Transgender - transracial. What is the essential difference?

[Kimstu]

@DemonTree

Do you think it is worth studying?

Absolutely.

@DemonTree

Do you think we can draw some conclusions even though it is difficult to untangle those influences?

We can acknowledge evidence, form plausible hypotheses, and point out possible inferences along with their caveats, of course. But no, we can’t draw firm conclusions about the relative effects of intertwined causal factors that we can’t meaningfully isolate from one another.

Why on earth would you imagine that we could? That’s like asking “Do you think we can read what’s written on the piece of paper sealed in this impermeable unbreakable unopenable opaque container?” No, we can’t, because we simply can’t access the crucial data.

What we can do is form some plausible hypotheses based on the evidence we do have surrounding the crucial data, of course. “Let’s see, we know that piece of paper came from Uncle Humphrey’s desk, and we can’t ask him about it because he’s dead, but we know he was very upset about the sprinkler malfunction, and he often liked to write letters to the newspapers about things he was upset about, though he was also very prolific with his shopping lists.”

@DemonTree

Otherwise I see little practical difference.

There’s a hell of a lot of practical difference between “We can’t tell what’s written on the paper in the impermeable unbreakable unopenable opaque container, but it seems very likely that it was written by Uncle Humphrey, and if so it seems plausible that it was either a shopping list or a letter about the sprinkler malfunction” and “We are convinced that there cannot possibly be any writing at all on the paper in the impermeable unbreakable unopenable opaque container, because that sort of paper is incapable of being written upon”.

In terms of actual cast-iron certainty about the content of the writing, there may be no effective difference between the two positions. But I don’t think that any researcher would agree that there’s “little practical difference” between them.

@DemonTree

Is this supposed to imply some kind of guilt by asociation?

I’m certainly not accusing you of advocating “race realist” positions, or similarly bigoted positions about gender, if that’s what you mean.

I’m just pointing out that you’re overstating the certainty of hypotheses about innate biological influences on gender differences, just as “race realists” overstate the certainty of hypotheses about innate biological influences on racial differences. And, ISTM, for fundamentally the same reason (minus the bigotry): You really want there to be definite concrete answers about exactly how, and how much, biology contributes to these phenomena, because you would like to know what the answers are. And you’re frustrated that those definite concrete answers simply don’t exist—not yet, and maybe not ever.

@DemonTree

How about we both stick to debating the actual arguments? That would mean showing that I’m jumping to conclusions

Yup, I’ve been doing that too, as have Riemann and other posters in the thread.

[AHunter3]

Kimstu in this segmant is quoting some allegedly ‘scientific’ article:

@Kimstu

The finding of sex differences in toy choice prior to the age at which a gendered identity is usually demonstrated is consistent with biological explanations of toy preference

PopScience horse shit.

Thought experiment: take two neolithic era homo sap toddlers, one male and one female. Hand them each a plastic dump truck and a pink cosmetics case.

Expected realization: either our brains are hardwired eons ahead of time to respond to toys aimed at the appropriate gender (umm, unlikely) or little toddlers, like everyone else, are learning from our culture both the gender that they ‘belong’ to and the toys that go with it.

Just because someone is able to get an experiment published doesn’t make it good research. When it comes to gender, there is a known strong bias that favors acceptance of work that supports innate difference. This is partly because the contrary research would take the form of “We looked for findings of difference; we were unable to find any”, because you can’t prove a negative, you can only fail to demonstrate a positive; and it tends to look like a failed experiment (“we didn’t find any”).

Despite that disadvantage, there is material available that indicates there is research support for the hypothesis that there’s no built in difference at the brain level, e.g. this article

[Riemann]

@DemonTree

Here’s my view:

You continue to completely ignore what I and others have said about the need to differentiate between gender identity and gender expression. I will respond one more time, but if you fail to acknowledge and address this, I’m done here. If you have an agenda to deny that gender identity is a real thing, you need to explain and justify that position explicitly, and I’ll respond. But I’m not going to continue to respond to your confusing statements where you seem determined to refuse to make the distinction clear. Either use the standard terminology, or justify why you refuse to do so.

@DemonTree

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.

“Female” in what sense, gender identity or gender expression? I suppose one might measure various characteristics to determine where someone lies in terms of gender expression relative to the social norms in a given culture. But gender identity is how someone perceives themselves, what they feel they are. Gender identity emerges into consciousness as the outcome of numerous developmental factors, no doubt both innate and environmental, but it is not some checklist of behaviors, and we have little idea how and to what extent it is causally connected to factors that determine gender expression. Gender identity is the sense of self, and the only way to discover someone’s identity is for them to tell you how they feel about what they are.

@DemonTree

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 offered this as a plausible hypothesis to account for the facts about identity that we observe in trans people. But it is not a hypothesis that is practically testable in any conclusive way. We have not the faintest idea what dimorphic features might be important in the emergence of a conscious sense of self, and the technology of neuroscience the measure anything is still in a crude primitive stage. Nothing we might do with neuroscience could possibly come close to the information that we can obtain about someone’s neuron configuration by talking to them.

In any event, I don’t know what you imagine hinges on trying to conclusively prove or disprove the explanatory hypothesis. Acceptance of the reality of trans people’s identity rests on psychology, on what they tell us about themselves. The importance of the explanatory hypothesis of sexual dimorphism is to correct the oft-repeated and ignorant supposition that the reality of trans people’s identities is contrary to “basic biology”. It’s importance is not that it’s easily provable, but that it’s perfectly plausible, with the hope that it might encourage people to listen with more of an open mind when trans people tell us who they are.

[DemonTree]

@Kimstu

I’m certainly not accusing you of advocating “race realist” positions, or similarly bigoted positions about gender, if that’s what you mean.

Glad to hear it.

@Kimstu

And, ISTM, for fundamentally the same reason (minus the bigotry): You really want there to be definite concrete answers about exactly how, and how much, biology contributes to these phenomena, because you would like to know what the answers are. And you’re frustrated that those definite concrete answers simply don’t exist—not yet, and maybe not ever.

This is why I said your reply is similar to my comment. We are both making an assumption about motives. I’m not frustrated because definite concrete answers don’t exist - that pretty much never happens in the social sciences. I’m frustrated because it appears to me there is good evidence for some hypotheses, at least as good as for hypotheses about environmental influences that are accepted as true without a hedge of caveats, yet they are not accepted in the same way.

@AHunter3

PopScience horse shit.

Thought experiment: take two neolithic era homo sap toddlers, one male and one female. Hand them each a plastic dump truck and a pink cosmetics case.

Expected realization: either our brains are hardwired eons ahead of time to respond to toys aimed at the appropriate gender (umm, unlikely) or little toddlers, like everyone else, are learning from our culture both the gender that they ‘belong’ to and the toys that go with it.

There’s a third possibility. Perhaps some toys which are very much more popular with one sex than the other are so because they have elements that appeal to inborn differences between the sexes. Maybe not a cosmetics case, but if you replace it with a doll… there have been experiments giving children’s toys to non-human primates, and they showed the same preferences as human children.

@Riemann

You continue to completely ignore what I and others have said about the need to differentiate between gender identity and gender expression . I will respond one more time, but if you fail to acknowledge and address this, I’m done here. If you have an agenda to deny that gender identity is a real thing, you need to explain and justify that position explicitly, and I’ll respond. But I’m not going to continue to respond to your confusing statements where you seem determined to refuse to make the distinction clear. Either use the standard terminology, or justify why you refuse to do so.

Okay, I’ll try to explain my thinking here.

1. Gender expression is commonly defined as how you present yourself: stuff like wearing dresses and make up. I’m really not sure whether differences between men and women in personality, preferences, aptitudes, and the sort of behaviour differences that probably don’t arise from conscious choice, like level of aggression and risk taking, are considered gender expression or not. Is being aroused or not by a given piece of pornography gender expression?

2. Let’s assume for now that the answer is yes. Then gender expression also arises from the brain, because brain = mind. We know environmental influences can and do alter the brain, so this is true no matter how our innate characteristics have interacted with the environment.

3. Therefore, in order to have a brain more similar to a typical cis female brain than a cis male brain, a trans woman would need to have gender expression more similar to a typical cis female than a typical cis man, as well as a female gender identity. (And by gender expression I mean those things I listed above, not how someone dresses. This is why I dislike using this terminology.)

4. I think your post was misleading. You are not claiming that trans women have brains more similar to a typical female brain. You are making the very different and much less significant claim that they have a female gender identity. Feeling that you are female does not make you actually female, even if that feeling has a biological basis in the brain.

I hope that clears it up. And I wish you had made your views clearer in the first place, then we could have avoided this whole discussion.

[MrDibble]

@DemonTree

There are also brain differences observable on scans, which by Occam’s razor we can assume are associated with the mental differences.

Someone can be (and has been) a more-or-less normally-functioning husband, father and civil servant with just a thin smear of brain lining his skull. I think you’re over-selling the relationship between physical brain structure and mind.

[Riemann]

@DemonTree

…in order to have a brain more similar to a typical cis female brain than a cis male brain, a trans woman would need to have gender expression more similar to a typical cis female than a typical cis man, as well as a female gender identity.

No, there is no absolute fixed relationship here. Again, gender expression is correlated with gender identity across populations but it is not locked to it. A woman typically tends to express her gender in certain ways in a given culture, but gender expression is highly diverse, and it is never a litmus test for identity. You would not question whether a cis woman is a real woman just because her gender expression is unusual for a woman. So you don’t get to do such a thing for a trans woman either.

@DemonTree

You are not claiming that trans women have brains more similar to a typical female brain. You are making the very different and much less significant claim that they have a female gender identity.

I am claiming that there are probably dimorphic brain features that differ between women and men, and that trans gender identity likely derives from such features, because of the evidence that trans gender identity is highly refractory to social pressure to conform to a norm of cis identity. There are probably also some aspects of gender expression that can in some people derive from such dimorphic features.

@DemonTree

Feeling that you are female does not make you actually female

So now we come down to the transphobic agenda.

Your frustration is that you don’t like the fact than the sexual dimorphism hypothesis is a plausible explanatory scientific hypothesis for the facts of what we see in the psychology of trans people; but that the only practical implication is to motivate us to listen to trans people with an open mind when they tell us who they are.

But you hate this because it’s the exact opposite of what you want. You don’t want to listen to trans people when they tell us who they are. You want some theoretical foundation for your desire to reject a trans woman’s assertion of womanhood. There is no such foundation.

[Pleonast]

@Riemann

But you hate this because it’s the exact opposite of what you want. You don’t want to listen to trans people when they tell us who they are. You want some theoretical foundation for your desire to reject a trans woman’s assertion of womanhood. There is no such foundation.

It used to be said “reality has a liberal bias”. I think we can now say “liberals have a bias towards reality”.

[Kimstu]

@DemonTree

I’m frustrated because it appears to me there is good evidence for some hypotheses, at least as good as for hypotheses about environmental influences that are accepted as true without a hedge of caveats, yet they are not accepted in the same way.

Please point out instances of similarly unresolvable “hypotheses about environmental influences that are accepted as true without a hedge of caveats”.

Because we don’t want to be comparing apples and oranges again here. There are indeed many instances of gendered behavior that we can deduce quite confidently are due to social conditioning rather than genetics, because they don’t reliably persist across different societies and periods in which humans have basically the same genetics.

For example, in some human societies it’s conventionally accepted for men to wear skirts rather than pants, while in other human societies that’s seen as unacceptably “unmasculine”. Same for men wearing jewelry or makeup, or men having beards or no beards, etc. So we can conclude from this inconsistency that these forms of gendered behavior are not determined by biological factors, because men in societies where men do wear skirts, for example, are just as biologically male as men in societies where they don’t.

However, we can’t validly invert that logically valid reasoning to argue that any particular type of gendered behavior that does reliably manifest in all known human societies therefore must be due to biological rather than social factors.

This is an important point, and one that confuses a lot of people. In propositional logic, it relates to the concepts of a “conditional statement” and its “inverse”, as in the following example:

Conditional Statement: If A, then B. For instance, I might say “If it has rained recently, then the road will be wet.”

Inverse: If Not-A, then Not-B. The inverse of the above statement would be “If it has not rained recently, then the road will not be wet.”

The crucial point here is that the truth of a conditional statement does NOT imply the truth of its inverse. In our example, for instance, it could well be true that the road is wet from some other cause, like flooding from a broken fire hydrant, even though it has not recently rained. So the original conditional statement could be true while its inverse is false.

The parallel setup for the current discussion would be the following:

Conditional statement. If a gendered behavior is not consistently manifested in all known human societies (A) , then it is not determined by innate biological sex (B) .

Inverse. If a gendered behavior is consistently manifested in all known human societies (Not-A) , then it is determined by innate biological sex (Not-B) .

I’m arguing that that conditional statement is true, for the reasons I gave above. But if you’re trying to argue that therefore I logically ought to accept your claim that the inverse of the statement is true, then you’re making exactly the mistake in your reasoning that I just described. The truth of the conditional does not imply the truth of its inverse.

[Kimstu]

@DemonTree

Feeling that you are female does not make you actually female, even if that feeling has a biological basis in the brain.

Well, that depends on how the term “female” is being defined in this context. It’s undeniable that feeling that you are female (i.e., having a female gender identity) does not make you genetically or anatomically female (i.e., someone with XX chromosomes and/or a female reproductive system) if you weren’t genetically or anatomically female to start with.

However, there’s no reason we can’t also define “being female” or “being a woman” as a social category, based on one’s gender identity rather than one’s chromosomal or anatomical sex. That is in fact what we as a society are now doing with the social categories of “woman” and “man”, largely in order to support the rights of transgender people, and IMHO that’s the right course to take.

I confess to not really understanding how this most recent phase of the discussion has any significant bearing on the stated thread topic of comparing transgender and “transracial” concepts, though.

[filmore]

@Kimstu

I confess to not really understanding how this most recent phase of the discussion has any significant bearing on the stated thread topic of comparing transgender and “transracial” concepts, though.

I see the similarity since some forms of trans gender seem more about a personal lifestyle choice rather than a deep biological imperative. This isn’t true of all trans gender people, but some trans gender people seem to have a very casual relationship with their gender identity. At this causal end I see trans gender as being more a lifestyle choice similar to how someone may choose a particular lifestyle direction like Christian, goth, southern belle, and so on. I’m not saying all trans gender people are like this. Certainly the people who go through gender reassignment surgery are trans gender at a deep biological level, but some trans gender people seem like they just have an affinity to a gender as opposed to being born in the wrong body. This kind of trans gender seems similar to trans racial, in that even if there isn’t a scientific or biological underpinning, it is a common human behavior to strongly align with a culture. Trans racial might just be more aligning with the common culture of that race. Some trans gender seems more like that, where they are aligning with the gender culture. That aspect of trans gender I see as similar to trans racial.

[Riemann]

@filmore

I see the similarity since some forms of trans gender seem more about a personal lifestyle choice rather than a deep biological imperative. This isn’t true of all trans gender people, but some trans gender people seem to have a very casual relationship with their gender identity…

Gender identity is certainly diverse. A significant minority do not have strictly binary identity; some people are fluid; and not every trans person necessarily feels intense dysphoria under cis normative social pressure. But I don’t think it’s appropriate to use the word “casual” about the gender identity of anyone who isn’t strictly and decisively binary.

@filmore

At this causal end I see trans gender as being more a lifestyle choice similar to how someone may choose a particular lifestyle direction like Christian, goth, southern belle, and so on.

I don’t. I think gender identity is an intrinsic part of someone’s nature, and that includes when it’s relatively flexible or non-binary. The lifestyle choices you mention are not really like that. And I don’t think there’s any evidence that racial identity is like that either, so I don’t buy that these represent parts of a continuum that overlaps.

[DemonTree]

@Kimstu

The truth of the conditional does not imply the truth of its inverse.

You gonna tell me what 2 + 2 is next?

I was thinking about how in the past researchers looking for genetic influences on behaviour would do studies on twins or adopted kids to try and isolate genetic from environmental factors, but at the same time researchers looking at parenting determined that eg parents who read to their kids more had kids with better vocabularies, and kids raised by aggressive parents grew up to be more aggressive - and concluded that the parenting caused the differences in the kids, without even considering that there could be a genetic influence, let alone trying to account for it.

And a few years ago I watched a documentary on sex differences where they showed that mothers treated their babies differently depending on whether they were boys or girls (without even realising they were doing so). But they didn’t mention the possibility that they were treating them differently because of (innate) personality differences in the babies. Perhaps this is mostly a popular science thing, but this is the sort of example I mean when I said we don’t get the same caveats around environmental explanations.

Here in this thread you explained how gender identity could lead to gender expression, but never considered the opposite hypothesis: that children’s innate personalities and interests could lead to them spending more time with, imitating, and identifying with the same or opposite sex parent and peers, and this could lead to them adopting more societally dependent markers of gender, as well as significantly contribute to forming their gender identity. How would we differentiate the two?

[Kimstu]

@DemonTree

Here in this thread you explained how gender identity could lead to gender expression

Actually, AFAICT that explanation was mostly Riemann’s, although I’ve made some remarks about it as well.

@DemonTree

but never considered the opposite hypothesis: that children’s innate personalities and interests could lead to them spending more time with, imitating, and identifying with the same or opposite sex parent and peers, and this could lead to them adopting more societally dependent markers of gender, as well as significantly contribute to forming their gender identity. How would we differentiate the two?

We can’t, as I’ve been explicitly pointing out in, e.g., my post #398!

@Kimstu

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.”

I’m absolutely baffled as to how you can imagine that I haven’t been “considering” precisely this ambiguity in how to attribute children’s behavioral differences to biological vs. environmental causes. ISTM that I’ve been talking about nothing else.

[DemonTree]

First, a note on the terminology. I prefer not to use the term ‘gender expression’ because it conflates real and in some cases large mental and behavioural differences between the sexes, with how people choose to present themselves. The things I am talking about are not a choice, and I don’t believe they are an expression of gender identity, either.

@Riemann

No, there is no absolute fixed relationship here. Again, gender expression is correlated with gender identity across populations but it is not locked to it. A woman typically tends to express her gender in certain ways in a given culture, but gender expression is highly diverse, and it is never a litmus test for identity. You would not question whether a cis woman is a real woman just because her gender expression is unusual for a woman. So you don’t get to do such a thing for a trans woman either.

The theory I subscribe to is that a female brain masculinised in the uterus will typically result in a person with measurably more masculine characteristics, and the individual may or may not have a masculine gender identity. And conversely, if a woman has many strongly masculine characteristics, a likely explanation is that her brain was masculinised in utero.

@Riemann

I am claiming that there are probably dimorphic brain features that differ between women and men, and that trans gender identity likely derives from such features, because of the evidence that trans gender identity is highly refractory to social pressure to conform to a norm of cis identity. There are probably also some aspects of gender expression that can in some people derive from such dimorphic features.

At least you’re not denying this outright, so perhaps there is still some debate to be had. Like I said, I think these features relate to ‘gender expression’ aka mental sex differences, and after accounting for those I’m skeptical that we’ll find a link to gender identity. But it’s possible.

@Riemann

Your frustration is that you don’t like the fact…

Thanks for the pop psychology, but you’re way off base. I think it’s a reasonable argument to say that someone with a female brain ‘is’ a woman, because in some ways we are our brains, more so than our bodies. But we are not our gender identities, so the same argument does not work. Of course you can choose to define ‘woman’ however you like, but that is not a scientific argument.

[DemonTree]

@Kimstu

We can’t, as I’ve been explicitly pointing out in, e.g., my post #398!

I would argue that the study I linked supports my hypothesis: all the biological male children raised as girls had moderate-to-strong male-typical interests, but only a subset consciously identified as male. This suggests that ‘gender expression’ is directly affected by brain masculinisation, and gender identity may or may not follow it. See also studies like this one, which shows increased activity and aggression in girls exposed to high levels of testosterone in utero. A direct effect on behaviour, not mediated by gender identity:

Increased aggression and activity level in 3- to 11-year-old girls with...

@Kimstu

I’m absolutely baffled as to how you can imagine that I haven’t been “considering” precisely this ambiguity in how to attribute children’s behavioral differences to biological vs. environmental causes. ISTM that I’ve been talking about nothing else.

It was this post, where you appeared to dismiss the possibility of a connection between brain structure and sex differences in interests and behaviour:

@Kimstu

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.

[Kimstu]

@DemonTree

I would argue that the study I linked supports my hypothesis: all the biological male children raised as girls had moderate-to-strong male-typical interests, but only a subset consciously identified as male. This suggests that ‘gender expression’ is directly affected by brain masculinisation, and gender identity may or may not follow it.

It’s not inconsistent with your hypothesis (if what you mean by “the study I linked” in this case is this cloacal-exstrophy study, which at this point is not the only study you’ve linked). But it really doesn’t provide much if anything in the way of actual support for it.

The study looks at fourteen individuals (a very small sample size) who were sexually reassigned as female and raised as female, as well as two who were not. The parents of all the children in question knew that they had been assigned male at birth. You can’t meaningfully get from that situation to any kind of definitive conclusion that the exhibition of “male-typical interests” by those subjects must have been due to their “male brains” irrespective of their gender identity.

@DemonTree

It was this post, where you appeared to dismiss the possibility of a connection between brain structure and sex differences in interests and behaviour:

You misunderstood me, or else I wasn’t clear enough in my statement. That answer of mine was a response to your naive inference that conformity to social conventions of male gender expression in any particular individual is necessarily evidence for what you called “a masculinised brain”.

That’s not at all the same thing as my trying to “dismiss the possibility of a connection” between the two.

Again, the mistake that you keep making here is trying to infer definitive conclusions from insufficient evidence, and then assuming that people who point out the problems with your inference are definitively asserting the opposite.

That’s not accurate. When I point out to you that you haven’t provided sufficient evidence to warrant inferring that Phenomenon A is caused by Factor B, that doesn’t mean that I’m asserting that Phenomenon A is not caused by Factor B. It just means that I’m trying to keep the discussion scientifically meaningful, instead of wandering in a maze of competing unsupported speculations.

[Babale]

@DemonTree

The theory I subscribe to is that a female brain masculinised in the uterus will typically result in a person with measurably more masculine characteristics, and the individual may or may not have a masculine gender identity. And conversely, if a woman has many strongly masculine characteristics, a likely explanation is that her brain was masculinised in utero.

Through what mechanism? And what evidence do you have for this claim?

[DemonTree]

@Kimstu

The study looks at fourteen individuals (a very small sample size) who were sexually reassigned as female and raised as female, as well as two who were not. The parents of all the children in question knew that they had been assigned male at birth. You can’t meaningfully get from that situation to any kind of definitive conclusion that the exhibition of “male-typical interests” by those subjects must have been due to their “male brains” irrespective of their gender identity.

It is inconsistent with your hypothesis, however, since the kids exhibited this behaviour without consciously identifying as male. It’s also inconsistent with the study on girls with CAH, since they also showed masculinised behaviour without having a male gender identity.

By the way, the kids with cloacal exstrophy were assigned female at birth. This is the actual meaning and origin of this terminology - intersex kids assigned a gender by doctors, usually based on what kind of genitals would be easiest to surgically construct. It’s kind of ironic that you are now using it in the opposite sense to the original; appropriated by transgender activists to downplay the existence and/or relevance of biological sex, the term has become simply a euphemism for it.

@Kimstu

You misunderstood me, or else I wasn’t clear enough in my statement. That answer of mine was a response to your naive inference that conformity to social conventions of male gender expression in any particular individual is necessarily evidence for what you called “a masculinised brain”.

Yes, you weren’t clear. “That doesn’t mean that there’s a connection between brain structure and social conventions of gender expression,” certainly sounded to me like you were denying any connection whatsoever.

@Kimstu

Again, the mistake that you keep making here is trying to infer definitive conclusions from insufficient evidence, and then assuming that people who point out the problems with your inference are definitively asserting the opposite.

You seem to have no problem assuming a connection between brain structure and gender identity in individuals, despite there not being any more evidence for that. How is this any more justifiable than my assumption?

Also, describing my statement as being about ‘conformity to social conventions of gender expression’ is rather misleading. I’m talking about mental differences between men and women, which may or may not relate to social conventions of gender.

@Babale

Through what mechanism? And what evidence do you have for this claim?

Probably the same mechanisms as in other mammals, where we are able to experiment and show the causes of sexed behaviour differences in a way we can’t in humans. And one form of evidence is the sort of studies on developmental differences that I have already given two examples of.

[DemonTree]

@Kimstu

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.

Thinking about this some more…

Sexual orientation is a mental attribute that generally differs between men and women. If I told you that I believe sexual orientation is largely innate (I do), would you tell me there should be a great deal of reluctance to make that claim, because that sort of assertion simply cannot be demonstrated in a scientifically meaningful way? And that it’s impossible to draw firm conclusions about the relative effects of intertwined causal factors that we can’t meaningfully isolate from one another?

If not, why not?

[Kimstu]

@DemonTree

Sexual orientation is a mental attribute that generally differs between men and women. If I told you that I believe sexual orientation is largely innate (I do), would you tell me there should be a great deal of reluctance to make that claim, because that sort of assertion simply cannot be demonstrated in a scientifically meaningful way?

Of course not: sexual orientation is not simply a “culturally mediated behavior”, it is a psychological characteristic. I agree with you that sexual orientation is largely innate (psychologically, even if so far the exact biological determinants of sexual orientation are still very imperfectly understood), and it seems likely to me that in that respect it is similar to gender identity.

But your analogy is way off base; you’ve completely misunderstood what I was saying. A more valid analogous question would be something like “Should there be a great deal of reluctance to assert that hand-holding between same-sex people is necessarily due to innate homosexual orientation?”

In that case, the hand-holding is the “culturally mediated behavior”, and the sexual orientation is the “innate brain differences”. And yes, I would maintain that there should indeed be a great deal of reluctance to jump to the conclusion that the hand-holding is necessarily being caused by the homosexuality. Because in some societies, it’s perfectly culturally acceptable and normal for heterosexual people of the same sex to hold hands, while in others it’s not.

Likewise, there are similar misunderstandings to be addressed in your previous post, sorry for delay in addressing them but got skeddle conflix just now.