Gender Fluidity

What’s the current state of research science on Gender fluidity/nonbinary identification?

As I understand it, the science is fairly compelling at documenting transgenderism as a phenomenon. Scientists havereported differences in brain activity between those who identify with their physical gender and those who have not, and evidence supports sex-reassignment as effective (though not completely effective.)

However, recently I’ve met/seen/been Facebook friended by people who claim that they reject genders, don’t identify as any gender, or feel that their gender identify changes regularly. Now, I don’t have any issue with using whatever pronouns they want, nor do I care who wears boxers or lipstick or long hair or short hair. However, I do care about science. And I’m very curious what science has to say about this seemingly new fad.

What’s the current state of research on the nonbinary?

(Mods: this is intended as a GQ factual question, but I’ll understand if it ends up in GD.)

I don’t have a cite handy, but I believe there have been scientific studies on gender fluidity, and it appears to be a real phenomena. Some people, it seems, wake up some mornings feeling male and some mornings feeling female. Whether there is biological evidence for this I can’t say, it certainly is rare, at least in the US, but I’m sure someone is studying it to better understand how it works and whether it’s primarily nature or nurture.

How is this not a mental illness?

I fail to see the illness aspect behind it

One would think it would have a negative impact on their interpersonal and social relationships. No one would deny that gender-static people have an easier time just living their lives.

For instance, people they know might call it a mental illness. I would imagine that could have a negative impact.

Moderator Note

The question concerns the state of research on the subject. Let’s confine this to factual information rather than your personal opinions.

This goes for everyone.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

Able-bodied people who self-identify as disabled people are considered to have a mental illness. How is this different?

The genderfluid don’t want BODY-POWERED PROSTHESES WITH DORRANCE #5X STAINLESS STEEL HOOKS?

More seriously, by your metric (does it cause them difficulty in daily living?), being trans could be thought of as a mental illness. However, that’s equivocal with saying being trans is a psychosis, or a delusion, which it most certainly is not. That’s why that terminology isn’t used.

It’s like how being on the autism spectrum isn’t considered a mental illness: It’s a dysfunction, but it isn’t the kind of dysfunction we use that terminology for.

Moderator Note

Start another thread in Great Debates if you want to discuss this. Further hijacks may result in a warning. Confine this to factual information concerning the actual OP.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

Excuse me but nowhere did I state an opinion, all I did was ask a question (how is gender fluidity not considered a mental illness when things like body dismorphic syndrome are?).

So you’re saying that mental illness is synonymous with delusion? Obviously that is not true.

Sorry, it is not up to date, only 2013, nor really research from a reputable neurological journal about gender fluidity; but this article does speak from the point of view of a professor who has been teaching a class entitled "Archaeology of Sex and Gender” for many years prior to 2012 at UC Berkeley.

Thus we see from her recounting her experience, that scientists/archaeologists have known about transgenderism and the gender fluidity of ancient tribes for a long time. It used to be much harder to teach the students about these topics, but around 2012 students became a lot more accepting of this old scientific consensus.

[QUOTE=Ph.D Rosemary Joyce]
My goal is to demonstrate how archaeologists, bioarchaeologists, historians, and art historians find ways to explore sex and gender in the past, when they don’t have the luxury of just talking to people or observing their behavior.

[…] teaching this interdisciplinary course[…] has been really challenging. Trying to explain to students, most of whom have never questioned the naturalness of a simple correspondence between two sexes and two genders, how historical scholars can understand societies that recognized more than two sexes, more than two genders, takes work.

When we take the next step beyond that, to consider how sex/gender may better be understood as a fluid spectrum, I expect to face the strongest objections.

And that was true, for the first few years.[…]

When I started again in 2012, I wondered if I was just not remembering how the course had gone. The students seemed to be ahead of me from day one. The opening exercise-- simply listing how we recognize what gender or sex someone is-- was too complicated-- it was where we were supposed to end up, not begin.

This spring, the second time around after I started teaching the course again, I was certain. Things had changed-- as I said to a group of students, I now anticipate that I won’t be able to teach the course-- at least, as it is set up now. […]

Students, without my prompting, used the term “cisgender” when talking about people who understood themselves in terms of the gender they were assigned at birth. When I was introducing the concept of multiplying gender categories, before I could point out that more categories are still boxes, students proposed that gender is fluid, a spectrum. Some of them suggested that even a spectrum or continuum of gender was a problematic concept, because it presumed a single dimension of variation. From week one, there were students ahead of me[…]

Because where my endorsement of gender as fluid, multidimensional, and non-categorical came from a history of theoretical engagement, theirs came from their everyday life: who they were, who their friends were, how they imagined the world was and should be.

[…]

something unexpected happened.

Along with a group that continued to define sex as the biological ground for corresponding genders (a position I hope students will feel free to defend, even though I disagree), there was an equally large group that described gender and sex, both, as cultural conceptions that artificially enforced stable identity on a more fluid continuum or spectrum of identity. A third group said they would describe gender as a personal experience, something outside social or cultural control, an internal state that could not be assessed without the testimony of the person.

While I wasn’t teaching this material, a new generation has formed: already thinking of gender as something that should not be a categorical identity imposed on them; ready to create space for their peers, not just for their own freedom to define themselves as they feel appropriate.
[/QUOTE]

Moderator Warning

Ambivalid, this is an official warning for failure to follow moderator instructions. I’m further instructing you to stop posting in this thread.

Take it to Great Debates.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

Something closer to what you wanted to know about, but still not quite there. This 2015 research published in Nature Neuroscience, and reported on by ScienceAlert and PBS, shows “the fluidity of perinatal gender,” in that we can artificially flood/suppress hormones in a rat’s brain during its perinatal stage (equivalent to the human baby’s 20th-28th week of gestation, all the way through 1-4 weeks after birth 1) to make the animal switch its sexual behavior, and brain structure, back and forth independent of its body/chromosomes.

The Nature article shows that mammalian brains will intrinsically be female, as maleness needs the extra step of gonadal hormone to de-methylate the DNA (methylation is basically the act of locking up and restricting parts of DNA from being read/expressed) and thereby constantly free the masculinizing genes needed to be read/expressed throughout the perinatal period. 2

[QUOTE=Fiona MacDonald]
 researchers in the US have managed to flip the gender of the brains of newborn rats, causing physically female rodents to behave like males.

[…]

the team injected 10-day-old female mice with a substance that acts like estradiol, a steroid that surges during the development of male rats,[…] Estradiol works by inhibitingDNA methyltransferase (Dnmt), an enzyme that usually silences certain genes. By blocking the action of Dnmt, these genes were ‘unsilenced’ and able to trigger the masculinsation process - even after the ‘window’ of sexual differentiation had closed.

“Physically, these animals were females, but in their reproductive behaviour, they were males,” […]

Not only did their behaviour change dramatically, but the rats’ brains also structurally transformed. […]

This is one of the first studies to help unravel the mysterious process of sex differentiation in the brain, and shows that continual Dnmt exposure is necessary throughout development to ensure that a brain turns female.

“It was thought that once established, sexual differentiation could not be undone,” […] “Our work shows that sex differences in brain and behaviour are epigenetically regulated, meaning that sex differences are not hardwired in our DNA but programmed during development.”
[/QUOTE]

1 http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=7898

2 http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v18/n5/full/nn.3988.html

I really really hate the attitude or belief that variant gender identities are only “real” or “valid” if there’s some demonstrable brain difference.

I’m not fond of “physical gender” either. Sex is physical; gender is what’s in your head.

Look, gender clearly originated with sex—generalizations were made about differences between the sexes and those generalizations became concepts that people shared, part of our social zeitgeist, our picture of how the world is, our model of reality. But like any generalization, it ignores the exceptions.

The generalizations themselves create mind-images, culturally shared notions and definitions of what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman. Those, and not the physiological plumbing itself, are what it means in practice, in everyday life, to interact with a woman or interact with a man. Those are the components that determine how you treat someone and react to them and interpret their behaviors and so forth. You do so based on a set of ideas in your head about what it means to be a man or a woman.

Some of us are exceptions, people for whom the generalizations about diffs between the biological sexes do not apply. We vary from each other, not just from the norm, so there are a lot of different “flavors”, of which gender fluid happens to be one. Our identities, like the original generalizations, are a set of notions and descriptions that we hold in our minds and ask that you consider holding in yours as substitutes for the original generalizations.

Why the fuck ought we to have to conjure up empirical data about brain differences? Does anyone seriously think we invent this shit because we got bored one day and thought it would be fun to deliberately set ourselves apart and open ourselves to ridicule and stuff?

^^^ Oops… I could’ve sworn this thread had in fact been moved to GD.

One thing that science has to say is that this is very much NOT a new fad, but has been around for a long time in a variety of different cultures. For some existing examples, Hirjas in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have a long history, as do various other genders in other parts of Southeast Asia, and the Balkans have had Sworn Virgins since the 1400s. References to a non-male, non-female people go all the way back to very early writings from Sumeria and Egypt, Even in America, before the Europeans turned up the concept of “Two Spirit” people was common to various Native American societies. These have often been deliberately ignored, categorized as something other than gender variation, or just not mentioned outside of narrow academic circles in the Western world, but it’s clear that they exist and have existed for roughly as long as we have records of human society.

If you view gender fluidity and non-binary gender as a completely new phenomenon that some kids today are starting out of the blue, it’s a lot like looking at homosexual behavior with a belief that it started in the 1970s in America.

Well, yeah, but it’s a stepping stone thing. Just like discussing how homosexuality isn’t a choice. Really, it wouldn’t matter if it were. But knowing it isn’t gives us an argument to make against those who say people should just choose to be straight.

Showing that transgenderism can actually involve physical differences completely disarms the idea that some people use that it’s just a mental illness. Once that’s resolved, we can move on to accepting gender more thoroughly.

First, you need to choose what you consider defenitive of ‘gender’:

  • external genitals:
    penis+testicals
    Vagina + ovaries
    indeterminate/some of both

or

  • DNA sex markers
    XX = female
    XY = male
    XXY (usually appears female, but generally sterile)
    XYY (usually appears male, but often sterile)

or

  • mental understanding of one’s own gender
    male
    female
    neither/other
    plus
  • mental attraction to some gender
    heterosexual
    homosexual
    bisexual
    asexual

All of these interact, and can either complement or contradict each other. It’s a very complex subject.