How useful for you that assuming such accusations upfront absolves you of any need to explain yourself. You’ve saved yourself some work there.
I’m going by direct experience. You know, them all being things you’ve already said in this thread.
I am making the assumption of consistency on your part, but if you want to disavow that, be my guest.
For the exact same reason that a cis male with a firm sense of a male identity that has always aligned with a male sex-assigned-at-birth may have many female-typical interests and behaviors. The fact that I feel that I am a boy does mean that I must then follow some rigid checklist of male gender expression and adopt some stereotypical male gender role. I don’t have to be a girl to want to play with dolls and wear a pretty pink dress. Gender identity and gender expression are distinct things, and are both diverse.
Biology and most especially human behavior are complex. You seem to feel that if you can find any example of something that does not following a rigid pattern, that disproves all claims for the existence of any underlying principles.
It is possible that these 5 have firmly male gender identities that they don’t themselves fully understand and accept because of the cultural context they live in, and might be happier living as males. It’s also quite possible that they are XY but do not have rigidly binary male identities.
We usually talk about identity being one’s internal sense of self. In some cases a rigid cultural context may mean that a person never fully realizes the sense of self that is most in accord with their intrinsic nature, the identity that might make them most content and most happy. So they make do (or sometimes not). But it seems an arcane philosophical point to ask whether an identity that is never fully realized actually exists.
Nitpick: I’m assuming you meant “does not mean” instead of the phrase I underlined.
Yes, thanks - always annoying when you carefully write out the exact opposite of what you’re trying to say.
Nope. I’m not claiming sex and race are the same thing or work in the same way, so I don’t know why you feel the need to keep pointing this out.
The cis male with female-typical interests and behaviours is not claiming to be male because of having a male brain, though. In fact we might reasonably conclude that this individual does not have a strongly masculinised brain, no?
Because this thread is about the difference between transgender and transracial. It’s the title of the thread.
No. Why would we? AIUI, there is evidence for a connection between brain structure and an innate sense of gender identity. But that doesn’t mean that there’s a connection between brain structure and social conventions of gender expression.
Whether somebody prefers pink to blue, or football to ballet, etc., doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about their innate gender identity.
Because if we are proposing that men and women have sexually dimorphic brains then we would expect this to manifest in different personality, interests, and behaviour. And we do observe that men and women, and boys and girls - and even newborn babies in one study - behave differently.
Note that all the biologically male kids raised as female in the study I linked to had more male-typical than female-typical interests and attitudes. That wasn’t caused by upbringing.
We would expect them to have some differences, especially at the level of strongly hormone-driven reactions. But there’s no reason to assume that all or even most of our social gender norms about “personality, interests, and behavior” are due to innate gender differences.
In fact, when we look at the variety of such norms in different societies and time periods, it’s very hard to argue for their innate gender-dependency as a general rule. Is it masculine or unmasculine for grown men to wear lace and makeup, weep easily, write poetry, or be subservient to their mothers, for example? The answer depends on which particular culture you’re looking at.
Fallacious inference. If all or many of the sixteen biologically male children in the study had an innate sense of male gender identity, and they were being raised in an environment where they absorbed conventional norms of gender expectations, then they would have been aware that the female gender norms being imposed on them felt “wrong” for them.
So that in itself could explain why they were more comfortable gravitating toward male gender norms, even though they were being encouraged to think of themselves as female.
Again, we can’t just assume that the behaviors of children—even very young children—with regard to social gender norms are pure manifestations of biological nature uninfluenced by social conditioning. Children get a lot of social conditioning about gender from a very young age, and absorb a lot of expectations about gender norms.
(Note also that a lot of the information in the study about the children’s behavior was derived from the parents, who were well aware that the children were genetically male, and who are also not immune to social conditioning about what behavior they might expect to see from a female-assigned child who was “really” a boy as opposed to one who was “really” a girl.)
Innate differences can manifest differently depending on the surrounding culture, but there will still be commonalities. If you look at table 3 you can see some examples of questions asked: toy choice, rough and tumble play, interest in marriage, wishes to be a boy. These seem less likely to be culturally dependent than a preference for pink. And they were all answered by the ‘subjects’, not their parents.
How would they know which gender to identify with and to adopt the norms of, if you rule out being told they are that gender, and also rule out them noticing they are more similar to that gender? It makes sense to feel female norms are wrong for you if they conflict greatly with your innate interests and personality. The idea that the boyish interests developed because they somehow subconciously knew they were boys, despite being raised as girls, seems kind of farfetched, and unnecessarily complicated as a theory.
Although I think it’s reasonable to argue for “rough and tumble play” preferences as plausibly, at least partly, hormone-driven, I think it’s hopeless to claim that we can reliably disentangle genetic from cultural factors in such heavily culturally mediated behavior as “toy choice” and “interest in marriage”. Children don’t even know what toys represent, or what marriage is, without being given that information by adults in the ongoing process of massive (even if inadvertent) social conditioning about gender norms.
“Wishing to be a boy” could indicate either innate male gender identity, or just desire for the greater freedom or authority associated with being a boy in a gendered society, or some combination of both factors.
As I understand it, that’s the whole point of the concept of innate gender identity. Children with cisgender identity tend not to resist or reject their assigned gender, whereas children with transgender identity do.
Similarly, cisgender children who are assigned a different gender because of intersex characteristics, like the exstrophy patients in your linked study, have a mismatch between their assigned gender and their innate gender identity. So a cisgender intersex boy who is assigned female, with surgically constructed female genitalia, can still “feel like a boy”, even if he’s being constantly told he’s a girl and is expected to conform to female norms of appearance.
I think you’re mixing up gender identity and gender expression again, or perhaps I haven’t been clear enough in distinguishing between them.
Children who have a self-perceived male gender identity will tend to feel that they’re boys and will resist being labeled girls and having female gender norms (gender expression) imposed on them.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that they have some kind of innate, essential discomfort with the specifics of female gender norms such as the color pink, or wearing skirts or jewelry, etc. etc. But they are told that pink and skirts and jewelry are “for girls”, and they’re not girls, so they don’t want them. In a culture where it’s conventionally accepted instead that pink and skirts and jewelry are “for boys”, children who identify as boys will be okay with them.
And again, the notion of children “somehow subconsciously [knowing]” that they’re one gender, “despite being raised as” a different gender, isn’t “farfetched and unnecessarily complicated”: it’s the fundamental basis of the innate-gender-identity concept.
I’m a bit puzzled how you can even say such a thing, given how long and how deeply you’ve been involved in these SDMB discussions on transgender and gender identity. Surely, if you acknowledge that a transgender boy can innately “know” that he’s a boy despite having naturally female anatomy and XX chromosomes and constantly being told he’s a girl, why wouldn’t you accept that a cisgender intersex boy with XY chromosomes and surgically constructed female anatomy can innately “know” that he’s a boy despite constantly being told he’s a girl?
Toy preferences have been shown in children too young to understand their own or others’ gender, eg here:
Preferences for Gender-typed Toys in Boys and Girls Aged 9 to 32 months (PDF)
Marriage is obviously a cultural institution, but a more general ‘interest in relationships’ need not be culturally dependant.
I am thinking of differences like men committing more violent crimes, young men taking more risks, women generally having a greater interest in children, men preferring visual pornography while women prefer erotic writing, and men showing a greater interest in things and women in people. Are these what you mean by gender expression?
It seems to me that these and other sex differences most likely have a largely biological explanation, and any theory of brain sex that doesn’t account for them is at best incomplete. This insistence that behaviour is completely independent from identity and only the latter is inborn seems a lot like an attempt to bring back the tabula rasa theory by the back door.
Firstly, I don’t think it’s right to say these kids are intersex, any more than a man with a micropenis is intersex. They were unambiguously male at birth and were raised female for (what seemed at the time) pragmatic reasons.
Secondly, what does ‘feeling like a boy’ mean, if it’s not a conscious feeling, and it’s not having the typical likes, dislikes, and interests of a boy? Can you feel like a boy without being like a boy, in mind if not body?
Huh? Having a micropenis is one of the conditions that qualifies for the “intersex” label, according to standard medical usage of the term (e.g., in this reference).
Note that I’m not claiming that a male-identifying XY person with a micropenis shouldn’t be called a man, or that he has to be considered “nonbinary” or “genderqueer” or whatever despite his identifying as unambiguously male. Of course such a person is a cisgender man. However, he also falls under the medical definition of intersex.
So yes, the boys in your linked study were intersex, medically speaking, even before they had the surgical interventions as part of their gender reassignment as female.
It means, AFAICT, having a persistent, insistent and consistent conviction that one is a boy. Yes, it’s a conscious feeling, even though the “knowledge” it’s based on may be subconscious (as in the case of transgender boys, for example, where all their conscious knowledge about their gender is sending the message that they’re female, but their personal conviction of gender identity rejects that message).
I don’t see any way that you can equate that with the idea of “typical likes, dislikes, and interests of a boy” without being grossly inaccurate and gender-essentialist. Children’s conformity to gender norms is heavily socially conditioned, even in early childhood. As your own linked study on “Preferences for Gender-typed Toys” explicitly acknowledges,
So while there certainly is a lot of social pressure pretty much from birth for children to conform to socially determined gender norms, I think you’re way off base in inferring that innate gender identity must produce gender conformity. A boy who likes pink or wearing skirts or whatever is still just as capable of “feeling like a boy”, in the sense of feeling that he’s a boy instead of a girl and that a boy’s body is right for him, as the most conventionally “boyish” boy.
It’s difficult for us cisgender people to get a clear sense of gender identity as a conscious awareness that’s separate from our social conditioning and familiarity with our own bodies, because we’ve never experienced them separately. Our assigned gender has always matched up with our gender identity, so we have no real conception of how it’s possible for them to be different. But the testimony of lots of transgender people, plus the indications from what scientific evidence we have so far on the subject, convinces me that they can be different, even if I don’t personally understand how.
@DemonTree
Here is the list of toys from the study you linked:
Blue teddy
Pink teddy
Cooking pot
Doll
Car
Digger
Ball
I really can’t imagine how ANY of these toys are possibly linked to gender in a biological, non-cultural way. It seems to me that any sex-linked preference for some toys over others would have to do with cultural biases, for example what kinds of toys the kid’s parents got them.
If you traveled back in time and ran this experiment with a sample of hunter gatherer kids from 20,000 years ago, are you really arguing the female children would have a preference for pink over blue or for cooking pots?
A while back you made a similar argument - that boys and girls show shyness for nudity from a very young age. And again, I ask, if this was a biologically innate characteristic, how do you account for the millions of hunter gatherers who lived and died without ever wearing clothes, or at least while leaving body parts that we in the west would be scandalized by uncovered?
This was explicitly pointed out in the study’s conclusions:
The overall findings don’t amount to much one way or the other, according to the summing-up:
We’ve got an indication of a possibility, and a suggestion of both biology and environment playing a role, but no clue as to how the relative importance of their roles might be meaningfully assessed. Like I said, it’s extremely difficult to disentangle biological from environmental influences in such socially saturated phenomena as play behavior in infants and young children.
AFAIK, cloacal exstrophy is not considered an intersex condition, because it is not the result of an anomaly of the sex chromosomes, sex-determining genes, or sex hormones. If a particular case of micropenis is a result of one of these factors then I guess the person would be intersex.
If it’s a conscious feeling, then the majority of the kids in the study didn’t have it. And children too young to understand gender yet definitely don’t have. Yet both showed gendered preferences.
Are those differences I listed in my previous post what you mean by ‘gender expression’? Is it gender-essentialist to think they probably have some kind of biological basis, even if they are also affected by social factors?
Any theory of ‘male and female brains’ that specifically ignores obvious and consistent male and female behaviour differences seems highly suspect to me.
Humans are much more complex than other animals and it’s hard to know what behaviors are societal versus innate. But we do see gender based differences in behaviors in animals that we also see in humans. Many male adolescent animals play fight in ways similar to the way adult males fight for dominance in the group. Adolescent human males are similar in this regard, in that they often engage in aggressive play. The aggressive play likely is an innate gender difference between the human sexes, but whether they like to wear blue or pink while they are wrestling is almost certainly from society. I would contend that those typical gender differences we see in animals that are mirrored in humans are likely the innate gender differences we have that are independent from the gender behaviors imposed by society.
As your own cites have shown, there are a lot of different possible explanations for the pretty weakly sustained behavioral trends that are being lumped together in the claim of “gendered preferences”.
Do you mean these, from a couple posts back?
If so, then these are phenomena that are all influenced by gender expression, but not necessarily solely dependent on gender expression, which covers a huge range of other behavioral phenomena like how one dresses, approved manners and modes of speech, etc.
There we have to watch out for our human tendency to project onto non-human populations behavioral patterns and explanations from our own experience in patriarchal human societies. Look, for example, at the way that behavior of wild horse herds was long interpreted as dominated by a herd stallion leading and controlling his “harem”. There’s a huge risk in studies of animal behavior for human observers to see the phenomena that they perceive to be “normal”, and interpret unexplained behavior in what seems to them a “normal” way.