Many female adolescent animals play fight as well. Do you have a link to a study that shows that this behavior is significantly more common among male animals than female animals, especially among species with a similar level of sexual dimorphism to humans or among our evolutionary relatives?
I think looking at different societies to see which differences are consistent and which vary might be a better way to tease this out. As well, we can look at studies on babies who have not been exposed to much socialisation yet, and also compare countries with more and less rigid gender roles to see how that affects career preferences etc.
These are the sort of phenomena that I think a theory of innate brain differences needs to explain. Liking pink or blue, not so much.
How exactly do you plan on doing that? That’s a serious question - healthy human babies are exposed to an enormous amount of socialization from the moment they are born (or even before). As noted in your own study, these babies were exposed to toys beforehand, and it is likely the toys their parents chose to expose them to earlier helped determine their preferences.
Avoiding this sort of socialization even briefly would have disastrous effects on the mental health and proper development of these babies. No study of humans can ever avoid cultural bias in the subjects of study, because humans are social animals and do not develop properly without constant socialization.
Again, it’s probably going to be extremely difficult for any theory to explain differences in violent behavior, interest in children, etc., strictly in terms of either innate brain differences or gender-norm socialization. I think everybody agrees that there are some significant innate differences between men and women on average, and also that men and women are all affected by huge amounts of social conditioning about gender norms. Disentangling how much of whatever behavioral phenomenon is innate and how much is conditioned is always going to be a very messy task.
Especially since this particular preference was not exactly fixed until recently. And in Japan, pink can be a masculine colour - sakura (cherry blossom) is associated with bishōnen and kamikaze. It’s all cultural.
It’s through watching animal documentaries this is shown often. But it also seems to be in literature as well, such as from So You Think You Know Why Animals Play... - Scientific American Blog Network
Even though all genders may play-fight, it seems more common in the males. That is something also seen in boys as well. It could be that it’s just society imposing behavior on boys versus girls, but that doesn’t seem totally plausible when the same behavior is found in animals. Whatever reason that male animals play-fight more seems like it’s also in humans.
Sure, disentangling them is hard, but if we allow that some differences are innate, then that means they are the result of having a typical male or female brain. And that’s why I say someone who matches the opposite sex in several of these - let’s say ‘innately-influenced’ - measures probably has an atypical brain for their sex.
The linked article talks about many species where both genders play fight, and the specific sentence you quoted seems related to what Kimstu warns us about here:
Additionally, I do wonder what animals he is referring to here, and whether they display a similar level of sexual dimorphism to humans, or more extreme variation. The cite for the quoted bit comes from here:
Fagen, R. M. 1981. Animal Play Behavior . New York: Oxford University Press.
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find a freely available source for this article online.
It may seem this way, but is that true, or merely confirmation bias?
But the fact that the disentangling is so difficult is what makes it impossible for you to make such claims with reasonable plausibility.
Remember, this whole strand of the discussion arose from the following observation by Riemann:
You absolutely cannot justifiably assume that a boy who wants to “play with dolls and wear a pretty pink dress” necessarily, or even “probably”, has “an atypical brain for their sex”. He might, but then again he might just have an individual preference for those things, or might even just have an individual personality with a strong contrarian streak so that he prefers “girls’ things” simply because he’s told that he shouldn’t prefer them. You just can’t infer conclusions about any individual from the existence of some overall trends.
But do you understand now why I think it makes no sense to admit that some sex differences in behaviour (and preferences, etc) are innate, but then declare those same gendered behaviour, preferences etc have nothing to do with brain sex?
That sounds like kind of a strawman. Nobody here, AFAICT, is declaring that no gender differences in “behavior, preferences etc.” have anything to do with brain sex.
What we’re doing is pointing out that many gender differences in behavior and preferences, etc., are clearly the result of cultural conditioning (there’s no intrinsic biological reason for hedgehogs to be marketed as “girl” motifs and giraffes as “boy” motifs, for example). And that the ubiquity of such cultural conditioning makes it very difficult to determine whether or to what extent some other gender difference is culturally conditioned or biologically innate.
Bringing the discussion full circle back to the OP’s focus on comparing gender and race, this is reminding me a lot of some discussions with “race realists”, who would get very frustrated about our objections that some study or other documenting differences between black and white subjects hadn’t proved that the differences were due to genetic rather than social factors.
The problem is that it’s really, really, really difficult to control sufficiently for social factors in order to isolate biological ones when studying phenomena like race and gender. That’s not something we’re just making up in order to frustrate people who want to understand the effects of biology on race and gender. It’s a genuinely complicated and possibly ineradicable problem in social science.
I think there is a great deal of reluctance - a very great deal - to attribute any differences between men and women to innate brain differences. Even differences which are extremely large, seen in all cultures, make evolutionary sense, and/or match differences seen in non-human animals.
The ‘gender identity’ theory seems designed to deviate as little as possible from the socially-approved ‘tabula rasa’ idea, while still explaining the existence of transgender people. But given the convincing evidence for innate diffetences, this cannot be correct.
Any theory of brain sex needs to explain these innate differences. Sure, individuals vary (although some attributes do have little overlap, like sexual orientation), but if you look statistically at a group, their innately-influenced gendered behaviour should match their brain sex by definition.
Nobody said that. You just seem to want to keep making absolute statements to set up straw men.
You seem to keep coming back to conflating gender identity with gender expression. I don’t know if you’ve just got an agenda that gender identity isn’t a real thing, but at the risk of wasting my time I’ll try again. There are obviously general correlations across a population in a given culture between a male identity and typically male gender expression, but a correlation is just that, not an absolute. Identity and expression are not the same thing, and they are not locked together. Some people may have a strong internal sense that they “are” a boy (gender identity) while adopting behaviors that are statistically more typically associated with a girl (gender expression). And humans are so complex and diverse that virtually nobody who identifies as a boy conforms to every aspect of typically male gender expression. There is no contradiction here, and this matter is orthogonal to any question of the extent to which identity and/or expression are innate.
Trans people don’t generally tell us that it’s just a question of them not wanting to conform to norms of gender expression. A trans girl does not usually say that she would be happy sticking with the “boy” identity that was assumed at birth provided that she can behave like a typical girl (expression). She usually talks about the fact that she feels she is a girl, not just that she wants to act like a typical girl.
Then we have nature vs nurture, or perhaps more strictly [nature + early environment] vs [cultural environment, social constructs]. In general, it’s extremely difficult to untangle these things in human behavior, because we can’t do the variety of carefully controlled experiments that we can do with model animals. The gold standard is twin studies, of course. But what we have claimed here is that the existence of trans people strongly suggests some significant natural component to gender identity, since trans people assert an identity that seems highly refractory to social conditioning. With gender expression I’m less clear that the evidence exists that we can necessarily have the same conviction that there are significant elements that are not social constructs. If we were to make a parallel argument to the argument we have made about identity, perhaps we would need to look at forms of gender expression that seem to be like trans identity in their persistence - that people seem to stubbornly persist in a form of gender expression despite persecution for doing so, despite strong social pressure to behave differently.
There ought to be a very great deal of reluctance to assert that any particular difference between men and women in culturally mediated behavior is necessarily due to innate brain differences.
Because that sort of assertion simply cannot be demonstrated in a scientifically meaningful way, at least in the current state of our knowledge.
Certainly it’s possible and justifiable to say that there’s some evidence that biology plays some role in determining gender differences in behavior patterns. But to get from there to conclusions about Specific Gendered Behavior A being B Percent Determined by Innate Sex Differences is a very, very long jump. And anybody who tries to make such a jump without sufficient evidentiary support should get called on it.
Again, this tendency to attribute criticisms of your conclusion-jumping to mere ideology-based stubbornness in your opponents rather than to serious logical weaknesses in your position is very reminiscent of “race realist” rhetoric.
Sure, but if we don’t know to what extent Specific Gendered Behavior A is in fact Determined by Innate Sex Differences, then any inferences we’re drawing from such apparent “matches” are completely fallacious.
Your arguments here are kind of an apotheosis of what I’ve heard called “cabby logic”: “Well, it stands to reason, don’t it?” That is, you see some kind of correlation or connection that seems superficially significant to you, and proceed to draw inferences from it without investigating to what extent the connection really is significant.
That’s the sort of rationale that leads people to conclude that workers are prone to shamming sick in order to get themselves a long weekend, because a whopping 40% of all sick days used fall on either a Friday or a Monday. Well, it stands to reason, don’t it?
Do you agree with this, @Riemann? When you said earlier in the thread that you rejected the tabula rasa hypothesis, I assumed that meant you did not agree with this attitude that we simply can’t demonstrate innate differences. But perhaps I misunderstood you.
Perhaps you are confused, but the message you quoted has nothing to do with tabula rasa.
Note, as Babale pointed out, that my remark is not supporting the tabula rasa hypothesis.
Acknowledging that it’s extremely difficult in practice to determine whether and to what extent a particular behavioral difference may be due to innate brain differences is not the same thing as asserting that innate brain differences have no influence whatever on behavioral differences.
Tabula rasa: “Children’s brains are effectively blank slates [literally] as far as inborn characteristics are concerned, so any behavioral differences we see among them are solely and necessarily the product of their environment.”
Kimstu, and AFAICT most early-childhood psychology researchers: “Children’s brains are influenced by both their genes and their environment, but those influences are so complex and intertwined that it’s very difficult to determine conclusively exactly how much of exactly what behaviors is innate and how much is culturally acquired.”
Do you think it is worth studying? Do you think we can draw some conclusions even though it is difficult to untangle those influences? Otherwise I see little practical difference. I was assuming Riemann’s rejection of TR also meant he would answer yes to those questions, but now I realise that may not be true.
Is this supposed to imply some kind of guilt by asociation? It’s the same sort of argument as the one you are criticising. How about we both stick to debating the actual arguments? That would mean showing that I’m jumping to conclusions rather than making dodgy comparisons.
Here’s my view:
Men and women have significant mental differences (this is well established), which are party innate and partly caused by upbringing. The exact proportion is not important. There are also brain differences observable on scans, which by Occam’s razor we can assume are associated with the mental differences.
A typical female brain is one that is similar to the female averages on the majority of these characteristics. A typical male brain is one that is similar to the male averages on the majority of these characteristics.
You claimed that “a trans woman really can as a scientific matter have a brain that develops more similar to a typical cis female brain than a typical cis male brain.”
I agree this is possible. And we could test this hypothesis by checking whether trans women have more female typical than male typical values for all these mental differences, and the reverse for trans men.
I think I know now what part of this you disagree with, but it would help if you’d say exactly what it is.