We’ve all heard the latest fashion for proclaiming that “there’s no such thing as race,” “there’s no scientific definition of race,” “race is a myth,” and the like. This thread isn’t about any of those claims or about race at all.
The purpose of this thread is to ask believers/proponents of the above claims about race the following question: Is there “such a thing” as gender? In other words, you believe it is not meaningful biologically to say that one person is (e.g.) black and another is (e.g.) white–do you think it is meaningful biologically to say that one person is male and another is female? If you believe that people should stop using terms like “black” and “white” because there’s really no biological definition of those terms, do you think the same thing about “male” and “female”?
We all “know” that females have XX chromosomes and males have XY chromosomes, and females have overies and males have testes. But what about (i) people with different chromosomal combinations (e.g., XXY), (ii) people with chromosomes that don’t match their genitalia (i.e., people with XX chromosomes who develop into males or XY chromosomes who develop into females), and (iii) people with both testes and ovaries (and other interesting combos of various stuff down there)?
And note that up to this point I’ve been speaking only of biology–things get more complicated if we through psychology (here meaning “whether a person feels like a man or a woman”) into the mix.
It seems to me that those of you who think that race doesn’t have any meaning if every single person can’t be placed into a race must believe that gender has no meaning since every single person cannot be accurately described as either male or female.
So, if you think race is a myth, do you also think gender is a myth? Why or why not?
Well, OK, sure, for certain values of “about.” I just meant that I’m not going to re-hash the 10,000 pages already discussing that topic directly (which mainly involve people talking past each other anyway).
Are we talking about sex or gender? You ask for gender (which is very cultural and I’d argue cannot be said to exist in any meaningful sense), but the physical stuff is sex. I’d say that sex is biologically well defined enough that you can say that it exists with a few footnotes here and there about genetic and developmental abnormalities.
In the sense that you’re using the word, I’d say gender, but not sex, is a myth. Being a woman doesn’t mean you can’t like NASCAR, power tools and action movies.
Also, the nonexistent of race in a scientific sense, isn’t fashion at all. It owes simply to the fact that scientists can’t come up with a consistent definition of race.
Scientists generally agree that there are population groups which differ by a wide variety of characteristics based on genetics. This is not in dispute. But population groups are pretty much ad hoc. The scientist doing the grouping decides what the boundaries are, and the categories are strictly man made and change depending on what characteristics are being looked at.
Sociological and political definitions of race are another question entirely. They do exist, but they vary widely across time and across locale and culture.
Good clarification, thanks. I’m talking about the physical stuff only–so “sex” by your way of talking. I’ve seen “gender” used as interchangeable for “sex” (and also used to mean the social aspects of sex, etc. etc. of course). Also, it’s the existence of those footnotes that creates the issue–it doesn’t matter that the footnotes describe only very few individuals.
By the way, I asked the question in the OP to Dorothy Roberts, author of “Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century.” Her answer was “gender is different.” I asked “how”? She said “it’s just different.” So let’s see if you guys can do better than her.
Very simplistically, they’re rather different things.
The vast majority of gender definition is in fact binary. There is the XY group and the XX group with distinct, observable phsyical features that do not overlap. The ‘gray area’ of gender ambiguity, while very real, is extremely small relative to the distinct groupings.
Whereas where it comes to racial definition, the whole thing’s a gray area.
To be honest, I’m not 100% sure of the biological definition of sex. The definition I’ve been going with is “in a given species, there are ‘n’ sexes, and each of those sexes is capable and necessary for successful reproduction, assuming the organs it develops do not have crippling abnormalities.” Which would give us humans a very well defined number of sexes (2, well, 3 if you count those rare cases that have no equipment as ‘no sex’ and count ‘no sex’ as a sex). Then we note a tendency for XX to be female and XY to be male.
On the other hand, you can define it chromosomally which makes the concept sex a tiny bit harder to defend without using statistical arguments, but may make it a more precise term.
Because it’s all grey area. Unless you can point to specific attributes that define someone as one race or another (like if all Caucasians had genes A, B and C, and no non-caucasians had those genes), there’s no real way to prove that two different caucasians are in fact of the same race, and not just members of two similar races.
There is no commonly agreed upon definition of ‘race’, but there is a commonly agreed upon definition of ‘gender’. Pretty much as simple as that.
As Simplicio said…yeah, it IS about that. Clearly. It’s not a fashion to declare that there is no agreed upon definition of ‘race’…that’s pretty much fact. And there IS a clearly agreed upon definition of ‘gender’. So, this is a thread for folks who want to try and find some warm and fuzzies about their views on ‘race’, perhaps to get some validation, and to make false equivalencies.
What is the biological definition of ‘white’, exactly? What is the biological definition of ‘black’? What distinguishing physiological similarities do ‘white’ humans have? How about ‘black’ humans? And if there are distinct ‘races’, then why can they interbreed?
As to ‘male’ verse ‘female’, that seems simple enough. The defining characteristics would be a ‘cock’ or a ‘pussy’. If you have one of those ‘cock’ thingies then you are, by definition, a ‘male’. Physiologically. If you have a ‘pussy’, then, by definition, you are a ‘female’. Physiologically. Seems simple enough to me. Some folks exhibit both physical characteristics, and they have their own physical definition. Some folks are born in the body of one gender but think in terms of the other gender. As long as they have one of those ‘cock’ thingies, or a ‘pussy’ thingy, they are, however, by definition ‘male’ or ‘female’. I could draw you a diagram if you like, but as I said, it seems pretty simple and straight forward to me.
What about them? They are in a small gray area. Like people who have 6 fingers or toes, though that is actually a more common variation. It does not detract from the definition of ‘male’ or ‘female’. Sadly for you, you can’t point to a similar wide spread definition of what ‘black’ is…nor ‘white’, since there is a HUGE variation in both of those ridiculously large classifications. You are trying to compare apples to alligators.
So, speak of biology wrt race then. What are the racial characteristics that define ‘black’. How about ‘white’? What about ‘hispanic’? Let’s talk about ‘asian’…what are the broad biological characteristics that make this population group similar in the same way that ‘male’ and ‘female’ are widely characterized by their biology? You can’t do it…which is why there IS a definition for gender that is meaningful, and there isn’t one for race. Again, this seems really simple to me.
It seems clear to me that you are simply wrong. Well, and that you are attempting a false equivalency in attempting to compare gender variation to some nebulous and totally unsupported concept of race.
Because, biologically, gender has a specific definition that works for the vast majority of humans…and race pretty obviously doesn’t.
From your first paragraph I get the sense that Dorothy Roberts was right. If you asked her the same question you asked here, then she was offering a legitimate correction about the ambiguity you introduced by talking about gender.
Anyway, I think you have to tighten a few things up if you want to have a meaningful conversation with people who disagree with you about this. Otherwise, speaking of gray areas, the whole discussion gets lost between what you’re claiming other people are saying and the questions you’re asking them to answer, and there’ll always be twenty people telling you different versions of why you’re wrong. I think when that gets cleaned up, it becomes more obvious that the point you’re attempting to make (and you are attempting to make a point) is not hitting the mark.
You need to be clear about what people are claiming with regard to race and ask the same question about sex if you want the comparison to mean anything. If we’re only talking about biology, is the question “are there marked biological differences between male and female?” Is that what you mean by “is there such a thing as gender?” It seems like you want people to answer that question, but then that isn’t what you say the argument is about race.
I wonder if you really think that a fair paraphrase of the argument about racial demographics that you hate is “people should stop using terms like “black” and “white” because there’s really no biological definition of those terms.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody say you should stop using the terms, like, conversationally. I think what people say is that you can’t neatly group humanity into a few races and then draw meaningful biological conclusions about those races, because those classifications vary so fluidly from individual to individual. If that’s the statement, rather than the way you phrased it, then the problem with the comparison is obvious. You can group humanity into categories based on biological markers for sex with way more precision. Even using designations as choppy as “male,” “female,” and “other,” the task of sorting people into sexes based on biology is trivial. You look at their anatomy and go down a checklist.
That’s why gray area matters. It’s the question of a few exception cases vs. an entire spectrum of characteristics varying slightly from an individual to individual. So the whole argument comes down to those two questions. Do you agree you can go down a biological checklist and determine simply and consistently if a person is male, female, or other? And do you agree that you can go down a biological checklist and determine simply and consistently if a person is black, white, or other?
Why are you making an analogy between the biologically vague term “race” and developmental abnormalities associated with sexual differentiation?
I think it is quite easy to accept that there are two sexes because all the phenomenon you listed, and I will add XO and XYY to your list, are the result of developmental abnormalities.
In the absence of developmental abnormalities we have two sexes with increasing overlap as we get into the social construct of gender.
In the absence of developmental abnormalities we have subtle, nearly unobservable variations from one population to the next in terms of skin color and other readily observable traits that become distinct entities as we get into the social construct of race.
I am not so sure about race, but I believe cultural and ethnic identities are very real.
And as far as gender, I start to think about people who do not feel connected with their biological sex. Most will probably grow up with a gender specific childhood, non supportive of a transgender identity. IMO, it must be very difficult to repress something as important as gender identity, and I wonder if it is fair or healthy to expect a rigid “norm” definition of gender based on biological sex.
In addition to sex being clearly dichotomous for the vast majority of individuals, there are also a very large number of different traits that correspond to sex.
By “dichotomous”, I mean that, for instance, there are plenty of people who have a penis, and plenty of people who have a vagina, but almost no people who have both, or neither, or organs intermediate between a penis and a vagina.
By “large number of different traits”, I mean that (for instance) the set of adults with well-developed mammary glands is almost identical to the set of adults with a vagina, is almost identical to the set of adults with high levels of estrogen and progesterone, is almost identical to the set of adults with a wide pelvic opening, and so on, and the set of adults who naturally grow facial hair is almost identical to the set of adults with a penis is almost identical to the set of adults with high levels of androgen and testosterone, etc.
Try either criterion with race, and it falls apart: There are some people with very dark skin and some people with very light skin, but there are also a large number of people with skin every shade in between. And skin color correlates only with a few other traits, and those only weakly.