Caring for offspring is a gender role with a clear connection to a female reproductive role. This is a role (childbirth) that transwomen can’t play because they lack a female reproductive system.
Yes, and some of these rituals (like the ones in bold) are widely seen as antiquated and sexist. I had my father walk me down the aisle, but to offset this regressive callback to less evolved times, my father-in-law walked my husband down the aisle.
I don’t know how you figure Mom groups are a gender norm ritual. It’s a support group for people who want to talk about locia, C-section scars, and breast feeding hacks with others who’ve gone through the same thing. This is not a performance of femininity.
It’s not a part of the body that others have access to. The shape and color of my body is visible to others, but does not directly affect my thoughts. My thoughts are not directly accessible to others and exist as a pattern of electrochemical signals.
Quibbling about the brain being a body part is not a useful distinction. Psychology wouldn’t be a distinct branch of medicine if we didn’t think minds were a different kind of thing than the bodies that carried them.
Aren’t brain structure differences biological as much as height and strength and genitalia? They’re just another physical difference, I thought gender roles were something else?
Just like the hunt for race-based brain differences, the hunt for sex-based ones has been unsuccessful. The most parsimonious explanation is that there is none.
Why are brain structure differences so unfathomable to you?
Sexual dimorphormism is apparent in our fingers. Specifically in the relative lengths of our index and ring fingers. Males tend to have shorter digit ratios than females. It is not as black and white as penis vs. vulva, but it is reliable enough to be a biomarker of biological sex.
So it would not surprise me at all if we were to find similar biomarkers in our brains.
My inner evolutionary biologist can grok how evolutionary pressures would create the rather boring penis-vulva dichotomy. It’s hard enough to do the reproductive dance with two choices. Imagine having to navigate multiple genital choices and trying to decide how what part fits with another during foreplay. It is just easier ecologically to have two sexes. But brain structure hasn’t been subjected to the selective forcing as our reproductive parts. Nature don’t care if you’ve got a pink brain or a blue brain. What matters is whether your weenie is able to deliver healthy sperm into a coochie matched with healthy eggs. I think we will find that there are arrangements of brain structure that you’re more likely to find in males or females, but on average, the there’s too much variability in either group to speak of a “male” brain and a “female” brain. Brains are more complicated than fingers.
These differences aren’t proven. Science is needed to assert there are differences.
“Unfathomable”? I’ve never said they are unfathomable. I’m taking the exact same stance I would if someone proclaimed matter-of-factly that whites had difference brain structures than blacks.
I apologize if this is not true; it was what I was taught in college, in, admittedly, the 20th century. (It was in a Women’s Studies class, taught by a very confirmed feminist.)
That said…can you really claim that there is no sexual dimorphism in human brains? None at all? Not a single behavioral or perceptual or cognitive trait that differs by sex? I’m not ready to believe that just yet… (May need another thread…)
You slide from one idea to another with dangerous facility. Transwomen cannot give birth…but why would they have any difficulty in “caring for offspring?” Caring for offspring is a gender role that transwomen can fulfil with complete success.
(It’s rather a non-issue, as cis-men and transmen can also very successfully care for children!)
OK, but you’re up here calling the ideas “scientific sexism”, so that makes me think you think it’s “unfathomable”. Being skeptical of the idea is fine. But labeling it sexism isn’t.
The brain is awash in the same hormones as the rest of our bodies. It is more parsimonious to posit that sex chromosomes carry genes that produce factors that can affect the development of the brain in a predictable way than to assume sex chromosomes have nothing to do with brain development. Our brains develop in the same milieu as our sex organs. (And why you’re likening this to race is crazy to me! You’ve spent thousands of posts arguing for the biological realness of sex and how that makes it different from social constructs like race. Of course it would be racist to believe that race maps onto brain structure. There’s little biological basis for race!)
We don’t prove things in science. We draw inferences from the weight of available evidence. The weight of evidence isn’t compelling yet, but that doesn’t mean it should be dismissed:
I wonder how people would react if in some bizarre way their base genetics switched to the opposite sex. Like, they fall into a chemical vat which changes their genetic sex. They spend a month in a coma and when they wake up, their body has become completely the opposite genetic sex they had before and their brain is exactly the same. I wonder if people would transition their bodies back to their mental sex or if they would just go through life looking like this new gender but feeling like their old one.
As for me, I probably would want my external presentation to be as much as my original gender as possible. I’m not sure I would feel comfortable having the world see me as a different gender. But I could also see myself procrastinating and eventually getting used the new gender.
@filmore, I wouldn’t be the first one to jump into that chemical vat. But that’s because I’ve been socialized as a woman and I’m rather comfortable with my current existence. If I turned into a guy, I’d have to learn so much just to fit in. I know I wouldn’t have to try to fit in, but I would want to. Like, I wouldn’t want to put my new hairy, muscular, masculine body into the skirts I have in my wardrobe. I don’t think that would be a cute look. I don’t have the personality to finesse that look.
But I think if the chemical vat could make it so that I didn’t have to go through that awkward phase of learning how to “do man”, I think I’d get used to it and maybe enjoy it. I like my current body OK, but I’ve never been a fan of my sex parts. I don’t know how I would feel about having male sex parts. But I’m thinking I could get used to them as someone who does not have sex now.
There’s a term called neurosexism that describes the elusive hunt for sex differences in the brain. There are similarities between this history and the history of scientific racism; both are sullied with sloppy study designs, erroneous data interpretation, and bad statistical inferences.
It is certainly reasonable to hypothesize that with all the hormone differences between the sexes, signs of this would manifest in brain morphology. But it really doesn’t seem like that is case, at least according to the author in that book I pointed @DemonTree to. A lot o studies that purport differences fail to control for very basic things, like maturity and size.
Even if there were brain differences between men and women, using these differences to argue for gender is a leap. A brain difference could easily have squat to do with gender, and all to do with determining how much time a person spends on the toilet taking a dump.
Could, indeed. Quite agree. It would need to be shown. I was just rebutting what I thought you were saying, to the contrary. You seemed to be saying there were no differences that weren’t societal. If that wasn’t what you meant, then my rebuttal was mistaken.
For the record, I vigorously disagree with the stance you seem to be taking. I don’t think I will be engaging with you more than superficially, as when I think you make a blunder and I pounce on it. I feel that, between us, there cannot be a meaningful meeting of minds, even on basic concepts and definitions. The gulf is so broad, real debate probably is not possible. It’s like a pro-choice/pro-life debate. At the end of the day, “I believe you are wrong” is just about all I got.
(I lack the saint-like patience shown by iiandyiiii. I couldn’t have done the hundredth part of the great job he has.)
I wasn’t doing that though. I’m just saying that there biomarkers for biological sex outside of our reproductive parts. If we accept the finding that our fingers can predict what sex chromosome we are carrying, then it is reasonable to suspect that the brain could as well. The idea isn’t crazy. It isn’t sexist. It just hasn’t been verified yet. And even if it is verified, it doesn’t mean that gender identity should be elevated over biological sex for legal purposes. A person can have the brain structure suggestive of ADHD or schizophrenia, but not have anything wrong with them. They should not qualify for disability or ADA accommodation based on this finding. And people can be diagnosed with these disorders and not have any noticeable brain abnormalities. Doesn’t mean they are faking. It just means neuroscience isn’t easy. So there’s no reason to think that sex-correlated brain differences would work any differently or that they should be treated any differently.