What if there are no differences between the sexes?

In My Humble Opinion
21

It is unfortunate that Rachel Dolezal is the current poster child for “transrace” because in her situation she was benefitting materially from claiming an identity as black person, which makes the entire possibility of claiming identity as another race look creepy and suspect. And actually I think we, as a society, should embrace it. I certainly believe there is no intrinsic set of race characteristics at the personality-and-behavior level. (As opposed to things like a tendency to have sickle cell trait, etc, I mean). So race is “all in the head”. And yet it certainly exists socially. We have notions about what it means to be “of” this or that race, and however much some of us would prefer that those notions all go away and vanish from everyone’s heads as harmful and restrictive, they are still persistent and pervasive.

So an individual person simply feels they aren’t at all “at home” with people of their own racial background. They gravitate towards a different cluster of people (presumably people who don’t hold unduly rigid notions of race themselves, but also presumably a cluster of people whose own racial makeup consists mostly of folks of a different racial background than our hypothetical individual). And they feel that this is where they belong, among these folks.

Yes, you could say “you should instead seek to be accepted for how and who you are AS a member of the race to which you were born”. But, as with gender, that’s going to translate as “you should set aside any desire to fit in with a community you feel you could fit in with, and instead devote your life to a goal of social change that won’t be attained in your own lifetime”.

I’ve known several people born of black families who rejected the notion of being black. Most of them didn’t do an inverse Rachel Dolezal and go around telling folks they were white, but one hung out in the East Village countercultural scene in the 60s and traveled with hard rock bands for years, accepted there as “one of us”, fitting in with a social cohort that was otherwise composed nearly exclusively of white folks; and one pursued an academic career as a cerebral university professor with zero discernable behavioral nuances or speech patterns typically associated with black people, while promoting a social theory that said all American social inequality affecting black people today is entirely about class and income and not about race itself —i.e., he “doesn’t believe in race” (and was remarked upon by grad students with varying degrees of approval and skeptical disapproval as someone who “presented white”).

I’ve known more than a few whiteborn people who rejected any sense of whiteness as their own identity, too. Some found white culture dead and lacking intensity and real feeling, or full of poisonous values and priorities they could not relate to; some were just immersed early in some other culture (hispanic or black) that they initially fit into effortlessly when young and weren’t willing to give that up.

So, if it were a specific individual who seemed to have formed most of that identity from a core experience of negative views of people of their own race? Yeah, it could mean we’re seeing an expression of self-hatred and denial there. I recall a black woman who wanted to be a part of the KKK awhile back. And stories that Hitler was Jewish or part Jewish and knew it. But I think it’s a mistake to assume that everyone who pushes away from an identity because they have come to hold very negative views of that identity (or of the people of whom that identity is composed) is expressing self-hatred. That viewpoint has an essentialism in it, the notion that who the person “really is” is the category they have rejected as their identity.

22

To go back to you with the face’s analogy, if I met someone who had 100% west African ancestry who self-identified as white, I wouldn’t tell him his self-identity was wrong, but I wouldn’t beat myself up for seeing him as a black guy. Cuz that’s what he would be to me. I wouldn’t say so to his face unless he asked. Nor do I think I would consciously treat him any differently than I would a white guy. But every time I’d see him, I’d be like “There goes that black guy who thinks he’s white!”

I don’t see it as disrespectful to see someone in a way that conflicts with their self-identification. As long as I make a conscious effort to treat him like I’d treat anyone else, I don’t see how his self-identification is all that important.

I self-identify as a woman because I don’t know any other term that fits who I am. But telling someone I’m a woman doesn’t mean I intend for them to treat me a specific way, besides using the feminine pronouns when referring to me. I don’t expect someone to hold doors for me or kill spiders for me. I don’t want them to assume I want to hear about their romantic dramas or assume that I am some kind of domestic goddess. I’ll coo over your cat photos, but babies that aren’t related to me don’t do much for me. If someone were to think that because I identify as “woman”, that means I’m into X, Y, or Z or don’t have X, Y, Z experiences, well, that would kind of piss me off. I don’t think about gender stuff all that much, but it is not because I’m oblivious to it. It’s because it is not important to me. Just like racial essentalist notions aren’t important to me. Like, I have no problem identifying as a black person, but that doesn’t mean I put a whole lot of weight in the “white people do it like this, while black people do it like that” mode of thinking. It would piss me off if someone assumed I was oblivious to racism and racial power relations just because I’ve chosen not to subvert the system with an oppositional self-identify.

23

I only remember watching Jem for that truly truly outrageous theme song. And I’d only catch the tail-end of GI Joe because it came on before Thundercats. I didn’t want to miss a single minute of my TC stories.

24

No it doesn’t have to mean that at all. If a black person rejected being black because of deeply held beliefs about blackness being incompatible with things they appreciated and valued, the answer to this situation would not be to tell them to accept being black and seek acceptance of other black people. It would be to debunk their rationale for rejecting blackness so that they can see better understand why others (especially other black people) might find it difficult to categorize them as they insist on being categorized.

My gender identity doesn’t imply a community affiliation to me (and neither does my racial one), so you’ve lost me there. I see myself as a woman obviously, but this identity would exist regardless of whether I felt a sense of belonging with other women. Does fitting in with a certain community come with gender identity to you? Common experiences and thoughts on life are what connects me to others, and i can have this with men, women, and everyone in between.

25

And there’s where we differ.

No one is a black guy. No one is a white guy. Except socially. There’s no biological difference that has ramifications at the “who you are” level, so the only existence that race has is social.

So here’s a person saying “If you wish to understand me, I advise you to start off with the realization that I’m a white person; I’ve always identified with white people”.

I can see being colorblind towards this person: “Oh, sorry, I’m utterly oblivious to race because I am so fully aware that race is meaningless as far as who a person is”. Although I think most of us aren’t so oblivious even when we think we are. But yeah, sure, if you walk through life incognizant of people’s race, no reason to make an exception for this person.

But to see him as black means what? That you know better than he does who he is? That you believe biology is destiny at the level of race and all people with this appearance, this ancestry, are “black”, and that it means something? And that his self-identification is wrong, that he isn’t white but only “thinks he is”?

26

I’m leery of telling someone they’re wrong about themselves, but I would encourage you to question this statement. (Edited to Add: See below, though)

Not in the sense of them necessarily being your tribe, your peeps, but in a more tenuous sense of “we have this in common”. That’s what it means to identify. I do think it is possible that a person can be unidentified with any gender. The agender folks among the genderqueer say that this is their experience.

Most of them, however, don’t experience the world around them as consisting of people similar to themselves who are equally unaffiliated with any gender. Instead they find the world rather strongly inclined to project certain expectations onto them based on the gender that they present as / are perceived as. (And they don’t like it).

27

I’ve gone on at length with the race analogy without ever replying directly to your point. When I said “doesn’t matter”, I meant “it doesn’t matter for our consideration for how his current reaction affects his future experiences”:

I probably should have said “never mind why” rather than “doesn’t matter”. I think the things that I said immediately following are relevant regardless of what factors might have led one boy to dislike the comment while the other boy enjoyed hearing it.

28

Read this, please. This also. And this.

I think perhaps you were thinking I was referring to something else. But I wasn’t. People were asking me to explain “feminine”.

I think you may also be under the impression that I once peed in your cornflakes or something.

29

Well, I don’t presume there are biological differences between genders either. “Male girl” is just as arbitrary as “black guy”, IMHO.

I would reply with, “I don’t wish to understand you anymore than I wish to understand anyone else. If you want me to treat you like I treat white people, I will oblige you on that. But you aren’t going to make me see you as a white person. I have been programmed to see you as a black person, and I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon, sorry.”

No, I am not “incognizant” of race. I see race, the same way that you see gender. And I don’t pretend that I am free from racial or gender prejudice. But I don’t think I have a “hang up” just because someone’s self-identification doesn’t jibe with how I see them. Not any more than you have a “hang up” for requiring a certain self-identification before you recognize someone as being “kin” to you. Because the way I see it, your framework is just as arbitrary and capricious as my tendency to see someone as “kin” based on how they visually present.

It means that my eyes are communicating to me that he belongs to the same socially constructed group that I do. Just like when I see someone dressed like me with non-hairy facial features, I will assume they are a “woman”. Just like when I overhear someone speaking the same jargon that I speak on the job, I will assume they work in my field. I’m open to having my mind changed (for instance, I might think that someone is black, when really they are a Pacific Islander). But I’m not going to take away my “open minded” card just because I can’t let go of the original label I had for them, as long as I feel certain I am treating them as I would treat anyone else. Maybe I fall short of that goal. But I don’t think I absolutely must perceive them the same way they want me to perceive them to show proper respect. I think it places an unfair burden on people to perpetuate that idea. “For you to love me, you totally have to understand me!” Well, no. I love many weirdo, incomprehensible individuals just fine.

Of course race means something. It means something politically and socially. Just because it is not biological doesn’t mean it does not exist.

Where did I say his self-identification is wrong? What I said is that he’s likely not going to make me see him the same way he sees himself, but that doesn’t mean he is wrong. It just means I can’t reprogram my brain at will. No one can.

30

Ok, I can see what you mean by that. But I still see “seeing commonality with others” as secondary to seeing yourself as one gender vs another.

The way you framed your response to my analogy above, it seemed like you were implying that one’s identity dictates who they define as their community. As if someone telling a “white” black dude that they should accept being black is akin to kicking out of some club. It would only mean this to someone who has centered his meaning of identity around feelings of group inclusion. Most people probably approach gender like monstro would: “I’m a girl. What else would I be”? And from that point of view, their actual identity is developed:”I’m a girl who likes to climb trees and wear tutus.”

31

Like monstro, I identify as a woman. I was assigned female at birth, I have female body parts. I’m also butch enough that I’m often more comfortable hanging out with guys than with girls. Because yes, there are statistical tendencies in the brain characteristics of men and women, but my brain tends more towards the “typically male” side on several of those characteristics.

My observation is that few people neatly fit completely into either binary. Most men have some “female characteristics” and most women have some “male characteristics”. But most of us, at least in my generation, feel comfortable identifying with the sex we were assigned at birth, regardless of exactly how masculine or feminine we are.

I think that’s easier for women of my generation, actually, because we weren’t told it was wrong to have masculine traits. We were told to judge each person by his character, not by his skin. Whereas boys with feminine traits were told not to be “sissies”, despite that “we’re all equal” noise in the background. Still, I know some men who have a lot of feminine traits and are comfortable being men.

I’m not certain the current trend towards classifying everyone into finer and finer buckets will turn out to be helpful. But perhaps is an improvement over denigrating boys who are “girly”.

32

Yes, I agree. The overwhelming majority of people follow that path, and why wouldn’t they? That “what else would I be?” sense of it being self-evident is so strong that it would take something rather extraordinary to knock a person off that trajectory.

33

I don’t want to be disagreeable, but I disagree!

The rationale underlying a person’s self-identity will absolutely affect his future experiences. How would it not? If he’s internalized negative ideas about what it means to be a boy (or black), then he will constantly perceive insult when he’s lumped in with boys. This will make him all the more insistent that he’s really a girl (or white), which probably means he will assign far more “identity value” to whatever feminine traits he exhibits than an average girl would.

In other words, being reactionary towards an unaccepted gender category in and itself affects one’s relationship with the gender they claim to have. If being called a boy was as value neutral as being called a brunette or right-handed, would this trigger a femme male to call himself a girl and catalogue all the ways that he is feminine? I doubt it.

34

I don’t dispute that but it’s also true of the boy who identifies with the (other) boys and who reacts with dismay if & when informed that he’s being like a girl.

I agree. I call it “polarization”. We do happen to live in a gender-polarized world, and it is far worse for kids than for adults, far worse for young adults of dating age than for middle-aged adults who are not in the dating market at the moment, and probably a bit worse for middle-aged adults than for the elderly. But the identity forming years are of course the childhood and adolescent years.

Again, I should have said “never mind why” or “for whatever reason”. There was no way to construct the hypothetical with children who had no past whatsoever. What I was trying to do is have you look at how the events in the hypothetical affect those two kids moving forward. Whatever the past consisted of for them it would have been a string of similar events, similarly polarizing events.

35

To monstro (but not doing the line by line thing) — Probably a more useful reaction than “OK, you say you’re white so you’re white” (etc) would be along the lines of “OK, you say you’re white… let me wrap my head around this, that your experiences pushed you towards identifying with white people and make you feel like a misfit among black folks… what’s that like?”

36

I can’t tell if you think this is a valid way of defining oneself.

If you heard someone say “I am a guy that likes feminine things and has a feminine personality. I identify as a “guy” because I don’t know what else I would be,” would you try to convince him that his self-identity is wrong? Too limited? Naive? Or would you just shrug and see this individual as someone who is a different gender than you?

If you’re going with the last option, I can’t help but think you’ve come up with a framework that guarantees you will always be an outlier (aka “special snowflake”). Someone can look like you and act like you, but as long as they adhere to certain terminology, they aren’t in the special club–a club that simultaneously seeks the same gravitas as conventional groupings (“men” and “women”) even though conventional groupings don’t have such stringent requirements. Do you see the weirdness here?

37

Why woud I ask that question when I already knows how it feels to be a misfit among black folks? I am very much familiar with the “poor misunderstood negro” narrative. Listening to yet another tale of woe isn’t going to change my mind about what it means to be black or race in general, although the story itself may make me feel less or more inclined to feel sympathy (not necessarily empathy) for the individual who tells it.

At any rate, I would only probe into someone’s psyche like that if I intended on having an intimate relationship with them. If they are just a guy I have to work with, I don’t need to know why they identify as white. In fact, if they brought it up without my prompting, I would be turned off. I’d wonder why they talk about their racial identity so much. Do they expect special treatment just because they identify as a white guy? Do they think knowing why they identify as white will help me work with them better? I’d be wondering what exactly they want me from and what will happen if I don’t give it to them.

38

Definitely not!

What I would do is introduce myself, and then say “I identify as a girl. I never fit in with the guys and there’s always this cognitive friction when people are thinking of me as a guy and it doesn’t fit who I am.”

We’d have a conversation. I wouldn’t expect him to walk away from it embracing my terminologies but I’d anticipate being understood by him.

I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: people use words like “girl” and “woman” and “man” and “boy” to refer to both sex and gender. (By “sex” I mean a person’s morphology, their body. By “gender” I mean the “self sense” that it glued onto it, both in the sense of one’s own sense of identity and in the sense of attributed identity).

I’m directly and deliberately challenging that when I say things like “I am a girl” or “I am a woman”. I’m saying sex is one thing and gender is a different thing and they should be unhooked from each other.

People like Darren Garrison (see upthread) make a distinction between me saying “I am a feminine male person” and saying “I am a male girl” — they see those things as asserting entirely different things. Your questions seem to be going in a similar direction: “Well what if a person identified as feminine but not as a girl, would you feel they’re ‘doing it wrong’?”

Because (if I understand correctly) you wish to continue to use words like “girl” and “woman” (etc) to refer to a person’s sex. It’s a bit annoying, maybe, to have someone claiming those words on the basis of gender and NOT sex, and then telling you you should accept that use, change your understanding of those words.

I, too, think there’s a difference between saying “I am a male girl (or woman)” and saying “I am a feminine male” — despite my reply to Darren Garrison (:confused: ), yes, it means something different, which is why I’m not satisfied to call myself a “feminine male” and use the more provocative “I am a male woman” formulation. It’s the difference between an adjective (I am a THIS with characteristics of THAT) and a noun (I am THAT). It’s making the political-social point that it constitutes a different identity. We attach profound importance to a person’s sex and gender, while gluing them together (sexgender as one thing) and I am saying feminine people who happen to be male often (not always) are profoundly feminine and only incidentally male, so in a world where it is given a profound emphasis, we’re miscategorized within the “sexgender” system. “Male girl” uses both adjective and noun, just like “feminine male”, but now the noun is the gender portion and the adjective refers to the sex portion, which emphasizes that the gender is the more important, more significant identifier. And that’s on purpose. So is the provocation.

39

The following post will be filled with generalizations. There are tons of exceptions, and I understand that gender is a spectrum. But, in general…

While it’s a spectrum, it likely really looks like two distributions with large peaks for “male” and “female” and plenty of overlap in the tails of the distributions. That doesn’t not negate the large peaks, though. I have two general comments: First, I dispute the premise of this thread completely, with the previous caveats. There are obvious physical differences between the sexes, why wouldn’t the brains have differences as well? There are biological and evolutionary reasons for men and women to, in general, have different brains. Further, why would humans differ from many other mammals and other species in this? I’m not saying we’re automatons, slaves to our biological heritage, but some obvious male/female differences that spring directly to mind are gorillas, lions, most (all?) bird species. I don’t know how different male and female chimps act (and that would be a good factoid, since I think we’re most closely related to them, right?) – maybe a primatologist can chime in.

Second, what you’re saying seems to obviously conflict with transgendered people, in that they claim (and I believe them) that they are another gender than how they appear.

I’m not sure how to square your claims with transgender claims, but I’ve been convinced that transgender is a real thing. From reading your posts from time to time, it seems to me that you fall in the middle of the spectrum, so it makes sense from your perspective that, maybe there’s nothing to gender. However, your personal experience doesn’t negate tons of research and lessons learned from the animal world.

40

What the research shows is that for female brains there are a wide range of structures and features that may or may not appear – a whole lot of variation among female brains in other words; and that when compared with male brains, for which there is, once again, a really wide variety – there is a tendency for some of those characteristics to be in evidence more often in female brains than in male brains, but for each such generalization there are plenty of male brains who have those features nevertheless – a whole lot of overlap, in other words.

Oh, I doubt that gorilla brains or lemur brains or kitty-cat brains are any more sexually dimorphic than ours are. They might be, and it doesn’t prove or demonstrate anything one way or the other, but I suspec that what’s true of our brains will prove true of theirs as well.

I would never say that. I am no more in the middle of the spectrum than a typical transgender person.

I am constantly encouraged by transgender activist friends to call myself transgender. I don’t, because if i did I would be spending a lot of time explaining that, no, I am not transitioning to female, am not on hormones, and do not attempt to present in such a way that observers will categorize me as female. My transgender friends say “that doesn’t make you not transgender, you’re transgender if your gender doesn’t match the gender you were assigned at birth, end of story!” We disagree about what to call it, but yes I’m gender inverted in the same sense they are.

Whether I call myself transgender or not, there’s not much social consciousness about people like me — who identify on the femme end of the spectrum (not the middle, thank you very much) but who do NOT wish to have their bodies “fixed”. My body isn’t broken. It’s male. I’m male. It’s my gender, not my body, that is “of the other side”.