Mark Gungor on the difference between men’s and women’s brains:
Are you saying that different activation patterns in the brain between genders for the same low level task (e.g. navigation) doesn’t necessarily mean there is either a structural or functional difference?
It could be a structural difference providing the same functional result, or it could be a structural difference providing different functional approaches with same general result.
But it seems difficult to believe that the functions being performed are not dependent on structure.
Male and female “brains” are a myth. The truth is virtually everyone’s minds are made up of both “feminine” and “masculine” parts. The idea that we all think so distinct based on sex implies that men are always “masculine” acting or women act entirely “feminine” which is not true.
Transgenders are that way because they are mentally ill. Idc what anyone says, they are. Unless you’re telling me that the constant feeling that you’re not born the right sex/gender and having talked to many, many actually do not want to be that way but they can’t help it. If that does not scream mental illness I don’t know what to say.
Not only doesn’t your second statement follow from your first, but your first statement could be used to refute your second.
I agree with you that there are no distinct female and male brains. And that it is not true that men are always “masculine” acting or that owmen are always in “feminine” mode. But in our world, most people treat you as an entirely different person depending on the sex they perceive you to be. They do that despite the fact that there’s nowhere near that level of polarized difference. And because they do that, the actual lived experience of being perceived and treated as a male is vastly different than the experience of being perceived and treated as a female. So what’s so goddam mentally ill about finding the treatment that you get accorded as one sex to be far preferable than the treatment you get exposed to as the other?
No, the differences are not large enough to overcome individual variance. Which is why we should dump identity politics and start treating people as individuals and care more about the content of their character and not the color of their skin, their gender preferences or which oppressed group they most closely can be associated with.
Here, too, I find myself agreeing with the premise but not the conclusion, at least not as stated here.
The differences are indeed not large enough to outweigh individual variance.
But we don’t live in a world where that is embedded in people’s minds as true. Instead we treat people very differently depending on our perceptions of their gender. That — and not intrinsic differences — is the main reason why the experience of being a female person is quite different from the experience of being a male person. And while the goal of any decent and progressive identity politics is to attain a world where we’re treated as individuals, the process of getting there requires informing people about the difference in treatment and experience and making people aware of the existing barriers to that ideal outcome.
Does some of what manifests as identity politics run afoul of that goal, and get immersed in simple-minded “I just want MY SIDE to win” social politics? Yeah. (So?) It’s not a well-poisoner. Many people speaking about their social-political situation are doing so from an idealistic and egalitarian conviction, and they should not be disregarded just because some folks aren’t.
I guess the question that puzzles me is - what is transgender? I can understand “smooth curvy females turn me on” or “big muscular guys do it for me”; I can even understand “I would like to hang out and gossip with those girls/ burp and spit with those guys”; but obviously, we didn’t evolve the concept of “I like pink frilly” or “I like loud trucks”. That seems more cultural. What specific brain mechanism says “I should have had a different set of genitalia” and what sort of “yearning” is it specifically? What do transgender identify as not working for them?
But again, the human spectrum varies so widely that no specific generalization works well. Even if there were a (let’s pretend) racial or sex difference in brains, the variation and group overlap are so great that a generalization between any two individuals is meaningless.
Predictably, the Atlantic recently published an article titled “There Is No Biological Difference Between Male and Female Brains”:
I guess the fact that 93% of all prisoners are men must be entirely due to socialization. :rolleyes:
Mental illness, but we don’t like to call it that because anything dealing with sex or sexuality is off-limits and transgenderism especially since addressing it was seen as an assault on homosexuality rather than its own thing.
First, there needs to be a definition since that’s exactly where this is going to go. There is transgenderism that is basically “I like things that aren’t stereotypically liked by my gender. I like to wear dresses and makeup. I like the color pink. I enjoy quilting and knitting and Hugh Grant movies.” That particular kind of transgenderism-we’ll call it ‘soft transgenderism’ is actually nothing. That’s a cultural issue and an individual is just being counter-cultural. Yay for them. There’s really no reason a woman can’t like hunting and flannel and a guy can’t like princesses and toile. There’s no biological predisposition to finding a skirt or pants comfortable and enjoyable to wear.
There is also what I will call ‘hard transgenderism’ (there are other terms which also have traction, but we’ll use this one) which is where we get into arguments. This is where a person perhaps due to the fact that their interests are non-stereotypical, or perhaps due to some vague uneasiness about themselves, or any other fairly normal existential crisis that many of us go through believes that their biological sex is a ‘mistake’ and ‘wrong’ somehow and that they are truly a different sex. This (though I will get shouted down in the comments below) is mental illness. It’s no different than the 5’7" 95 pound anorexic that looks at themselves and says that they are fat. Or the plastic surgery addicts that destroy their bodies in search of the one procedure that will make them perfect. Or the gym-nuts who destroy their joints and start drug use because they just aren’t muscular enough. They are senses of unease with oneself (which is a really common experience for most of humanity) and then taking it to self-harming extremes. It really needs to be addressed as mental illness. They need to be getting help to learn to be comfortable with their bodies, rather than being told their bodies need to conform to their idea of themselves because ultimately, the problem is not with their body. Their body is what it is. Their problem is their perception of it and inability to live with it. It’s really a form of self-loathing and the solution to hating yourself isn’t to change your shape, but change your mind.
No, that’s silly, senoy.
Transgender people of the type you’re talking about — the ones who transition, the “traditional” understanding of what “transgender” means — do not think, in contrast to the facts, that they are biologically and morphologically male when their body is in fact biologically and morphologically female. If they thought that, they would not bother seeking a doctor from whom to get a prescription for hormones and to schedule a surgery. Think about it.
They think they should be biologically and morphologically male, in order to bring their physical sex into accord with their gender. Gender, as they use the term, as I use the term, as pretty much anyone discussing the phenomenon of being transgender uses the term, refers to something other than the physical body, since otherwise being “a man whose body is biologically female” (or the other way around) would make no more sense than “bright darkness” or “frozen heat”.
You’ve been exposed to this for quite some time now. If this concept is beyond you, your concern for the healthy mental functioning of transgender people may in fact be misplaced.
Sure, but if used as a test for “maleness” and “femaleness” the distinction tested would have failed to label 56.8% of the male babies as male, and 25% would be tagged as female. 63.8% of females fell outside of the “female” bin, 17.2% fell in the male one.
My wording might have been strange, but that’s exactly what I said when I said ‘believes that their biological sex is a ‘mistake’ and ‘wrong’ somehow and that they are truly a different sex.’ I’m not implying that they are somehow hallucinating and lack the ability to look in the mirror and see that they have biologically different parts than what they think they should have. I’m stating that they look in the mirror, see the parts that they do have and thing that it’s some sort of mistake and their ‘true self’ should not have those parts. That’s where it becomes mental illness. Their body is their body. There is no hidden ‘true self’ located within it somewhere. It’s unhappiness with who they are and a form of self-loathing. Again, it is best addressed via therapy, not surgery.
Here’s where I think we’re all falling off the page. There ARE differences between male and female brains. I listed some above. Just like there ARE differences between male and female breasts. You are right though in that some people don’t have some features that are more typical of their sex. Just like there are some men with bigger breasts than some women. We still wouldn’t say ‘Aha! Since some men have bigger breasts than some women and some women have very small breasts, there are no differences in breast size between genders.’ That’s a ludicrous claim. We are all well-aware that there are differences and we are also well-aware that there are outliers. We know that looking at breasts is not a definitive test of maleness or femaleness, but we also know that it’s a pretty good indicator.
Our brains are different. Not remarkably so, but different nonetheless. I get that this is a scary thing to admit. There is a long and storied history of using differences as a tool of oppression. When you talk about brain physiology, it’s especially fraught with peril since we don’t have a firm grasp on what that means and so it can be used to advance discriminatory ideas which turn into discriminatory behaviors. Whenever we talk about ‘different’ there is a natural tendency to think in terms of ‘better.’ I think that it’s fairly safe to say men’s or women’s brains are not better than brains of their opposite. We’re not even really sure what those differences manifest as as far as thought processes go. I get that it’s very easy to go from saying ‘Our brains are different.’ to ‘Women have less spatial awareness, so we should take their driver’s licenses.’ At the same time, I don’t think it’s a good idea to ever deny the facts for the sake of argumentative expediency. You should use the facts to fight the battles and not the battles to fight the facts.
You say that as if you’d somehow demonstrated it to be true. You haven’t. And it isn’t true.
There are a lot of specific reasons given for why a given individual might look in the mirror and decide that the parts they were born with are wrong. As far as I can tell you haven’t addressed any of them.
Here’s a short list you can work from.
• Author Julia Serano (Whipping Girl) describes a kind of schematic diagram that appears to exist in people’s heads that describes what the body is supposed to be like. She notes, for example, people who lack limbs or organs who have “phantom limb” sensation and similar experiences, even those who were born that way. She posits the possibility that for some transgender people, this wiring diagram calls for a different set of sexual parts than they were actually equipped with.
What if she’s right? If there is indeed a built-in somatic sense of body integrity, and that for some people it “calls for” a sexual set other than what the person was born with, are you saying it is “mentally ill” to deal with that by transitioning? What’s the alternative? We have the technology to do that; we don’t have the technology to modify the problematic perception.
• Many people point not to their own categorization of themselves, but to everyone else’s categorization of them, which is based on the body that they have, which others see and interpret. If you can’t easily change the entire world and the way it perceives you based on your sex, but you can change your sex and therefore change the way people react to you and treat you, that seems pretty logical and reasonable to me. What’s “mentally ill” about it?
• You also have many transgender people who acknowledge that they, like pretty much everyone else in our culture, have different notions and expectations of males and females — they don’t think of them the same way. So in considering themselves, they feel they are a very bad fit for all of the perceptions that are tied to the sex to which they were born. Their gender, the whole ball of wax that constitutes identity, all those notions and expectations and whatnot, is a far better fit fo the set of assuptions tied to the other sex, and so in order to be happy with themselves and comfortable with how they perceive themselves, they identify as that other identity. And having done so, their body seems entirely wrong, it’s not the body that goes with that identity. So what’s “mentally ill” about that? Do you have difficulty understanding that some minority percent of male-bodied people have a ‘self’ that far better fits the identity patterns associated with female people, or vice versa? They aren’t “out of touch with reality” to think so, it’s a fact that such identities exist, polarized by biological sex (whether the identities themselves are just social constructs or not — society is real).
Mental illness is always a fraught term, since after all, what is a schizophrenic except someone that hears things from their own perspective and what’s wrong with that? Generally we draw the line between quirky and mentally ill when the thoughts hurt yourself or others. That’s not always true, since after all a person can commit suicide from a completely rational position, but typically we say that self-harming or other-harming is a sign of illness.
When you’re taking a perfectly healthy organ and removing it in order to better fit your self-conception it is arguably an illness and not simply a differing thought process. I liken it to the people who feel that they should be amputees and then go about sawing off their legs. I think that many of the arguments that you put forward above could equally apply to them. They might have a ‘built-in sense’ that they are amputees, they may categorize themselves as amputees and dislike the way that society treats them for being able-bodied. Being able-bodied, society puts certain expectations on them that they don’t want to fulfill. So, then lopping one’s leg off should then be seen simply as righting a wrong done against them by biology? I personally don’t think so. I think it’s much more indicative of a mental illness. Similarly someone that wants to amputate their penis because of a societal expectation of what someone with a penis should do is not simply living their truth. They are mentally ill and self-harming.
I’m not denying any facts, but “different” is an imprecise term, and I think in this context it is important to avoid misinterpretation. I replied to a post about a single study with an n around 100 that I could find no replications of. It’s easy for the casual reader to just read the quote, and particularly the bits the poster formatted in bold, and ignore the importance of the sentence about this applying to the average, not to individuals.
If the combination of features distinguishing male and female chests only differed at the statistical level shown in the studies of sex linked differences in brains I’ve seen so far, I doubt we would consider there to be a “male” and “female” chest. You could claim male and female chests were different, or not, but you would have to specify what you mean by “different”.
If there are statistically meaningful differences in the female and male brain, but (as research tends to support) more variation within each sex than between two sexes in general, to me that means…
• The stereotypical notions of “feminine” and “masculine” are probably at least in part rooted in these real statistical diffs. senoy and Surreal and other participants in this thread will hopefully recognize a partial validation of their perception in this statement. It is good that they do so: I think this is an issue where a lot of us hold a piece of the truth.
• But it also means you’ve got a distribution that looks like this. By mathematical-geometric definition you’re always going to have some individuals in each of the two overlapping populations whose location is better and more accurately described using descriptors of the other population than by using the descriptors of the population of which they are a member. An individual orange dot that’s over in the mostly-green area has more meaningful factors in common with the greens than with the oranges, and there’s nothing illogical or “mentally ill” about recognizing that and identifying with the greens. i.e., there’s no real reason that the body that you inhabit should be more meaningful than recognizing that in all other ways you are one with the gender that is conventionally defined as the folks occupying the other body type.
• It also gives the direct lie to the legend / illusion that the sexes are like this. Get out of that either/or thinking. It’s factually wrong.
I basically agree. There’s tons of overlap between the male and female distributions for most traits. But I’d also point out that there are some areas where there is almost no overlap.
For example, there’s an active thread in GQ right now about the A-10 “Warthog” with over 300 replies:
How many of the people that actively participated in that thread do you suppose were born with a vagina?
I didn’t read the thread but I’d guess that the number of women that responded to that thread is well below 10%, maybe even 0%.