I don’t know much about this.
But I thought brain scans had been pretty good for a while at distinguishing male and female brains, and are still getting better. This paper suggests >90% accuracy looking at the whole brain, and >85% accuracy looking only at certain specific brain regions.
Being able to distinguish at such accuracy implies sexed differences that can be seen, given sufficiently sophisticated tools
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Okay, I agree with you that teenagers identifying as the opposite sex for a few years and trying out new pronouns is pretty harmless. But you don’t think it’s fair to point out that in other cases it has led to something harmful?
This is theory at best. We dont know enough to prove it using scientific method. It makes for interesting debate but thats about it.
I hate a few things about this discourse software.
Me too.
I believe thoughts are objective biological phenomena.
But take Monstro’s list of identities: nationality, ethnic, racial, religious, and sexuality group. All those are equally thoughts in people’s brains, and have the same objective reality as a penis, or a skin colour. So then why treat gender identity differently to racial identity?
Im not sure that I understand. Are you saying a persons held religious identity is as absolutely real as the color of their eyes? Religious identity (and other identities) are evolving as we age and experience life. Physical features are permanent.
But I’m not the one claiming full and certain understanding. It’s transphobes who persistently claim that it’s “basic biology” that what’s between your legs is the sole determinant of what makes you male or female. People who actually understand biology know that behavioral phenotypes (mental configurations) are just as significant as somatic phenotypes; that both are always influenced by both genetics and enironment; and that biology is complex, the only consistent rule is that there are always exceptions to the most common outcomes.
The principal evidence for what I’m suggesting is the existence of trans people. But what I’m pointing out is that it is perfectly consistent with everything we know about biology that both body AND brain may be sexually dimporphic in significant ways.
OK, I agree. I think people are wrong to bring physiology into a debate when they are really debating politics.
Maybe so, but trying to prevent teenagers from transitioning has also definitely led to something harmful.
That’s what @Riemann is saying. Because your religious identity is encoded in the connections between your neurons, which are just as physically real as your eye colour. Anyway, eye colour can also change; many white babies are born with blue eyes, and they turn brown later.
While I agree that memories are encoded in the brain, Im not convinced that thought it. Thought is more imo. I think that there is a mind/brain difference but obviously I cant prove it. Why are some people smarter than others? Its it simply down to more neural connections in the brain? I got nothing.
If it’s all genes, why bring up uteruses in the first place? The fact is that there isn’t one simple biological definition of ‘female’ or ‘male’, there are always going to be fuzzy edges.
Because it’s the uterus and all the rest that enable the female reproductive role to be carried out. The chromosomes are important because you can’t have the hardware without the genetic blueprint.
It’s like asking what makes a human a human. Our species has a genome that no other species can claim. It is our blueprint; forensics can tell whether a cell recovered from a crime scene came from a human, a dog, or a bacterium. The actual flesh and blood organism called Homo sapien is the phenotypic result of the human genome. The result is our bodies. All of it matters because you can’t have a person without human DNA.
There is a simple definition for male and females. The existence of anomalies doesn’t change this basic reality. People with Down Syndrome are not considered a separate species from humans with 23 chromosomal pairs, and people born with anomalous sex chromosomes doesn’t alter the fact thaf only two distinct sex classes exist within the human race.
I’m a materialist, so I do think thoughts are some kind of physical phenomena. But I’m still not sure what sort of distinction @Riemann is making between gender identity (physically encoded in the brain) and racial identity (physically encoded in the brain). Race is a far more fuzzy category than gender, so why was everyone so down on that white woman who claimed she identified as black?
Im guessing because she appropriated the pain and suffering of African Americans without actually having to suffer herself.
And the point here is that it’s easy to see that basic external physical characteristics are not (setting aside cosmetics, surgery etc.) a matter of choice, not a matter of whimsy, and generally relatively stable. But it’s not easy to discern the same thing about the various aspects of someone’s state of mind. There are clearly many things about our state of mind that we do have a choice about, and which can change rapidly. That makes it easy for all states of mind to be dismissed as though they are nothing more than whimsical choices. And this is what transphobes (and homophobes) do all the time.
That’s why I think it’s important to emphasize that everything about our state of mind is objectively physically real, it’s a neuron configuration. That correct model gives you a much better framework to see that while some aspects of our mental configuration are rapidly changing choices or opinions, other aspects of that neuron configuration - including gender identity for most people - may be just as stable and persistent and beyond our voluntary control as eye color, part of the fundamental structure of our brains.
Heh, so species are obvious and definitive are they? I’m sure taxonomists will be thrilled to hear that.
If you have to handwave away any exceptions to your rules as irrelevant, that says to me that they’re not very good rules; more like guidelines, really.
This is becoming a tiresome straw man. Let’s stipulate that:
(a) there is a clear defined sexually dimorphic SOMATIC phenotype - male/female bodies;
(b) that it’s overwhelmingly bimodal - exceptions are very rare and don’t invalidate the basic model.
What’s principally in dispute so far as I’m concerned is your claim that no aspect of gender lies in our mental state. So what, exactly, is your model/explanation for trans people? Or do you just not have one, and for you it’s just “if you’re born with a dick I define you as a man, and I don’t care about anything else”?
I was “down” on her because she’s a pathological liar and using those lies to advantage herself, damn the consequences for others.
However, I think the point DemonTree is making is that even if Rachel wasn’t a pathological liar and hadn’t harmed anyone, it would be 100% acceptable for others (especially black people) to side-eye her claim to “blackness”. While there are plenty of white-passing folks who are treated as black by black people, there is always a concrete basis for that “variance”. Like, white-passing folks can have recent black ancestry. Maybe they were adopted by black parents and raised culturally black. Maybe they are albinos! If you stroll up in a black space looking like a white person, it is unlikely you’ll be thrown out. But it wouldn’t be racist to ask for your backstory and then question your belongingness if the backstory is fishy (“I’m black because I love jazz and watermelon.” A black person gatekeeping blackness doesn’t make them a racist.
The same with Jewish folk. I can sit down in a synagogue and tell everyone there I’m a Jew just because I say I’m one, and they allowed to ask for more information and determine for themselves whether I’m really a Jew. They aren’t rude for correcting me on what constitutes a Jew.
If someone told me they are a woman because they love dresses and swishing their long hair, I want to be able to side-eye that person without being called a TERF. I want to have the discretion to pick which narratives I consider evidence of “womanness.”
We allow all other social constructs to be “gate-keeped” even though there are no special customs or expecations oriented around those social constructs. There are no “blacks only” bathrooms (thank goodness!) because we realized that doesn’t make sense in a society where race isn’t supposed to matter. So this is why it is odd to me that the prevailing message is that gender gate-keeping is a horrible regressive thing, yet we keep perpetuating the notion that genders describe real and socially important differences. If gender is social construct, let’s treat it that way and come up with some rules that 95% of us can agree upon so that we know what is being talked about when we say “woman” and “man”. If gender is a figment solely of the individual’s idiosyncratic mind, then let’s stop giving gender the gravitas we’ve been giving it for eleventy-billion centuries. Let’s pick a position and stick with it, ffs. All the back and forth is hella confusing.
That’s a bit disgenuous - the prevailing message is surely that it’s horribly regressive only if you define gender as the genitalia you were born with, and gatekeep by that criterion.