Gender Roles

[Politesse]

"Current scientific consensus acknowledges biological sex as primarily bimodal rather than strictly binary, recognizing the existence of intersex conditions and the complexity of sex determination processes". Rather elegant and succinct way of putting it! You could profitably post this as a reply to quite a few of the wacky statements in this thread. I wonder who the algorithm stole this from?

 

[Jarhyn]

"Current scientific consensus acknowledges biological sex as primarily bimodal rather than strictly binary, recognizing the existence of intersex conditions and the complexity of sex determination processes". Rather elegant and succinct way of putting it! You could profitably post this as a reply to quite a few of the wacky statements in this thread. I wonder who the algorithm stole this from?

Nobody, any more than linear regression steals it's line from the points.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

And as far as I can tell you've yet to explain what the demarcation of "sex" is.

Perhaps you could explain why the 99.9% accuracy accomplished by sexing at birth is inadequate for your purposes.
Tom

Because we are discussing the 0.1%.

How did "we' get from discussing gender roles to intersex?
Tom
ETA ~Your post was "And as far as I can tell you've yet to explain what the demarcation of "sex" is."

I'm not talking gender, I'm talking sex and the dividing line of it from gender. Some people love saying shit like "that is gender, not sex", yet seem incapable of explaining where the line is divided or even what sex explicitly is.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I love how you trim out the references to science that I *do* accept

Except that you DON'T actually accept scientific views. You instead rely on "sciency" views, views presented as if they are science but are not.

Fine - YOU go tell Sigma that the study she posted some time back is not real science. Have fun with that.

Every time you say Humans have only two sexes and deny the research that brains are gender-coded.

I deny that sex and gender are the same thing. You insist upon conflating the two.

And as far as I can tell you've yet to explain what the demarcation of "sex" is.

Sexes are the result of evolution that leverages the merging of two different sized gametes for reproduction. The term for a species that uses two different sized gametes to reproduce is "anisogamous". In anisogomous species, members of those species evolved two distinct reproductive systems, one for each of the two gametes. The reproductive phenotype that has evolved to support the production of small motile gametes appears in members of the species that we call males; the reproductive phenotype that has evolved to support the production of large sessile gametes appears in members of the species that we call females.

The specific elements of the phenotype vary by species, but within every anisogamous species, two reproductive phenotypes exist.

The existence of two (and only two) sexes is HOW BABIES GET MADE in anisogamous species.

That's great. When are you answering my question.

Where is the line? Or are you suggesting, because you sure aren't saying, that sex ends at the squishy bits inside the abdomen. And are excluding any and all neurological and chemical processes involved in the regulation of said bits?

 

[Politesse]

And as far as I can tell you've yet to explain what the demarcation of "sex" is.

Perhaps you could explain why the 99.9% accuracy accomplished by sexing at birth is inadequate for your purposes.
Tom

Because we are discussing the 0.1%.

How did "we' get from discussing gender roles to intersex?
Tom
ETA ~Your post was "And as far as I can tell you've yet to explain what the demarcation of "sex" is."

I'm not talking gender, I'm talking sex and the dividing line of it from gender. Some people love saying shit like "that is gender, not sex", yet seem incapable of explaining where the line is divided or even what sex explicitly is.

I don't think such a line can even exist. At least, not as long as people's perception of "sex" is profoundly shaped by the culture's portrayal of gender, and it always is. The idea of a strictly biological definition of sex is attractive, but unrealized in practice. As genetic researchers realized the second they started unpacking the real biological influences on sexual expression in the early 20th c. Ever since then, we've been stuck in that all too familiar situation, in the sciences, where the uneducated think the question has a simple "science says" answer but actual scientists propose something far more complicated and nuanced.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I'd say we certainly have a baseline that has been very successful for most people. The issue is that it might not work for all people, and there are some that seem heavily invested in the presumption of organs providing identity instead of the reality being a bit more complicated, and that it merely seems like the organs are providing the identity. Kind of like gravitation in Newtonian Physics and Relativistic Physics.

I think sex might simply be your sexual identity and gender is how society allows you to manage it.

 

[Jarhyn]

I'd say we certainly have a baseline that has been very successful for most people. The issue is that it might not work for all people, and there are some that seem heavily invested in the presumption of organs providing identity instead of the reality being a bit more complicated, and that it merely seems like the organs are providing the identity. Kind of like gravitation in Newtonian Physics and Relativistic Physics.

I think sex might simply be your sexual identity and gender is how society allows you to manage it.

I would say Gender is less about what society "allows", but society does provide whatever I put material that eventually organizes into the space the brain has that tends to accrete into that internal relationship

 

[Politesse]

I'd say we certainly have a baseline that has been very successful for most people. The issue is that it might not work for all people, and there are some that seem heavily invested in the presumption of organs providing identity instead of the reality being a bit more complicated, and that it merely seems like the organs are providing the identity. Kind of like gravitation in Newtonian Physics and Relativistic Physics.

I think sex might simply be your sexual identity and gender is how society allows you to manage it.

"Identity" is an inherently social question; inanimate objects and non-social organisms do not have identities. We know, then, that any sense of "identity" must be on some level socially constructed. Those who are not versed in the social sciences often think that "constructed" means "fake", but that's not really what social construction means. Rather, we take the scaffolding of the observable universe and construct our stories and narratives around it. We build social constructs like gender around the physical traits that denote sex, race around certain favored phenotypes, intelligence around certain cognitive functions, etc. But whatever the objectively observable facts that might underlie some of those concepts, we cannot resist the seem to resist the urge to embellish, categorise, reinvent, narrativize, and anthropomorphize the natural world. The very language of science is infected with this plague, with our talk of "laws" and "constants" and "taxonomy"; social terms applied to natural phenomena that neither think nor feel anything about their own nature or how they "ought" to be organized into comfortingly simple and non-overlapping groups.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I'd say we certainly have a baseline that has been very successful for most people. The issue is that it might not work for all people, and there are some that seem heavily invested in the presumption of organs providing identity instead of the reality being a bit more complicated, and that it merely seems like the organs are providing the identity. Kind of like gravitation in Newtonian Physics and Relativistic Physics.

I think sex might simply be your sexual identity and gender is how society allows you to manage it.

"Identity" is an inherently social question.

I disagree. I've personally known two people who's identity (not sexual, but the baseline personality) changed drastically after severe head trauma. There was zero social involvement in that. Who they were as people had changed. I doubt very much I have known the only two people that have suffered this.

Identity is very much a physical thing.

The very language of science is infected with this plague, with our talk of "laws" and "constants" and "taxonomy"; social terms applied to natural phenomena that neither think nor feel anything about their own nature.

I'd say social inertia is a bigger issue. We get used to how things are filed. And with sex, it is generally a very useful labeling. It is very accurate. But, as with biology. it isn't perfect.

 

[Jarhyn]

I'd say we certainly have a baseline that has been very successful for most people. The issue is that it might not work for all people, and there are some that seem heavily invested in the presumption of organs providing identity instead of the reality being a bit more complicated, and that it merely seems like the organs are providing the identity. Kind of like gravitation in Newtonian Physics and Relativistic Physics.

I think sex might simply be your sexual identity and gender is how society allows you to manage it.

"Identity" is an inherently social question; inanimate objects and non-social organisms do not have identities. We know, then, that any sense of "identity" must be on some level socially constructed. Those who are not versed in the social sciences often think that "constructed" means "fake", but that's not really what social construction means. Rather, we take the scaffolding of the observable universe and construct our stories and narratives around it. We build social constructs like gender around the physical traits that denote sex, race around certain favored phenotypes, intelligence around certain cognitive functions, etc. But whatever the objectively observable facts that might underlie some of those concepts, we cannot resist the seem to resist the urge to embellish, categorise, reinvent, narrativize, and anthropomorphize the natural world. The very language of science is infected with this plague, with our talk of "laws" and "constants" and "taxonomy"; social terms applied to natural phenomena that neither think nor feel anything about their own nature or how they "ought" to be organized into comfortingly simple and non-overlapping groups.

This is not something I entirely agree with as a statement.

Many things, indeed anything capable of rendering behavior as a result of parsing some context via some arbitrarily configured system are going to have "identities" within them operating as drivers.

The identity is literally the state of the system that has been configured in such a way as to produce that "truth" of the system.

Under this concept of identity, even a CPU has a number of identities, namely identity statements for each of its instructions, formed of the microcode for those instructions.

I pose that the identities humans have are fundamentally similar in the form of some arbitrary configuration of neurons which produce "systemic facts" fundamental to the operation of whatever-it-is.

The configuration of my brain that determines why I feel "feminine" when I do certain things is a part of my "identity", and because it relates to gender, is part of my "gender identity" and this is true even if I am the only human or other entity on the planet.

 

[Politesse]

I disagree. I've personally known two people who's identity (not sexual, but the baseline personality) changed drastically after severe head trauma. There was zero social involvement in that. Who they were as people had changed. I doubt very much I have known the only two people that have suffered this.

I don't see how that contradicts my point at all. Absent social expectation, you would have no reason to comment on the "changes" to their personality at all. Under the neutral eye of the microscope, our personalities, to whatever extent those are really existing things, change all the time, for any number of reasons both physical and experiential. But because these changes altered the nature of your social relationships with these persons, you felt the need to create a new category to accomodate the shift.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

"Current scientific consensus acknowledges biological sex as primarily bimodal rather than strictly binary, recognizing the existence of intersex conditions and the complexity of sex determination processes". Rather elegant and succinct way of putting it! You could profitably post this as a reply to quite a few of the wacky statements in this thread. I wonder who the algorithm stole this from?

I hope it was me:

Search results for query: bimodal

iidb.org

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I disagree. I've personally known two people who's identity (not sexual, but the baseline personality) changed drastically after severe head trauma. There was zero social involvement in that. Who they were as people had changed. I doubt very much I have known the only two people that have suffered this.

I don't see how that contradicts my point at all. Absent social expectation, you would have no reason to comment on the "changes" to their personality at all.

What?! That is ridiculous.

Under the neutral eye of the microscope, our personalities, to whatever extent those are really existing things, change all the time, for any number of reasons both physical and experiential. But because these changes altered the nature of your social relationships with these persons, you felt the need to create a new category to accomodate the shift.

That's nonsense. Shifts in behavior patterns and noticing them is a big part of being a mammal and empathetic.

 

[Politesse]

That's nonsense. Shifts in behavior patterns and noticing them is a big part of being a mammal and empathetic.

Of course it is. All social organisms are capable of some degree of empathy, and you could easily argue that for primates, it is perhaps above all other factors our specialty. Our most fundamental instinct, which has opened the door to language, culture, faith, and all manner of useful invention.

 

[Emily Lake]

Sexes are imaginary in the way you treat them. They are not real.

HOW DO BABIES HAPPEN???????

Also, you can't be serious, using a chatbot to give you the answer that you want to see. FFS, you should be better than this.

 

[Emily Lake]

"Current scientific consensus acknowledges biological sex as primarily bimodal rather than strictly binary, recognizing the existence of intersex conditions and the complexity of sex determination processes". Rather elegant and succinct way of putting it! You could profitably post this as a reply to quite a few of the wacky statements in this thread. I wonder who the algorithm stole this from?

It's bullshit thought. First off, there is absolutely no consensus that holds that view. And to get anywhere near a "consensus" level on that, you have to include the personal ideological views of people who have a degree that is broadly classified as "science" but is completely irrelevant to that actual science involved in evolutionary biology and reproduction.

This is akin to saying that there's "scientific consensus" that climate change is a hoax because a whole bunch of zoologists signed an on-line questionnaire.

 

[Emily Lake]

I love how you trim out the references to science that I *do* accept

Except that you DON'T actually accept scientific views. You instead rely on "sciency" views, views presented as if they are science but are not.

Fine - YOU go tell Sigma that the study she posted some time back is not real science. Have fun with that.

Every time you say Humans have only two sexes and deny the research that brains are gender-coded.

I deny that sex and gender are the same thing. You insist upon conflating the two.

And as far as I can tell you've yet to explain what the demarcation of "sex" is.

Sexes are the result of evolution that leverages the merging of two different sized gametes for reproduction. The term for a species that uses two different sized gametes to reproduce is "anisogamous". In anisogomous species, members of those species evolved two distinct reproductive systems, one for each of the two gametes. The reproductive phenotype that has evolved to support the production of small motile gametes appears in members of the species that we call males; the reproductive phenotype that has evolved to support the production of large sessile gametes appears in members of the species that we call females.

The specific elements of the phenotype vary by species, but within every anisogamous species, two reproductive phenotypes exist.

The existence of two (and only two) sexes is HOW BABIES GET MADE in anisogamous species.

That's great. When are you answering my question.

Where is the line? Or are you suggesting, because you sure aren't saying, that sex ends at the squishy bits inside the abdomen. And are excluding any and all neurological and chemical processes involved in the regulation of said bits?

Sex classification is defined strictly on the basis of the reproductive tract. Brains don't figure into it.

The chemicals that are involved in governing the reproductive system are produced BY THE REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEM itself. They are triggered by the pituitary gland, which resides in the brain - but the trigger is not different by sex. The trigger says "make sex hormones", but it doesn't specify which type - the gonads do that.

 

[Emily Lake]

I don't think such a line can even exist. At least, not as long as people's perception of "sex" is profoundly shaped by the culture's portrayal of gender, and it always is. The idea of a strictly biological definition of sex is attractive, but unrealized in practice. As genetic researchers realized the second they started unpacking the real biological influences on sexual expression in the early 20th c. Ever since then, we've been stuck in that all too familiar situation, in the sciences, where the uneducated think the question has a simple "science says" answer but actual scientists propose something far more complicated and nuanced.

People have only decided to shape their understanding of sex because of culture's portrayal of gender quite recently. For the entire history of our entire species - our entire class actually - sex is based on the reproductive phenotypes that are the result of evolution.

The absolute reality is that reproduction in humans, and in every single fucking mammal on the planet, requires the merging of two different gametes, supported by the reproductive system that has evolved to generate them. This notion that if someone like frilly dresses and is docile, then they're somehow "female" is 100% false when that person has a male reproductive system.

Stop trying to retrofit your religion onto science.

 

[Emily Lake]

I'd say we certainly have a baseline that has been very successful for most people. The issue is that it might not work for all people, and there are some that seem heavily invested in the presumption of organs providing identity instead of the reality being a bit more complicated, and that it merely seems like the organs are providing the identity. Kind of like gravitation in Newtonian Physics and Relativistic Physics.

I think sex might simply be your sexual identity and gender is how society allows you to manage it.

Organs don't provide identity. Sex is not an identity at all.

Identity is nothing more than a psychological wish to control the perception of other people.

 

[Emily Lake]

We build social constructs like gender around the physical traits that denote sex, race around certain favored phenotypes, intelligence around certain cognitive functions, etc.

Okay, this is fairly well said.

I would, however, challenge where you extrapolate from this.

If social constructs are narratives built on top of observable reality... then by what reasoning do you believe that a person has the ability to "identify" into or out of those constructs? And to what extent does a person's psychological desire for a different narrative justify the subversion of the observable reality atop which the narrative sits?

Can an unintelligent person "identify" into being smart, and by dint of their professed identity, demand acceptance into a graduate program or MENSA?

Can a white person "identify" into being black, and by dint of their professed identity, demand access to race-specific scholarships and support structures? Can that white person who identifies as black demand that they be recognized during Black History Month?