It would also define a significant number of people as “other”; because there are people who have neither testicles nor uteri.
I doubt it. Because I think even that first graph you’re showing is a lot more complicated than you’ve made it look.
But even if it does work that way – it would work that way by providing 100 different genders. Which would not work in any coherent way at all.
Quoted for truth.
I’m getting the impression we’re not going to find one as we’ll always be able to point to an atypical example that bucks the norm. I guess we just create those bright lines ourselves based on the cultural construct of gender.
I’d argue the OP wasn’t looking for a bright zero exceptions line. ISTM they were looking for what are the essential features that reliably apply to the vast bulk, not the one-in-a-million or even one in 10,000 oddballs. I think they will search in vain, but I believe that is what they were searching for.
Most of us, be we raging conservative or loudly “woke”, have a reliable intuitive sense of “I know it when I see/interact with it.” What are those something(s) that drive that intuition? Accepting that occasionally our intuition will be fooled by somebody from one of those far outlier camps.
That’s really interesting. As a marathon runner I routinely outpaced my ex-wife. I put that down to just having longer legs. She’s more competitive than I am.
Or else we admit that there are no bright lines, and quit trying to construct them.
Yeah; I don’t think the problem is even the one in 10,000 oddballs. It’s the 90+% who are somewhere in the overlap on almost any category named; and, for the few remaining categories, more like a couple or a few in 100 than one in ten thousand or a million.
I think I have more of a sense of “I know it when I am it.” Sometimes when I see/interact with people I make the most likely assumption; but I might be wrong, and at least once I know that I have been.
Practically speaking, how would we achieve this and what would it look like? To the best of my knowledge, there has yet to be a society that did not differentiate between men and women. Some cultures have had leeway for those who didn’t fit the binary paradigm, [Balkan sworn virgins](Balkan sworn virgins - Wikipedia spring to mind, but there were still bright lines. I can’t help but think sometimes those bright lines serve a legitimate purpose. We segregate sports by sex for a reason.
In a lot of ways, we have achieved it, and the world didn’t end. Women are firefighters. Men are nurses. Girls take shop and boys learn to cook. There are a whole lot of public bathrooms around here (including in this quite red area of a blue state) that say on their doors some version of “We Don’t Care”. All genders can go to school together and can get the same educations.
Sports seem to be being dealt with on a case by case basis, depending both on the sport (some don’t need to be segregated at all, for others it makes sense) and, in the case of trans people in sports for which it does matter, on the degree of physical transition and in relevant cases the age of transition.
Exactly. In NY, at least, even dress codes are evening out – women can go topless where men can go topless.
Other than sports, and some private things like churches and private schools, I can’t really think of some place where women and men are treated differently by the rules or statute or whatever.
Theoretically. Less so in practice.
There are, however, places where it’s normal in practice.
No question.
Interesting. Those apps that will change the sex of faces, and age them and so on must be making some of the same changes, but it’s much simpler for a 2D photo than for an actual face.
It really can not be stressed enough that that 1 in 10,000 people is 800,000 people.
There are more than 30 countries with populations of less than 800,000.
Of course. But most of us will not interact meaningfully with 10,000 people in the course of a lifetime.
The point is not to suggest that the unusual people aren’t fully people. But rather that if you or I have a 1 in 10,000 accurate rubric, that will probably take us errorfree from cradle to grave.
But if it’s actually 1 in 100, that doesn’t work. And for most of the supposed differences, it’s so much higher than that that almost everybody’s somewhere in the overlap zone.
I don’t think that follows. As the OP points out, in practice, most people can easily and uncontroversially be classified as either male or female at a glance. The rest generally aren’t perceived as falling into hundreds or thousands of unique groups, but rather as being on the border between those two. So any theory that says there’s no clear dividing line between the two has to explain why nearly everyone can distinguish between them in a way that’s consistent across both the subject’s and the observer’s cultures.
Sure. This applies to a lot more than just the obvious surgeries, though: hair transplants, facial surgery, body contouring, clothing, hairstyle and makeup, voice, mannerisms, etc.
Friends and family often feel entitled or even obligated to weigh in on how impactful a change in any of those areas will be. Sometimes that’s even because their opinions were invited. But looking at only one feature at a time in isolation can obscure the distinctions that are clear to everyone else.
If I’m lamenting being called “sir” by strangers in public and wondering what I can do to change that, it doesn’t help to be told “I don’t know where they’re getting that idea! Plenty of women have short hair, plenty of women have deep voices, plenty of women have strong jaws, plenty of women have narrow hips, plenty of women dress like lumberjacks…” It’s not just one of those features they’re picking up on, it’s the combination of all of them.
As I said upthread, it’s the old “lumper versus splitter” debate, complicated by the definition being emotionally important to one side and the hatred and cruelty of their opponents.
“People are male, female or other” is a perfectly reasonable way to classify people that fails because a lot of people either don’t want to be “other”, don’t want the “other” to exist, or to force people into a category they don’t want to be in.
Yes. But that glance tells you little or nothing about what portions of their behavior fall along conventionally coded male or female lines; and that glance may lead you to that conclusion even if some of the information a casual glance gives you contradicts those lines.
If you look at me, you’ll almost certainly conclude that I’m female; and that conclusion would be correct. But you’ll come to the conclusion despite the fact that I’ll probably be wearing at least some clothing sold as being for men; and possibly all my visible clothing will be coded male. My hair is long but I won’t be wearing makeup and never even learned to put it on properly.
And whether or not I’m wearing a dress (which does happen sometimes, though rarely) no casual glance is going to tell you that I hate sewing, was never very interested in dolls, am entirely uninterested in what’s in fashion, and run a farm. Or where I am on any of a whole mess of other behaviors that are coded male or female in this society, most of which are coded the other way in some other society.
So
– I don’t think you are going to find distinct, non-overlapping clusters. I think you’re going to find a blurry mess. And I note that even your three-dimension example using three supposed traits resulted in three groups, not two.
Why do humans nevertheless generally see two relatively neatly separable groups? Because humans see patterns. We see them so strongly that we see them whether they’re there or not. And we see them very strongly when the culture tells us that they’re there.
And the tendency to want to see two and exactly two categories, even when they’re not there, seems to be very strong in a lot of human brains.
The tendency for behavior to be neatly divided between two genders in any given culture often appears full of holes if you look hard enough – it’s usually full of exceptions. But yes, most or maybe all human societies do make a distinction.
Why do all or almost all cultures see this particular pattern? For one thing, quite a lot of cultures allow for blurring of those lines, in all sorts of ways, some of them publicly acknowledged and some of them not (and some of them allowing for more than two groups). And for another, because human groups need to have children and because humans are just plain weird about sex, the social rules of any given group are generally going to include some arrangements about marriage, under one form or another (and the forms vary extremely widely); and those arrangements are going to involve gender even when they allow for trans people and/or homosexual behavior to be accepted. And for a third, because we’re the result of a very long stretch of evolution, going way back before the existence of humans, in which the egg-producers needed to match up with the sperm-producers in order for there to be a next generation; so the tendency to see this distinction is probably buried really deep in our heads.
The human tendency to exaggerate the distinction is interesting. It implies to me that, if societies didn’t put a whole lot of effort into exaggerating different behavior, different clothing, etc., the similarities would be overwhelming. Nobody has to teach tall people how to be tall, or worry that tall people will otherwise be taken for short, or vice versa. But pretty much every society teaches people how to be female or male. Why do we have to teach it, if the difference is so real and obvious?
Because people appear to have a drive for gender differentiation, but how the genders differ is determined by culture. It’s the norm for there to be things like “feminine hairstyles”, “feminine clothing”, “men and women’s speech patterns”, “men’s work and women’s work” and so forth; but exactly what they are differs from culture to culture.
It’s the way human instincts seem to usually work; they determine the basic structure but rely on culture to fill in the details. Like how children have an instinct for learning language, but not any specific language.
I suspect somebody somehow raised without any input as to how their gender was “supposed” to behave would upon being dropped into wider society feel seriously uncomfortable, like they are doing things wrong but can’t figure out why.
You’re whole post is awesome, but IMO this is the punchline. Superb work; thank you!!
We deeply want it to be simple because it’s so important to the perpetuation of the species.
But it isn’t. Human complexity ensures it is not.
But why do we have a drive for exaggerated gender dfferentiation? Saying that we have it doesn’t explain it.
They probably would, according to the people around them, be doing things seriously wrong all the time. But I doubt it would be because whatever innate sense of their gender they had felt essentially off in some fashion. And there are a whole lot of people, in any society in which it’s reasonably possible, who don’t behave as their gender is “supposed” to behave; as well as always a few even in societies that do their best to forbid it.
– where’s that blush icon? consider it in here.
Humans are indeed just plain weird about sex. Every other species that has sex just has it. They don’t get ashamed or embarrassed about it. They don’t decide there’s something wrong about it, with or without carefully limited exceptions. I could go on.
I suppose there’s some precursor to this in other species; there is for everything else. But I can’t think of it.