Doesn’t the existence of trans people imply an underlying biological fact of the matter regarding gender?

Great Debates
101

Yeah… you’re already aware that this is an oversimplified example so I won’t harp on that. You’ve got the gist of it — it’s the context of cultural expectations that causes a person to consider themselves typical or atypical.

With one exception: If — hypothetically speaking — there’s an actual wiring diagram in the brain that makes a person say to themselves “gee, ya know, I was supposed to have a penis!” and the body in which they were born isn’t so equipped, then it doesn’t matter if they live in America or Nacerima, they’re gonna want to transition. We don’t know that this exists and is a factor, but author Julia Serano posits that it is, and says this is NOT ABOUT GENDER, it’s about SEX (i.e., morphology); she says she would have wanted to transition regardless of cultural expectations (gender) and that’s what makes her trans. So I don’t want to erase her perspective.

102

That’s a remarkably poor criterion. Any child that grew up without any human contact would be severely stunted in cognitive development. Concepts are formed in the mind of a child at a certain stage of cognitive development. In the absence of any human contact, it’s questionable whether such a child would be capable of forming any concepts at all.

103

I would suspect that there are multiple reasons someone might want to identify as the opposite sex. One reason in particular that I would like to address not based on anything I have read would be the idea that if someone was not happy about who they were as a man or a woman the default may be to choose the other sex. Liking who we are as people is a very important driver in decisions we make. I sometimes wonder if a broader definition of gender rolls with positive connotations might be useful in society.

104

On the one hand, it’s certainly true that societies should not use transgender identity as a bludgeon to enforce gender conformity. Gender stereotyping along the lines of “Oh, you have a penis but you like wearing skirts, so you must be a transgender woman” or “Oh, you have a vagina but you don’t like wearing skirts, so you must be a transgender man” isn’t useful or healthy for anybody.

On the other hand, AFAICT, the notion that significant numbers of transgender individuals are identifying as transgender merely out of a misguided conviction that they need to become more gender-conforming is almost certainly bullshit. Transgender people in general have spent a LOT of time thinking about issues of gender identity and gender conformity. Most of them are quite well aware of the differences between simply not liking conventional gender roles and actually identifying as a different gender from one’s birth assignment.

105

I think it just might be useful to step back from the notion that we should evaluation the perceptions of someone who says “I was born female but I should have been male, I’m definitely one of the guys, never a girl” or vice versa, and decide whether or not they have a good grip on reality or whether or not they perceive things as they really ought to be perceiving them, and so on.

Question One: Why the fuck do you care? What’s YOUR investment, what’s in it for you one way or the other?

Question Two: Umm, basically there is no question two. Just the first question.

I’m genderqueer, I went my own route, I have my own take on all this shit, and it isn’t the take that transgender women (or men for that matter) tend to promote as their perspective. But my attitude is all “let 1000 flowers bloom”, please let my perspective get out there so it can be considered by people questioning their gender identity, etc but I feel no need to pee on anyone else’s.

106

:clap: :clap:

107

Well if I was a counselor and someone came to me for counseling on this particular issue I thought it might be a useful road to explore

108

That’s utterly fair and relevant. I apologize for being prickly and defensive.

109

But most people who bring up that stuff aren’t counselors who are trying to help people with gender identity or gender conformity issues. Most of them are just busybodies.

I lean towards “it’s not about the label, it’s about accepting people for what they are.” This has served me well, and bought me a lot of grace when i mess up my friends’ pronouns. Because even if I’m an old lady who has issues with pronouns, i really do accept my trans and non-binary and gender-non-conforming friends, and they recognize that.

110

I don’t see how it follows. If gender is a spectrum rather than some absolute binary thing, then why would it be impossible for people to feel that their true place in that spectrum is somewhere different from the place where others have previously assigned them?

111

Gender is certainly a spectrum, not a binary.

112

In the best spirit of “it’s easier to communicate if we define our terms”, let’s discuss what it means for something to be “a social construct”.

I was a sociology grad student working towards a PhD in the field, and also a feminist theory junkie from way back when. This is my take on “social construct”, for what it’s worth:

If something is a social construct, it can still be a very imposing presence in people’s lives, something they have to deal with all the time (insofar as they have to deal with other people), so it does not mean “it’s just a bunch of easily dismissed vapor that we should all ignore”.

It does, however, mean that the way it is set up (whatever “it” may be) could be utterly different. Maybe not infinitely different — there may be some solid anchors to non-social reality that constrain the ways in which “it” can be set up. Since we’re discussing gender, there are probably some facts pertaining to sexual difference which create some constraints like that. For example, how society perceives pregnancy is something that could be set up in a variety of different ways, not just the form we’re familiar with, but it’s probably reasonable to suppose that a mirror-image world in which the males are shamed if they get pregnant outside of marriage is an unlikely one.

If someone identifies as the opposite gender, that implies that there is an opposite gender. It isn’t inevitable that we as a society would only visualize two genders, and if we visualize more than that, what the heck is an “opposite”?

If someone identifies as the opposite gender, that implies that one possible reaction to the way society thinks of gender is to identify in a fashion contrary to expectations. It may imply that identifying as the opposite gender is, itself, a social construct, an identity that is out there that people know about, that is socially available.

If someone identifies as the opposite gender, and is understood by other people to have done so, that understanding that people have is, itself, a social construct, consisting of all the expectations that beliefs and notions about exactly what it means to “identify as the opposite gender”.

We’re doing it. In here, in this thread, on this board, we are participating in the social construction. Construct is a verb, not just a noun, you know. Social constructs come from people. A social construct is a notion that is socially shared and, furthermore, is expected to be shared. If you’re in here and your individual take on what it means to identify as the opposite gender is an outlier, a perspective that is not in keeping with the one that you’re expected to have, you’ll experience social tension. People will react to you in various ways. It’s a microcosm of how people react when a person violates the expectations that people have of them based on their perceived sex, so there’s your little taste of exactly how real a social construct can be.

I’m not one of those people who go all hippy-dippy and say shit like “reality is whatever you conceive it to be”, or the social version of that “everything is a social construct, the belief systems that people have are all programmed into people who are blank slates before they’re socialized and it makes no sense to speak of ‘physical reality’, we can only perceive what we’ve been taught to perceive”, or whatever. But social reality isn’t non-real. Just remember, language is a social construct, too. You think in the terms and use the concepts embedded in that social construct. You interact with people and encounter all those expectations all the time.

113

And so a person, having been assigned a place on that spectrum, could feel that they belong in some other place, without, I think, even necessarily needing to know or identify where the extremes of the spectrum are.

I was sitting in the sunshine and decided I would be more comfortable if I moved to a seat in the shade. I didn’t need to comprehend or measure absolute zero temperature to do that; it was simply: I’m here. I think I belong over there.

114

It’s not about whether someone can feel they belong at a non-cis-binary point on the spectrum of gender identity, obviously they can. The point raised by OP is why they feel that way.

The point is that society has historically be strongly cis-normative, disowning and persecuting trans people. So it cannot possibly be social factors that cause someone to feel a trans identity. There must be innate or non-social environmental factors that cause people to assert a trans identity in defiance of social factors.

So although gender expression is largely socially constructed, gender identity is not. The features that define the male/female categories in a given society are socially constructed. But where we feel we belong on the male/female/nonbinary spectrum, that cannot be just attributable to social factors, since social factors have always historically pushed us strongly to be boring cis-binary, yet non-cis-binary people have always nevertheless existed.

115

This is false, misconception.

The fact that social pressures steer people to consider themselves in a normative way most definitely DOES NOT mean that any alternative way of considering one’s self can’t also be a social construct.

Social pressure shapes us to be law-abiding. That doesn’t mean that “being a criminal” isn’t a social construct. It most certainly is. Part of how the social pressures do shape most people into law-abiding citizens is precisely the social construct of the criminal.

116

The analogy doesn’t work, because social factors do not just “shape us to be law-abiding”. Teenagers join criminal gangs through peer pressure that being a drug dealer is cooler than being an accountant. Adults become criminals because they have no money because they can’t get a job. These are all social factors. Given the structure of our society, being a criminal can be a rational cost/benefit life strategy for some people.

I certainly agree that what society deems “being a criminal” is a social construct. But if that’s analogous to anything here, it’s analogous to gender expression, which I agree is a social construct. The features that define the categories of gender are a social construct - in a given society, the differences in behavior and appearance that are generally associated with being male/female.

But which category we feel we belong to is clearly not just attributable to social factors. Society has historically held a gun to our head and said - if you have a penis, you are a man. It is preposterous to suggest that social factors are leading someone born with a penis to assert that they are a woman.

Incidentally, has it occurred to you that if you really believe that gender identity is attributable solely to social factors, you should be totally on board with conversion therapy? If social factors make someone LGBT, it should be possible to change them.

117

Which categories exist is a function of social factors - which category a person feels they belong to may be innate, but the process of finding a name for the thing you feel is often inexact, and sometimes limited by the categories you know are available. Fifty years ago, a person born with female anatomy, who had no interest in presenting femme, and who was attracted to other women, would identify as a butch lesbian, because that was the closest category that matched what they felt. Today, that same person with the same feelings might identify as a trans man, because they’re aware that the category of “trans man” exists, and its an even closer fit to what that person feels than “butch lesbian” was. In the future, there will likely be some additional categorization that we haven’t yet conceived of, which this same person might feel is an even better match than “trans man.” In all three eras, our hypothetical person has the exact same internal state, which can be both inborn and unchangeable, but what category they choose to associate with changes based on what concepts they’ve been exposed to, which is a socialization process.

118

I don’t think this follows at all. In particular:
“Social factors make someone LGBT” does not imply “it should be possible to change them.”

Similarly, people sometimes say that either you are born gay or it’s a choice. That’s as wrong as saying either you are born without the use of your left arm or it’s a choice not to use it.

119

If you’re saying that everything about gender identity/expression is a complex interplay between social factors and innate factors (or perhaps non-social environmental factors), then I completely agree.

What I’m pushing back against is the “blank slate” nonsense that everything about gender is entirely socially constructed and completely arbitrary.

120

and I am pushing back against the idea that “social construct” implies “blank slate”. :wink: