I don’t know where my own came from. Pretty quickly we end up spiraling down into the “free will versus determinism” vortex here: I can say I vehemently rejected the identity being pushed at me. That feels like me being willful, choosing. But you can ask why I did. Whether I say I did so because of who I am or that I did so because of a sequence of experiences, it ends up looking like I was determined, either by my innate nature (biological determinism) or by what happened to me (social determinism). I’m not a determinist. There’s a fundamental problem with the entire “why” question and to address it further would be a hijack of the thread.
I am no blank-slate proponent. I do not believe we are all merely as our social location and the array of social inputs has made us. That very much a problematic perspective and I have no truck with it. That, too, would be a hijack of the thread, albeit perhaps to a lesser extent.
What social pressures is someone alleviating by asserting a trans identity? It has historically been likely to get you disowned by your parents, ostractized by society, even murdered. Well, I guess if you’re dead you no longer feel social pressure.
Okay, good question. I would guess internalized pressure to conform with their gender identity. I’m not transgender personally so I can’t speak with authority on this.
There’s also the benefit, if one can pass off as the opposite gender, of starting a new life for all intents and purposes outside of intimate relationships* as the opposite gender from the one assigned at birth. Losing friends and family, facing potential death threats, and moving away are steep costs but the mental anguish caused by gender dysphoria nonconformity - itself the product of internalized social pressures to conform with gender stereotypes - may outweight that.
~Max
* Even then, I’ve read about an instance where the partner and immediate family didn’t know.
ETA: To clarify, it only becomes gender dysphoria after the person adopts a gender identity different from the one assigned at birth. So the correct term here - before the individual changes gender identity - would appear to be nonconformity or variance.
So you’re back to explaining the origin of gender identity by first assuming the existence of gender identity?
I’d suggest that you write shorter posts, because at this point I’m just stopping at the first nonsense I encounter, and it’s usually in the first sentence.
Hold on. That post was not attempting to explain the origin of gender identity. It was attempting to explain the origin of a transgender individual’s transgender identity. I apologize if I lost track of the discussion.
The particular instance of “gender identity” you just now quoted refers to the one assigned at birth, by society directly, and adopted by the individual as a developing child because society (i.e. parents, friends, family) told them to adopt it.
That would explain why you never responded to some arguments, and frankly I find it highly disrespectful of you to continue to engage me without even reading the whole post, let alone to openly admit so. Good day, sir.
I didn’t say that. I said that the person has traits that are society associates with a gender other than the one they have been assigned. I never said anything about traits that “fit well with a trans identity.”
As for where the traits come from? Natural variation among humans. If these gendered traits are not biological, then there’s no reason that, say, someone with XY chromosomes would necessarily have more male-assigned traits than female-assigned traits.
To be clear, I’m not saying that gender is entirely sociological in nature. I’m addressing your claim that the mere existence of trans people requires gender to have at least some biological basis. And, more specifically, I’m disputing the idea that a trans identity could not arise in a cis-normative society without there being a biological component to gender.
I’ve said many times on this board that the use of hormone therapy to treat gender dysphoria does suggest there is a biological component. But the mere existence of trans people does not.
I don’t know exactly what you mean by biological, but variation does not happen by magic. Variation is attributable either to genetics or to environment, with the latter subdividing into social and non-social environmental factors.
It sounds like you are not defending the (preposterous) view that massive cis-normative social pressure causes the variation that includes trans-associated traits. That variation is then necessarily attributable to genetic or non-social environmental factors. In other words, you agree with me.
I think we’re talking past each other a lot in this discussion.
Here’s an aphorism: Arguing which human attributes are caused by biology and which ones caused by culture are like arguing how many gallons of the swimming pool’s water are due to its length and how many due to its width.
When I say that gender, sensing your own, developing a gender identity, etc, are all social, that doesn’t mean they aren’t also innate. But they could be different under different social situations, what we see is how they manifest in this context. We never get to see them outside of any social context. That does not, however, mean that people are blank slates and that gender is all programming and that individuals are just passive vessels who get written to by society.
Not one tablespoon of that swimming pool water is a product only of its length, or of its width; every drop of is exists as the confluence of both. (And also of its depth, to be sure)
But if the length is held constant, we can vary the width to see how much the volume changes. And if the width is held constant, we can vary the length to see how much the volume changes.
I’m glad you wrote this post, because I think it clarifies that the problem here is that you misunderstand what it means to say that something is innate (attributable to genetics) or environmental (attributable to social or other environmental factors).
To have a volume requires both length and width. Similarly, to make a person always requires both a human genome and some environment compatible with human life. “Genes without environment” or “environment without genes” are meaningless. When the front falls off a ship, you can’t tow it outside of the environment.
But it is not about the absolute requirement, it is about variation.
(Note from here that the analogy with a swimming pool if not perfect, because a volume always changes if you change either length or width. Whereas it is not true that a change in genes always changes a trait, or that a change in environment always changes a trait.)
If we say that eye color is innate, we are not stating the obvious fact of the absolute requirement for genes to make an eye. We are saying that if some normal environment compatible with the existence of eyes is held constant, then variation in genotype causes variation in eye color.
And if we make the stronger claim that eye color is 100% genetic, then what we mean is that in the range of normal environments that we encounter on earth where people live, all the variation in eye color that we see is explained by variation in genotype. But we are obviously not implying that environmental conditions are totally irrelevant to eyes. If you stop feeding someone, their eyes will turn yellow with jaundice. On the moon, it is meaningless to say that eye color is genetic because that environment is incompatible with life so there are no eyes at all.
So this is a contradiction in terms, and I think it is your misunderstanding in action. You are saying that to make a person requires both a social environment and genes. Of course that’s true. But it’s not about the requirement, it’s about variation.
And if we’re talking past each other, frankly it is because you misunderstand what “social construct” and “innate” mean.
When we say, for example, that “race is a social construct”, we mean that it it is not innate at all. We mean that when a normal environment compatible with human life is held constant, variation in genotype does not gives rise to variation in traits that have been claimed to correlate to the race categories that were invented by our culture.
If you are including gender identity in this description of people, then by definition you do not think gender identity is a social construct.
I’ve been following this thread closely, and appreciate your responses. Intuitively this seems correct, and I agree with the way you put it. From my perspective, I think the confusion that arises from the broader conversation is that there does seem to be a message from some in the trans community (at least that’s my perception of it) that there is no biological component, that it’s all cultural. That, I think, is incorrect. I understand where the desire to make that argument comes from, but I think that those who make the argument (and again, it could be that I’m misinterpreting some of what I’ve seen argued) are dismissing some very real underlying biological components to gender.
As a caveat, I’ll add that by biological I don’t just mean genetic. I’m also including things like exposure level of hormone exposure while a fetus, nutrition, etc. Whether nature or nurture doesn’t matter in my consideration of the question. What matters is that there is a component that’s in the brain (all of us, not just those who are trans or non-binary) not just in the culture we were born into.
If you’ve encountered that message as a predominant message from the trans community, I think that’s unusual. Not that I’m necessarily more in the loop than you are or anything. But I get the sense that the position most embraced at the moment is that trans people are born with a gender that does not match the sex they were assigned at birth by their mom’s obstetrician, and that the gender they were born with is built in.
The subtext, at least for some people, is “if it isn’t a choice, if we’re born this way, everyone has to accept us; but as long as they can say we were born the same as anyone else but for someone reason went this way, they can claim we brought it all on ourselves”.
There are tolerance and acceptance issues on the other side, too, though. For example, there are people who say to me, “Your so-called gender identity does not count. I respect transgender people because they were born with a gender that doesn’t match their sex, and as soon as they can manage it, they transition to whatever extent they can, and live their lives as a normal member of that gender. But you aren’t trans! You are fine with being male and don’t present as female and you don’t transition. We know what ‘trans’ is all about, it’s a specific biological human variation that follows a specific known trajectory. And since you don’t match that pattern, you’re just a whiny self-immersed cisgender male trying to be trans-trendy”.
That attitude arises from the simplistic (and scientifically unsupported) notion that we know exactly what trans is, and that it’s like a diode that got put in backwards, and we’re all gonna accept them but only if they match the conventional transgender narrative. Notions that it is built-in tend to support this simple model — it’s concrete, it’s blocky, it holds the promise of having distinct edges that define what it is and what it isn’t.
Genderqueer and nonbinary people are far less likely to be fond of the “hey it’s genetic” explanation because we fear, with damn good reason, that it’s a model that will leave us out in the cold.
It’s still common for people in the social sciences to advance a strong “blank slate” agenda, because they have embraced this misguided ideology that if anything is innate that is somehow morally repugnant. I think you’ve referenced people like this, and I think you were just being too generous to them, because you assumed that their position could not be so ridiculous, and that by “social construct” they could not possibly mean what they actually mean. (To be clear, I do not mean that the concept of a social construct is at all invalid. Race is a social construct. Many things are socially constructed. Just that it’s over-applied. People have claimed that it is useful to think of an electron as a social construct.)
It is particular ironic when LGBT folk in the social sciences advance this blank slate ideology, when their own existence in cis-het-normative societies is strong evidence that it is wrong.
I agree that the whole area of gender identity is not well understood in terms of the underlying factors that contribute to that. Of course study into the area is also going to be very complicated because there are so many different factors in play which are difficult to impossible to isolate. I doubt that it will turn out to be anything like “it’s 100% genetic and these are the gene(s) responsible.” My guess is some of the complexity is going to turn out to involve feedback loops, where social / cultural exposures in early life alter the development of the brain in certain ways.
I don’t claim to have the answer, but IMHO some of the claims made (it’s 100% genetic, or it’s entirely cultural) are going to turn out to be incorrect.
ETA: Just to clarify, by early life exposures altering the development of the brain, I of course mean for all of us, not just those who identify has trans, non-binary, or queer.
I’m agreeing with @AHunter3 as to what is common in the trans community. I don’t hang out with social science academics, and can’t speak to what they are saying. But I can speak to “a predominant message from the trans community”, because I have friends who are very active in the broader trans community.
I tend to think in examples, so if it’s okay, I want to posit an example.
There are the Americans, and there are the Nacerimas (to borrow from a too-cutesy-for-words anthropology 101 example). In American culture, girls are given pink frilly dresses and dolls, and boys are given baseball caps and toy guns. In Nacerima culture, boys are given pink frilly dresses and dolls, and girls are given baseball caps and toy guns.
Jim is born in American culture, and Midge is born in Nacerima culture. Both are assigned male at birth. Both kids love them some pink frilly dresses and dolls.
If I’m understanding @AHunter3 and @Max_S , you’re suggesting that, in the hypersimplified example, Jim is likely to identify as a transgirl, because she identifies with the trappings her culture assigns to girls. Midge is likely to identify as a cisboy, because he identifies with the trappings his culture assigns to boys. Is this broadly accurate?
And @Riemann, am I right in thinking that you believe Jim and Midge will identify as cis or trans with little regard to the culture they’re in?
No, I have absolutely no idea what would happen, and nor does anyone else. Gender identity arises from a complex interaction between genes and environment. We have no idea which factors are important, my position is only that there must be some significant genetic or non-social environmental factors, since social factors are so strongly cis-normative.
If variation in something is caused by social factors, then that variation in social factors must exist. But when societies have very consistently persecuted trans people, trans people keep showing up. So being trans isn’t plausibly attributable solely to variation in social factors.
I’m also going to go out on a limb and guess that some of the social trapping we assign by gender are completely arbitrary, and others are influenced by underlying biology. So, I think that pink and frilly and totally arbitrary. We even know that pink used to be a “boy” color to the ancestor-culture to our own. But I’m also going to guess that guns and dolls tend to be more attractive to boys and girls based in part on biology. When I was a kid, my mom gave all of us Tonka trucks. And my brothers and I spent endless hours playing with them as trucks in the sandbox. My sister treated her truck as a doll. It was the daddy, and a stuffed animal was the mommy, iirc. Because my sister is a cisnormative woman, and really liked dolls as a girl.
(I identify as a non-gender-conforming woman, fwiw, and I’ve always been more into “boy” things than “girl” things, but not to the point where I’ve ever identified as male.)