The problem with expression is that we’re largely limited to the range of identities that other people have in their heads.
In fact, I would like to add a fourth axis: altercast identity, the identity that other people assign you, which tends to be based on your presentation. When we present, we are “fishing” for the ideal, desired altercast identity to be attributed to us by the folks we interact with.
So there’s our identity; there’s our attempt to package ourselves to others so as to be perceived as (or as close as possible) to our identity; and there’s the identity that they do in fact assign us, which may or may not be what we were hoping for when we presented.
PS— I apologize for my tendency to come across as a know-it-all. I really don’t mean to be lecturing you on what the correct understandings are in these matters. I just have a talent for coming across that way, I’m afraid.
“Gender” originally meant “type of thing”. You could have a farm with multiple genders of animals, or a store selling many genders of goods.
It also meant “grammatical subtypes of certain grammatical objects, linked to specific characteristics of what the grammatical object refers to”. Countables vs uncountables.
Eventually, sociologists wanted to have a short word to say “prejudices linked to apparent sex”, because damn that’s a mouthful and “sexism” was already taken for a different meaning. They chose the word “gender”. Later on, this meaning was absorbed into the general Anglophone public, and from there it has also jumped to other languages. It can refer to those sets of prejudices, or to which “type of person” one identifies as.
You can draw axes after axes as long as you want, but it won’t do any good. Give us a 4th, a 5th. It doesn’t matter. Axes and spectra are far too poor to describe human identity. Our vocabulary is simply not there yet! Wait for it, and respect people. That’s all you have to do.
I disagree. To be specific, many behaviors, tastes, inclinations, etc… are linked to sex. Comparing distributions of traits between males and females, the averages are often different, though the distributions overlap, and there is overwhelming evidence that such average differences are rooted in biological differences between the sexes. This need not be any reason to hate or discriminate against someone with mental traits closer to the average of the opposite sex, of course. It’s simply a biological fact.
If we say that male humans are taller than female humans, it causes no controversy. Of course to be pedantically correct we should throw “on average” into that sentence, but with height everyone just understands: males and females have overlapping height distributions but the averages are different, with the male average being taller. To state this fact does not deny the existence of tall women or short men. It is merely a fact.
If we say that male humans have more aggressive and violent thoughts and behaviors than females on average, it should not cause controversy but it does. Once again, distributions overlap, but averages are different. The average difference between males and females on this trait, and many other psychological traits, is rooted in biology. (In fact some of the physical features that cause sex differences in aggression in humans are also present in cats, mice, and even some insects.) Thus average differences between the two sexes on psychological traits are neither arbitrary nor learned.
So as to how that plays out in social gender roles, I’d say it’s an interesting question worthy of study. But every human society that ever existed has acknowledged that the great majority of people fall into the category of either women or men, and held certain roles either entirely or mainly for women, and others either entirely or mainly for men. So gender roles are not entirely arbitrary.
I tend to agree, IRT Champion. I’m not convinced that Difference X or Difference Y is built-in but I’ll readily grant that some batch of diffs probably are, and when they are, they fit your description: differences between the populations when taken as a whole (on average), but with more difference between individuals of the same population than the two populations differ, hence a lot of overlap.
Please know that speaking about what I’m about to is very hard for me. I want to provide citations for everything I’m going to mention, but it has such a mental overhead I can’t spare the mental and emotional energy to get a cite to every study I mention.
I don’t buy the brain sex thing. I mean… I do, but I don’t. Like… obviously being trans is physical. Yes, even being non-binary. Unless you’re some kind of dualist then of course there’s a physical basis for all identity – in your endocrine system, in your brain, whatever parts of your body influence your feelings, thoughts, and mood it’s all there. What mix of these aspects arise from genetics, hormonal nonsense in utero, or effects of your environment (ranging from social interaction to trauma to nutrition) is unknown, and it’s almost certainly all 3. I honestly don’t know if it’s something we can ever know for sure, scientifically, and probably varies greatly from society to society and person to person.
Brain sex science gets dangerous super fast. For one, even the notion of a neurological sex is contentious on its own. While obviously there are biological difference between XX and XY people, the brain is such a complex organ there are at best extremely broad, inexact notions of what differences exist in the sexes, and what we’ve been able to study so far is so variable and so vague that the studies frequently aren’t even well regarded. In addition, even into adulthood your brain maintains some degree of neuroplasticity. It’s not out of the question that the act of consciously identifying and presenting as a gender, and if you pass, being treated as that gender – not to mention things like being on HRT, can change those traits to a degree (again, generously granting they exist in a consistent way that we can measure).
Now for the hard part – trans neuroscience in general is uh… it’s sure a thing. So one of the most prominent theories in the body of transgender medical research to this day is the “Blanchard Typology”. For those not familiar, the Blanchard Typology is only focused on trans women and proposes two classes, based on sexuality:
“Homosexual transsexuals”: Gay men who adopt feminine presentation and mannerisms to fit into the gay community.
“Autogynephilic transsexuals”: Straight men who are attracted to straight women, and have a paraphilia (fetish) for seeing themselves as women.
There is a third “pseudo-classification” that was added later. You may have noticed this typology does not account for bisexual trans women. It was later extended to include so-called “pseudo-bisexual” trans women, who are (straight) autogynephilic trans women who can tolerate being with a man because the thought of being penetrated fulfills their fetish. (Yes, the claim is that trans women cannot be bisexual, and all self-identified ones are really only into women. Yes this is still adhered to to this day by subscribers to the typology).
This was the only medical framing of trans people for a very long time, and as such a lot of medical research either directly assumes it as a frame, is researched by people whose background includes reading work that almost exclusively mentions it and thus play to it unconsciously, as well as peer reviewers that consider it a high bar of evidence to go against it (meaning research not adhering to the typology has a higher bar for publishing).
If you want to read a trans perspective on the typology I recommend Julia Serano’s work. While even with her, I’m skeptical of trans neuroscience/neuropsychology, she’s done some good work talking about the failings of the typology from a medical and medical research perspective.
So, for instance, your “brain sex” thing? The only studies I know of that show this don’t show quite what you say. They show that “homosexual transsexuals” have brains similar to cis women while “autogynephilic transsexuals” do not. There have been a few studies that have done this, a couple posthumous ones that involve brain dissection, and at least one that used EEGs on living subjects. The single EEG one I know of used (heterosexual) pornography and, rather unsurprisingly, found that heterosexual trans women (that is, trans women into men) identified more with the women in the (straight) porn and lesbian (““autogynephilic””) trans women were sexually attracted to the women, which was different from the brain patterns of the (straight) cis women they were compared to.
But it uh. It gets worse. There has been other research assuming this frame that gets more problematic. For instance, treating autogynephilia as a paraphilia there is a study that shows that “autogynephilic transsexuals” whose brains were dissected after death (I believe) showed brain structure closer to other studied paraphilias like pedophilia (yes, the paper directly compared it to pedophilia, not any other paraphilia), rather than cis women.
And like… what do you even do with things like that? Obviously neuroscience is good, and we should continue studying it. But neuropsychology and things like “normative brain structures between sexes” especially is in such a nascent stage not much can be drawn from it, and the whole thing is a house of cards.
Like… okay, let’s play the what if game and say that we did 30 studies and they all show that trans womens’ brains are closest to that of pedophiles. Not that trans women are pedophiles, or harming children, just that for some unknown reason the brain structure is most similar to that. Does that mean we bar them the right to self determination? Prevent them from interacting with children (even though they’re not even pedophiles just “similar” whatever that means)? Take away legal gender changes? Disallow them from services and medical intervention that help them? What if it’s connected to trans womens’ sexuality? Do we let straight trans women have access to these things but if they ever have shown the slightest interest in women then they’re disallowed because of their “different brain structure”? Are we actually going to with a straight face apply Gold Star Homosexuality to trans women because of some brain structure things we probably won’t actually understand the significant of for 50 more years rather than relying on their own words and deeds?
Neuroscience is interesting. Medical science is interesting. These things deserve to be studied, in a trans context or otherwise. But basing trans peoples’ validity, and trans peoples’ rights, and the meaning of largely self-described, intensely personally felt social concepts like “gender” on this research just does not go anywhere good. I don’t think it’s quite Eugenics, but I think maybe its close friend Eugenics stops by every few days to say hello and give it a gift basket and borrow a cup of sugar.
I should’ve put “straight” in scare quotes to denote it’s how the typology uses it. I was trying to use the language the typology uses to keep things consistent for a couple paragraphs, but then switched to using the normal "straight " for trans women into men later and “lesbian” for trans women into women later on.
I’m in full-on dubiety about the built-in biological causes, and mostly for social-political reasons, and I had heard about the Blanchard bullshit (courtesy of ContraPoints on YouTube).
You’ve still got my jaw dropping.
Wow. Talk about a poisoned well!
I mostly get my back up about the built-in bio causation because I don’t like to see a question of fact answered on the basis of the political-social connotations of the answer, and because I think the implicit argument (“They have to accept us if it’s built-in. Same as the gay and lesbian folks. That’ll put a stop to them saying we are behaving immorally or brought it on ourselves through our choices”) is wrong to begin with (eugenics, as you said — eugenicists have no problem going after people for ‘inferiorities’ they believe to be built-in bio differences)
As someone who used to identify strongly as an autogynephile prior to transition, and who still believes that the theory is useful to a first approximation, but that it inadequately describes our subjective experience and motivations for transition, I have a lot to say about this and gender as a whole, but I need to go to work.
That sounds like the upper class men in Victorian times. They powered their face, used makeup; and wore wigs, stockings, frilly clothes, and shoes with heels. The only thing missing is skirts.
I think it is undeniable that some people will exploit biologically-based explanations to do potentially problematic things. However, eugenics isn’t the first thing to come my mind. Like, I could see prospective parents screening their embryos to reduce the likelihood of their offspring beng gender or sexual “weirdos”…however science defines that. The ethics of that is in the eye of the beholder, IMHO. Personally, I would worry about the possibility of advantageous traits being selected against if gender-sexual conformity is selected for in this manner. But embryo screening all by itself doesn’t send up a OMG EUGENICS!!! flag in my mind because I think it would be the rare society that would mandate such screening for everyone. I also don’t think genetic screening would eliminate all gender-sexual nonconformity, given the influential role of the environment on human behavior and proclivities.
I don’t think a biologically-based explanation is inherently laden with problems or that there is nothing useful to be gained from one. From the reading I’ve done on the subject, it seems to me that quite a few transgendered individuals see themselves as having a medical condition, not a socio-political identity. To me, it seems pretty unfair to deny these folks the fruits of scientific inquiry just because there might be some negative ramifications of such inquiry . So I don’t agree with you that there’s is only one implicit argument. “People will accept us more!” is certainly one, to be fair. But “Maybe we can find a cure/treatment to prevent others from going through the pain we’ve had to endure” is certainly another one too.
Going the other extreme from built-in biological causes is to a blank-slate theory. That is almost certainly wrong, and can be dangerous in its own right. For example, “just make him play with trucks until he stops calling himself a girl” or other such nonsense that can be directed at children who are transgender. The reverse is also damaging, “don’t let her play with trucks, or she’ll turn into a boy.”
I think the answer is probably someplace in the middle. I think that most people are born with a clear sense of their own gender, and they adopt societal norms around that gender in reflection of that. For most people, the societal norms probably aren’t perfect (how many men would like knitting if they tried it?), but are close enough to get by. Of course, we aren’t talking about most people, but those who have a disconnect in that they are very far from either gender norm, feel like they fit into both, neither, just aren’t sure, or a different one than their outward morphology suggests.
I think asking questions about why that is the case are completely legitimate from a scientific perspective. The danger with something that is so socially charged is that the work can be used to push an oppressive agenda, whether the results actually support it or not. Eugenics was wrong about genetics, which didn’t stop eugenics advocates from dragging genetics in as an excuse to oppress and kill people.
Anyway, I hope society is moving towards accepting people as they are, and treating them with respect and dignity. The question of why they are that way should not be a judgement on their right to exist or live as they prefer. That’s a lot more than I meant to write. I mostly just wanted to say that blank-slate is dangerous, and (almost certainly) wrong.
A slight hijack and I apologize for that. I have a question for Jragon since you seem to have and be willing to dispense knowledge, both first hand and through study. This may not be something you can answer directly, but any help is better than flailing about blindly
So, this Blanchard typo thing you mentioned, is that, at least in part, where the notion that I’m a homosexual if I’m interested in a woman with great curves who happens to have a penis between those curves or have sex with her? I’ve really been trying to figure this out the past few months and the pov that any penis with penis sex is homosexual regardless of how womanly one person and manly the other person is utterly baffles me.
I think it’s much more likely the Blanchard typology comes from the idea that trans women are “really men” than vice versa. After all, plenty of bigots who have never heard of the typology naturally come to the “is a man sleeping with a trans woman gay?” on their own.
Oh, god. Blanchard is a deceased dead dinosaur ghost that has been ground into fossil fuel and pressurized into diamonds. If it helps you in your own experience of gender, that’s fine, but if you want to tell people that scientists are using this framework in AD 2019, please provide a cite.
But! It’s also folly to sciencify human identity. Any analysis will have the effect of fracturing identities into supposedly more and less legitimate groups. If a scientist wants to help solve the problem of gender, the chem lab and the MRI machine are the absolute last place they should be.
Is this in response to me or Ronald Raygun? Because you clearly didn’t read my post if it was to me because that was… The entire point if my post. That neuroscience and medical typology is a bad thing to base trans validity on, especially because the well is so poisoned.
And Blanchard is still alive, he (unfortunately) has a Twitter and still does research.
That was more 18th century and Regency than Victorian times, but yeah. And while men’s fashions of the time didn’t actually include skirts, this was the era of the light-colored skintight pantaloons or “inexpressibles”, through which the outlines of a gentleman’s leg muscles, derriere and “package” could be distinctly seen, similar to modern leggings.