Gender Roles

[TomC]

Why do you not see that trans is the same?

Like so many posts in this thread, you're flipping between sex and gender as though they are interchangeable terms.
They are not.

One important difference is that sex is an objective characteristic. Gender is an abstract characteristic. Sex is not fluid, gender is fluid. For 99.9+% of people, sex can be determined at birth by observation. Innie means a female, outie means a male. The tiny fraction of a percent that doesn't match that norm are every bit as human as everyone else, they're just abnormal.

Gender is very different. Most people have a gender identity that matches their sex. But those are not the same thing and not always.

Gender is what is "imaginary", not sex.
Tom

Gender is mental. That doesn't make it imaginary.

Tolkien fandom is mental. It's imaginary. Its also very real. I'm one.

Nevertheless, gender is huge in individual's lives, but not as objectively real as sex.
They are very different, even if that inconveniences the ideology of some people.
Tom

 

[Bomb#20]

I think this phenomenon is VERY new; It seems to have originated no earlier than the late nineteenth century, and I suspect that it coincides with the move from display to camouflage in warfare.

Before the widespread use of rifled guns, solidiers wore bright colours to intimidate their enemies by showing off their numbers; As accurate long-range personal weapons became the norm in warfare, it quickly became apparent that this was an extremely dangerous strategy, and soldiers started to try to blend into their surroundings.

Rifles were already widely used in warfare by the 1700s; what changed in the late nineteenth century was smokeless powder. The point of the bright colors in earlier uniforms was to be as recognizable as possible through the smoke covering the battlefield, so you wouldn't be shot by mistake by your own side.

 

[bilby]

I think this phenomenon is VERY new; It seems to have originated no earlier than the late nineteenth century, and I suspect that it coincides with the move from display to camouflage in warfare.

Before the widespread use of rifled guns, solidiers wore bright colours to intimidate their enemies by showing off their numbers; As accurate long-range personal weapons became the norm in warfare, it quickly became apparent that this was an extremely dangerous strategy, and soldiers started to try to blend into their surroundings.

Rifles were already widely used in warfare by the 1700s;

Well, that depends what you mean by "widely".

what changed in the late nineteenth century was smokeless powder. The point of the bright colors in earlier uniforms was to be as recognizable as possible through the smoke covering the battlefield, so you wouldn't be shot by mistake by your own side.

Early riflemen in the British Army wore green, rather than the red uniforms that their (far more numerous) smoothbore armed colleagues wore.

And uniformity was a seventeenth century invention (though as the elite rifle units showed, not a universal one even a century later). Prior to the 1645 Army of the New Model, regiments wore whatever colour the regimental commander chose (or could afford, or was available), and it was common for armies to be varied in their coat colours, and also common to face enemies with similar coloured clothing (particularly the cheaper colours).

I strongly suspect that both explanations are contributors to the trend towards camouflage; Such changes rarely have a single common cause when they evolve over many decades, or even a couple of centuries.

 

[Bomb#20]

In this way "male" and "female" are not actually fixed binary representations at all, and they have no absolute reality.

It's curious how all categories are subjective mental impositions on the boundaryless continuity of nature, whenever the topic is the categories used by gender critical people, but somehow the categories used by trans activists are objective facts of reality whenever the topic is whether "transmen are men", or "transwomen are women", or somebody is being banned, fired, or prosecuted for so-called "misgendering".

 

[Bomb#20]

Sexes are

Sexes are imaginary in the way you treat them. They are not real. To quote a reddit post I made recently, with an added evaluation by an unbiased observer:

User
Please evaluate the following statement for lies, untruths, and biases, with respect to current scientific understandings.

Do not evaluate such as is discussed indirectly in the text; rather focus only on those of the speaker, not of those spoken of.

If something is general rather than specific, evaluate it on its face with the general text; simplification to general fact is to be considered acceptable.

ChatGPT
Please provide the statement you'd like evaluated.

The notion that ChatGPT is an unbiased observer is counterfactual. A large language model inherits the biases of whatever corpus it was trained on, plus whatever biases its developers deliberately introduced when they decided they didn't care for the outputs they were getting from their newly-trained model in its raw form. Every output from an LLM should be read as if it were prefixed with a Donald-Trump-style "People are saying...".

 

[Bomb#20]

Sometimes the gamete sex and the genital sex have a mismatch: that's what's called intersex.
Gender & Sexuality - Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling

Intersex
...
Based on an assessment I conducted with Brown University undergraduates I also estimated intersexual birthrates to be about 1.7%, and have since been called on widely by journalists and other experts to examine these issues.

The 1.7% statistic is dominated by late onset congenital adrenal hyperplasia. LOCAH does not cause a mismatch between the gamete sex and the genital sex. It causes acne.

According to Wikipedia,

Anne Fausto-Sterling, an American sexologist, in a 2000 book "Sexing the Body" came up with an estimate that people with intersex conditions account for 1.7% of the general population.[58] These estimates are cited by a number of prominent intersex advocacy organizations.[59][60][61][62] Of these intersex individuals, according to Fausto-Sterling, 88% have LOCAH.[58] Leonard Sax, an American psychologist and a family physician, criticized these figures in a review published in 2002 in The Journal of Sex Research, stating that from the clinician's perspective, LOCAH is not an intersex condition.[63] Including LOCAH in intersex prevalence estimates has been cited as an example of misleading statistical practice.​

 

[Jarhyn]

Sexes are

Sexes are imaginary in the way you treat them. They are not real. To quote a reddit post I made recently, with an added evaluation by an unbiased observer:

User
Please evaluate the following statement for lies, untruths, and biases, with respect to current scientific understandings.

Do not evaluate such as is discussed indirectly in the text; rather focus only on those of the speaker, not of those spoken of.

If something is general rather than specific, evaluate it on its face with the general text; simplification to general fact is to be considered acceptable.

ChatGPT
Please provide the statement you'd like evaluated.

The notion that ChatGPT is an unbiased observer is counterfactual. A large language model inherits the biases of whatever corpus it was trained on, plus whatever biases its developers deliberately introduced when they decided they didn't care for the outputs they were getting from their newly-trained model in its raw form. Every output from an LLM should be read as if it were prefixed with a Donald-Trump-style "People are saying...".

You haven't yet offered any actual critical analysis to support any sort of assertion that anything I said is in any way inaccurate.

 

[Bomb#20]

... To quote a reddit post I made recently, with an added evaluation by an unbiased observer: ...

The notion that ChatGPT is an unbiased observer is counterfactual. A large language model inherits the biases of whatever corpus it was trained on, plus whatever biases its developers deliberately introduced when they decided they didn't care for the outputs they were getting from their newly-trained model in its raw form. Every output from an LLM should be read as if it were prefixed with a Donald-Trump-style "People are saying...".

You haven't yet offered any actual critical analysis to support any sort of assertion that anything I said is in any way inaccurate.

No? You said ChatGPT is unbiased. My critical analysis supports the assertion that your claim is inaccurate. But since you find it unconvincing, let's get a second opinion...

User
Are you biased?

ChatGPT
As an artificial intelligence developed by OpenAI, I am designed to be neutral and unbiased in my responses. My purpose is to provide accurate and helpful information to the best of my abilities, regardless of personal beliefs or preferences. If you have any concerns about bias in my responses, please feel free to point them out, and I'll do my best to address them.

User
Did your designers succeed in making you unbiased?

ChatGPT
As an AI language model, I strive to be as unbiased as possible in providing information and responses to users. However, biases can sometimes inadvertently exist due to the nature of the data on which I was trained, societal influences, or the limitations of language understanding. OpenAI continuously works to mitigate biases through various methods, including diverse training data, algorithmic adjustments, and ongoing evaluation processes. While efforts are made to minimize bias, achieving complete neutrality is a complex and ongoing challenge in the field of artificial intelligence.
​

 

[bilby]

Bias, like discrimination, is a thing we like to pretend is both always bad, and possible to eradicate.

But it is neither.

Bias is inevitable, unavoidable, and (when it is a bias towards something good) it is a good thing.

The problem is that people use shorthand. instead of "unjustified bias" they simply say "bias". Instead of "unwarranted discrimination" they say "discrimination". And then these words become pejoratives.

IMO, the question "Are you biased?" should be answered with a question: "How could I possibly not be?". But then, I would say that, because I am biased towards the understanding of concepts, and away from kneejerk defensiveness at apparent attacks on my credibility*.

Being neutral in your responses is not laudable, and not a useful design goal for an LLM. But the designers of ChatGPT were evidently strongly biased towards the belief that neutrality is laudable. It often is. But...











* Though I am probably not as biased as I should be in these contexts. I am only just human.

 

[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?

I can't tell whether you're trying to deny the agency of individuals, the role of the rest of society, or both?

How about denying that a person can wish their preferred reality into being?

How about you actually take a stab at answering the questions I asked? Here, let's start with an easy one:

Can an unintelligent person identify into being smart, and as a result of their professed identity demand acceptance into MENSA?

 

[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.

Err, no. That has been the consensus within the sciences on sex and gender for some time now. Even before gender had emerged as a distinct concept, biological sex was defined roughly the same way. Accuracy matters. If you're going to pretend the last 120 years of scientific research never happened, no one can stop you, but you have personally benefited from many of the advances of the 20th century in science, medicine, and technology. Consider whether it is truly worth it to you to throw science under the bus for the sake of one outdated ideological conciction?

Please go ahead and provide the support for a reproductive system that has clearly evolved to support the production of spergs among any mammal. I'll wait.

You - and a bunch of other people with degress that are irrelevant to the subject, as well as a crapton of activists and ideological proselytizers - are conflating the definition of sex with the proxy measures that we use to identify sex. Furthermore, you're falling into the abyss wherein you conflate different sized breasts with being different degrees of female, and different lengths of penis with being different degrees of male... and then pretending that because there exists a variety of sizes and expression of primary sex characteristics WITHIN each sex, there somehow exists a "spectrum" BETWEEN the sexes.

 

[Emily Lake]

Some fish are transgender, clownfish starting off male and becoming female, and some wrasses (Labridae) starting off female and becoming male.

Clarification - that is not "transgender", there is nothing at all related to "gender" in this. It's sequential hermaphoditism.

I am not an expert, but I have not been able to find any critters that change sexes and then change back again - in species that are sequential hermaphrodites, it seems to be a one-direction change. All of them start off as one sex, and at some point a transformation is triggered (sometimes lifestage, often environmental) and they change to the other sex. But once they've changed, they cannot go back.

 

[Emily Lake]

Applying these analyses to our species, we find that we are just plain weird.

Men are usually bigger and stronger than women, a feature typical of male competition. A related feature is men's lower-pitched voices. That seems like a way of making oneself seem big, because lower pitch is from longer wavelength, in turn from a larger source.

Male facial hair seems like an ornament, as does male baldness, comparable to male-lion manes, male-deer antlers, and male-bird flashiness. However, there is a female feature that seems like an ornament: breasts. I point that out because female monkeys and apes are usually flat-chested by human standards.

It's always difficult to distinguish between what is driven by sexual selection as opposed to natural selection. Male pattern baldness is probably not sexual selection - although who knows, maybe our primordial female ancestors really liked a shiny pate. Most women I know don't have a problem with baldness, it's natural and it rarely makes a man unattractive. I think it's more plausible that the gene for baldness ends up being propagated largely because by the time it manifests, the male has already passed on his genes and made offspring. So while baldness isn't associated with improved likelihood of survival, it's also not associated with a decreased likelihood.

Natural selection at the point of Darwin's observations was essentially described as "that which improves the survival of an individual will be passed on, and through this mechanism enter the species as a whole". We know more now, and it's more properly described as "that which doesn't fuck up the chances of an individual having kids is probably going to make it into the gene pool". Although even that gets messy when you look at population dynamics, and the ways in which a deleterious mutation can become endemic to a species, ultimately leading to the extinction of that species.

In regard to breasts... again that becomes a bit of a philosophical question. On the one hand, humans have a fairly long period of nursing. So it kind of makes sense that we might develop organs that have a large volume of milk glands in females, as well as the fat deposits needed to keep those milk glands functioning and protected. On the other hand... maybe male humans have just liked boobs for a really long time. And on the gripping hand... Cows and Nannies. Humans aren't the only animals with boobs, and I don't think anyone believes that the udders of bovidae are strictly ornamental.

This would explain male dominance. Whenever one sex clearly dominates the other in some society, it is always the male sex.

Hyenas

I add that qualification to include cases of neither sex dominating the other. But it seems to be maintained by men being bigger bullies than women, rather than mutual consent while trying to avoid coercion. Sometimes sexism takes the form of outright misogyny, something that I find baffling. How can a heterosexual man expect to have a good sex life with someone he dislikes so much?


There is also something very odd. Women seem to be more concerned about their appearance than men, and this seems to be cross-cultural. This is not an absolute binary, of course, because there is plenty of overlap. But that is contrary to what one would expect from biology: more concern with male appearance than female appearance. So this indicates something weird that we don't understand very well.

Sexual competition within a social structure. Women have been more concerned about our appearances in relatively modern times... but it's far from a general state. Within other cultures, men ornament just as much if not more than women. It's all about whether we compete against members of our own sex for mating privileges, and if so what form that competition takes.

Within humans, males have largely competed against each other in terms of strength and aggression. The theory is that strength and aggression are necessary for a hunter, to be able to provide both sustenance and protection to their mate while she is pregnant as well as while she cares for very young kids. So females would select males that can demonstrate those characteristics. On the other hand, females compete against each other with displays of fertility and nubility - the perceived ability to successfully bear a fetus to term and keep it alive. The highest likelihood of an uncomplicated pregnancy, as well as the time-frame for multiple pregnancies, happens when the female is freshly fertile - right after menarche. Much of the ornamentation that women engage in when competing against each other for mating privileges is based around making us look young, fertile, and ovulating. Clothing that accentuates hips and breasts distinguish us as adults and not juveniles, signaling that we're capable of reproducing. Bras keep our boobs from sagging so we give the impression of being young. Makeup hides wrinkles and the discoloration of age, giving the appearance of the flush of youth. Blush and lipstick accentuate the indicators of ovulation.

 

[Emily Lake]

As to gendering, we have a whole set of gendered features, and they are sometimes mismatched.

• Gonads (they make gametes)
• Genitals (primary features)

Gonads and genitals are not "gendered" features, they're sexed features. They're primary sexual characteristics.

• Secondary features

Secondary sexual characteristics are still sex-linked characteristics, they're directly associated with the development of our sexed bodies, and are tied to our sex determining mechanism - in humans that is karyotype, despite the existence of some genetic mutations.

• Sexual orientation
• Gender identity
• Personality - a *lot* of overlap, it must be noted

Beliefs and personality aren't sex-linked characteristics. Some of them might be inherited, but not all heritable traits are sex-linked.

I'll also point out that you have jumped off of your normal tendency to provide well-supported scientific information. All of your posts to this point have been about the evolution of and mechanics of sex. Here, however, you've simply assumed gender identity and personality into the mix.

I challenge your assumption.

 

[Politesse]

You - and a bunch of other people with degress that are irrelevant to the subject, as well as a crapton of activists and ideological proselytizers - are conflating the definition of sex with the proxy measures that we use to identify sex.

Wait... are you saying anthropology is a "degree irrelevant to the subject" of human evolution and biology? What would be relevant, Bullshit Political Spin Studies?

Judging by the inxomprehensible babble that is the rest of your post, I guess any degree at all is suspect. For the record, I'm not a sp---, but I have no animosity toward those who are on the spectrum, they are often a darn sight more rational minded than us normies.

 

[Emily Lake]

The European obsession with female breasts is also a relatively recent cultural development, universal neither across time nor across cultures. Most people in most cultures are capable of finding beauty and sexual attraction in breasts both male and female, but they were not always obsessed over in the way they are now.

 

[Jarhyn]

The European obsession with female breasts is also a relatively recent cultural development, universal neither across time nor across cultures. Most people in most cultures are capable of finding beauty and sexual attraction in breasts both male and female, but they were not always obsessed over in the way they are now.

So you use a middle example of a culture not apparently enamored of the breast by the clear lack of prominence, nipples, or accentuation?

Of these three the middle stands out as a culture that isn't focused on the breasts, making your universality claims a bit suspect.

And now you are actually fighting with Politesse, whose degree is in anthropology, apparently, on universality of something in human cultures...

 

[Emily Lake]

Why do you not see that trans is the same?

Like so many posts in this thread, you're flipping between sex and gender as though they are interchangeable terms.
They are not.

One important difference is that sex is an objective characteristic. Gender is an abstract characteristic. Sex is not fluid, gender is fluid. For 99.9+% of people, sex can be determined at birth by observation. Innie means a female, outie means a male. The tiny fraction of a percent that doesn't match that norm are every bit as human as everyone else, they're just abnormal.

Gender is very different. Most people have a gender identity that matches their sex. But those are not the same thing and not always.

Gender is what is "imaginary", not sex.
Tom

Gender is mental. That doesn't make it imaginary.

Also doesn't make what is believed into something real.

What a person believes is in their mind, yes. And sometimes those beliefs are based in reality, sometimes they're not.

 

[Emily Lake]

Sexes are

Sexes are imaginary in the way you treat them. They are not real. To quote a reddit post I made recently, with an added evaluation by an unbiased observer:

User
Please evaluate the following statement for lies, untruths, and biases, with respect to current scientific understandings.

Do not evaluate such as is discussed indirectly in the text; rather focus only on those of the speaker, not of those spoken of.

If something is general rather than specific, evaluate it on its face with the general text; simplification to general fact is to be considered acceptable.

ChatGPT
Please provide the statement you'd like evaluated.

The notion that ChatGPT is an unbiased observer is counterfactual. A large language model inherits the biases of whatever corpus it was trained on, plus whatever biases its developers deliberately introduced when they decided they didn't care for the outputs they were getting from their newly-trained model in its raw form. Every output from an LLM should be read as if it were prefixed with a Donald-Trump-style "People are saying...".

You haven't yet offered any actual critical analysis to support any sort of assertion that anything I said is in any way inaccurate.

YOU didn't say it. You went and asked a program to regurgitate something at you, and because it aligned with your own belief, you presented it as if it held some authority.

 

[Emily Lake]

You - and a bunch of other people with degress that are irrelevant to the subject, as well as a crapton of activists and ideological proselytizers - are conflating the definition of sex with the proxy measures that we use to identify sex.

Wait... are you saying anthropology is a "degree irrelevant to the subject" of human evolution and biology? What would be relevant, Bullshit Political Spin Studies?

Judging by the inxomprehensible babble that is the rest of your post, I guess any degree at all is suspect. For the record, I'm not a sp---, but I have no animosity toward those who are on the spectrum, they are often a darn sight more rational minded than us normies.

Funny how anthropologists have never really had difficulty distinguishing an adult male skeleton from an adult female skeleton... at least not until gender studies decided to infuse itself into everyfucking thing, and now actual experienced anthropologists get ousted from presenting at conferences when they want to talk about identifying the sex of human remains.