Gender Roles

[Emily Lake]

She had come up with a theory of menstruation, that it was to periodically clear out the womb lining so that infections of it don't persist.

That seems like a very strange hypothesis. Other mammals have periods if they don't become pregnant. Dogs and cats definitely shed their uterine lining if their eggs are unfertilized.

 

[Jarhyn]

She had come up with a theory of menstruation, that it was to periodically clear out the womb lining so that infections of it don't persist.

That seems like a very strange hypothesis. Other mammals have periods if they don't become pregnant. Dogs and cats definitely shed their uterine lining if their eggs are unfertilized.

So? It's not like it's being presented as a theory exclusively applicable to humans.

 

[Emily Lake]

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?

Of course we can't.

I can't wish my eyes perfect. The doctors can't make them perfect (even if I didn't consider the risks on surgery unacceptable my prescription isn't stable), but they can make things far better than they would otherwise be. Fundamentally, it comes down to wearing glasses is better than not wearing glasses.

The issue with the transgendered is like this. While one can dream of perfection the reality is far from it. It comes down to whether the patient has a better life with medical intervention or without. That's how basically all medical interventions should be evaluated--is the patient better off. And the low regret rate says they are. (Especially as most of the regrets stem from society, not from the individual.)

Sure, sure, that's totally why Sweden, Finland, Denmark, UK, and France have all stepped back from interventions on minors, and why several of them have found that long-term evaluation shows that intervention in adults does not produce a material improvement in mental health.

The people who are made persistently happier because of their surgeries and exogenous hormones are in the minority if you look more than a year or two out. It's a short term boost, but it rarely lasts. For some few people, it lasts - but they're the exceptions.

 

[Jarhyn]

We can pretty clearly see that fascism is on the rise, Emily. Far right groups have been gaining power largely through control of the media and selective messaging, largely fueled by xenophobia against immigrants.

As a result, the actual answer for why countries are passing bans on blockers is likely "because rich people are afraid of brown folks and because the people drumming up fear of brown folks are afraid of families having members that won't produce kids".

 

[Emily Lake]

But she wants to use this as an excuse to socially exclude those who nonetheless express desire to be socially included by people who act and dress and think like them.

Nah, I want to exclude males from female single-sex spaces, services, and sports. Which shouldn't be that hard to understand.

I don't give a fuck how people dress and act. Dressing in stereotypical female attire isn't what makes someone female. Acting like a stereotype of how society insists women are supposed to behave doesn't make someone female.

And to be quite frank, the notion that you - a male - have any actual fucking idea how females think is absurd. You don't. At the very best, you have a male-centered invention of how you believe women ought to think, that is filtered through your own sexual desires.

 

[Emily Lake]

In many ways I find the lack of interest many people take in the "third gender" to be problematic.

If there are various roles that can be taken with regards "the reproductive process", "not reproducing" is also a role, and paradoxically, it is a role that affords more direct selection of society than the other two (I can easily play favorites with my relatives in ways parents cannot).

Of course there will be evolutionary selection around that role same as there is around the others.

Choosing whether or not to have kids doesn't actually change a person's sex; nor should it give anyone a special privilege to override sex-based boundaries.

 

[Emily Lake]

This is not about negotiation so much as simple structural and systemic fact of "sperm contributor", "egg contributor" and "non-reproducer".

Non reproducers don't have a third kind of reproductive anatomy that evolved to not produce gametes. Whether they actually reproduce or not, they still have either a sperm-producing anatomy or an egg-producing anatomy.

I have a recollection, but I'm not sure it's true or false. So I'm just going to ask: Jarhyn, now that you have undergone a voluntary orchiectomy, which public shower do you think is the appropriate one for you to use? If you were to end up incarcerated, which prison do you think you should be placed in? And why?

 

[Emily Lake]

I'll note yet again that incessantly holding on to and enforcing "oldspeak" definitions is clearly still an available route to enforcing "newspeak" evils.

This is done wherein there are multiple terms in some domain which the disingenuous asshole wishes to PREVENT from being used to express certain ideas in some nuanced way. The idea is that by suppressing the division of the terms into distinct applications, they can suppress discussion of the new concept.

As a result, shitheels could, for instance, suppress discussion of gender by, say, trying to collapse the two concepts back into a single usage.

By depriving the world of distinctly useful terms for fairly distinct things, they prevent the new understanding from taking hold and being brought to challenge the social structures they hoped to preserve through their enforcement of Newspeak

This is bullshit Jarhyn.

I have been quite happy to discuss sex and gender as separate things. The problem is that activists who wish to destroy sex-specific spaces, and to allow males to have a right of entry into female spaces, services, and sports against the will of those females have started play silly games with language, and have started trying to RETROFIT their new version of gender into historical usage. They're the ones insisting that the "women's room" has always meant anyone who says the magic words that they feel like a woman, and that it was never intended to mean humans of the female sex. It's activists who have been engaging in the intentional conflation of them, and trying to foist not just gender, but self-professed subjective unverifiable gender identity into situations that have always clearly been based on sex.

 

[Emily Lake]

"Gender" and "sex" were synonyms in English for about six hundred years, and they still are in the common usage of normal people who haven't gone down the newspeak rabbit hole.

Otherwise known as having a high school diploma...

Do you say the smae thing about all specialized language? "Astronomy" and "astrology" meant the same thing back in the day, and still do to people who know jack shit about either, so let's just ignore science!

Just so we're clear... sex is synonymous with astronomy, and gender is synonymous with astrology.

 

[Emily Lake]

We landed on "gender" as the concept going towards the behavioral support structures and "sex" relating instead to the wider topic of differentiations around gamete support in general.

No we fucking did not.

YOU have pushed that notion, and you've done it based largely on your own untested and untestable hypotheses and baseless beliefs.

 

[Jarhyn]

"Gender" and "sex" were synonyms in English for about six hundred years, and they still are in the common usage of normal people who haven't gone down the newspeak rabbit hole.

Otherwise known as having a high school diploma...

Do you say the smae thing about all specialized language? "Astronomy" and "astrology" meant the same thing back in the day, and still do to people who know jack shit about either, so let's just ignore science!

Just so we're clear... sex is synonymous with astronomy, and gender is synonymous with astrology.

Clearly, you have not, seeing as you insist one is unreal woo, despite the very clear reality of "third gender" selection pressures.

I have been quite happy to discuss sex and gender as separate things

 

[Jarhyn]

We landed on "gender" as the concept going towards the behavioral support structures and "sex" relating instead to the wider topic of differentiations around gamete support in general.

No we fucking did not.

YOU have pushed that notion, and you've done it based largely on your own untested and untestable hypotheses and baseless beliefs.

Society does. Science does. The faux science conservative trans-exclusionist crowd does not.

I've even described how these things are testable, but it takes scientific literacy that you haven't displayed yet to grok that.

It absolutely shocks me how few people have a really READ Darwin's work on why traits happen and what makes traits "expectable".

 

[Emily Lake]

We can pretty clearly see that fascism is on the rise, Emily. Far right groups have been gaining power largely through control of the media and selective messaging, largely fueled by xenophobia against immigrants.

As a result, the actual answer for why countries are passing bans on blockers is likely "because rich people are afraid of brown folks and because the people drumming up fear of brown folks are afraid of families having members that won't produce kids".

The most progressive countries on the planet are... fascist... because their medical and scientific investigations have produced results that disagree with your beliefs.

Have you even bothered to go look at the research from Sweden, Finland, Denmark, UK, and France? No - you just make a self-serving assumption that it *must be* because of rich people and racism. That's some incredibly deep seated confirmation bias. It's the kind of confirmation bias that flat-earthers have.

 

[Emily Lake]

"Gender" and "sex" were synonyms in English for about six hundred years, and they still are in the common usage of normal people who haven't gone down the newspeak rabbit hole.

Otherwise known as having a high school diploma...

Do you say the smae thing about all specialized language? "Astronomy" and "astrology" meant the same thing back in the day, and still do to people who know jack shit about either, so let's just ignore science!

Just so we're clear... sex is synonymous with astronomy, and gender is synonymous with astrology.

Clearly, you have not, seeing as you insist one is unreal woo, despite the very clear reality of "third gender" selection pressures.

Well, at least now we know that you think astrology is totally real. I bet you have a ouija board and take your tarot card readings seriously too, don't you?

 

[IIDB Staff]

Address the argument and not the person. Gonna start passing out warnings with suspensions if regulars who have been here for years still can't figure out how to follow this one simple rule.

 

[Politesse]

"Gender" and "sex" were synonyms in English for about six hundred years, and they still are in the common usage of normal people who haven't gone down the newspeak rabbit hole.

Otherwise known as having a high school diploma...

Do you say the smae thing about all specialized language? "Astronomy" and "astrology" meant the same thing back in the day, and still do to people who know jack shit about either, so let's just ignore science!

Just so we're clear... sex is synonymous with astronomy, and gender is synonymous with astrology.

If that's the case, what you're doing by confusing your gender ideology for the real biological sciences is the equivalent of demanding that other people acknowledge the scientific reality of horoscopes.

 

[Jarhyn]

Wow. Just... Wow.

So, Emily you really don't see the difference between "far right groups have been gaining power" and "the country is fascist"?

One implies that even a minority with limited majority support could see success, and the other posits that fascists can only accomplish fascist goals while in complete power.

These are very different propositions and you have mutated my position "minority fascists can achieve some fascist goals through minimal majority support" into your straw man of "thinks the country is controlled entirely by fascists".

We can see where this political will principally flows from and it is the segment entrenched with goals towards fascism, particularly the the UK and the Tories who have infected much of Europe with their codswallop.

 

[Emily Lake]

We landed on "gender" as the concept going towards the behavioral support structures and "sex" relating instead to the wider topic of differentiations around gamete support in general.

No we fucking did not.

YOU have pushed that notion, and you've done it based largely on your own untested and untestable hypotheses and baseless beliefs.

Society does. Science does.

No it doesn't. The things that YOU read and accept might say so, but your echo chamber does not represent the entirety of society, nor does it even remotely represent scientific accuracy.

But hey, let's circle back to what you've put forth. You shared a case in which an AI program was given a bunch of fMRI scans, and then was ASKED to find the differences between males and females. It was TRAINED on a set of data that included tens of thousands of elements, and it had a SPECIFICALLY IDENTIFIED OBJECTIVE. It came up with an answer for WHAT IT WAS DIRECTED TO DO.

Now, let's also acknowledge a few major elements that were NOT CONTROLLED FOR in this project: the direct effect of hormones and neural plasticity. There's no way to tell whether the criteria that the AI honed in on were picking up hormones, nor if it was picking up learned behavior as a result of conditioning.

Alright. You're supposed to understand something about data science, about predictive modeling, and about machine learning. So let me pose you a question.

If this AI was given a large set of fMRI scans, which were all labeled "black" and "white", and was given the directive to find the differences between black brains and white brains across tens of thousands of elements...

• Do you think it would be able to come up with a solution that distinguishes them?
• Do you think that the distinguishing criteria would be meaningful?
• Do you think that the distinguishing criteria, and the repeatability of them would support developing policies that use those criteria to identify people as black or white, regardless of their actual melanin content and experiences?

You found a study that gives you the answer that you want to have. And because it confirms your pre-existing belief, you have failed to consider the shortcomings, faults, and applicability of the study. And you've ignored thousands and thousands of other studies that have repeatedly demonstrated that there are no meaningful differences in the structures of the human brain on the basis of sex - there are average differences, but they are not material to behavior, cognitive ability, or anything else that makes a difference in the real world. Furthermore, they've repeatedly found low levels of predictability - and they've acknowledged that they cannot exclude the influence of conditioning and the way that affects our very plastic brains.

You want to change my mind? Here's all you have to do: Go take that AI, and feed it a large set of fMRI scans of children under the age of three, and explicitly give the AI the option of finding no material difference.

If it still manages to find a reliably predictable set of differences, then I will accept that it has validity.

Until that time, however, I put this in the same category as I put all of the great many studies done that attempt to "prove" that black brains are just different from white brains.

 

[IIDB Staff]

​

Address the argument and not the person. Gonna start passing out suspensions to regulars who have been here for years and still can't figure out how to follow this one simple rule.

​

 

[Emily Lake]

"Gender" and "sex" were synonyms in English for about six hundred years, and they still are in the common usage of normal people who haven't gone down the newspeak rabbit hole.

Otherwise known as having a high school diploma...

Do you say the smae thing about all specialized language? "Astronomy" and "astrology" meant the same thing back in the day, and still do to people who know jack shit about either, so let's just ignore science!

Just so we're clear... sex is synonymous with astronomy, and gender is synonymous with astrology.

If that's the case, what you're doing by confusing your gender ideology for the real biological sciences is the equivalent of demanding that other people acknowledge the scientific reality of horoscopes.

In what way do you think I'm conflating gender ideology for biological sciences? What have I posted that gives you this impression?