I’ll admit, I did overstate the dominance of Blanchard’s Typology in 2019. However, its effects are still seen which was more my point. You’ll still see studies confusingly test differences between “lesbian” and “straight” trans women which is just a more polite phrasing of the typology, even if they’re not explicitly using it or if you were to ask them they’d say they reject it.
There is, of course, a large body of work by people like Julia Serano, and she’s done a very good job at debuking the typology and showing why it’s not nearly as highly regarded anymore among neuroscientists. Which is why I recommended her. But the point of my post was that neurological science is a piss poor thing to base trans validity on, and using the worst example of trans medical science was the easiest way to do that.
If you want my personal positions on gender, I’m far, far closer to Os Keyes than anything.
To be clear, when I said Blanchard was dead I meant their idea, not Dr Blanchard themself. I congratulate any scientist who outlives one of their theories and survives to tweet.
Some biological differences are pretty obvious. Men commit much more crime than women and are incarcerated to a much greater degree. This is true of every society in the world.
One would have to argue that every society on earth throughout history has taught men to be more criminal than women, or has otherwise influenced men to be more criminal than women.
Yeah, it’s a strong candidate. So is the business about males being more visually oriented in their sexual attraction. But nevertheless I can see the possibility of social causal reasons being possibly responsible with no built-in bio components, even in these cases.
Don’t get me wrong: when I say “dubious” I don’t mean I’m a firm believer in social causation; but I find it useful to proceed with an attitude that regards it as an unresolved question.
So how is that supposed to work on an epistemological basis?
FWIW, I’m an enthusiastic LGBTQ ally. If “born that way” is to have any meaning, I think that there have to be strong biological causes for most instances of being gay or thinking of oneself as gender-nonconforming. If that were not the case, then to paraphrase echoreply, society could simply say, “Everything about your sexuality and gender identity is socially caused and therefore can be molded into anything else, so please conform.”
My take is that male/female differences range from micro to macro and are vast in scope and deeply hardwired.
To provide an example, I lived in Japan for 8 years. That’s a society that developed quite separately from that of the US. Yet, when you go there, the male/female roles in society and the behaviors are all the same. There is no “through the looking glass” quality to gender–at all. Men act as Americans have grown up thinking men act, and vice versa for women.
And I’m talking about micro-behaviors, too: facial expressions, the way people walk, vocal inflections. If anything, Japan presents, in the case of women, a hyper-feminine version of what femininity looks like here. Men, roughly as masculine. (And this is all true and very easily perceived despite the fact that body language, facial expressions, etc., are very different there for social reasons!)
And I would say that’s true of every society on earth. Now, sometimes people adduce certain things that seem to be role reversals and use that one thing to advance the blank slate theory. I’ve heard, for example, that men are more emotional than women in Iran and thus–no male/female differences!
Yeah, I don’t buy that. I don’t think there has been global social conditioning across millennia and oceans to make male/female behavior correspond very, very well.
The “opposites” of choice versus “born this way” is a false dichotomy.
I am who I am. I am a maker of choices; that is how I express who I am. Could I make different choices? Or, more to the point, could I be true to who I am and make different choices? Well, no, because my choices aren’t separable from who I am. I would not be the same me if I were a person with different preferences (ranging from minor things like whether or not to put milk and sugar in my coffee or to drink it black as god intended, to things that are more critically important to my sense of self).
I hate the “born this way” argument. I think it is politically wrongheaded. I dont’ like the implicit helplessness and passivity, nor the implicit “you need to tolerate and forgive us for stuff we can’t help it”. Why the fuck should my identity require that kind of grudging acceptance? I am here and this is who I am, and if I do, or did, have a choice, I choose to be who I am and damn the consequences.
I don’t think of it as a dichotomy either. I think that sexuality and identity is a combination of innate desires and choices.
But I do think that a large percentage of gay people are gay because they simply have that attraction.
If that were not the case, why would there be sexual attraction at all? I’m a straight guy. I don’t choose to be annoyingly horny at times–it just happens. I don’t choose to be attracted to women. I just am. There are definitely times when I am with someone and happy about it and would rather not be attracted to anyone else, or there are times when I am horny and would rather just shut off physical desire until later. But biology does not give me those options. OTOH, I can choose whether to go after multiple people, and I can choose how to react to horniness.
I think it’s that way with most gay people. Well, I don’t just think: that’s how most gay people describe their experience. I have a good gay friend, however, who says he chose to be how he is.
I respect your claim to choice and autonomy in the matter. If that’s how you say you feel, then cool. But a lot of gay people claim to be “born that way,” and I don’t think we should invalidate their narratives, either. Plus, there is a lot of science to back that up.
With all due respect, I have observed you twice now arguing based on what you want to be reality. But that’s not how reality works. I also don’t think it has been politically wrongheaded to make this argument–at least not up to the year 2019. I think it has been key in convincing a lot of people that gay people can’t help their attraction and thus should not be persecuted for it.
i admire this declaration of autonomy, and I agree that this is how society should work. We should be able to do what we want and be what we want so long as we are not hurting others.
“Born that way” only implies passivity or helplessness to people with a specific agenda (usually, but not always, religion-oriented). A person who argues in support of biological explanations is starting off from the very reasonable assumption that people are biological organisms as opposed to supernatural entities who are magically able to override their genes and environment.
AHunter, if genetic research was able to show that an individual’s placement on the maculine-feminine spectrum can be predicted with a 90% confidence by the volume and degree of asymmetry of their gray brain matter, would this not be compelling evidence of a biological explanation for gender? Why would be the scary implication of such a finding?
You are missing the significant effect that colonialism and general dominant cultural spread has affected these factors. For instance, in Japanese culture, go 400 years back and you’re right, go 600-1500 years back and you’re wrong. The adjectives you’d use to describe female gender roles in Japan at that time would be closer to “fearless”, “devoted” and so on rather than “meek” and “obedient”. It was during the Edo period that Sinicization began occurring through the spread of Chinese writings throughout Japan. Women during this period lost a great deal of recognition, political power, and their ability to be warriors (though part of this was due to the lack of war after Sengoku jidai and the samurai class in general moving to a more bureaucratic role). Women became expected to be meek, obedient, pretty etc.
There’s also a number of Indigenous American and African societies that had much more inflated roles for women, and as such had more dominant personality expectations for women. Matrilneal and Matriarchal societies, or egalitarian societies. The concept of providing and breadwinning, for instance, is female in many parts of Africa. Men generally did the hard labor (plowing etc), but women would do the sowing, tending, and fetching of resources (even across long distances). It’s fairly well known that women’s role became one of more passivity as money and colonialism took hold and the European colonizers would expect men to be the social and household leaders, and would only trade for things (typically grown or created by women) with the men in the community, thus inflating the men’s role because they acquired and held the now dominant money (profiting off largely women’s labor).
There are a few things that are near universal, for instance things like hunting are almost universally male, things like foraging, home/child caretaking, and oftentimes (but not always) agriculture are typically female. But the traits such as meekness, mildness, etc were generally more influenced by social roles writ political and social power than anything else.
Even if we agree that some social behaviors are in-built in a “from birth” sense (and I somewhat agree), the mechanism is not clear and is overly confounded by social factors to really meaningfully diagnose this scientifically. It’s possible, for instance that in a vacuum the differences in personality are extremely small, but the general fact that men are stronger and become hunters while women generally tend to children or things “back home” leads to a form of historical determinism rather than biological determinism. That is, these relatively small biological factors near-inevitably lead to the social conditions that birth broader social norms (like women being nurturing). Maybe that’s a distinction without a difference, I’m not sure.
Some of this can also be hormonal. It’s well known among trans people that, for instance, crying is just easier when estrogen is dominant, and anger generally comes more quickly when testosterone is dominant. Some of these may be psychosomatic factors induced by cultural expectations around the hormones, but let’s accept this for the sake of argument if nothing else. This is a biological difference, of course, but given it’s hormonal rather than genetic/brain oriented (other than the genes and parts of the brain that cause this hormone dominance of course) it’s something that’s only broadly a difference in peoples sex assigned at birth, and doesn’t really affect trans people who undergo HRT. Not to mention the confounding factor of those nonbinary folx who undergo low-dose HRT to suppress hormones and have hormone profiles not typical of women or men. Even then, some degree of social conditioning plays a role, both trans men and trans women have some degree of social passivity for different reasons (trans men being told not to speak up all their lives, and trans women being conditioned that they need to be passive to be “womanly” and other things like transmisogyny).
As for things like criminality, again, that’s going to depend on social role and the dynamics of the community. Theft by men, for instance, may be due to “breadwinner” status, and I’m not sure how theft stats vary by that status in cultures where the gender expectation of that is flipped. Some crimes may not have really have meaning in some societies, like a society with a communal distribution of resources to those who need it (e.g. all food is gathered into a “pool” shared by everyone) has a much different notion of theft. And, on top of that, I don’t think we exactly have crime statistics for pre-colonization indigenous societies. Even among the ones that governed large groups of people such as the Aztecs that information is largely lost, at least to the degree we’d need to find normative trends in that direction. Even then it’s possible that gendered crime like that is something that manifests due to the social conditions that give rise to large sprawling civilizations with centralized codes of law and ethics and doesn’t manifest in smaller tribal/communal or nomadic civilizations.
So, I agree that biological differences between what we broadly consider the sexes exist, but I disagree that it’s something that can be meaningfully diagnosed independent of the historical trajectory the world has gone through. Physically, it’s something that’s going to be a giant messy confluence of brain structure, genetics, and hormones and not something that’s going to have an easy answer to point to. Socially, it’s a mess of history and culture, especially with dominant cultural influence on smaller nearby cultures, and even then, even with medical testing, we can’t tell to what degree society influences medically testable biology. Nutrition can affect hormone profiles. The brain maintains neuroplasticity into adulthood, who’s to say that social expectations of the genders don’t create the brain structure we detect as being “the criminal predisposed male brain”, after all, if you’re a materialist rather than a dualist, everything is in the brain, so who’s to say that these “brain differences” aren’t unique to the societies they occur in and not per se actual genetically predisposed brain differences.
For me, my problem with the notion of biological differences and biological-behavioural between the sexes exist (or the concept of biological psychology and neurpsychology in general, gender and sex aside) isn’t that they don’t, they absolutely do, but rather that such a thing is not meaningfully something we can measure unless and until we know the exact role that societal conditioning plays on these factors, and I’m not sure I can devise an ethical or feasible experiment to raise humans independent of society to measure this. Even with that data, it’s likely to be such a confluence of different profiles in the body I’m not sure the panels of tests that purport to “detect” this stuff is something that can easily be measured (for instance, four people with similar traits may have one due to hormonal reasons and one due to brain reasons and one with a mix of the two and one with a hormonal reason that’s entirely different from the hormonal reasons from the other two). Even then, and this is something science may solve but is a problem in the forseeable future, is that a lot of this stuff can’t be detected in living organisms. Almost grey matter-based neuroscience has to be performed on cadavers because it requires dissection. So if these factors are based on gray matter, there’s no way to tell if a living person deviates because it’s simply not something we can measure on living humans for the foreseeable future.
Some of the stuff with biological sex differences with regard to behavior reminds me of another issue I’m familiar with: AI judging assistants and crime detection units.
You can sell these as very good things “if we have an AI give sentencing recommendations to judges, or help determine if a crime occurred, then racist cops and judges can’t judge differently based on things like race!” The problem, of course, is that the data to train these tools has to be done on some data set, so you have two options:
Use existing crime and sentencing data
Have someone synthetically create crime data, or massage existing crime data so as to be “unbiased”.
The issue with 1. is you’re just systematizing bias by training a machine to replicate current sentencing trends. Even if you disallow “inadmissables” like race, AI agents are notorious at finding ways to fit to these things anyway, e.g., the neighborhood the person is from, the hour the crime occurred (people who work night shift may trend towards certain races), etc.
The issue with 2. is that you’ve now inherited the unconscious biases of whoever crafted the data set, or have created a meaningless data set that doesn’t resemble real world factors.
It’s the same with biological science with regards to sex and race. It’s not necessarily that such a classification of differences can’t exist in a platonic sense, it’s that your data set is inherently fucked up and biased by millennia of history and immediate social trends and conditioning, as well as the fact that the body and its effect on behavior is just that complicated.
My question is, what about that 10%? Are we going to deny people their gender identity based on whether or not they’re detectable by this metric? What if it’s proven this is fluid throughout life, or the act of identifying a certain way can change this structure?
What about non-binary or third genders? This science inherently assumes
There is a masculine-feminine gender spectrum
Everyone fits on it
I’m agender, I reject having a place on the masculine-feminine spectrum entirely. Not “in the middle somewhere”, not on it. This research is absolutely, inherently biased towards the cultural idea that there are two gender buckets and everyone is somewhere in between these two. Am I not valid because this test can’t detect my identity? Am I less entitled to services I need like HRT or surgery? Sorry, I’m not going to have some scientist look at me, say “okay she looks vaguely feminine of center and I got a value of -0.23 [slightly female] so I assume my test worked!” Fuck that.
Basically:
I’ve posted this article like 6 times now, at least once in this thread, but I really think everyone in this discussion should read Counting the Countless. It explains why neat, finite buckets for gender and identity in general, and systems that purport to detect, operate on, or categorize them, are essentially administrative, datalogical violence against queer people.
So I agreed with most of what you said, but I think this is ultimately the most important thing.
At the same time, a thought experiment: We go back to ancient Rome or China or anywhere you please, and we observe men and women. Would male and female body language, facial expressions, etc., seem familiar to us, and would they still seem different to us in the way they do now? I think so.
So while I think you’re absolutely correct that society greatly magnifies whatever inherent sex differences there may be and, in most societies, rigidly and rather oppressively enforces them, I still think that there are minute to large differences hardwired in.
Contrariwise, I don’t we could historically find a society in which the above parallel differences were not observed (however, there may be some outlier societies in which people’s manner seems so different to our modern Western eyes that we would have a hard time templatizing the differences. I think those would be rare, however.).
Maybe the 10% have such gross brain abnormalities that their brains aren’t classifiable with this hypothetical rubric.
Or maybe that 10% possesses a suite of genes that are more powerful than their brain structure. So maybe they have a brain that predicts an 8 on the masculine-feminine scale. But they have a couple of rare alleles that can alter that person’s personality in such a way that their empirical score is a 5. Maybe if we throw genetics into the model, we are talking about a model with high predictive strength rather than moderate strength.
I’m presuming that a third gender would be in the middle of the masculine-feminine spectrum. And while I’m open to the idea that not everyone fits on the masculine-feminine spectrum and thus may defy this kind of rubric completely, I’m struggling to imagine how such a person would present (outside of individuals who don’t exhibit a discernable personality, like folks who are profoundly mentally disabled).
You can identify however you want to identify, but that doesn’t mean a group of highly trained gender experts would not be able to reach a consensus about whether your behaviors can be classified as “high masculine” or “moderate feminine” or “evenly masculine-feminine”.
Like, I can choose reject to the notion of the right-handedness- left-handedness spectrum. I personally don’t feel I fit either of those boxes. I’m also not ambidextrous. However, I know handnesses can be assessed in a quantitative way. It may not result in a perfect characterization of someone’s lateralization, but it can describe something that is meaningful to most people.
I was administered the MMPI-2 about twelve years ago. According to the results, I have an even blend of masculine and feminine traits–a result that neither surprises me nor troubles me. Nor would it trouble me if it was found that I had a brain pattern suggestive of “masculinization”, despite me possessing a vagina and identifying as a woman. I may not think of myself as being all that masculine, but I do understand why I am perceived that way by others. And I don’t take offense to that perception. To draw an analogy to race , I don’t think of myself as “non-black”, but I understand how I could be perceived that way by others. Although a DNA test can’t predict with 100% accuracy whether an individual will present as black to the average American, it can probably do that with a 90% accuracy. I would find it kind of strange if it couldn’t. And I wouldn’t find that 10% error rate to be high enough to render such a test completely meaningless.
Right, fuck that. Which is why I wouldn’t advocate that kind of approach.
I think scientific research into the biological underpinnings of gender and sexuality could make it so that fewer people will stop thinking of gender or sexual noncomformity as the latest fad that emo kids have latched onto rather than a expression of a biological reality. Yes, I could see there being some uncomfortable ramifications of extrapolating too much from scientific findings. But uncomfortable ramifications are lurking behind all scientific pursuits. That is why we have ethics boards and regulations. Like, we have the ability to make it illegal to deny someone HRT or surgery on the grounds of a brain scan result. But a person should be able to get a diagnostic brain scan if they are desperately seeking a biological explanation for their dysphoria. I think it would be unfair to deny people that information just because we can think of all the bad ways that information could be used.
A couple of days ago I had a chat with my mother. I swear, just a few years ago if you had asked her why people do bad things, she would have immediately gone to an obnoxious spiritual explanation. “They don’t know Jesus.” “They are possessed by Satan.” “They are just hateful people who want to be hateful.” I grew up hearing this kind of shit. It repulses me.
But the other day, we somehow got on the topic of hell and why so many people cling to the concept so hard. She pleasantly surprised me by talking about how people do bad things because they have been traumatized by previous experiences. Or they are they have unusual brain wiring. I would have never thought my mother of all people would become a biological determinist, but miracles can happen, I guess! I think she started seeing how obnoxious her previous mindset once she moved into a predominately LGBT church, where she is currently a minister (I don’t think it’s just a coincidence that she also stopped believing in hell once she made this move). I gotta think the more people make that transformation, the easier it will be for everyone who isn’t “normal” to find acceptance.
If scientific research only produces null or ambiguous results, I’m OK with that. I’m also OK with results that are hard to interpret solely through a biological lens. But I’m not OK with us not doing research at all on the basis of it being too hard or too"icky".
Let’s say that in 2021 our notable biologists set forth the claim that an individual’s placement on the masculine-feminine spectrum is an expression of Gene #39.
In the year 2023, a person born female finds that who she (/he/they) are is not in keeping with the socially established definition of girl and woman.
Instead of listening to this person’s viewpoint extensively, the people in her institution (school, place of employment, whatever) have her tested. It turns out that she doesn’t have the relevant marker on Gene #39. Only a few people do, it turns out.
“You’re full of shit”, they inform her. “You’re a girl. Woman. Whatever. Now shut up and start acting like one”.
If a society is going to be this draconian, then they would just use the XY or XX chromosome determination for male or female. And they wouldn’t have to wait until 2023. Scientists have already been able to do genetic testing to determine if someone is XY or XX for decades.
Parts of society are already that draconian. Only the specifics differ. Ask transitioners about medical gatekeeping and differential access to insurance coverage for transitional procedures.
There are also gatekeepers within the LGBTQ+ communities, people who wish to restrict “transgender” to people who have dysphoria and have transitioned, intend to transition, or at a minimum would dearly like to transition. I can’t say that I blame them on the terminology use (I think there should be a term we all recognize as referring to transitioners; in practice that word is “transgender”, however umbrella-like some trans activists would like to make it instead). But quite aside from terminology, some of those folks have been very dismissive of gender atypical people who don’t match that description.
As I’ve said above (somewhat clumsily, I suppose), I don’t firmly believe there’s a built-in bio difference, but I don’t firmly believe that there isn’t, either. It seems to me that if there is one, it is most likely to manifest among people who have what Julia Serrano describes as a ‘brain sex’ that contradicts their physical morphology. This is different from gender. This is essentially a map in the brain that says what the physical architecture of the body ought to be, and in transgender people such as herself, calls for a female body structure. I myself have no experience of that kind of mismatch, that physical-body dysphoria. But, taking her word (and that of other trans people) for it, I could more readily believe that that is a biological situation. Gender, on the other hand, has at best a handful of biological contributions to what is a fundamentally social thing. We know this because large chunks of it have varied over time or between cultures. And even the most likely built-in elements (aggression differences, the visual components of sexual appetite working differently, etc) are observed to manifest as having very large differences within each sex population, and yet the social notions – the gender attached to that hypothetical bio difference – insists on a black-and-white polarization, insists on “oppositing” the sexes.
Focusing on built in bio differences as somehow “proving we are a natural occurrence and not an aberrant behavior” definitely contains the risk of splitting the community, such as it is, of dividing us. It definitely brings the risk of gatekeeping and of selective “legitimacy” issues.
My perception may be entirely off, but it seems to me that your concept for “agender” actually validates the two gender bucket idea. Or maybe I just don’t understand what rejecting a place on the masculine-feminine spectrum really means in practice, when we’re dealing with social constructs.
If someone lives a life unconstrained and indifferent to societal gender expectations-- and yet they still identify as the gender they’ve been raised as because why not–what would distinguish this type of person from someone who identifies as agender? Does it only boil down to self-identification?