than half of all people were rural residents. Sometime in the lifetime of my children, we crossed the point where more than half of all people live in cities.
Things that work reasonably well in a relatively homogenous small community or rural area don't work so well for highly diverse big cities. Times have changed. The ongoing national debate about bathrooms makes it clear that our current setup is now problematic.
I fail to grasp why you are so hung up on this detail. Historic precedent is very often a matter of "it was what they could afford in a poorer society than modern America" or "it was the first thing someone thought up without really studying the problem space in earnest." The fact that this is the status quo in no way whatsoever suggests that it is some kind of best practice that we should dread altering.
When I was growing up, I lived on the edge of town. In one direction, there was more housing, plus shops and businesses. In the other, there were wooded areas. It was really common for men to relieve their bladder on a tree somewhere while out and about. I also learned to relieve myself in the woods, though it is less convenient for a girl.
In a situation like that where it is logistically feasible and socially acceptable to just pee on a tree, there is less need for public toilets. But that does not translate well to the big city. You don't have sufficient privacy nor sufficient greenery. Peeing on a tree occasionally in a wooded area is not a threat to public health. The tree will consider it to be fertilizer and it will not cause the spread of disease amongst people.
But in the big city, if lots of people pee and poop on sidewalks or in alleyways, this is a public health hazard. There is currently a hepatitis A epidemic in Southern California that is killing people. It is related in part to large numbers of homeless people relieving themselves exactly that way.
Public toilets are just less of an issue in rural settings. People routinely just pee on a tree. In some parts of the world, population densities reach small city levels, but they are too poor to build the kind of infrastructure for modern bathrooms. People continue to relieve themselves in a nearby field. One result: Women get raped and sometimes murdered while trying to pee and poop.
Bathroom facilities are a real need in highly populated areas in a way that they just are not with fewer people. We now have 7 billion people on the planet. This is unprecedented. It should be no surprise at all that it leads to unprecedented problems in areas that no one would have ever expected.
https://www.livescience.com/54692-why-bathrooms-are-gender-s...
http://theconversation.com/how-did-public-bathrooms-get-to-b...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_crime
> Thus, this "girl" wasn't a girl at all. Biologically and scientifically speaking, he was a boy with an undeveloped penis.
Actually, scientifically speaking, a different developmental path than the one to which you are accustomed happened. There are real differences that conflict with a desire held by some that people fit in neat categories that do not exist as the clean, platonic ideal they want it to be.
I think "we" should accept the reality that gender is not binary rather than using the political process to harass people who are living proof of that fact.
His delayed sexual development doesn't change the scientific reality that he had, and still has, male hormones and male chromosomes. Biologically, he is a male.
So is this woman:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MedicalMysteries/story?id=54657...
That isn't normal & healthy development, any more than blindness is normal & healthy. Rather, AIS is a medical condition, a syndrome that causes suffering.
People exist who do not fit into either-or gender boxes. It is just reality.
The thing is, many of these young people had a strong sensation of being a "boy" despite societal pressure otherwise.
This notion of an internal representation of gender identity is backed by science, and this isn't even the only example.
So there is no argument here that these people are anything but boys with a different developmental path. But is suspect most could have told you that, despite what a non-invasive examination of their body would tell a biological essential-ists.
> Where we differ with leftists is how to view the transgender phenomenon.
Yeah, conservatives want to make it illegal or at least economically infeasible to be transgender. The irony here being that this type of developmental path would rock many conservatives in America to their very core if it happened in their family.
My claim, backed by science, is that this child was a biological male: he had male hormones and male chromosomes. His delayed development didn't change that scientific reality.
This is actually a nice way to reinforce my prior statement, so thanks. You're claiming someone was "biologically male" but hey that person didn't even express a penis until age 7-12. They're not even really intersex people, it's just the traditional definition of "biologically male" is comically incapable of dealing with this.
What's more, before that change most (there is other documentation of this) of the people you would have lectured about being biologically female felt a very strong affinity to the male identity. By happy coincidence, their hormonal cycle gifted them with anatomy they felt more comfortable with.
> he had male hormones and male chromosomes
Well, he specifically lacked some hormones, but...
Look, trans advocates for the most part don't disagree that a trans man and a person born to the traditional definition of men are exactly the same. They're obviously not precisely the same. What trans people want is an opportunity to be trans people without violence, discrimination, and fearmongering.
Trans activists tend to object to the biological essentialism argument not because it is founded on an observation of scientific facts about DNA (which, btw, a lot of people get wrong). They object to it because it's often used to justify acts of violence or discrimination by appealing to defending a biological norm that needs no guardians.
For example, something is a "disorder" has historical been used as a bit more value neutral word for variance, but the more it is used the more it has become synonymous with disease. Similar for "medical condition". For example, we don't call left handed people to have some form of mental disorder, as that would imply today that there is some form of problem rather than simple variance. It also don't match at all those people who are ambidexterity.
If we found a genetic marker for handedness, it would likely also not be called a genetic disorder. If the variance cause additional problem, then the additional problems would be the disorder and the handedness a simple side effect.
One could argue that gender is more important than handedness, but then we enter values and believes into the mix and that would definitely be political in nature.
To be fair: There ain't unified views on this on any side, I consider myself a pretty "leftist", never voted conservative in my life, yet I take great issue to the way the political left has picked up identity politics like it did.
At times it feels like they are demanding an unlimited right to "self define", spawning cultural oddities like "headmates" in the social media sphere, which basically normalize mental illness as something that shouldn't be treated but merely seen as being "different".
People identify as a pansexual muffin collectives and society is supposed to accept that "identity" with all seriousness, complete with "feeling" insulted when people don't use the "proper" made up pronouns to address them.
Yes, that's an example from the rather extreme end of this issue, but they do exist and to me they exemplify where this kind of "everything is made up, I am whatever I wish I am" thinking will ultimately lead.
It's not me doing that equation, that equation happened when you pick up the banner of "identity politics" and all kinds of weird folks rally under it to celebrate how weird they are. [0]
> There's a growing pile of evidence (such as the OP) that mental perception of gender is at least partly biologically based and independent of outward presentation
The OP, while being mostly anecdotal, is pretty much evidence that this whole "gender is 100% a social construct!" idea can't be the full story. These biological boys were misgendered by society, as a result society educated and treated them like girls, yet the boy from the story turned out to be.. a boy and feeling just like that.
If anything it's evidence for the exact opposite of "gender is a social construct".
> So it doesn't seem like transgender people are saying "everything is made up" — they're probably accurately describing a real phenomenon.
Actual transgender people, with mismatching biological gender and brain chemistry, most likely are nowhere near as prevalent as some circles pretend. While it is an issue that society should come to a resolution about how to deal with, I fail to see why it became one of the cornerstones of a whole political movement.
It seems like in doing so, the left has gotten a lot of bycatch in the form of mentally ill people suddenly having a justification for why they are not "mentally ill" but rather it's society's fault for not accepting them for their mental illness.
This might sound harsh, but I'm saying this as somebody with mental health issues himself who knows very well how difficult it can be to "fit in" and the doubts about if one should actually aspire to "fit in" or instead simply declare one owns "oddness" as a character trait and run with it.
It's not easy and imho everybody has to deal with this to a certain degree, regardless of how "normal" or "odd" they are, it's simply part of the experience of living as an individual in any society.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSMEtfqAdmM&list=PLjBnqlVZLi...
I agree there probably aren't that many transgender people, but the best estimates I've seen suggest that there are probably a little over a million in the US. It is a tiny fraction of the US population — less than half a percent — but on the other hand, cities with that many people are considered a pretty big deal. It seems like an issue worth considering — not the cornerstone of a political movement, sure, but I don't think it is the cornerstone of one, unless you're considering "trans rights" as a political movement of its own (in which case, that's kind of tautological).
Where did I criticize "transgender people"? I merely pointed out how identity politics, which is not just about transgender people but covers a whole field of people, has been pretty much been the sole focus of "leftist social politics". Probably because there ain't actually that much left it could pick up to rally behind, which in itself is already a success.
Nothing of what I said was intended as a direct reply to people making claims here, but rather as a discussion of the general phenomena which does include the claim of "gender is a social construct" but also includes plenty of people who normalize mental illness in the course of said discussion.
Look, my goal is not to make people who don't fit the mold "undesirable", this isn't an especially easy topic to discuss because there are no clear-cut answers and it can be very touchy for some people.
Somewhere in there, there is a very valid issue hidden of how do we deal with mental health issues. Do we consider them part of the course and accept people living with them affecting everybody around them? Do we consider them "broken" and "not compatible with society" and try to change their personality?
These issues seep into the general issues of psychology and sociology not being very hard sciences, so science can't give us any clear answers about what to do. In that regard, I find it disingenuous how the left, with the help of gender studies, tries to construct a consensus that ain't there and most likely won't be there for the foreseeable future.
I think it's a bit more extreme than that. It's not just they want to be able to self-define, but they also want to command others to accept those definitions. There are really two kinds of personal identity: the identity you apply to yourself and the identity that another person applies to you. They aren't the same, and are unlikely to align if the self-applied identity is unconventional.
In a way, their behavior could be interpreted as "revolting against categorizing humans by inventing ridiculous new categories", which might be a nobel and idealistic cause (as categories are often the source of prejudice) but it's also unrealistic because it denies certain biological realities of which none are subjective in any way.
Yeah, that's true, but for more conventional identities the possible misalignments are not as extreme and basic.
There's likely more variation than we've previously realized due to social constructs.
If you consider a gender to be the distinct set of behaviors that achieve the highest genetic fitness for their matched biological sex, then there is likely to be much less variation than current political discourse would suggest.
There are, for example, a diversity of hair color, and that changes over a lifetime. Why would DNA's natural "experiments" with regards to gender be any different?
I have a boy and its obvious gender differences are innate, not learned. It was somewhat eye-opening as I was raised with the "gender is a construct" theory even though I was fairly skeptical of it. Other parents I've spoken to have noticed the same thing.
I think we're going to look back to this period and think "wait, did people really think gender was 100% social" the same way we think back to things like, say, phrenology or classifying homosexuality as a mental illness.
That the fashionable seasonable colors is associated with the feminine gender is true, but it says nothing about whether it's an inherent trait, as you imply, or something created by society.
I have to say I'm quite suspicious of inherent genetic traits that only reveal themselves when the textile industry appears and has to find ways to get people to buy more product.
It is entirely reasonable to assume that there is a biological basis for the sex differences in men and womens fashion. There may not be proof that the sex differences are innate, but it's reasonable to propose that they are innate.
By the same token, it is unreasonable to deny that these sex differences are innate, until such time as proof is offered.
> I have to say I'm quite suspicious of inherent genetic traits that only reveal themselves when the textile industry appears
There's also every reason to believe that people were modifying their appearance before textiles were around. See scarification, use of colored clays / paints, etc. Even something like singing can be used as a way to attract mates. There's no reason to pick textiles as the sole use of fashion.
Regarding the example, I was picking on one given, particularly on the seasonable part. I realize people were adorning themselves before the industrial revolution. But then again, people of all genders were doing that.
I mean, I don't trust the processed food industry either, and will readily admit that they do everything they can to manipulate human desires for profit. Do people have an innate desire for Coke and chicken nuggets? No. But looking at what the industry does, and then using that to conclude that (most) humans have no instinctual tendency towards sugar and high fat foods seems mistaken.
Many more people are certain of their sex than of their gender. That's the whole point of analyzing cases like this.
Things tend to happen for a reason. Why green? has the world gone mad? We're actually subservient to our genetics much more to our culture. Maybe green gets those people more mates, thus its been standardized. Maybe greeting others in a friendly matter means a larger social circle and more dates.
We're not terribly removed from animals and the mechanics of evolution control our culture, just like we see with animals. There's some wiggle room but for the most part is not arbitrary nonsense.
The same way many cultures, even ones with no connection, have standardized dresses for women, typically. A dress is a clever garment. Varying the hem determines how revealing and sexy it is thus a young woman would have a short hem and an older one not looking for a mate might not. On top of the design naturally showcasing the bust and the ability to trivially modify it to show more arms, back, and cleavage.
Going back to the story, gender is, in humans, a complicated mess. Probably is in other species too (it's not just male dogs who try to hump your leg… although is that a sign of trans male dogs or just reusing an existing behaviour for multiple situations, the female canine behavioural equivalent of male nipples?)
Yes, some things happen for a clear reason, but sometimes the reason is "that's not a harmful mutation".
There are a few gender differences that I find quite obviously to be social constructs.
Things like pink/blue or dresses/pants? There's nothing innate about those preferences, we're obviously taught "x is for boys" and "y is for girls" about a lot of things.
What I'm saying is that the assumption that gendered color preferences are pushed on children is, IMO, faulty. Most parents I've talked to have the same experience as me: their children identified their own gender, figured out what people of that gender do by looking around at the world, then started imitating that.
You're assuming that gender roles are pushed onto children. My experience (and the experience of most parents I know) is that parents are too busy to really care about trying to indoctrinate their children into the proper gender role.
The kids indoctrinate themselves.
Well of course. I'm not saying babies reinvent gender roles every generation. I'm saying the opposite. Society is the one who defines gender roles and teaches the kids what's expected of them. Like in the article.
>>> What I'm saying is that the assumption that gendered color preferences are pushed on children is, IMO, faulty
I never said pushed. But the fact that pink is seen as a feminin colour or that boys don't wear skirts because reasons is entirely made up. There's nothing innate about it.
>>> You're assuming that gender roles are pushed onto children.
I never said pushed. I'm saying it's not innate.
>>> The kids indoctrinate themselves
Again, that doesn't mean it's innate.
Why? It's reductive -- you are replacing a trait with the trait. A 'transgender person', for instance, refers to a person who is trans (among other things.) A 'transgender' focuses on a specific, singular trait of a person, while removing the 'person' from the discussion.
Socially, we typically use adjectives to refer to people who we don't like. Look at media coverage of 'the reds' or 'the gays'. It's a tool for making a combining a group of people and making them a homogenous 'other'.
but do we typically refer to people who we don't like using adjectives?
Also, the semantics change by using "the gays" as opposed to just "gays".
> It's reductive
Or just efficient. Is it not understood that "transgender" refers to a person? Do I need to refer to every red sox fan as a "red sox supporting person" now? The "homogenous 'other'" stuff sounds like cynical lib-pop psychology.
"Fan" is short for "fanatic" (noun) and not, for example, "fanatical" (adjective), so this statement seems to advance the point you are purporting to refute.
> Also, the semantics change by using "the gays" as opposed to just "gays".
Who says that?
I hear, "gay people", "our gay brothers and sisters", "the gay community", "the LGBTQ community", etc. But I only hear "the gays" from people who use it in an uninformed and disparaging way.
So again, you're making the point you're trying to refute.
That's kind of a tangent. It's easy to com up with other examples - e.g Engineer vs engineering trained person, scientist vs scientifically qualified person etc..
However, to focus on this point; Given the word fan is considered neutral, and people uncontroversial refer to themselves as others as fans, to me refutes the idea that you can derive the meaning of language from narratives around their origins..
> Who says that?
me, with as much authority as your original assertions
> But I only hear "the gays" from
but isn't that cause vs correlation?
> you're making the point you're trying to refute.
I don't follow your logic. I didn't supply the example your feel refutes my point. Plus, your example is biased by whatever circles you happen to run in - who gets to judge who is/isn't informed? Can I guess the people you are talking about (as uninformed) are also an outgroup relative to you?
A person with schizophrenia may imagine and feel things that aren't strictly real, but are nonetheless "real" in terms of what they experience. In that case, it would be harmful to legitimize those things, and it's important to help the person distinguish between what feels real and what is real. In no way am I equating transgender feelings to schizophrenia, but those same principles should apply.
No, but people like to misrepresent metaphors when it suits their worldview.
This is a very touchy subject so hear me out. Anorexic can be caused by a type of body dysphoria; meaning you always see yourself as fat -- a disconnect between who you are and what's in the mirror. Same goes for people who feel like they need a part of their body amputated in order to be complete. Some surgeons preform amputations on these people, more out of fear that they'd try to preform amputation themselves. But is this healthy? This gets into a very complex discussion on what is health/mental health.
I'm totally for people changing their gender roles or adding things from opposite gender roles. Throughout history we see major roles associated with either men or women change. From the Greeks to the Sumerians to the Romans, the idea of what men and women do in society can change quite a bit. Today we might acknowledge it's more fluid and we don't have to be locked into these social constructions. We redefine gender as the social construction and sex as the biological XX/XY chromosome types.
When people throw around "mental illness" with "transgender" it is never to uplift, but almost always to denigrate. It's a conservative thing and it's terrible. If they are having trouble identifying with themselves, and want to change their bodies drastically, essentially mutilating themselves (to quote South Park, "You mean I'm just a man with a mutilated penis?") we should ask ourselves .. is that a good thing? Maybe you can look and act and be like a woman/men, but accept what you were born biologically as a man/women.
I wish there was a way to talk about body dysphoria in a way that was helpful and not hateful, and maybe talk about how progressives can be for gender role fluidity and transgendered individuals, yet also acknowledging that reassignment surgery may be a bad thing and a sign people's view of themselves may not be in line with reality or beneficial to their overall well being.
It's a very dangerous issue to touch.
I know we are on Hacker News where everything must be done from first principles with whatever knowledge happens to be rolling around in the head of the person writing the comment, but this stuff is pretty settled folks.
The long-term implications of sexual reassignment surgery are far from settled.
Being transgender, even if we accept your premise, doesn’t.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/
Johns Hopkins got taken over by McHugh, who had a very clear (and stated) agenda to shut the clinic down. The evidence he compiled to do so was very sketchy - it didn't look at things like happiness or suicide rates. It looked at things like having heterosexual relationships (in the new sex) vs having homosexual ones. Nobody can quite figure out how it was scored and it overall feels very much like cherry picked junk statistics.
Also, not everyone who is trans needs or wants SRS, and many are happy without it. There used to be a lot less understanding of this, and it made things more difficult for a lot of people.
And ultimately? Yes, it would be great (and possibly change my own desire for it) if SRS was better, and allowed you to be fertile. This is true of most transgender treatments. It doesn't mean we should stop doing the not perfect things we have and stop pursuing better surgical options.
Also, if an individual, for good or ill, cannot be trusted to make the permanent decisions about their body - who can?
This is a form of survivorship bias - people who have meaningful things to say don't bother to speak on such a politicized topic. The same kind of reason freenet is full of criminality.
The same goes for anyone who flags this comment as long as the parent remains up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You run a cesspool.
My dude, that is just not how writing, conversation, or moderation works.
incredible
who would think that?
Edit: I guess that even though in this case there is misassignment at birth one could make the case that the transgender label applies. I don’t really have an opinion but one could also consider that intersex is something different: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
Definition: "denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond with their birth sex."
You're thinking of "chromosomal sex".
There's all sorts of other things that can happen that lead to a mismatch between these things.
The definition is admittedly a bit weird when dealing with intersex people, but there you go.
It is not uncommon to hear of transmen who talk about always knowing they were male and were really confused when their penis didn't grow at puberty.
The point is the parts you're born with don't match how you feel. Just because the exact cause can be identified in this case doesn't make it invalid for others. If you had one of these kids at age 8 insisting they were a boy, but they still had a vagina... they'd be as trans as any trans man.
There is a biological basis for the feelings trans people feel.
It seems with trans people, they are assigned the correct sex (technically) but wrong gender at birth. We don't have a way to know the correct gender at birth and just assign it based on biological sex. This works well for most people, but obviously not all. Maybe someday we will understand these things in greater detail.
I suppose we could have a society that does not assign gender norms to kids until they reach a certain age. However this would be a massive overhaul to our entire society.
You could look at chromosomal sex, but even that can get weird. You have Kleinfelter's people (XXY), people who are XX but male because they have the SRY gene on one of their X chromosomes (XX Male/ de la Chappelle syndrome). You have people who have a Y chromosome but develop female because of androgen insensitivity.
You can even have people that are chimeras that literally have both XX and XY genes in their body; there is a report of somebody who was 94% XY giving birth.
There's a whole spectrum of intersex possibilities and ambiguous genitalia. Historically, doctors would pick which sex was surgically easiest to assign to the baby if their genitalia were ambiguous, and that was kind of disastrous because it's not just a societal construct and not just something you can flip at birth.
Biologically speaking the presence or absence of SRY is kinda the closest thing to technical that you can get; that is the gene that causes the ovotestis to develop into testicles and start secreting testosterone and anti-mullerian hormone. Pretty much all the other changes in sexual development are keyed by levels of sex steroids.
But as mentioned even if you have that, all kinds of things can cause that go weird; from your body not making testosterone, to it not being responded to correctly, to the womb environment introducing other chemicals that alter brain development.
And especially with brain development, we don't really know how it works. There's studies that look at - if you take a baby mouse, and remove its ovaries/testes, and give it hormone X, then it acts this way towards other mice that looks more male or female.
However, humans aren't mice and a lot of our sexual behaviors are pretty unique to the species (like face to face sex), and even then, our brains are way more complicated and complex. The difference between gender and orientation is almost impossible to see in an animal model (usually they look at things like, does the mouse try to mount female mice when they are receptive, does it exhibit lordosis posture, etc).
> However this would be a massive overhaul to our entire society.
Depends on the age involved but it really doesn't change anything the first few years. We'd have to get over the obsession with blue for boys and pink for girls and painting the rooms and gender reveal parties... but not much else. I mean historically (young) boys and girls wore basically the same clothes (just so more didn't need to be made/bought) and were treated the same because it really doesn't make any difference.
Bathrooms are kinda the first thing but really what other difference is there? Especially before puberty?
And let's not forget that even then, you're always going to have people who are ambiguous or fall between the cracks. Gender nonconforming, genderfluid, genderqueer - people who just don't feel one label fits them all the time. Even within the two-gender framework you have effeminate gay men, tomboys, and all sorts of other perfectly valid identities.
There's an excellent chart here - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/beyond-xx-and-xy-...
The DSM is useful, don't get me wrong. But among the subjects of mental illness include Orgasmic Dysfunction and other such... "illnesses".
Being Homosexual was considered a mental illness in the 1970s. Today, it isn't, because we've all figured out that the thoughts behind it are messed up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sexual dimorphism is weird. There must more to it than sex hormones.
What if all children are naturally inclined to "feel like boys", whatever that means. But then society dictates that some are "girls" and are put in dresses, hair plaited, and told to behave a certain way? Why wouldn't they feel uncomfortable with their assigned gender role, regardless of what's coming for them in puberty?
But it were the case—if every young (apparent) girl felt the same unease about their gender—one would assume that the people in the town would have already acknowledged that. They seem quite comfortable discussing gender.
Funny how once their penises start growing they're accepted for the boyishness, but the "real" girls are stuck in their shitty gender role, and few people note the hypocrisy.
https://books.google.ca/books?id=bEycBQAAQBAJ&pg=PT161&lpg=P...
http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/appsych/opus/issues/2011/spring/ge...
There's certainly a biological component to sex. There are chromosomes, hormonal differences, morphological differences in genitalia, brain dimorphism, and several other ways in which things can go. And they can generally be mixed and matched any which-way. I've never understood why people who don't actually have an interest in human biology want to demand a simple picture. If they want a simple picture, there is the simplest one available: Let people do what they want. Don't let it bother you. End of story. If you want to get into human biology, dive right in! It's amazingly complex and will surprise you at every turn! Everything you think is 'this is always how it is' goes wrong at some point, and we've seen most of it! (Speaking of which if anyone knows any case studies involving a person with no working mirror neurons, I'm interested.)
If so, there could actually be a sort of "third sex" on the horizon. It's been explored quite a bit in sci-fi tropes, but amazing that it's actually (kind of) real!
Imagine if you literally got to choose your sex, with no preset arrangement... you were just a "third gender" type, then elect to go through either male hormone or female hormone therapy depending on your druthers.
So imagine if there was a simple way to delay that process until adolescence, when children could choose for themselves whether they wanted male or female anatomies.
Or is the issue that with male chromosomes it's "tricky" to get working ovaries?
But what if it's not the typical transgender surgery, but actually having the gonads and tubercle turn into ovaries and clitoris instead of testicles and penis?
I imagine it would produce about half X-ovums and half Y-ovums. X-ovums should be normal, Y-ovums might not be viable at all.
If they were, Y-spermatozoons could probably not fertilise them, or in any case it would fail rather fast without developing into a viable embryo. X-spermatozoons could fertilise them to produce male embryos.
Producing working ovaries with male chromosomes is the most unlikely step, but otherwise it seems like it should work provided the biological machinery is there to support pregnancy.
That said, the fact that one gene seems to have so much effect suggests it's plausible that in the future we might be able to do something to make those individuals fertile, or to enable genital reconstruction surgeries for transgender people that enable new fertility.
Note that much of this may be oversimplified, so any experts can feel free to apply some pedantry to the finer details.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testis-determining_factor [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_gonadal_dysgenesis
More seriously, I'd say their personal preference should be the most important. It's not like we have a shortage of people.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/h...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fa%27afafine
But it's not really viewed as a "choice." Samoan society is just arranged differently to reflect the more variable realities of gender.
The word "girl" used to refer generally to young children, probably because they don't really start to differentiate much visually before puberty.
People seem to generally be more comfortable when they can put a label on things...
The sexes are quite visible before puberty in terms of behaviour, just not so much in external development.
I'm not much against gender roles, I don't see the problem with them. From a practical perspective, it seems like people will do better if they are familiarized, from an early age, with the role they'll almost inevitably seek to fill to at least some extent. Worst case you find out you've been somewhat wrong at around puberty, and you adjust from there.
I am a woman who was one of the top ranked students of my graduating class. I see lots of problems with it. An awful lot of the social construct of girl's lives only works if you "marry well" and if marrying well is the only thing you want out of life. You run into a fuckton of serious friction between that social construct and wanting an education, making your own money, being gay and on and on and on.
As just one side of the story. I also did not want my sons to grow up and not know how to, for example, feed themselves properly. This has serious health consequences and just fundamentally should not be someone else's responsibility.
To the extent that this is the expectation on women, it is the expectation on men to be husband material. Straight women in western society are legally and culturally responsible for choosing a husband if they want one (and most do).
The majority of women (and men) want to have kids, either ASAP or eventually, and the best way to raise kids is in a stable marriage. When people encourage you to do this, entirely at your option, they are reinforcing very reliable advice.
If you want an advanced education, great! Nobody has the right to stop you, and nobody should have the right to force you either. Anyone who feels they have the determination and desire to contribute to science or business, and is so passionate that they are willing to forego or delay their personal development, should feel the full support of society.
> I also did not want my sons to grow up and not know how to, for example, feed themselves properly.
Cooking food, especially staple meals, is not gender specific. Every man I know can cook local staple meals (pasta and sauce, omelettes, chili, chicken and vegetable soup, [sometimes soy sauce based vegetable soups, depending on social group]), I see no difference in general adherence to common dietary advice except that the guys maybe like red meat more.
Mere adherence to a gender role is not a moral good in and of itself; but that shouldn't turn people off of them. They give structure on matters that you don't feel all that passionate about.
Also, while I generally agree that a stable, healthy marriage is best for raising kids, one of the problems here is that people are living longer and having fewer children. Even if a woman marries well, after her kids are grown, there are very real problems for her and other people to expect her to remain confined to certain caretaking roles.
The fact that people are living longer and child mortality rates are down inherently creates social pressure to handle things differently than in the past. I think you only escape this by erasing a great deal of progress that led to both of these positive outcomes.
Fair enough, I would not advocate for nifty fifties or rural Iraq style forcible/near-forcible gender roles. The extent to which force is involved is the extent to which they are wrong.
If you take force out of the equation, you get a useful mental model; put force in, and you get a repressive system.
> The fact that people are living longer and child mortality rates are down inherently creates social pressure to handle things differently than in the past.
This is definitely true, but it seems this question is already answered for us: people continue to want to have kids at nearly the same rate (after the initial decline), but typically trend toward or below the replacement rate in terms of the typical number of children per household.
I was a homemaker and full time mom. I also was an excellent student. I have found it quite challenging to develop a serious career. I feel strongly that gender expectations are a big factor in that problem.
So, it is a thing I think about a lot.
I agree that there is nothing inherently wrong with having a useful mental model for "this is how to act." But I think we face substantial challenges in teasing out how to separate masculine and feminine expression from the raft load of problems that cause the trend known as the feminization of poverty.
Yeah, among the elderly, marital status is the largest determining factor in poverty rates; and among the unmarried elderly, sex is the next major factor [0]. That said, I don't see a trend in the data I've seen on this, but that could just be for lack of samples.
I will say that this definitely touches on your earlier comment (which I'll quote)
> Even if a woman marries well, after her kids are grown, there are very real problems for her and other people to expect her to remain confined to certain caretaking roles.
This is basically the conclusion of a major, life-altering decision.
Option a) Optimize for "feminine" roles, be able to have and raise kids in an optimal manner, and attach yourself to your husband's naturally greater earning role so that you can maintain your lifestyle into old age.
Option b) Optimize for general/economic roles, choose a difficult and time consuming career which nobody else will appreciate you for, because you may not have a family in your 30s to care about how much you earn. Live out the rest of your days on your own dollar (albeit with nobody around who wants you to cook for them or support them emotionally, which even to me as a [fairly young] man who cooks for others seems kinda lonely). Statistically speaking, this route goes poorly for both sexes, but especially poorly for women (that "never married" category on the SSA fact sheet).
At a glance, it seems unfair that these are the two main choices for women, but I don't see how you could expect much different.
The difference can be largely attributed to the unique maternal relationship, and the fact that it is a career in itself. The uniquely paternal part of child rearing is more of a job than a career, and part of the gig is to have other work anyhow.
It seems like a very difficult decision, and I sympathize with it. Young and foolish as I am, I think that if I had a straight daughter, she has a better chance of achieving a likely life goal (having [a] kid[s]) and remaining above the poverty line if she is at least well equipped for the "feminine" role. I would have no trouble encouraging her to work on that while also getting a proper professional education.
[0]: https://www.ssa.gov/retirementpolicy/fact-sheets/marital-sta...
Also if cooking and being emotionally supportive are part of the female role, does that mean that you wouldn't raise your sons to be capable of doing those things? Where are their wives getting their emotional support from, and what happens if the husband/wife unit is split up for a time because of work or family obligations? Is the husband just going to eat McDonalds and canned spam for three months because the wife is across the country caring for her dying mother? To me, cooking and being emotionally supportive are not "important skills for women", they are important skills for all adults, especially if they are at the point of settling down with a partner.
http://michelerebooted.blogspot.com/2017/09/unmarried-bitche...
Thank you for engaging me in good faith. A meaty debate or discussion with someone who is not being an asshole about it is always a good thing and, sadly, not very common.
I would like it if you avoid associating me with that statement. I deliberately avoid speaking on what people "deserve" or "don't deserve". I make an effort to avoid ascribing moral categories like "bitches" based on people's personal lifestyle preferences.
I'm glad to have had a conversation in good faith on this matter, but associating me with the disgusting statement "unmarried bitches don't deserve to eat" is a manifest breach of good faith.
I was homeless for nearly six years. I got off the street earlier this month. I was quite open on the internet about my struggles in trying to figure out how to come up with enough earned income to eat. It garnered me damn little sympathy or support and there were an awful lot of people who were quite ugly to me and accused me of things like trying to panhandle the internet.
If the title makes people uncomfortable, well, that is the intention. Maybe you should stop and reconsider your view that gender roles are no problem if you feel so deeply offended by having it put baldly to you that a position that it is fine for women to be groomed to be a wife (from birth) is one that actively makes it difficult for most women to meet their basic needs at some point in their life.
Adieu.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5%CE%B1-Reductase_deficiency
And what do you mean by "sexual purposes"?
Also this article doesn't describe a simple culture construct. It's about a real biological change that causes apparent girls to develop into boys through puberty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle-cell_disease#Genetics
a person who receives one defective and one healthy allele remains healthy, but can pass on the disease and is known as a carrier or heterozygote. Heterozygotes are still able to contract malaria, but their symptoms are generally less severe
It's a good book. I recommend it. I guess my point is that sometimes when something is different Now, it's hard to grasp it's significance and pros and cons because maybe our viewpoint is skewed to our current perceptions (which is a theme throughout the book, it has alot of time travel).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5α-Reductase_deficiency#Fertil...
I was a tortoise until age 7. Being a reptile is a bummer, and my tutle penis didn't develop until age 45. Most people born in CA are like this... Just sayin'.
“By a quirk of chance Dr Imperato’s research was picked up by the American pharmaceutical giant, Merck. They used her discovery to create a drug called finasteride, which blocks the action of 5-α-reductase.
“It is now widely used to treat benign enlargement of the prostate and male pattern baldness. For which, I’m sure, many men are truly grateful.”