Gender Roles

[Jarhyn]

But they exist as a very small minority

You keep saying shit like this as if it matters.

It doesn't.

I can also recognize and acknowledge that vast majority of the animal kingdom wouldn't exist at all if heterosexuality were not the norm

No, this is not true in the least.

The true statement is "[the] vast majority of the animal kingdom wouldn't exist at all if homosexuality were the norm"

Bisexuality does not in the least prevent the vast majority of the species from procreating. Pretty much the only species bisexuality hits are those who die automatically and immediately after having sex once.

You are falling into the fallacy of the excluded middle.

 

[Jarhyn]

The point is that if there is anyone that is ambiguous you can't divide the world into male and female. Doesn't matter if they are one in a billion.

Heap fallacy taken to an extreme.

No, it's not. He is absolutely correct. You are trying to wave away your false binary.

 

[Jokodo]

"Heterosexuality" in an invention of the late 19th century, and was invented after "homosexuality".

This is an odd take. I get what you're saying in the following bits, but even so, it seems like it's heavily influenced by an ideological desire rather than by observation.

I'm not sure you are getting what I'm saying in the following bits.

Yes, same-sex attracted people and animals have existed pretty much for as long as we've recorded history. But they exist as a very small minority.

That's almost certainly true when you talk about exclusively same-sex attracted individuals, but for any species, or for any sex within one and the same species, it may or may not true when talking about same-sex attraction alongside different-sex attraction. There is some evidence at least for the females of H. sapiens, even in cultures with a moderately strong normative pressure for heterosexuality, some level of same-sex attraction (typically alongside, and usually dominated by, different-sex attraction) is actually the default.

I don't particularly care about anybody's orientation, and I think it's stupid to denigrate (let alone persecute) people for it. On the other hand... I can also recognize and acknowledge that vast majority of the animal kingdom wouldn't exist at all if heterosexuality were not the norm. The only thing "new" about heterosexuality is the name we've given it.

Do you have evidence that early Christians (or indeed anyone before the 18th C) thought of buggery as a sin the vast majority of the population are intrinsically unable to be tempted by? I'm sure people who experienced little or no same-sex attraction existed and considered themselves lucky (to the extent they were giving much thought about it at all) when homoerotic acts where considered a sin and/or crime, but did it make them in their own minds, a different kind of person from those who did? Assuming they did seems to be, by all I've seen, an anachronistic interpretation.

Plants don't have a sexual orientation, as they don't actually have sex. One could argue that most fish don't have a sexual orientation as they don't engage in sexual intercourse either - females spew out a bunch of eggs and male splatters a whole bunch of sperm across them. But most mammals and birds actually do engage in sexual intercourse (including the dove pair that insists on going at it seven times a day on wall right outside my office window, no shame those two). That sexual intercourse is how babies happen, it's how the species is promulgated. Heterosexuality must be a consistently strong norm in order to perpetuate the species.

I'm not American and English is not my first language. Maybe "heterosexuality" means something very different in American English from what "Heterosexualität" means in Austrian German. Maybe. I'd be very surprised to learn that that's true, though, and the very existence of the word "bisexuality" in the former idiom seems to suggest otherwise.

None of what you said implies heterosexuality as I understand it as a "norm", or a default, or even as particularly common. All it implies is that most females of the species engage in penis-in-vagina intercourse during their period of fertility sufficiently often to produce the species-typical inter-birth interval (IBI). Typical IBIs in all apes are measured in years, with humans' actually being the shortest of all great apes. Saying that the promulgation of the species requires "heterosexuality [as] a consistently strong norm" in humans would suggest that a woman who has sex with other women three times a week, and sex with a man three times a decade (but is sufficiently fecund that she gets pregnant every time she does) be counted as heterosexual. I don't know about you, but I'd be more likely to call her a lesbian than even bisexual, let alone heterosexual.

Evolution only cares that sex that can result in offspring happens. Except in species where engaging in sex prohibitively expensive (because they're strictly solitary and aggressively territorial such that even getting closer enough to another individual to even think about it carries a significant risk of injury, or because the penis typically gets stuck and breaks off, etc.), evolution doesn't give a rat's ass about all the other sex that may our may not happen, at least not from a directly reproduction-related perspective. It may acquire additional functions such as bonding and the release of tension, and indeed one of our closest relatives, the bonobo, can serve as a textbook example of such additional functions - but indeed, for those additional functions, different sexes are no longer a strong prediction.

Watching humans, it should be pretty obvious that sexual intercourse is NOT prohibitively expensive in our species. Well above 90% of the sex happening in our species is intrinsically incapable of producing offspring, possibly as much as 99% of we include masturbation. Natural selection doesn't care why a particular sexual act doesn't produce offspring - jerking off to depictions of sex (even if PIV its the only thing that gets your aroused), or sex while using efficient contraception, or sex involving a post-menopausal woman or any other individual that is temporarily or permanently infertile, is, at least from the perspective of the promulgation of the species, entirely equivalent to same-sex acts. Yet those of who don't masturbate don't have a word (or concept) to distinguish themselves from those of us who do ten times for every one time they have actual sex. The fact that those of us who don't do same sex partners identify by a label that sets them apart from those who (sometimes, often, almost exclusively) do isn't a fact about reproductive biology, nor likely a fact about innate psychology, but appears to be almost exclusively a fact about culture. I'm not claiming it's a cultural norm that happened in a biological vacuum. I don't subscribe to blank-slatism. It's almost certainly a cultural norm that is more likely to evolve than the opposite, given the biological predisposition of most members of the species. It's nonetheless a cultural norm that cannot be exhaustively explained by biology alone, with the specifics varying in time and space, and humans being as profoundly cultural an animal as we are, there's likely going to be a feedback loop between what we feel we're supposed to be aroused, and what we are aroused by, or at least profess to be.

I don't know about your sex life nor is it any of my business, but being in a monogamous relationship with a woman with acquired infertility, I can assure you that all of the sex I've been having in the last six years is functionally undistinguishable from homoerotic acts as far as its potential contribution to the promulgation of the species is concerned, and it didn't make much of a dent in my sex drive.

 

[Jokodo]

tL;dr: having sex that can potentially result in offspring is neither necessary nor sufficient for "heterosexuality". A man in a monogamous relationship with a post-menopausal woman or a nun who is staying true to her pledge but is sometimes having second thoughts when she sees the priest, never with the other nuns are still heterosexual in my book (and if they aren't in yours, I'd like to see your definition). A woman who got pregnant and gave birth two of the four times she had intercourse with a man over the course of a decade has above average fertility in Austria in 2024. Explaining heterosexuality by the need for PIV sex for reproduction is missing a big, big step.

What @Emily Lake is describing isn't "heterosexuality" under any definition I've encountered so far - it's not being iredeemably grossed out by the idea of occasional PIV sex if you have a P, and either that or failing to resist rape if you have a V. Near-universal heterosexuality in both sexes isn't a requirement for that trait to be present in the large majority of females and at least a sufficiently large minority of males for the availability of sperm not to become a bottleneck.

 

[Jokodo]

I expect in that process a trait, arose that seeks to push androgens away entirely, and a particular behavior (seeking castration in some way) as a result that achieves that selection target reliably enough, and that when this happens the resulting individuals often exceed their peers in accomplishment, lifespan, and logical thought.

On the other hand... I expect that a process trait arose that seeks to accept and work within the confines of one's physical reality, and that the particular behavior of not seeking to mutilate the body in order to conform to a hypothetical ideal influenced by transhumanist and post modern narratives results in individuals that exceed their peers in contentment, decision making skills, adaptability, and rationality.

Just saying. Your post might be one of the most self-congratulatory reframings of an extreme outlier behavior I've run across in a long time.

Jarhyn's kind of right about lifespan though. Testosterone, according to my readings, is fairly directly involved in men's lower life expectancy, and I'm not even talking about the riskier behaviour it triggers, but about physiological effects on the aging process itself. An artificial reduction of testosterone loads could very well increase life expectancy of people undergoing it as an elective treatment, if all else were equal (which, as a general rule of thumb, it never is, especially not when comparing a marginalised group with the population at large).

Lower testosterone in males, perhaps. No testosterone on the other hand? Not so sure. No testosterone from the onset of puberty? Hard disagree, for reasons I've given multiple times.

Is no testosterone even on the table? It's anyone going for it? Even a typical female developmental trajectory includes testosterone - it is produced, albeit at lower levels than in testes, in the ovaries of healthy females of all mammals, as far as I know; it certainly is in humans. Even removing the gonads doesn't lead to no testosterone, as it is produced in small amounts in the adrenal glands too.

 

[Jokodo]

I feel the most controversial part about the proposition that "a male body can totally have a female (or unusually female-like) brain in it" is the notion that "female brain" is a useful category*. We know that a male body can totally fail to have a penis on it (at least one that we wouldn't let pass for a clitoris if we saw it on a different body). We know that a male body can totally have female type facial and body hair pattern on it. We know that a male body can totally have undescended gonads in it. We know that a male body can totally have unfused labia on it. Why would the brain be any different? Sure you can say all of these are disorders/medical conditions, so what? Feel free to call female brains in male bodies a "disorder"; we aren't discussing whether they are healthy and what that would even mean, we are discussing whether they exist. Do you have any reason to believe that the brain correlates more strongly with sex than the actual fucking genitals we use for actual fucking, which is kind of the fucking point of sex in the first place?

No, I do NOT believe that the brain correlates more strongly with sex than the actual sexual reproductive system. In fact, the brain is one of the LEAST dimorphic organs in our entire bodies. My position is that "male brain" and "female brain" are largely absurd and regressive notions. To the extent that there are observable differences on average between the brains of people with male bodies and people with female bodies, those differences are: 1) extremely small 2) non-predictive 3) directly attributable to hormones and 4) the result of neural plasticity as it arises from conditioning.

For the most part, the "pink brain in a blue body" argument is a vapid position based on wishful thinking, largely put forth by two groups of people. One of those groups of people consists largely of extremely conservative traditionalists who view women as being "naturally" subservient to men, and who wish to engage in pseudoscience in order to push their sexist narrative. The other group of people consists largely of transhumanist zealots who wish to supplant the observable reality of our sexed bodies - and the role of those developments from an evolutionary perspective - with a set of wishes that rely on a gendered soul and thus to override policies that relate to sex-based separation of services and spaces regardless of the negative impacts that would befall women and girls.

If you do, I'd be interested to read your arguments, it's certainly not something that's trivially or obviously true. Indeed if anything, I think there is, specifically from an evolutionary perspective, some very good reasons to predict a "male body with female brain" to be (much) more common than the other kinds of mismatches discussed, as I explained here. If you have data to counter these hypotheses or conceptual arguments that they are less plausible than I make them sound, please do present them. Not so that I can pick them apart, but so that I can learn.

What exactly do you think a "male body with a female brain" means? What do you think a female brain is in the first place? What makes a brain "female"?

Well I did say this:

the most controversial part about the proposition that "a male body can totally have a female (or unusually female-like) brain in it" is the notion that "female brain" is a useful category​

We aren't that far apart on this.

I will however comment on this line of yours:

To the extent that there are observable differences on average between the brains of people with male bodies and people with female bodies, those differences are: (...) 3) directly attributable to hormones​

​

I'm sure that's true. I'm also sure it's true of the vast majority of sex traits, including primary ones. Atypical development in a hormone- dependent developmental pathway doesn't require atypical hormone levels. It may be caused (and for all I know, more often is) by atypical levels of expression of the hormone receptors in the relevant tissue. So it can still be true that a trait that is attributable to hormones shows atypical development in an otherwise typically developing individual.

 

[Jokodo]

I'm pretty poor at reading reindeer minds, I guess they would, though. But when we circle back to humans, I would probably instinctively pay attention to shoulder width and height in a similar fashion when seeing a person from behind, and yet I feel those are more fruitfully described as characteristics with a sex skewed distribution rather that secondary sex characteristics, which to me at least better describes beards and breasts. The conclusion I'll reach in that way will be, for most of the range, tentative, and I instinctively know as much. The conclusion will be fairly firm at the tails, but much less so for typical values of either sex. I'm no Dwayne Johnson, and let's be honest, most of us aren't. If I see a Dwayne Johnson from behind, I would indeed be very surprised to learn that person was born a woman even if I saw him in a dress, but for someone, with my shoulders, I wouldn't be all that surprised even if I saw them in gender-unspecific male-leaning clothes. If I saw such a person in female-signalling attire, I'd read them as a cis woman if anything. Maybe not an excessively feminine one, but "this must be a trans woman/ transvestite/ man going for a woman in carneval" isn't a thought that would likely cross my mind, as it would for Dwayne Johnson. That being said, my shoulders are probably pretty average for a male of my subpopulation. If the male average value for a trait is insufficient to sideline the tentative conclusion triggered by a notoriously transient property such a attire, I fail to see how calling it a "sex characteristic" when talking about individuals rather than population means is anything but misleading. Thus, "do conspecifics instinctively pay attention to a trait under conditions of incomplete information" seems to be a rather insufficient condition for that trait being a "sex characteristic" under what I would consider the most intuitive definition.

Tertiary sex characteristics if you like, or more reasonably "sex correlated" traits rather than "sex linked" traits.

Sex correlated traits are, generally speaking, those that reflect dimorphism and are often assumed to be the result of sexual selection. They are not directly the result of sex-based hormones, nor are they tied to sex chromosomes. They are traits that are independent of the process of sexual differentiation in our development, but which express with different averages by sex and often show considerable overlap in the distributions by sex, and produce a material bimodal distribution when plotted without sex being used to divide the population. By material, I mean that the trough between modes is not near-zero.

Secondary sex characteristics directly result from the process of sex differentiation in our development, either as a direct result of the action of hormones or because they're actually tied to sex chromosomes. Secondary sex characteristics are distinguished from primary sex characteristics in that they are not directly involved in the process of reproduction.

It's not uncommon to be mistaken about a person's sex when looking solely at sex correlated traits - shoulder breadth, height, foot size, hand size, and the like. They're generally good at suggesting sex, but they show a large amount of variation. There are plenty of 6' tall women with broad shoulders and narrow hips out there, and there are plenty of 5'7" men with small feet and small hands out there. These characteristics are a good proxy for sex most of the time, but are not reliable.

It's a lot less common to be mistaken about a person's sex when looking at secondary sex characteristics. Most of the time, if you end up being mistaken, it's because someone has intentionally attempted to mimic the opposite sex. Secondary sex characteristics - in the absence of intentional mimicry - is an extremely good indicator of sex, with a very low miss rate.

You might see someone with narrow shoulders and swish from behind and assume that they're female. You might even thing "my, what a caboose that gal has!", but when they turn around and have a beard and adam's apple, and are obviously male it's not like you're going to fall over from shock. Most of the time this would result in "oh, that's a dude! Well, he's got a nice behind" and you go on with your day and don't give it much thought beyond "hey I saw this dude earlier, and at first I thought he was a chick because he had this really nice sway to his backside, boy was I mistaken".

On the other hand... if you see someone with a rolling gait, wide hips, breasts, a facial structure that has a smaller and narrower chin, narrower jaw, rounder forehead, rounder orbital sockets, arched brows, narrow waist compared to hips, no facial hair (and no hint of a 5-oclock shadow), no protruding adam's apple, narrow shoulders relative to their hip width, and femurs that aren't orthogonal to the ground... and they end up having a penis... you're likely to be surprised. Not guaranteed, but likely nonetheless.

Both tertiary and secondary sex characteristics act as signals of sex to potential mates. But at the end of the day, it's primary characteristics that are the deal-breakers in reproduction.

And just in case it needs to be said... talking about the role of reproduction in evolution, and in how different characteristics have evolved and the role that those characteristics play within any given species is not in any way passing judgement on individuals who either cannot or choose not to reproduce. That's an entirely different discussion that has no place in this interaction.

I don't know if you think any of this contradicts what I said, or why you would if your think it does. @Bomb#20 had suggested to use whether reindeer use antler size and shape to gauge the sex of an individual in incomplete information scenarios to determine whether its a secondary sex trait. You seem to agree with me that's an insufficient condition?

Re "at the end of the day, it's primary characteristics that are the deal-breakers in reproduction" - true, but what if anything that implies for any other domain isn't determined by that observation and may well have to be decided on a case by case basis.

 

[Jarhyn]

I expect in that process a trait, arose that seeks to push androgens away entirely, and a particular behavior (seeking castration in some way) as a result that achieves that selection target reliably enough, and that when this happens the resulting individuals often exceed their peers in accomplishment, lifespan, and logical thought.

On the other hand... I expect that a process trait arose that seeks to accept and work within the confines of one's physical reality, and that the particular behavior of not seeking to mutilate the body in order to conform to a hypothetical ideal influenced by transhumanist and post modern narratives results in individuals that exceed their peers in contentment, decision making skills, adaptability, and rationality.

Just saying. Your post might be one of the most self-congratulatory reframings of an extreme outlier behavior I've run across in a long time.

Jarhyn's kind of right about lifespan though. Testosterone, according to my readings, is fairly directly involved in men's lower life expectancy, and I'm not even talking about the riskier behaviour it triggers, but about physiological effects on the aging process itself. An artificial reduction of testosterone loads could very well increase life expectancy of people undergoing it as an elective treatment, if all else were equal (which, as a general rule of thumb, it never is, especially not when comparing a marginalised group with the population at large).

Lower testosterone in males, perhaps. No testosterone on the other hand? Not so sure. No testosterone from the onset of puberty? Hard disagree, for reasons I've given multiple times.

Is no testosterone even on the table? It's anyone going for it? Even a typical female developmental trajectory includes testosterone - it is produced, albeit at lower levels than in testes, in the ovaries of healthy females of all mammals, as far as I know; it certainly is in humans. Even removing the gonads doesn't lead to no testosterone, as it is produced in small amounts in the adrenal glands too.

My goal was going to eventually be supplementation of testosterone to "the point where I can be reasonably sure my bones won't rot."

Spoiler: Mostly irrelevant aside about going to Amsterdam.

As an aside, I left my HRT at home for my trip to Amsterdam.

The bike culture here is very thick, but the tourists make it a pain in the ass. Still, it's been educational. My husband has had a harder time biking than me.

So far I haven't been off my pills long enough for it to really start effecting me much.

I've been a bit more "gross teenager" I think?

We are assured it's less crowded away from Amsterdam, and there is more sanity paid to the roads, by a fair margin.

Tomorrow my husband and I are going to take the train out to some of the other areas, perhaps Haarlem or Utrecht.

We stopped at a place for burgers a bit off of the beaten path, and it was definitely a winner.

I do think it's important to occasionally have some experience of what it means to be a man. I have become curious over time about what it is like to have a more "female selective mode" endocrinology, but I don't want any of the secondary anatomy even though I'm not a game of male secondary anatomy on me either.

Apparently there is an effort to get the prostitute windows out of central to quell some of the tourism, which I fully support, as it will involve the creation of a dedicated space for people to safely do and display and see and experience as they wish within the boundaries of consent... Just not in front of the children.

We aren't that far apart on this

My thoughts about brains is, generally, presented as a simplification of the idea that many brain parts differentiate as they will, and some differentiate in such a way that the person wants for their breasts to develop, and to have some hope of hips to be larger than they would otherwise be, as when they see all the people, these people they see with these traits have the body that they see is "as I want to be", and estrogen is a means to that end, and I don't begrudge this.

Other times it will be the same but for an Adam's apple and a beard and a deep voice and some more rapid muscle development.

Other times, it will be "I don't like the noise this stuff makes in my head..."

Other times it will be "I want the noise that makes in my head".

Sometimes it will some admixture of some or even all of these in some measure. Maybe someone wants to grow breasts and long hair and an Adams Apple and muscles and then quit all the hormones so they get the traits of each without the noise at all, and then just work hard to maintain it all, as much as will remain.

I know I'm the "I don't want nosie" but I haven't decided one way or the other on shooting for a breast and hips? The asymmetry would be very off-putting to some people, and I wouldn't do anything to correct it. It's something for me to consider.

I just think that some people are going to want the body they want.

Sometimes that involves not developing any secondary sexual characteristics at all!

I think the most important thing is to just let people have what they want if they can do it without consequences beyond what it does to whether they reproduce or not.

The thing that sickens me more than anything else is the "but what if you want kids later" crowd, gatekeeping other people's decisions about their anatomy and reproductive health and choices.

The world doesn't need as many people producing as many people as are today, and the people who have been produced can provide whatever benefit as they may to their fellows through the fruits of their lives (though you are not owed outside their consent to give!)

A person's reproductive choices are their own, and it disappoints me when people would act in some manner of bad faith to stop someone from making a "reproductive choice" such as "to never".

 

[Jokodo]

"Women" and "men" are meaningful categories. But there are things in the realm of what you can get when you expose embryos to a mix of hormones that aren't clearly one or the other. Also, "beer" and "bread" are meaningful categories in the realm of what you get when you release yeast onto cereals, but there's kvass and sourdough soup too.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I don't know about your sex life nor is it any of my business, but being in a monogamous relationship with a woman with acquired infertility, I can assure you that all of the sex I've been having in the last six years is functionally undistinguishable from homoerotic acts as far as its potential contribution to the promulgation of the species is concerned, and it didn't make much of a dent in my sex drive.

Exactly. The majority of my sexual encounters have had zero chance of reproduction and none have ever had more than a tiny chance. Does that make me not straight???

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The thing that sickens me more than anything else is the "but what if you want kids later" crowd, gatekeeping other people's decisions about their anatomy and reproductive health and choices.

It's not exactly unusual for cis-het people to decide they don't want children. While I never made an irreversible decision against children I knowingly chose a partner that couldn't and I have never regretted it.

 

[Bomb#20]

In the context of determining whether an otherwise male person with a more female-like cognition thinks more like the typical woman or more like a typical man, there is no need to argue for it at all - it's a tautology!

Now there's an ambiguous sentence. "A more female-like cognition" than what? More female-like than male-like? Yes, that's tautological. But more female-like than the typical man's cognition is female-like? That's not a tautology, but an empirical matter,

indeed, and I believe you can guess which I meant.

Yes: I'm guessing you meant the one that's tautological and probably has no referents. My concern about the ambiguity is that readers may take your statement as justification for unwarranted inferences about the surely far more frequent non-tautological cases.

on which the statistics that m2f transgendered people commit crimes at typical male rates rather than typical female rates provides evidence.

How good is that evidence though? I'm not intimately familiar with those statistics nor with the current discourse in criminology, but I believe it is a well established tenet of criminology that members of marginalised groups commit crimes at rates significantly above the population average, in ways that do not solely reflect their individual constitution.

That sounds like a tenet from the unscientific aspects of sociology bleeding into the (ideally) more scientific psychology part of criminology. What possible basis is there for claiming members of marginalized groups commit crimes at rates significantly above the population average, when women commit crimes at rates significantly below the population average and women are a marginalized group if ever there was one, other than some form of circular reasoning?

So depending in your estimate of the size of that effect and the degree of marginalisation of m2f people during the time period the statistics were collected, a typical male rate of actualised crimes reflects a significantly lower intrinsic criminal inclination, and may very well reflect one in a similar ballpark to women's,

That appears to assume "marginalization" is a single independent variable rather than a hodgepodge of different phenomena.

at least for a subset of the group.

And that appears to be an unfalsifiability engine.

A person whose cognition is 3% of the way from male-typical to female-typical might well perceive himself to have "a more female-like cognition" because he's comparing his cognition with those of typical males, and has precious little understanding of how people whose brains are 100% female think.

Possible. Also, in case that was unclear, I didn't want to imply that the description above fits all trans women, just that it is biologically entirely plausible that such people exist at rates well above the rates for anatomically intersex individuals.

As an abstract exercise in considering what sorts of phenomena evolution allows for, sure. But empirically, the observation that neuroscience papers I've seen reporting feminine brains in m2f transsexuals seem to cherry-pick single measurements rather than reporting feminization across a wide range of sexually dimorphic brain characteristics makes it biologically less plausible.

 

[Jokodo]

In the context of determining whether an otherwise male person with a more female-like cognition thinks more like the typical woman or more like a typical man, there is no need to argue for it at all - it's a tautology!

Now there's an ambiguous sentence. "A more female-like cognition" than what? More female-like than male-like? Yes, that's tautological. But more female-like than the typical man's cognition is female-like? That's not a tautology, but an empirical matter,

indeed, and I believe you can guess which I meant.

Yes: I'm guessing you meant the one that's tautological and probably has no referents. My concern about the ambiguity is that readers may take your statement as justification for unwarranted inferences about the surely far more frequent non-tautological cases.

on which the statistics that m2f transgendered people commit crimes at typical male rates rather than typical female rates provides evidence.

How good is that evidence though? I'm not intimately familiar with those statistics nor with the current discourse in criminology, but I believe it is a well established tenet of criminology that members of marginalised groups commit crimes at rates significantly above the population average, in ways that do not solely reflect their individual constitution.

That sounds like a tenet from the unscientific aspects of sociology bleeding into the (ideally) more scientific psychology part of criminology. What possible basis is there for claiming members of marginalized groups commit crimes at rates significantly above the population average, when women commit crimes at rates significantly below the population average and women are a marginalized group if ever there was one, other than some form of circular reasoning?

I give you the history of (gang) crime in NYC and New England. Less than a century ago, the scene was dominated by Irish Catholic immigrants and their descendents, with a significant Jewish component, two groups that were being given a hard time by old-time New Yorkers. Half a century later, the O'Connors and Rosensteins of NYC were for the most part accepted as old-time New Yorkers themselves and behaved the part, with Puerto Ricans and African American immigrants from Dixieland and the Caribbeans taking over their former role. If you believe that development has anything other than a sociological explanation, ie that "criminal genes" were bred out of the Irish and Jewish gene pools within a mere couple of generations, I want to see your math to show that's even remotely plausible!

 

[Bomb#20]

Whether "girly brains" are real or not, you are misrepresenting him. A brain is an aspect of anatomy as much as a gondar gonad or a pelvis. One thing a brain definitely isn't is a belief.

I find it interesting that you would correct an autocorrect-induced typo (I don't even know what a "gondar" is!) but leave what I can only assume is a pronoun you don't go by untouched. I was tempted to write a separate post explaining how that was accidental when I realised (too late for an edit of the original post) that. Kind of counters the claim that "radical trans activists" will cancel even well- meaning individuals for accidental misgendering. Either that, or you officially don't qualify as an RTA.

I don't think anyone familiar with Jarhyn's position on men participating in women's sports would mistake teda for an RTA. It's so nuanced and intermediate between the more popular conflicting opinions that ta would probably get cancelled for it by actual RTAs.

 

[Bomb#20]

How good is that evidence though? I'm not intimately familiar with those statistics nor with the current discourse in criminology, but I believe it is a well established tenet of criminology that members of marginalised groups commit crimes at rates significantly above the population average, in ways that do not solely reflect their individual constitution.

That sounds like a tenet from the unscientific aspects of sociology bleeding into the (ideally) more scientific psychology part of criminology. What possible basis is there for claiming members of marginalized groups commit crimes at rates significantly above the population average, when women commit crimes at rates significantly below the population average and women are a marginalized group if ever there was one, other than some form of circular reasoning?

I give you the history of (gang) crime in NYC and New England. Less than a century ago, the scene was dominated by Irish Catholic immigrants and their descendents, with a significant Jewish component, two groups that were being given a hard time by old-time New Yorkers. Half a century later, the O'Connors and Rosensteins of NYC were for the most part accepted as old-time New Yorkers themselves and behaved the part, with Puerto Ricans and African American immigrants from Dixieland and the Caribbeans taking over their former role.

Are you suggesting you can prove a generalization with an example?!? That's not how it works. I already disproved the generalization with a counterexample.

If you believe that development has anything other than a sociological explanation, ie that "criminal genes" were bred out of the Irish and Jewish gene pools within a mere couple of generations, I want to see your math to show that's even remotely plausible!

Oh for the love of god! Epic false dilemma fallacy. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

ETA: "marginalized" is a polyphyletic category. As a good cladist you should abandon the term.

 

[Jokodo]

How good is that evidence though? I'm not intimately familiar with those statistics nor with the current discourse in criminology, but I believe it is a well established tenet of criminology that members of marginalised groups commit crimes at rates significantly above the population average, in ways that do not solely reflect their individual constitution.

That sounds like a tenet from the unscientific aspects of sociology bleeding into the (ideally) more scientific psychology part of criminology. What possible basis is there for claiming members of marginalized groups commit crimes at rates significantly above the population average, when women commit crimes at rates significantly below the population average and women are a marginalized group if ever there was one, other than some form of circular reasoning?

I give you the history of (gang) crime in NYC and New England. Less than a century ago, the scene was dominated by Irish Catholic immigrants and their descendents, with a significant Jewish component, two groups that were being given a hard time by old-time New Yorkers. Half a century later, the O'Connors and Rosensteins of NYC were for the most part accepted as old-time New Yorkers themselves and behaved the part, with Puerto Ricans and African American immigrants from Dixieland and the Caribbeans taking over their former role.

Are you suggesting you can prove a generalization with an example?!? That's not how it works. I already disproved the generalization with a counterexample.

I didn't say it's the only significant factor. I said it is a factor that must not be lightly discarded when comparing two groups one of which is obviously marginalised.