Gender Roles

[Emily Lake]

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.

Mmm... not exactly. Identity is a psychological thing, and as such it resides in the connections of the brain. Perception is a physical thing, and it resides in the structures of the brain. Severe head trauma that changes a person's personality does so because it severs connections. I would think it should be obvious, but I'll say it anyway - when you materially damage the structure of the brain, you also sever connections.

But brains are plastic - they change based on our experiences, our exposure, our education... and even on what we think about. If you obsessively focus on something, it gains more connections in your brain, it changes your mind.

 

[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.

"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.

You truly are the Deepak Chopra of genderism.

 

[Lion IRC]

...inanimate objects and non-social organisms do not have identities.

"How dare you impose your binary, exclusionary, othering - saying my partner doesnt have an identity!"

 

[Politesse]

...inanimate objects and non-social organisms do not have identities.

"How dare you impose your binary, exclusionary, othering - saying my partner doesnt have an identity!"

Presumably she felt that the tower had personhood/animacy.

 

[Emily Lake]

And yet her feelings don't make it so

 

[Politesse]

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?

 

[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?

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?

 

[Lion IRC]

...inanimate objects and non-social organisms do not have identities.

"How dare you impose your binary, exclusionary, othering - saying my partner doesnt have an identity!"

Presumably she they felt that the tower human had personhood/animacy.

Fixed your post.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

What failure rate are you going on about?

Humans can be sexed at birth with a 99.9% accuracy rate. It's actually more than that.

If your model correctly predicts natural outcomes in 99.9% of cases, it has a .1% failure rate in need of explanation.

Oh FFS. It's not a fucking model, it's the result of evolution! And the "failure rate" here is lower than a whole lot of other genetic and developmental anomalies! The explanation isn't a failure of "the model", it's failure of genetics to avoid mutation!

This is nutty. This entire approach is nutty. This isn't a goddamned "model" we're talking about. Would you say that a cat being born with polydactyly is a failure of the "model" of cat? Or would you acknowledge that it's a genetic mutation? Holy shit, where's the tylenol?

The cat is a case of imperfectly following the blueprints, or of a smudged blueprint. Why do you not see that trans is the same? It happens, you do what you can to minimize the problems it causes the people.

I got dealt a presumably bad gene, should I have ignored the effects or acted to minimize the harm? (Hint: in only one of those two scenarios would I be alive by now.) And I got a few lesser bad genes--should I not be permitted glasses with astigmatism correction? (It's nowhere near perfect, so does that mean it shouldn't be done?) There's not really anything to do but live with the flaw to my color vision (and what's with the universe, dealing me a vision flaw from my mother who never was aware of it because she had another far worse one?!) so there's nothing to do or not do. And are my feet a flaw? 13EEEE is hard to find and the 14Ws that I hike in are a special order item only. XL gloves aren't quite as bad to find but I've passed on many a sale because they only had S/M/L.

 

[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

 

[lpetrich]

As to why the sexes differ, let us consider what makes different sexes.

The first organisms were prokaryotes, and they all multiply by dividing. The closest they get to sex is to squirt bits of genetic material into each other. How they divide (chromosome: O):
(O)
(OO)
(O O)
(O) (O)

Eukaryotes are more complicated. How they usually divide (mitosis: chromosomes: X)
((X))
((XX))
((X X))
((X) (X))
((X)) ((X))

But many eukaryotes alternate between two chromosome-number phases: haploid (X) and diploid (XX). Mitosis works the same for both phases, but going between them is more complicated.

Haploid -> cell fusion -> diploid -> meiosis -> haploid

Mitosis: (X) -> (XX) -> (X) (X) and (XX) -> (XXXX) -> (XX) (XX)
Meiosis: (XX) -> (XXXX) -> (XX) (XX) -> (X) (X) (X) (X)
Cell fusion: (X) (X) -> (XX)

That is the origin of sexual reproduction: the eukaryotic meiosis-fusion cycle.

 

[lpetrich]

Phylogeny of Eukaryotes:

• Progress towards the Tree of Eukaryotes - ScienceDirect
• The New Tree of Eukaryotes: Trends in Ecology & Evolution

Conservation and Variability of Meiosis Across the Eukaryotes | Annual Reviews

Comparisons among a variety of eukaryotes have revealed considerable variability in the structures and processes involved in their meiosis. Nevertheless, conventional forms of meiosis occur in all major groups of eukaryotes, including early-branching protists. This finding confirms that meiosis originated in the common ancestor of all eukaryotes and suggests that primordial meiosis may have had many characteristics in common with conventional extant meiosis.

So meiosis originated some 2 billion years ago, in some very early eukaryote.

Nearly all eukaryotes with a working haploid-diploid meiosis-fusion cycle have some way of restricting which haploid cells can fuse with which other ones. They have some proteins on the surface of their cells that another cell checks against its surface proteins. If those proteins are mismatched, the cells may then fuse.

That is likely ancestral, but another thing likely equally ancestral is isogamy -- lookalike sexes or "mating types". Some protists and fungi have a lot more than 2 of them. They don't all have to get together, of course, just 2 different ones.

From isogamy emerged anisogamy, sexes different in size and the like. There is always only 2 of them, as far as I know.

In many ancestors of multicelled organisms, this went one step further to oogamy: one sex is egg cells, large, stuffed with food, and nonmotile, and the other sex is sperm cells, small and motile. Sperm cells swim to egg cells and join with them.

 

[lpetrich]

Oogamy originated several times, once in animals, once in the algal ancestors of land plants, and several times in various other algae.

Some organisms produce both eggs and sperms: hermaphrodites. Many flowering plants have flowers with both stamens (male) and pistils (female). Some flowering plants have separate stamen-only and pistil-only flowers on the same plant, however; they are "monoecious".

But being separate-sex is very common, with some individuals making only eggs and some only sperms. That's nearly universal among animals, and some plants also do it, like flowering plants with some individuals with stamen-only flowers and some with pistil-only flowers; they are "dioecious".

What makes some female and some male is any of several kinds of genetic and environmental factors, and not just XX-XY chromosomes. Some fish are transgender, clownfish starting off male and becoming female, and some wrasses (Labridae) starting off female and becoming male.

Sex Determination: Why So Many Ways of Doing It? | PLOS Biology

 

[lpetrich]

Egg and sperm cells are collectively gametes, secreted by glands called gonads.

Primary sexual characteristics are features of the genitals. For external fertilization, there is often little or no difference, because both sexes squirt their gametes into the surrounding water. Internal fertilization is a different story, with male-animal genitals being designed for sperm injection, and female-animal ones sometimes supplying additional features, like white and shells for bird eggs. In live bearers, the genitals provide a home and nourishment for the embryo/fetus before it is ready to be released.

In our species at least, genitals almost always develop as one sex or the other, and in agreement with the sex of the gametes.

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

Intersex

There is a continuity between masculinity and femininity. In 1993 I published an article titled The Five Sexes that unleashed a firestorm of debate about sex and gender, with a particular focus on the intersex experience. I asserted that “the two-sex system embedded in our society is not adequate to encompass the full spectrum of human sexuality.” I had intended to be provocative, but nevertheless was surprised by the magnitude of the controversy unleashed. At the time I suggested, tongue in cheek, a five-sex system, which I later amended in The Five Sexes Revisited. Rather than identify a specific number of sexes, in the second paper I wrote “sex and gender are best conceptualized as points in a multidimensional space.”

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.

Two of the kinds are gamete-genital matches, two are gamete-genital mismatches (male genitals that make eggs and female genitals that make sperms), and the fifth one is making both eggs and sperms, like one gonad making eggs and the other one making sperms.

• The Five Sexes
• The Five Sexes, Revisited

 

[lpetrich]

I now turn to secondary sexual characteristics. These are conditioned by whether one is making eggs or sperms. Eggs require much more investment than sperms, and that makes a difference.

Among solitary animals, females are often larger than males, and among mantises and spiders, female ones can be dangerous to their mates, because these arthropods like to eat other arthropods, meaning that a male one looks like a potential meal to a female one.

Among social animals, it is often reversed, again from which sex invests how much. Males are much more free to compete with each other for mates than female ones, and that's what they often do. One way to compete is to be large, and that's what sometimes happens. Another common way to compete is to be flashy in some way. Male birds are often much more colorful than female ones in their species, and male lions have manes, which female ones don't. Such features are sometimes called ornaments in the professional literature.

Charles Darwin himself discussed the origin of such features, something often called "sexual selection". He considered their origin a combination of male competition and female choice, though the latter factor was not adequately appreciated until the last half-century. That's a consequence of differences in resource investment in the next generation, and in some species, that is reversed. In some crickets, males produce big sperm capsules that their partners eat, and females compete for males.

Sexual difference theory: mormon crickets show role reversal in mate choice - PubMed

Male Mormon crickets produce a large spermatophore that the female eats. Spermatophore proteins are important to female reproduction, and females compete for access to singing males. Males reject most receptive females as mates, and those accepted are more fecund than rejected individuals. This role reversal in courtship is in contrast to the behavior of the sexes in katydid species in which the males produce small spermatophores.

This bird has the reverse of what birds usually do because it's the male who sits on the eggs.
 Phalarope

Sexual dimorphism and reproduction

In the three phalarope species, sexual dimorphism and contributions to parenting are reversed from what is normally seen in birds. Females are larger and more brightly colored than males. The females pursue and fight over males, then defend them from other females until the male begins incubation of the clutch. Males perform all incubation and chick care, while the female attempts to find another male to mate with. If a male loses his eggs to predation, he often rejoins his original mate or a new female, which then lays another clutch. When the season is too late to start new nests, females begin their southward migration, leaving the males to incubate the eggs and care for the young. Phalaropes are uncommon among birds and vertebrates in general in that they engage in polyandry, with one female taking multiple male mates, while males mate with only one female. Specifically, phalaropes engage in serial polyandry, wherein females pair with multiple males at different times in the breeding season.

 

[lpetrich]

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.


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

 

[lpetrich]

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

• Gonads (they make gametes)
• Genitals (primary features)
• Secondary features
• Sexual orientation
• Gender identity
• Personality - a *lot* of overlap, it must be noted

 

[bilby]

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.

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.

Civillian fashion amongst men reflected this change to drab and unintrusive clothing, particularly driven by the effects of the Great War.

Compare the clothing of the King of England in 1901, with that of the holder of the same office in 1833:





King George IV doesn't appear to have heard the news that "Women seem to be more concerned about their appearance than men".

It seems rather that men's fashion has, in the last 150 years, been dominated by the radical change in what constitutes soldierly or martial appearance.

Male fashion has become drab and uniform, not because men are unconcerned about their appearance, but because men are more concerned about looking tough, dangerous, and military, than they are about looking unique, colourful, or flamboyant. And this is a VERY recent development, which flies in the face of thousands of years of men seeking out bright colours, expensive and impressive fabrics, and using their cloting to impress their peers.

Further, the industrial revolution produced a new level at which to show off. A suit of fine clothes used to be amongst the most expensive things a man could own. But now we have cars, (and even private aircraft). A man in a flamboyant and brightly coloured jacket looks drab driving a Toyota Corolla; The same man in a drab suit looks the duck's nuts in a bright red Ferrari.

 

[Politesse]

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.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

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.