Of course not. I wasn’t suggesting that any two humans actually exist in practice in precisely identical environmental conditions. I was describing the theoretical model for how we think about relative contributions to some effect when many factors are involved.
Think about health outcomes, which are an equally complex result of many factors. In a similar way, no two humans are exposed to precisely the same environmental conditions in terms of lifestyle - nutrition, exercise, exposure to toxins, etc. Does that complexity imply that there cannot be a significant genetic contribution to the probability of (say) getting cancer?
You seem to think that if something is complex, that implies there can’t be a significant genetic contribution. That’s wrong. If somebody were suggesting absolute genetic determinism, then “it’s more complicated than that” would be a valid rebuttal. But that’s a straw man, nobody who knows anything about genetics would ever claim that something as complex as human personality is determined completely by genetics. It’s genetics and environment. The kind of question we’re likely to be asking is whether genetics explains (say) more like 10% or 30% or 50% of the variation in some trait. In that case, the fact that the trait is the complex result of many factors doesn’t mean much in itself. It does mean it may be much more difficult to control for those many factors and prove the relationship, but it doesn’t imply anything about the size of the genetic contribution.
The related issue here is the question of why you (and many people in the social sciences) seem to think that it’s a problem if there is a significant genetic contribution to human behavior, and have an ideological agenda to resist the idea.
Obviously I can see the motivation in some situations. If a trait is something desirable - intelligence is the obvious example - then it’s of great concern and has social implications if certain subsets of humans have differing genetic predispositions for the trait.
But gender identity or sexual preference are not aspects of personality where one part of the spectrum is “good” and one part is “bad”, except of course to bigots (and that bigotry is all social conditioning). The immense diversity in gender identity is all part of the natural variation in human nature, and it’s not clear to me why it’s a problem if the genetic contribution is significant.
If gender identity and sexual preference were completely a result of social conditioning, that seems to me far more problematic. For example, it creates a justification for the notion of conversion “therapy”. If identity and preference are entirely the result of social conditioning, then in principle social conditioning could change them. Perhaps (with Jeebus’ help!) we really could change LGBT people into non-LGBT people. And there isn’t any definitive rebuttal to the misguided notion stated in the OP to this thread that a child exploring their gender identity is qualitatively similar to a child fantasizing about being a dog. If our minds are blank slates and genetics doesn’t matter at all, then why can’t someone really be a dog in the same way that a trans woman really is a woman?
No, I don’t think I believe that or anything like that. stops to consider for a few beats
In general, for each and every human behavior, I would say there is always a built-in component (which may consist of not merely one but a whole horde of genetic markers, and also non-genetic built-ins such as factors that are simply intrinsic to being indivdually intelligent social beings or some such thing).
But for many human behaviors, human social learning is involved, which means that what we’re seeing is how those intrinsic built-in factors manifest under certain select social circumstances.
I think you’re fully with me on that so far. (Correct me if not).
OK, now, here’s where I seem to be expressing myself unclearly, and confusingly…
In many cases (or so I am positing for consideration), there’s a sort of sensitive dependence on precise social circumstances (to borrow from the world of nonlinear causality in physics) – where the same built-in factors result in a wide range of resultant behaviors that vary all over the map as a consequence of minor differences in the social experience of the individual in question.
Did that assertion make more sense than my garbled way of saying it previously?
And would you sign on in agreement with it, or do you stand in disagreement with me there?
So, finally, I am asserting that a lot of gender and sexuality identities and expressions are likely to be in that latter category. I only know this anecdotally and from personal experience interpretation, but I’m pretty confident in saying so, nevertheless.
Oh, I’m equally opposed to the hard-line social sciences assertion that absolutely all human behavior is the outcome of socialization – that we have no core nature, that we are born as blank slates and that every observable human behavior is the outcome of what we’ve been socially exposed to.
And I’ve compared the arguments that occur between the two extremes to two people arguing how much of the damn swimming pool’s volume is due to its length, and how much to its width, and I’ve often felt like neither side has much understanding of depth. If you catch my drift.
And, to answer the remainder of your question, I don’t think I’m very much inclined to adopt a position on something factual in nature just because I like what that position would let me go on to argue if it were indeed true. Quite the opposite. As I’ve said previously, I think a lot of the impetus to have us all ‘believe’ that LGBTQ identities and inclinations are built in is exactly that, that people like what they think it lets them go on to say next if it’s true: “You can’t go around blaming people for being gay or trans if they’re born that way, you can’t say it’s a sin or immoral cuz they can’t help it!”
I’ll admit that probably prompts a little bit of reactive knee-jerk antipathy on my part, but really I’m aware that yes it could be built-in, or some aspect of it could be at any rate. I don’t claim to know. What I do claim is that it doesn’t fail to make rational sense that it could be otherwise. It does.
And as I said before, I am uninclined to reach for a “built-in” explanation for a difference as a default belief when I don’t know one way or the other.
I’ll quote the brilliant Elizabeth Janeway on that one (speaking on the subject of gender differences at the time):
Or vice versa. We could convert all the annoying Christians into Satanists while we’re at it.
A theory that all of what’s inside our heads is conditioned to be there and that there’s no intrinsic factor that prefers something because it’s genuinely better (for us personally) also leaves us all with no ability to claim superiority for any of our beliefs, let alone any of our tastes and preferences.
Just as I won’t embrace the “built in” theory on the basis of what it will then allow me to go on to say, I wont’ dismiss the “socially constructed” theory on the basis of the horrible things it would let someone else go on to say. It’s intellectually dishonest either way.
I dismiss both of those theories because I actually think they’re both wrong. I think it’s all a complex interaction of social and innate factors. The innate factors may or may not differ in a specific polarized way between gay and straight or between trans and cis but that doesn’t mean there are no innate factors at work here. Blank slate theories ultimately leave one unable to explain why we seek happiness or avoid pain: if everything’s socialized then we’d have to be socialized to consider pain unpleasant, we’d have to be socialized to consider happiness a good thing. And if that were the case, how the hell does socialization occur then? Of what would its rewards and punishments be composed if nothing is intrinsic, if nothing is built in?
The OPs question, like the “I identify as an attack helicopter” thing that’s been floating around, is mostly a mockery of transgender experiences. But I can give good-faith consideration to an idea tossed out in bad faith.
How would one know that one “is” a dog? One would have to have extrapolated from external observation of what dogs’ internal lives are (probably) like and then concluded that one’s own internal life is more like that than akin to the internal lives of (other) people. One also has to extrapolate what other people’s internal lives are in fact like – never having been any other person. The difficulty with getting to the internal life of a dog is that they aren’t very talkative; I don’t find it easy to believe that even the pet owners who “speak for their pets” and think they read their pets’ minds really know what the dog feels and thinks and how it imagines things and so forth. But despite all these barriers I suppose it could happen that someone actually has an identity wherein they have more in common, at the fundamental-self level, with dogs than with the rest of the species human.
I’d have a lot of curious and skeptical questions about how this transdog would communicate this sense of identity to me or anyone else though. Hopefully not by trying to hump my leg.
Being transgender is more easily grasped conceptually. It’s far easier to accept that someone has realized that their self has more in common with the self of people born of the opposite sex, although yes they have to extrapolate from external observations both of the opposite-sex people AND of others of their own sex in order to derive that sense of understanding of self. But people of our species write and talk and sing about what it is like to be us and that makes it accessible in a way that the inner life of a dog kind of isn’t , if you see what I mean.
All I can imagine you might mean by this is factors that are not genetic, but are not malleable to social conditioning. That would mean early non-social environmental factors, for example the intrauterine environment. If that’s not what you mean, you have to explain what a “non-genetic built-in” is.
[My bold] This is simply a claim about the relative size of the contribution of genetics vs social environment to the variance in gender identity. But no, that’s really not something anybody could conceivably judge through personal experience, unless you have a close personal relationship with a large number of pairs of identical twins. You observe a lot of subtle variation, sure - but you cannot possibly know its cause. Again, the existence of complexity and extensive variation implies nothing in itself about the size of the contribution from genetics vs environment.
I’m not sure why you think this is brilliant. It just makes explicit her ideological bias. Why is any genetic contribution an “unresolvable hypothesis” with an apparently arbitrarily high standard of proof, whereas we can assume without evidence that social conditioning is sufficient to explain 100% of the variance?
Of course, but with the correct non-blank-slate model for brain development there’s a straightforward rebuttal to show how this type of slippery slope mockery is nonsense. We can also addresses the scientifically ignorant trope that it’s “basic biology” that you can only possibly have a cis gender identity, and that trans people must be fantasists or something. All humans (XX and XY) have virtually identical sets of genes. There’s very little on the Y except some high-level triggers that influence the expression of other downstream genes that we all possess (on X or the autosomes) that do the actual construction work. So people of either biological sex possess all the necessary genes to make a brain with a male identity or a female identity, it’s just a question of when and if those genes are switched on. So it’s perfectly plausible that a significant minority of people could have a male body but some or all aspects of a female brain, or vice versa. But human genes will only ever make a human brain of some kind, they can’t possibly make a doggy brain - that requires doggy genes. If someone describes their gender identity as something within the range of human variation - which includes trans and non-binary, of course - that’s something objectively true. The fact that the only way to know someone’s neuron configuration is to talk to them doesn’t make it any less objectively real than their genitalia. But if someone says they have a doggy brain - well, that’s not real. That may be the way they feel, and if a furry wants to be treated as a non-human animal, I have no problem respecting that. But they certainly don’t really have a doggy brain in the same way that a trans woman has a human woman’s brain.
It’s hard to pin down the exact features, but distinct gender identities (sexually dimorphic subjective mental states) surely exist. A cis man has a sense of male identity that would not vanish if he lost his virility, or even if he lost his genitalia completely. And the most compelling evidence for the notion of gender identity is the existence of trans people. Unless you think trans people are all lying or deluded about their subjective sense of self, distinct male-female subjective mental identities exist that are independent of physical sexual identity.
And the absence of distinct gender identities would be the biologically implausible case. Subjective identity informs behavior, and we see sexually dimorphic behavior to some degree in virtually all non-human animals.
As to whether this has any genetic basis? Again, the best evidence that there is at least some genetic contribution (or some early non-social environmental factors) is simply the existence of trans and non-binary people. There has historically always been immense social pressure to conform to cis-binary stereotypes. Why would trans and non-binary people exist at all if gender identity were a “blank slate” at birth, and generated solely from social conditioning?
And again, the absence of any genetic contribution would be the biologically unlikely case, since the sexually dimorphic behavior that we see in most non-human animals is substantially instinctive. Of course, humans have vastly more sophisticated culture than any non-human animal. But there’s no good reason to believe that all trace of underlying instinctive behavioral tendencies simply vanished.
ETA: I should also have stated the possibility that it’s random with respect to genotype. That there are distinct pathways to the development of brains with a predisposition to male/female characteristics, that the choice of pathway is established fairly early, and that the choice of pathway has a stochastic element that is completely uncorrelated with genotype (other than the correlation with XX/XY of course). In other words, to the extent gender identity is not attributable to social conditioning, and apparently may be refractory to it, it could be XX/XY correlation plus a purely random component that in a minority of cases results in predisposition to a trans or non-binary identity. Predisposition established fairly early in life, but not a genetic predisposition.
The thing is, I have no trouble visualizing a world in which the socially shared understanding of what it means to be a male (and what it means to be a female) hardly even overlap with the notions that have characterized our society. And I think we don’t know that any fragment of what our current notions contain is encoded in any of our genes.
That doesn’t mean they aren’t. I’m not saying that they aren’t. I’m saying that we don’t know that they are and that it isn’t farfetched to think that they aren’t.
But you do realize that this doesn’t imply that such transformed behaviors have no genetic component, right? The way a genetic predisposition will be manifest as a phenotype will depend on the environment, and the phenotype may change completely if culture drives a change in the social environment. That’s doesn’t mean there can’t still be a genetic component, some degree of predisposition to certain behaviors.
Take a toy example: there’s a genetic component to being generally intelligent, and being generally intelligent is correlated with being better at crossword puzzles. So some people have a genetic predisposition to be better than others at crossword puzzles. The fact that crossword puzzles didn’t exist 200 years ago doesn’t mean that being good at crossword puzzles cannot have any genetic component.
It may be that gender roles in modern society are completely unrecognizable from what they were 100 years ago or 1000 years ago, and may change dramatically again over the next 100 years, but there may still be a significant genetic component to those behaviors.
If you claim it isn’t farfetched, then provide an evolutionary account of the process by which humans somehow completely lost the sexually dimorphic instinctive behaviors which are present to some degree in virtually every other animal species on the tree of life, including our ancestors. I’m not saying it’s totally impossible, but postmodern social theory that wants to assume zero genetic component and the extreme blank slate model as the null hypothesis is on the farfetched side of this.
I don’t agree with the premise that sexually dimorphic instinctive behaviors do indeed exist, for certain, in every other animal species. We aren’t unbiased observers. I know for sure that we have projected our preconceived notions onto our studies of other primates, for example.
Note, once again, that I am not asserting that there are animal species with no built-in sexually dimorphic behaviors. I’m just saying your assertion that there are none isn’t a starting point I would agree to stipulate.
I’m a man; the problem with stating that my sense of being male would not vanish if my genitalia were lost in an accident or some such thing is that I did possess them for 47 years, and all along the way received a staggering amount of external stimuli telling me I was, in fact, a male. That’s what I self-evidently am, and what everyone’s told me I am my whole life. How do we know my “sense” of being male wasn’t constructed by those stimuli? You cannot take that history away.
Beats me, and I don’t see why we need to insert loaded terms like “lying.” The point is we don’t know what this “sense of male/femaleness.”
Animals, to the extent they behave differently, do so because of sex; gender is a human concept.
Furthermore, what behaviour? “Identity” isn’t behaviour; as you say, identity drives behaviour, but what behaviour is it, exactly, that you feel is particular to, say, a female identity in a male body, or vice versa? I mean, surely it’s not sexual orientation? I hope not. What else is it, though? Most stereotypically gendered behaviour is, well, just stereotypes.
If we could in fact pin down behaviour that is unquestionably indicative of female or maleness in a genetic way, not merely passing stereotypes, and see if that behaviour is (in some way to measure that is unbiased) demonstrated by people consistent with their gender identity in opposition to their sex, that’d be a huge, huge thing in favor of genetically inherent gender identity. But I am unaware, to be honest, of any agreement at all on what a list of those behaviours would be. We could probably brainstorm a few, I guess.
Of course, there could be genetic contribution. But that itself is potentially a hideously complex matter; genetics could contribute to the likelihood of trans identification in a literally limitless number of ways which may, in fact, defy our current understanding of what transgender identification even really is. If gender is disassociated from sex, is it even male/female? Why would we assume it is? What if it’s something totally different and we are wrong about it being a male and female thing, and we’ve just been projecting stereotypes onto it?