I agree that race is a social concept, I just see it as more externally determined, while gender is a more internally determined concept.
There’s no such thing as a cis man in the absence of being socially assigned to a gender (“at birth”, as it were, although in true fact people assign us all our lives not just at birth). In a genderless society you would be neither cis nor a man. You might be male, if we restrict the definition thereof to a certain set of biological plumbing.
In this society I’m a cis man. Regardless of what others say.
I agree, but I think there are differences in the way those social constructs are linked to other characteristics.
Gender as a social construct is ultimately based upon the biological reality of sex—which is very strongly although not perfectly bimodal—although gender doesn’t perfectly correlate with biological sex.
Phenotypic differences between different populations are also a biological reality, but they are way less strongly modal than sexual dimorphism is. Blending characteristics from different population phenotypes is far more common, both among sociocultural groups and among individuals, than being anatomically intersex is.
So, although gender is quite imperfect as a social extrapolation from biological sex, racial category as a social extrapolation from biological phenotypic characteristics is far more imperfect. Biologically speaking, racial criteria are grossly arbitrary and massively unreliable as proxies for actual genetic kinship. Gender identity, on the other hand, is pretty reliable (although by no means infallibly so) as a proxy for biological sex.
So I think this is why we tend to consider race on some level more arbitrary and “made up” than gender, and why race seems more salient as a group identity than as an individual characteristic.
When do gender differences start appearing in baby animals? Many animals have gender differences in adults, such as one gender hunting and the other taking care of the young. When do those differences start to be noticeable?
In humans it seems like around 1-2-years-old there are gender differences from my experience. Give a shopping cart to a playgroup of 2-year-olds and the boys will use it as a bulldozer to push everything around while the girls will use it like a cradle and put a doll in it. So while the different clothing styles the boys and girls are wearing is dictated by society, there does seem to be some inherent gender differences dictated by genetics. A toddler who doesn’t have the gender typical behaviors stands out and may be described with terms like “flamboyant” or “tomboy”.
As race encompass a set of genetic differences, it seems conceivable that there are some inherent differences between the innate behaviors of different races that emerge from those genetic differences. But I’m not sure that those differences are strong enough to be noticed. If there was a playgroup of toddlers of different races, I’m not sure if we could notice that a toddler of one race was acting more like the toddlers of a different race than their own.
While it’s certainly possible that perceived gender differences in early childhood behavior are at least partly due to difference of genetic sex, it’s fallacious to assume that they are.
Even infants are aware of subtle social cues from adults, and adults are incapable of being totally gender-neutral in their interactions with children and with each other. By the time children get to toddler age, they’ve already absorbed a huge amount of expectations about behavior and gender from the people around them and the media they’re exposed to. So we just have no way of telling how much gender differentiation in toddler behavior is truly innate, and how much is acculturation.
There have been some studies such as this one attempting to identify truly culture-neutral gender-related differences in some fundamentals of young infant behavior such as gaze duration. But it’s a very long way from those findings to being able to explain exactly why a group of toddler boys uses a toy shopping cart as a bulldozer while a group of toddler girls uses it as a doll bed, for example.
Yes, I think for gender identity (as well as sexual orientation) the important differentiation here is not between genetics vs environment, it is between [genetics + early environment] vs [later social/cultural environment]. If [genetics + early environment] lead to a firmly established identity in early life that is not later malleable either through volition or social pressure, we can loosely regard that as being part of someone’s intrinsic “nature” even though it may not be genetic in origin.
It’s worth noting as an aside that it’s not rare in animals for sex differentation to occur through entirely non-genetic mechanisms.
Naah. What’s that logical fallacy where you project from the part to the whole? Culture can be a component of socially-defined race, but is not the be-all and end-all of it.
Case in point - I am completely alienated from South African Coloured culture - I’m intimately aware of its mores and folkways but I don’t practice any of them, down to having a completely different accent - but I nevertheless retain a Coloured racial identity. I could immediately identify with the experience of that alienated artist without seeing it as anything like transracialism, because it’s similar to my experience (and many of my friends). It’s merely cultural alienation, not feeling like you’re a different race.
You appear to be assuming that there exists this thing called “race” that exists separate from one’s participation in culture, the projection of other people (that’s social, what other people do) of who they consider you to be, and how you conceptualize yourself (against the backdrop of existing identities in society, that is also social). But it doesn’t. The only place race exists is as a social construct. Remove the social constructs and point at race. Go ahead. Define it. Describe it.
It doesn’t exist physically. There are sets of genetic configurations and the phenotypes that go with them, but they don’t directly correspond to what we call “race”.
No, you misunderstand me. I’ve highlit part of your statement that still pertains - I’m saying remove the participation, and the conceptualization (and hence the core of identity) remains.
I agree with that. That is true.
But the conceptualization (and hence the core of identity) can’t be isolated from the indivdual’s personal history of social interaction. It doesn’t happen in a social vaccuum. YES, if you magically suspend social processes right now but the person in question has a history, they still have an identity with this factor included as part of it. But up until you suspended them those social processes were informing the individual of what race is, and the individual was a social participant in that reverberating social interaction, along with all the other individuals.
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Being alienated from a culture now doesn’t magically erase your race or change it, because all that past still exists. BUT that past is not the culture, it’s an internalized model, a personalized abstraction of, and conversation with, it. That’s as much a part of racial identity as the mores and folkways of culture.
The only possible transracialist, IMO, would have to be an amnesiac cultural adoptee.
Even a self-hater is the race they hate. It’s kind of built in.
Well, except that some people, I think, have a lifetime experience of having embraced an identity other than that expected of them, including those things that constitute race. But they will have been perceived as being a race that may not correspond to how they conceputalized themselves as a three year old, a second grader, etc, nonetheless, so it’s complicated.
Same is true of transgender and genderqueer people. Part of our identity, because it is part of our personal experience, is bound up in the perceptions of others. Which in turn involved being perceived and treated as a gender other than how we conceptualized ourselves. I remember it well. It’s why I don’t like the AMAB / AFAB nomenclature: it’s not like my mom’s obstetrician made a typo when filling out my birth certificate; I got assigned a gender by other kids (and teachers and other adults for that matter) every damn year, and treated accordingly, subjected to expectations accordingly, and subjected to the way folks treat people who aren’t as expected as well — and all that is part of who I am, that’s formative experience.
I thought it was an implication of the same EO in my previous OP - at least for scholarships provided by the collages. But perhaps I was wrong. Either way it’s not important for my point, which is that it doesn’t matter whether @iiandyiiii supports it in this thread or not, there is a huge double standard in how these two parallel situations are treated by society.
Some of those things that constitute race.
I am skeptical that one can authentically forgo everything that constitutes one’s race for another. That would involve erasure of all awareness of: ones lineage, social responses to one’s known lineage & phenotype, etc. As you acknowledge, even people adopted by different-raced parents at birth will still have the latter. And most supposed “transracial” examples, like Dolezal and mistymage’s g-g-p, will definitely have the rest as well.
Is there social construction involved in gender identity? Sure. No argument there. Is it the same degree or quality as the social construction of race? I don’t think so. It has a much greater internal component, IMO.
Or to put it another way - I believe you can (I must stress) theoretically raise a (mentally and physically typical) child without a racial identity as we commonly understand it. I don’t think you can raise one without a gender identity (even if that identity is nb).
What is a gender identity, though? Is it the sum of personality and mental attributes that makes you resemble the average of one sex more than the other, or is it what gender you believe yourself to be, possibly just because that’s what you’ve been told you are?
If it’s the latter, then it is something that can change. And if it’s the former, it’s possible to be wrong about one’s own gender. Neither quite seems to match the common paradigm.
As soon as you start talking about “resemble”, you’re talking about gender expression.
So it’s a little like the latter, but without the “possibly just because that’s what you’ve been told you are” bullshit gloss you’ve added.
Isn’t that the position of most transgender people before they realise, though?
Before they realise what, precisely…?
…yes, exactly.
Yes, what? If you thought of yourself as a woman until today, then did you have a female gender identity? If not then what is a gender identity?