I made up this model of gender identity based on my readings on the matter to try to conceptualise the factors that work to determine a person’s gender identity.
The model builds in complexity from layer 1 through to 6. It’s based on the abstraction layers in the OSI model. Maybe it isn’t as linear as this. Not sure. I posted this in another thread on gender, but didn’t get any feedback.
**Identity **- behaviour, mannerisms, interaction with society
Sexual Attraction - straight, gay, bi
**Phenotype **- e.g. hair distribution, breasts, adam’s apple, genitals
**Hormones **- e.g. estrogen, androsterone, testosterone expression
DNA - genes
**Chromosomes **- XX, XY, XXY etc
Is this a reasonable approach to conceptualise the factors affecting gender?
Well, if sexual attraction isnt part of gender identity, them maybe “gender identity” is too specific a term for what I am describing. Maybe “sexuality model”?
Chromosomes are a lower level, more physical layer, that information coded in the genes is built on.
No, genes are not “writ on chromosomes”, genes are chromosomes. Chromosomes are a bunch of genes (and junk DNA, and some structural proteins) connected together. The reason that chromosome counts matter is because of the genes on them. So your items 2 and 1 collapse into each other.
I might like your model or I might not. I have to say I don’t find it self-explanatory in and of itself. It needs a paragraph of discussion under each numbered item in order for me to follow your thinking.
In particular, the connection between items 1-4 and the next two, items 5 and 6, are going to require extensive discussion and unpacking. And that between 5 and 6, by itself.
If I were doing my own, I’d probably include most of the factors you’ve got (although I’d tend to shoehorn 1-4 into fewer categories, maybe genotype and physiological phenotype), but the interesting stuff (IMO) is all about the interaction between those and the sexuality (5) and gender identity (6) levels, where we know for sure that the same values in items 1-4 do not correspond to the same values in 5 and 6. To be fair, for intersex people there is variation in what you see in items 1-4 as well.
ETA: I would add a social level you don’t have: Received, or altercast, gender identity. How one is perceived, the behaviors towards one’s self that reflects others’ perceptions of one’s gender identity.
The only purpose of this post is to rile people up and piss them off. If you had a thoughtful contribution to make, you would have fleshed it out and explained it. As is, the only conclusion is that you’re trying to troll this thread.
3 and 4 are so entertwined as to become “materially” the same thing - the expression (or not) of various hormones have a huge impact on a person’s “natural” physical presentation. (natural here meaning; not a clothing or fashion or makeup alteration like wearing padded bras or a binder or tucking into a dance belt or using contouring makeup to give yourself better cheekbones or stubble)
5 has nothing to do with any of this (seriously tho why do people keep insisting on putting sexual orientation in here?)
6 really needs to be broken down into internal and external components, like AHunter said. At the very least it needs to recognize behaviors that are done “for yourself” vs behaviors that are done “for society.”
I’m inclined to reply to it as if it were sincerely offered, nevertheless… it’s a convenient statement to riff on, as it were …
The phrase “Whatever you decide it is” makes it sound entirely arbitrary, as if a human being is going to decide that their gender identity is whatever weirdly convoluted or ludicrous thing they pulled out of their ass for completely random reasons. But there’s no real reason to denigrate the process of “deciding what it is”, and we should examine that: gender identification as a verb.
Because it is a verb. For those of us whose answers to the gender identity question are unconventional, we are generally well aware of it as a verb, we have typically spent oodles of time contemplating it and being perplexed by it and turning it this way and that way in our head until one day something clicked into place and made sense.
It is something we all do, though. Yeah, you too, Shodan, whether you recall it in those terms or not. The typical heterosexual cisgender male – a male-bodied person with XY chromosomes and a conventionally male-bodied physiological phenotype who is altercast by others as a normal male, who matches the expectations and descriptions of what guys are like to a comfortably high degree and recognizes himself in those descriptions more often than not – doesn’t have to turn things this way and that way and get all head-scratchy perplexed about it, things click into place with comparatively little effort. But it’s still a verb. The guy in question still decided, or recognized, or, as we like to say, identified, selected a gender identity, and thus his gender identity is what he decided that it is, see?
Actually I see the shadow of a point in there; “DNA” is presumably about genetic variation (presumably the trans equivalent of the ever-elusive “gay gene”), whereas “Chromosomes” appears to be some combination of sex determination and sex chromosome aneuploidy, which is involved in a variety of conditions often lumped under “intersex”. At a biological level, those topics also reduce to genes (respectively, the SRY gene and the pseudoautosomal regions, mainly), but are not generally considered “genetic variation” as such.
Getting from biological sex to gender identity is a murky mess (I’m inclined to suspect there is no necessarily causative connection, myself), and as far as I know you can count genetic studies of transgenderism on the fingers of one hand, so both of these points for now are filed under “probably important somehow, but we don’t know how”.
Also, one can interpret it as DNA referring to the nucleotide sequence and chromosomes include proteins and epigenetic markers that dramatically impact gene expression.
There are also specific genes, such as the Y chr SRY gene, that are critical for initiating the gene expression cascade to take XY genetic make up and result in maleness. Defects in that gene can impact whether or not XY results in hormonal and phenotypic maleness.
Thanks IvoryTowerDenizen. That explains my thinking better than I could.
I should also point out that each layer is not a cause of the previous, it is rather, an increase in abstraction as you go up. From the most physical to the societal.
I can see how you say 3 and 4 are intertwined. On one hand I am saying that each level does not have a *causal *affect on the next, but 3 causes 4. If each layer represents abstraction, or even complexity, then should probably be equal. So, yeah, they should be the same level.
5 - If it is called a sexuality model, rather than gender, would 5 remain?
6 - I actually had this before I posted this model, so I will add back in.
Issue for me is the implication that the layers rest on one another (analogized as with abstraction layers), when in fact not only do they not depend on each other but are not necessarily even correlated. I also don’t see how they are increasing in complexity.
Apart from that, as a bunch of things that affect gender identity, sure, you’ve listed the main things.
Well, I mean, you can call it a turducken or a phase modulator if you want to, but it still won’t fit. You didn’t call it a sexuality model before, you called it gender (which also can mean sex identity). AND you called #5 sexual attraction, and it doesn’t matter.
Let me try and explain. Are you saying that men are more likely to be gay than women are to be lesbian, or perhaps vice versa? Ooookay. So let’s break that down.
Do you mean that ‘socially’ it’s more acceptable for a man to present as gay than for a woman to present as lesbian? Or maybe actually ‘physically’ it’s more or less likely?
Need proof for either of those (or both). And here’s where it falls apart. What is a ‘man’ in your calculations and giant international study? Is a FtM trans man ‘enough of a man’ to count? What about a MtF trans woman who hasn’t hormonally transitioned yet? Does she still count as hormonally a ‘man’ for the purposes of figuring out what percentages of whom are gay or straight? What about actual intersex people - are you remembering to count them? How are you counting them? They have their own preferences that might not jive with your study categories. What about the data from countries where it’s still super illegal to be not straight? What about cultures like the ancient Greeks who didn’t define sexuality as a duality in the same way we do? How do you explain the concept so you know that different cultural backgrounds are answering ‘correctly’? What about people who are bi or pan? What about people who are asexual? What if some guy is strongly religious and identifies as ‘straight’ and constantly fights his urges to look at other guys’ butts, but he absolutely is straight in his own mind?
Sexual attraction, sexual preferences, gender models (what even - you can’t just make words mean something they don’t mean), or turduckens, it still doesn’t relate. A person’s individual gender/sex identity does not depend upon who or what (or whether) they want to bang knickers with a particular type of other person.
I am going to agree with the people who don’t get why ‘sexual attraction’ is in there, it’s a separate thing from gender identity that doesn’t tie in at all. I’m not sure what you’re trying to understand, but the categories seem to range from weirdly specific (the last 4) to irrelevant (2) and very broad (1).
Yep, you’re right. It’s either sexuality or gender identity. They really are separate things. Like sexuality and hair colour.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
…