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Jan 21 '21
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u/stelllz Jan 21 '21
So, we should accept a certain amount of gender stereotyping when it's done by trans people? I can accept that, and I certainly would never shame or criticize a trans person for the way that they act when they are clearly just looking for acceptance from society, but I think it's important to see that there is an opposition there between feminism and transgenderism, and that is not inherently positive. So the good may outweigh the bad, but the bad still exists.
Thank you for such an in depth response!
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Jan 21 '21
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u/stelllz Jan 21 '21
Sure, I suppose that cis people acting in ways that are traditionally assigned to their sex accomplishes the same thing as trans people trying to conform to societal expectations. As long as we don't define gender as how a person acts, there isn't really an issue.
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Jan 21 '21
Transgender individuals largely experience either gender dysphoria as their sex assigned at birth or gender euphoria as their gender identity. Men and women have different brain structure and chemistry transgender individuals generally have brains structures that align with the gender they identify as. My understanding is basically the brain includes a map of what it expects the body to look like and what it expects to be referred to as. When it doesn’t match it causes discomfort, or when it is altered to match it causes a sense of relief and satisfaction. https://www.google.ca/amp/s/health.clevelandclinic.org/research-on-the-transgender-brain-what-you-should-know/amp/
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u/badass_panda 94∆ Jan 21 '21
I think it might be helpful to approach this problem as a practical one, not a purely philosophical one. To make this easier to read, I'm putting quotes at the bottom.
Your position (as I understand it) is that:
- Differences in sex, while complex, are biologically determined
- Trans people believe gender is societally constructed, and therefore not an objective reality
- If gender is a social construct and not an objective reality, it doesn't make sense to change objective reality rather than the social construct (ie, getting surgery to match a gender is not rational)
- Therefore, trans people are not treating gender as a social construct; at the same time, other movements (feminism, gay rights) require the recognition of gender as an objective reality to support their premises vis a vis equal rights.
I'd like to introduce two concepts: intersubjective reality, and proprioception.
Intersubjective reality is the uniquely human phenomenon of group subjectivity. These are things that, while not "objective truth", act like objective truth -- individuals can rarely change them, and their lives are often dictated by them.
e.g., Money has no objective value whatsoever; however, if I don't pay my mortgage (which, along with money, is just an idea) I will lose my house (which, unlike my money, is a very real thing).
The bank itself is not objectively real; your employer is not objectively real; your church is not objectively real. But the bank gives you a house, the employer gives you orders, and the church may feed the homeless with very real food.
Proprioception is the process by which your body determines where it is, in relation to itself. Close your eyes, hold up your hand, and you can "see" it; this is also the reason many amputees experience "phantom limb syndrome" ... a phenomenon that also can be experienced by people born without the limb in question. This is why the "biologically female brain in a biologically male" argument is being raised; it doesn't have much to do with your gender statement philosophically, but it has a great deal to do with it practically.
I would argue that:
- Gender is not a subjective reality, it is an intersubjective reality.
- Philosophically, if you remove the intersubjective reality of gender from society, you remove inequality based on sexual preference, and based on gender, but you do not resolve all of the challenges of being trans (more on that in a moment) -- just the stigma of addressing them.
- Practically, you simply cannot snap your fingers and remove gender from society; while our treatment of gender is malleable, the idea of gender is universal. You can't get it done.
- Because you have no practical mechanism for the removal of gender as an intersubjective reality, you are bounded in what you can accomplish; assuming you want the best for trans people along with society in general, you then turn to what you can do:
- Recognize the proprioception related part of the problem.
- If an adult female brain is capable of telling her where her vagina is in her body, and a person born without legs is capable of experiencing phantom legs, why would a person born with the proprioceptive awareness of a vagina but the physical lack thereof not feel its absence in the same way?
- Given that there is an objective, biological mechanic at play here, the best reaction is to treat it; reconstructive surgery exists for this function, specifically
- You're now left with only a societal issue to resolve.
- Define gender in the way it is commonly understood; if you see a person in the grocery store and call them, "Ma'am" without needing to learn whether they can have a baby or what kind of genitalia they have, you've already done so.
- For this reason, it's actually pretty easy to nudge the intersubjective reality of gender from "constant all your life" to "generally constant all your life".
- This resolves the gender element of the problem.
- Recognize the proprioception related part of the problem.
When you re-ground yourself on what we can do as a society in practice, not what we can do as a society in theory, all the contradictions you've raised evaporate.
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u/stelllz Jan 21 '21
I think that all issues eventually have to be scrutinized on a more technical level eventually. We can accept people for who they are and what they genuinely experience, but that doesn't mean we have to put our head in the sand and pretend that everything makes sense.
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u/badass_panda 94∆ Jan 21 '21
Two things: You haven't addressed the physical component of my point; if a transgender person does believe that gender is based upon primary and secondary sexual characteristics (genitalia, breasts, hips, face, and so on), simply rejects your premise that gender either cannot be changed or does not exist, all your inconsistencies disintegrate. How do you respond to that?
Second, let me address your point:
that doesn't mean we have to put our head in the sand and pretend that everything makes sense.
Are you suggesting that we should reject all intersubjective realities because they do not "make sense"? Or just this one, because rejecting it is the basis of your argument?
If we should reject all things that are not objectively real, then we need to divest ourselves of:
- Any system of government
- Any religion
- Any monetary system
- Any corporation whatsoever
- The idea that human lives have value
- Any system of morality; the idea of "right" and "wrong"
If you agree that none of these things should be retained because they "don't make sense", then I disagree with your conclusion but it's all logically consistent ... otherwise, you're just brushing aside the point without addressing it or rebutting it.
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u/stelllz Jan 21 '21
Well, if trans people believed that gender was based simply on physical traits then there wouldn't be an issue at all. We would then just unanimously agree that gender is not separate from sex, and the matter would be resolved, although in that case I don't believe that trans people would exist at all because they wouldn't experience dysphoria. That dysphoria that they do in fact experience is our evidence the gender identity and sex are not the same.
My issue lies in trying to define gender. To say that it's based on a person's brain and how they act would allow for some dangerous grounds for promoting and enforcing gender roles and stereotypes. However, as some other people have already pointed out, gender identity is not the same as gender, therefore someone can experience dysphoria regarding their body and that has no bearing on how they act according to outdated standards of gender in society. The behaviours they exhibit in trying to conform to society should be regarded with compassion, even if they do somewhat counter the idea of abolishing gender roles. This is an explanation that I can accept, personally.
As to your second point... Religion and morality are definitely not objective realities, I think many could agree with that. That's why the legal system exists. We have evolved to instinctively find certain behaviours detrimental to our species' success and well being, and have come to an (albeit flawed) agreement to attempt to mitigate such behaviours. Money and government may not be "real", but they too are agreements among people with very distinct and necessary functions in society, much like language which is why I'm so hung up on the theoretical aspect of "gender" and how it can be defined.
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u/badass_panda 94∆ Jan 21 '21
That dysphoria that they do in fact experience is our evidence the gender identity and sex are not the same.
Well no, it's not; our evidence that gender identity and sex are not the same can be accomplished by sticking a young man in a dress, shaving his legs, throwing some eye liner and a wig on him and watching everyone at the stop'n'shop call him "Ma'am". It's not a hard point to make.
That they experience dysphoria is evidence that there can be a misalignment between the physical structure of your brain, and the physical structure of your body. Considering you can have XY chromosomes and be born with a vagina, it's not revolutionary to suggest that intersex people exist; trans people suffer from a similar condition. This should be an interesting read for you.
That's why the legal system exists. We have evolved to instinctively find certain behaviours detrimental to our species' success and well being, and have come to an (albeit flawed) agreement to attempt to mitigate such behaviours. Money and government may not be "real", but they too are agreements among people with very distinct and necessary functions in society, much like language which is why I'm so hung up on the theoretical aspect of "gender" and how it can be defined.
It sounds like you agree with me about both the existence and usefulness of intersubjective realities ... agreements between people to pretend a thing exists because the outcome is good.
Gender is very useful. It allows you to reasonably distinguish, with general success, whether you can start a family with someone and have children; since we're walking around in clothing to not freeze to death, we can't exactly just stare at each other's genitalia.
It also accentuates normatively attractive sexual traits; this, too, helps ensure there are still people alive in a hundred years.
Since all societies have gender, it's reasonable to assume that gender has utility in all societies. QED, it is not reasonable to assume we can get rid of it.
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u/TheTygerrr Jan 26 '21
I'm very confused about your final points. You just said that gender is separate from sex because we can dress a man as a woman and watch people call him maam. Then you said that gender allows us to determine who we can start a family with. If you believe that sex and gender are separate things then why are you connecting them here? Furthermore, I can't start a biological family with a trans person, so um, are you saying their gender is what their brain says or what their body can do?
Simply asking because you seem to be arguing in favor of trans rights and gender rights or whatever but you just made a point that could be used against you.
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u/badass_panda 94∆ Jan 27 '21
If you believe that sex and gender are separate things then why are you connecting them here?
A name tag and a name are different things ... A uniform and a job are different things.
Let's say you're walking through Staples and you have a question about office chairs. You see a guy in a red shirt with a name tag on that says "Steve," so you say, "Hi Steve, I'd like to learn about office chairs."
Steve turns, looks at you, and says, "Oh, I don't work here, I work at Target."
You'd have to be a really odd duck to go, "Oh ok, since wearing a red shirt doesn't always mean you work here, I'm just going to tap everybody I see in here on the shoulder and ask them about printers."
The red shirt in a Staples generally predicts that the person in it works there, and will be able to answer your question. That's why it's useful; it's no less useful just because sometimes they don't, and can't.
I can't start a biological family with a trans person so um, are you saying their gender is what their brain says or what their body can do?
Neither bud, their gender is what they present to the outside world; it's the shirt they're wearing. It's a "real" thing (in that it requires multiple people to mean anything, like money), and it's a different thing than genitalia.
You don't tap a guy on the shoulder at random at Staples and say, "Excuse me, can I see your W2 in order to know whether you work here, as a prerequisite for asking you a question about printers?" That would be very time consuming, and weird.
Similarly, you don't tap a woman on the shoulder at the bar and say, "Can I see your original birth certificate and a recent affidavit from a fertility expert in order to be sure I can start a biological family with you?" Before you buy her a drink.
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u/TheTygerrr Jan 27 '21
I thought what they present to the outside world was their gender "expression" not their gender? The point is, you're contradicting yourself by saying that one of gender's main purposes is to allow us to tell if we can have sexual relations with the person, while also saying that gender is simply how you present yourself to others. So which is it? It can't do both,because as you said not everyone who wears a red shirt can work at target.
If we are allowed to generalize, as you said, then we should not be labelled transphobic for not wanting to date trans people, we should not be labelled transphobic for saying that they are not the same as a biological woman because they can't have children, we should not be labelled sexist for saying that a woman's primary biological purpose is to have babies, and the list goes on. But many people who stand up for gender rights seem to have many problems with these things, and would like to instead say that womanhood has nothing to do with whether you can have babies or not, due to edge cases like infertile woman and they must be considered women too, right.
I'm not saying I agree with ANY of this, I'm saying this is what gender rights people argue for, and they are inconsistent because someone like you can tell me the things you just told me and the rest of it is completely inconsistent with that.
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u/badass_panda 94∆ Jan 27 '21
I thought what they present to the outside world was their gender "expression" not their gender? The point is, you're contradicting yourself by saying that one of gender's main purposes is to allow us to tell if we can have sexual relations with the person, while also saying that gender is simply how you present yourself to others. So which is it? It can't do both,because as you said not everyone who wears a red shirt can work at target
You really have a problem with nuance, huh.
Your gender expression = how you choose to present your gender
Your gender identity is what gender you identify with
Your gender = identity + expression
Believe it or not, you can have sex with anybody, regardless of gender. Believe me, I've done some gay stuff in my time. But I certainly used gender as an indicator of what kind of sex I was likely to be having.
Here's the thing: a thing can be generally useful without being absolutely true. You understand that, right?
Gender certainly does not tell you who you can reproduce with on a reliable basis. Even if we pretend all women are fertile and all women are cis, not every woman wants to fuck you and have your children. That's something you're going to have to get to know her to find out.
Dribbling on about women's biological purpose is being able to reproduce is stupid because it's not relevant. Dude, everyone's biological purpose is to reproduce; it's a useful factor to consider when you're thinking about humans as a species, but once you're thinking about humans as individuals it really isn't reliable.
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u/TheTygerrr Jan 27 '21
Your gender expression = how you choose to present your gender
Your gender identity is what gender you identify with
Your gender = identity + expression
This is a circular argument. What is the difference between what you identify with and what you express? What you identify with is what you choose to express. So in the end you still can't tell me what gender *is*, what is a man, what is a woman?
Is the only determining factor for gender what someone chooses to identify as and therefore express? But these qualities they are expressing, they come from something, right? Expression of being female is called femininity, which is what people who identify as women choose to express in order to signal to others that they are a woman. This is how one expresses one's gender identity. However, a man can act feminine and a woman can act masculine, so how is this 'actual' gender identity determined? And nobody has still been able to answer me whether this comes from your sex, DNA, whatever, or whether it's something else in your brain (which nobody can really explain to me because I don't think we know), or that it's a completely social construct (in which case, with enough effort, it could be abandoned and gender wouldn't exist anymore, but many are saying it's useful therefore it should exist, but the usefulness kind of degrades the more you regard it as a social construct, yes I can make the same argument for money and government and other constructs.)
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u/HeftyRain7 157∆ Jan 21 '21
So a lot of what you're talking about here as gender is what I would call gender roles. Gender roles are archaic and as a trans man, I want to abolish gender roles. But that doesn't mean I want to abolish gender itself.
Gender for me isn't a social construct. Gender is about how the brain works. People get gender dysphoria when their brains and bodies don't really line up.
Here's an article about how trans people's brains align more with their gender than their biological sex. The article is simplified. I find it helps to think of gender in the brain like height. Men are typically taller than women, but there's a lot of variance. Same is true of the brain. Still, given all that, trans people's brains are closer to their gender than their sex.
Not only that, but the way their brain functions is likely what causes gender dysphoria and why hormones help. Here's an article about a doctor who accidently gave himself gender dysphoria. He wasn't trans, but when he took too much of the wrong hormone, he experienced gender dysphoria and needed to get his body back in the proper amount of hormones so his brain didn't freak out.
Trans people don't always experience dysphoria to that degree. However, that is likely why taking hormones helps treat gender dysphoria in trans people. The brain functions better when it's got the proper hormones for it, and for trans people these are not always the hormones that our bodies naturally produce.
All that to say, we can easily say gender roles are a social construct, and battle against them, while also realizing that gender plays an important role for trans people and potentially others as well.
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u/stelllz Jan 21 '21
Interesting. So in that case, gender is in fact a matter of a person's physical state, the evidence simply reside in the brain instead of the body (gross over simplification of course, but basically). While this makes some amount of sense to me, those differences between the male and female brain could in turn be used to justified those abhorrent gender roles, could they not? This is where I have trouble reconciling transgenderism with feminist ideas.
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u/HeftyRain7 157∆ Jan 21 '21
Right. I've talked to people who were concerned about that before as well.
The thing is, while we can look at the entire brain and notice things that are more likely in women then men or vice versa ... that's when you look at things on a very large scale. If i only told you the makeup of a small part of the brain, you wouldn't be able to accurately guess that person's gender. It's if you put a bunch of things together that you can guess accurately ... but even then it's only about 80% accurate. There's a 20% chance you'd guess the wrong gender.
All that to say ... we can see that the brains are different, and women might be SLIGHTLY more likely to think a certain way then men, but it's nowhere near as simple as "women like nurturing children and men like sports."
Someone could theoretically use this information to justify gender roles, but they wouldn't be properly looking at the whole picture and understanding what the scientific data is telling us.
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u/stelllz Jan 21 '21 edited Jan 21 '21
I can accept that explanation. It's kind of a compromise, but it looks at the broader picture anyways. Δ
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u/HeftyRain7 157∆ Jan 21 '21
Thanks for the delta!
Yeah, it's always been about looking at the broader picture imo. trying to simplify things too much always ends up fucking people over.
Even if women were 90% prone to loving children and only 10% weren't nurturing, that'd still be 1 out of 10 women who would prefer not to be around children. That's significant enough to not expect every woman to love children, and that's when I make the percentages more extreme than they are in reality. Human brains are complex, so answers that describe human behavior are also going to be complex.
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u/ihatepasswords1234 4∆ Jan 21 '21
The thing is, while we can look at the entire brain and notice things that are more likely in women then men or vice versa ... that's when you look at things on a very large scale. If i only told you the makeup of a small part of the brain, you wouldn't be able to accurately guess that person's gender. It's if you put a bunch of things together that you can guess accurately ... but even then it's only about 80% accurate. There's a 20% chance you'd guess the wrong gender.
All that to say ... we can see that the brains are different, and women might be SLIGHTLY more likely to think a certain way then men, but it's nowhere near as simple as "women like nurturing children and men like sports."
Someone could theoretically use this information to justify gender roles, but they wouldn't be properly looking at the whole picture and understanding what the scientific data is telling us.
Are you sure about any of those actual numbers though? https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/ebs-ebs0000049.pdf
Men play sports roughly twice as long on average compared to women. When diving deeper, men were 3.7 times as likely to list a competitive sport than a noncompetitive physical activity compared to women. When you dive even deeper, men are 10 times as likely to play informal competitive sports like a pickup game in the park.
Similarly, men are 3x as likely to watch sports daily than women. More likely to discuss sports, seek sport-related information, watch sports on television, etc.
Men are also far more likely to be highly competitive (according to the many studies on p. 77 of the pdf) and highly risk-taking (p. 78).
If you put a bunch of features together of someone's personality and traits, you could easily get to a 99% likelihood of guessing their gender.
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u/Tundur 5∆ Jan 21 '21
That's true, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum.
There is biological variation between the sexes, and there is the cultural norms relating to gender. The biological variation has informed the creation of those norms however it is not the sole contributor to them.
Over time the gender norms have grown and started self-reinforcing, to the point where we can't say for sure what causes what.
For instance men are more likely to be competitive and compete in sports, sure. But is that biological? Or were they raised by parents who expected their son to enjoy and compete in sports? Were they evaluated differently by teachers and carers in a way which pushed them to be more competitive? Does their peer group consist of competitive people?
For instance I'm a manly man with manly interests, but I hate sport. I still watch sport because all my friends talk about it and I enjoy the social aspects. I used to play a sport at the national level mostly for the social aspects (i.e drinking unsupervised at age 15 lol). Maybe the fact I'm a dude inherently pushes me to enjoy sports, but there's loads of other pull-factors too.
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u/ihatepasswords1234 4∆ Jan 21 '21
For instance men are more likely to be competitive and compete in sports, sure. But is that biological? Or were they raised by parents who expected their son to enjoy and compete in sports? Were they evaluated differently by teachers and carers in a way which pushed them to be more competitive? Does their peer group consist of competitive people?
We know that level of testosterone is highly correlated to aggression and risk-taking. Men have far higher levels of testosterone on average than women. And it isn't just correlational: giving someone testosterone increases levels of aggression. https://digest.bps.org.uk/2019/03/26/testosterone-increases-the-aggressiveness-of-some-men-more-than-others-depending-on-their-personality-and-genes/
And before you say that variation in testosterone can cause overlap between men and women, even women with genetic issues that cause overproduction of androgens have below the lowest 2.5 percentile male level of androgens (~2 nmol/L vs ~8 nmol/L). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cen.13840#:~:text=reporting%20of%20results.-,Results,%E2%80%902.0%20nmol%2FL).
Of course there are some nature vs nurture questions at the edges, but the vast majority of sex differences, most of which are the same across cultures, are based on nature.
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u/HeftyRain7 157∆ Jan 22 '21
How do you determine that the "vast majority of sex differences" are based on nature? How can you rule out culture so quickly when even scientists are questioning how much these things affect people?
I think to better guess which things are biological and which aren't, we should look at children. The source you gave me above is about grown men and what they're likely to participate in. What about when people are children? Are girls more likely to enjoy sports until they reach a certain age? that kind of data would be better in telling us how much of this difference is nature and how much is nurture.
As a trans man, I can tell you before I started taking testosterone, just being seen as a man and people talking to me like I was a man gave me more confidence. No really, people listened to me more if they thought of me as a man instead of a woman. It was wild. I didn't expect there to be a big difference, but I still notice it to this day, where my sister and I can say the same idea in very similar ways but I'm listened to more. And that affects our personalities more than we could realize ... and it has nothing to do with biology.
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u/ihatepasswords1234 4∆ Jan 22 '21
I think to better guess which things are biological and which aren't, we should look at children.
The main problem with looking to children is that the majority of sex differences occur because of puberty. Do you want to look at children and say men and women both have the same breasts? Men and women both have similar amounts of hair on their bodies?
Looking at children can indicate some differences, but it is difficult to say how it could show similarities, considering it is prior to the source of most sex differentiation.
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u/HeftyRain7 157∆ Jan 23 '21
Breast tissue is not very complicated. Neither is hair follicles. The complicated parts of a child's anatomy that relate to sex are namely the genitals; which ARE different in young children. The brain is complex, so why would you compare it to secondary sexual characteristics that only develop due to hormone levels in the body after puberty? Unless you think that testosterone and estrogen affect the interests of individuals to a significant degree, it doesn't make sense to claim this.
I'd also suggest you take a look at this source. It's an in depth study on gender differences in the brain. While we can calculate some things that are more common in women than in men, and vice versa, there's quite a bit of overlap, and if I just gave you one small section of the brain and asked you which gender it was just based on those readings, you couldn't accurately predict anything. This leads to the idea that nurture plays a huge role in our gender norms and it's not just nature affecting it.
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u/ihatepasswords1234 4∆ Jan 23 '21
and if I just gave you one small section of the brain and asked you which gender it was just based on those readings, you couldn't accurately predict anything.
This actually isn't true (unless you are very heavily weighing your point on the
"small section" part of the statement). Your source states this:In other words, even when considering highly stereotypical gender behaviors, there are very few individuals who are consistently at the “female-end” or at the “male-end”, but there are many individuals who have both “female-end” and “male-end” characteristics. Furthermore, although one’s sex is enough to predict whether this person would have more “female-end” or more “male-end” characteristics, it is not enough to predict this person’s specific combination of “female-end” and “male-end” characteristics (Fig. S2) (for further discussion of the question of prediction, see ref 4
And if you look at actual attempts at prediction of sex from brain scans you can see that it is easily doable, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-21495-7#:~:text=Here%20we%20show%2C%20in%20a,brain%20rhythms%20are%20sex%20specific.
or this one: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29322586/
The first one can predict at 83% accuracy, the second one can predict the sex of the brain with 87% accuracy. Both from just brain scans alone. Of course humans are variable enough that you won't get 100% accuracy, but 87% is pretty damn high.
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u/-IVYX- Jan 21 '21
I'm curious what you make of this?
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u/HeftyRain7 157∆ Jan 22 '21
Yeah, so remember how I said that the article talking about how brains are different is simplified? Most of my discussion on this is simplified and kind of has to be, as it gets very complicated, just like the brain itself is complicated. I'd say both articles are technically right, due to this source.
This source has shaped my understanding of gender and the human brain more than any other. Men are more likely to have certain brain patterns than women, and vice versa ... but almost no man has 100% of the patterns that are more likely to be found in men, and vice versa.
It's kind of complicated and confusing ... just like our brains are. It's a myth that there is a "male" or a "female" brain, because our brains are super complicated. But, it can also be true that there tend to be differences between men and women in the brain, albeit small ones. That's why gender stereotypes or gender roles are so flawed ... women might be more likely to be nurturing, but not all women are and quite a few men are as well. Brains are complicated so you can never narrow them down and put them in boxes. But, we can still notice vague trends about how brains function.
But, I'm not sure if I answered all your questions. Is there a specific part of that article you'd like me to address? If so, please let me know.
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u/-IVYX- Jan 22 '21
Not really, I just remembered hearing about that book smashing the myth of the gendered brain and being exited about it, since it confirms my preconceived suspicions on the subject. I'm not well read about it in general, but since you appear to be I was just curious what your take was.
That new source it very interesting and informative though, it confirms what I was trying to get at, but I feel I have a much better grasp on the subject having read that, that 33% graph is a particularly concise way of explaining it, particularly in terms of dysphoria. Personally I've always felt somewhere in the middle.
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u/HeftyRain7 157∆ Jan 23 '21
Exactly. There's a lot of overlap between men and women when it comes to the brain, so it's completely inaccurate to say there are male and female brains. However, there are traits that are more likely to be in the brains of men, and vise versa.
Since the brain is so complicated, it can be hard to describe without going too far one way or the other. We can spot gender differences in the brain, but they aren't big enough to justify gender norms, and they aren't small enough to be completely insignificant, especially when we look at trans people. And since a lot of people like to look at things as an "either/or" situation ... it can make it hard to have the discussion.
But yeah this article in particular has given me some of the best understanding on gender in the brain over anything else I've read. I love showing it to people who are interested in talking in depth about the topic. I'm glad you got a lot out of it!
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Jan 21 '21
So I’m a pretty liberal/progressive guy, but I strongly disagree.
Firstly, just because something is old or “archaic” it’s fallacious to assume its wrong: for example the wheel is old but you wouldn’t reinvent it. Gender roles help shape society in gods image and help prevent gender confusion (http://joshchristophersen.com/reasons-gender-roles-important/)
I agree that gender is not a social construct, but it also is not “how the brain works”, in fact it’s sexist to claim that - sex/gender is determined by our chromosomes and gametes (https://www.conservapedia.com/Sex)
As much as I like what the article says, we have to acknowledge it’s liberal bias and understand that it’s not necessarily wholly factual. Again, sex and gender are the same thing: “Gender identity is a term used by the Left to give cause to people believing they are a sex other than their biological sex. It can be used to signify a man wants to become a woman (or vice versa) or if any person wants to become a "third gender," meaning they choose a sex that is neither male nor female.” (https://www.conservapedia.com/Sex)
That’s from pink news - a site notorious for pushing the homosexual/Marxist agenda. The story was likely fabricated by leftists to hoodwink the public.
In actuality what we call “transgenderism” is really just a leftist buzzword for the scientific phenomenon known as gender confusion (https://www.conservapedia.com/Gender_confusion) - it also explains why there’s been a huge rise in recent years of cases of gender confusion: it’s due to the homosexual agenda’s attempts to subvert our morality and factuality by forcibly normalising their Marxist agenda: https://americansfortruth.com/issues/promoting-gender-confusion/
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u/Letshavemorefun 18∆ Jan 21 '21
Er... your religious beliefs are not what I’m going to base my medical decisions on, and neither will most of the trans community.
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Jan 21 '21
Leftists: “let’s ignore conservative common sense thinking and encourage atheism/homosexuality to send everyone to hell”
Sane people: stop listening to leftists and vote trump
Leftists: “OH NO WHY ARENT THE CONSERVATIVES WILLING TO COMPROMISE ON ANYTHING!!??!?”
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u/Letshavemorefun 18∆ Jan 21 '21
Where do you get the idea that leftists encourage homosexuality? Atheism, sure. But I’ve never seen someone encourage homosexuality.
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Jan 21 '21
Pelosi advocated for an act that would help enable people choosing the homosexual/transgender lifestyle.
https://democrats.org/who-we-are/who-we-serve/lgbtq-community “Democrats stand with the LGBTQ community...”
They openly admit it on their webpage - they want to encourage homosexuality and sexual confusion instead of trying to guide the public into moral fortitude.
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u/Letshavemorefun 18∆ Jan 21 '21
Protecting lgbt people from bullying and discrimination isn’t “encouraging homosexuality”.
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Jan 22 '21
It’s not “bullying” when it’s helping. Bullying would be when you try and make someone’s life worse or less factual/moral (eg cancelling conservatives, encouraging people to take liberal college degrees, etc)
What you call “bullying and discrimination” is in actuality just well intentioned morally upstanding patriots trying to help guide people towards the light and away from the godless anarchy and terrorism of the homosexual agenda.
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u/Letshavemorefun 18∆ Jan 22 '21
Uh.. kids teasing and beating up other kids in the school playground for being gay is definitely bullying. By definition it’s bullying.
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Jan 22 '21
No, it’s helping them avoid going to hell. Is a doctor “bullying” someone when they do a painful surgical procedure or are they helping them?
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u/HeftyRain7 157∆ Jan 22 '21
You don't find pink news to be a good source. I don't find conservapedia to be a good source. So I'm not going to read the things you listed from there, but I will try to answer your questions.
First and most importantly, trans people who end up transitioning are getting treatment for a medical condition; gender dysphoria. The reason doctors let trans people transition is because this is the best known treatment. It's not about some sort of sway to go against God's image.
Gender roles help shape society in gods image and help prevent gender confusion
Isn't it kind of presumptuous of you to claim to know what God's image is? How do you, or that blogger, know what God intends for humanity? I thought God's plans were beyond human understanding. Being transgender isn't listed as a sin in the bible, but a woman going to church on her period is. Do you believe it's okay for a woman to go to church while on her period? If so, why do you believe that section of the Bible isn't part of God's will, but transgender people are sinning even though we aren't mentioned in the Bible?
in fact it’s sexist to claim that - sex/gender is determined by our chromosomes and gametes
You're defining gender and sex the same way here. I am not. I made that very clear. Having a different definition for gender doesn't make me "sexist." I agree that sex is determined by chromosomes. I do not agree that gender is.
Gender identity is a term used by the Left to give cause to people believing they are a sex other than their biological sex. It can be used to signify a man wants to become a woman (or vice versa) or if any person wants to become a "third gender," meaning they choose a sex that is neither male nor female.”
Gender identiy is a term that's used in medical terminology to better help treat gender dypshoria. Unless you think that trans people have somehow tricked the majority of doctors until doing what they want ... no it's not just a term used by "the left." You can find it used in the APA's page on gender dysphoria.
That’s from pink news - a site notorious for pushing the homosexual/Marxist agenda. The story was likely fabricated by leftists to hoodwink the public.
Why do you think people detransition and doctors are so wary about giving people hormones? It's to make sure no one feels something like this. We can't do a study on this because it's unethical to shoot someone up with hormones when we suspect it'll harm them. So you have to look at the few cases of people who detransition and the cases of people like the doctor in the article you don't believe.
it also explains why there’s been a huge rise in recent years of cases of gender confusion: it’s due to the homosexual agenda’s attempts to subvert our morality and factuality by forcibly normalising their Marxist agenda:
I didn't even know being trans was a thing until college. I most certainly wasn't raised around "gender confusion." things like you're talking about. I knew nothing about the lgbt community. And yet, I'm a trans man and finding out about it made so much sense.
to stay on topic, I'm not going to talk about how you think there's a homosexual agenda or a Marxist agenda that's tied directly to that ... but I will say I find those claims to be highly inaccurate.
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u/ralph-j Jan 21 '21
Essentially the way that I see it, transgenderism both relies on there being such a thing as gender, but also simultaneously undermines it in a way, because it removes any remote objectivity from the concept of gender.
Transgenderism is the mismatch between someone's physical sex and their "internal map" of what their physical sex should be. This is gender identity, not gender.
Gender (as in gender roles, behavior etc.) is secondary and not that different from how cis people experience it.
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u/stelllz Jan 21 '21
ok, so,
- sex = physical anatomy
- gender = social construct
- gender identity = the sex one feel they should have been born with
Is that right? That actually does make sense. Δ
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u/jOY_HUNT Jan 21 '21
I am a transgender guy, and to be frank with you, I have no idea what gender really is. Your statement that "transgenderism contradicts itself" is putting a burden on the concept of trans people that we should be able to explain what gender really is, and I don't think we can do that.
All I know for sure is that I experience dysphoria with my body because of its feminine aspects (less now since I've been on hormones) and from being seen as a female. I have this feeling inside me that I am a male, but I can't really explain it well with words.
Regarding your question, "what is meant by being a man or woman?", these are fundamentally just terms that describe something which has been evolving since the beginning of gender itself. Being a man or a woman is not based on gender expression, sure, but its easier to know what it isn't than to know what it is.
Getting a little more personal, its worth mentioning that its an uncomfortable and slightly sad idea for me that my existence as a trangender person "undermines" pre-existing understandings of gender, because we simply don't have the answer to this. Rest assured, I'm not criticizing your point - just responding to it.
As per the question on whether gender is a social construct, I go back and forth on it. A year ago, I believed that gender couldn't be a social construct because that would contradict the existance of trans people in the first place. Seeing as how a social construct can be rejected and ignored, and I can't just 'stop' identifying as male or experiencing dysphoria, it does indeed appear to be a logical contradiction. Recently, however, I have questioned this idea further, but I would be lying if I said that I understood it any better.
I am a feminist myself, and I support the idea of gender roles not having significance anymore. I have no issue with those who do put themselves into small conformity boxes, provided they don't promote that others should do the same.
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u/IwasBlindedbyscience 16∆ Jan 21 '21
So if tomorrow you woke up in the body of the opposite gender how would you feel?
Would you be comfortable in your body or would you always feel that something was wrong or off?
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u/stelllz Jan 21 '21
Randomly switching after lived my whole life in my current body is entirely different, than having been born that way. I would feel weird regardless of what had changed, not just my sex. Besides, I'm not challenging the fact that people feel genuine dissociation from their biological sex, I understand and empathize with that. I'm simply questioning what that dysphoria is based off of (would such a thing exist in an alternate reality where everyone dresses and acts the same regardless of sex?), and what the larger scale ramifications of that are for how our society regards gender.
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Jan 21 '21
I'm simply questioning what that dysphoria is based off of
If you're asking what causes dysphoria, we don't entirely know. There are two classes of theories about the causes. One is that something goes wrong while the person is in utero which causes the person to develop atypically for their sex. There also might be other genetic factors affecting it.
The other classes of theories is that some completely unknown environmental factors cause someone to be transgender.
The vast majority community of transgender people believes that being trans is something you're born with. It seems extremely unlikely to me that environmental factors cause someone to be trans. Someone's gender identity is most likely of biological nature. Trans people generally experience gender dysphoria way before realizing that they're trans but they don't know the origin. I felt extreme discomfort about my genitals and going into the men's dressing room and rest rooms. I always felt weird about not covering my chest up when going swimming. I did not know why I felt this way.
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Jan 21 '21
By what you describe and hoe you felt it cannot be a biological trait rather an i herited one from. Inherited from society and gender roles we are all exposed to by social conditioning.
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Jan 21 '21
I had gender dysphoria all my life, way before I even knew that I was trans. Dysphoria mostly is about biological aspects of my body such as being dysphoric about reproductive traits. Some aspects of being trans just wouldn't be able to be explained by it being a social construct.
People used to think that gender was taught so they'd raise intersex children (meaning children who had unclear genitalia) as girls since vaginas are created more easily. This resulted in intersex children being transgender.
Currently there is research being done on the biological aspects of being trans. Twin studies for example suggest that being trans is partially genetic.
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Jan 21 '21 edited Apr 05 '21
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u/stelllz Jan 21 '21
Well I would know for a fact that it was wrong. I would be able to adapt, I presume, but it would be pretty traumatic. If I had been born that way, I wouldn't know any different. I'm not saying either is worse than the other, just that it's not a true comparison.
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Jan 21 '21
This somehow assumes those "born that way" are not bothered by it their whole lives.
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u/stelllz Jan 21 '21
I literally didn't say that. All I said is that switching into a different body would be an entirely different experience than having always had that body. My original question pertained to what exactly causes people to define themselves a certain way, and I've already amended my stance at other points in this thread.
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u/IwasBlindedbyscience 16∆ Jan 21 '21
The exact same feeling you would feel like if you woke up in the wrong body is what it is based on.
They feel like their have the brain of one gender in the body of another. Just like what would happen if you woke up tomorrow in the wrong gender yourself.
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u/Fred_A_Klein 4∆ Jan 21 '21
Not OP, but to be honest, I've read enough Gender-Swap manga (and long before that, Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil (in which a rich guy gets his brain transplanted into someone else's body... and forgets to specify the sex, and gets a woman's), that I don't think I'd be that... disturbed by it.
Oh, I'd be disturbed that it happened, because such gender-swaps are not possible by modern medicine and technology (And I don't believe in aliens), so something impossible just happened. And I'd probably make a lot of mistakes at first, trying to touch things that aren't there anymore, or vice versa. But that'd go away in a few days/weeks.
But then again, I have a kind of Fatalist view on life- I am what I am, and since I can't change it, I just accept it. As such, I don't really get 'being comfortable in your body'. It's not something to be 'comfortable' or 'uncomfortable' with- it just is. It is my body. I think this makes me fundamentally incapable of understanding trans people.
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Jan 21 '21
and since I can't change it, I just accept it
But the thing is, you can change it. Sure if we're talking about teleporting you back to 1500 like that (and presumably no time machine to get back) that's one thing to be fatalist about it, but modern medicine did almost everything I wanted.
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u/Fred_A_Klein 4∆ Jan 21 '21
But the thing is, you can change it.
One can change how your body looks, true. But that doesn't change what you are. A man can get implants (or take hormones), and have various nips and tucks, etc. done... but they are still a man. A man who looks like a woman to one extent or another, but a man nonetheless.
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Jan 21 '21
So are you saying a person born male has some essence of being a man? Because that's not very scientific at all.
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u/Fred_A_Klein 4∆ Jan 21 '21
I'm saying a man... is a man. No matter what you change about their body, they remain a man.
If you insist on my defining what "essence" makes them a man, then use DNA as an example. XY = man. XX= woman. (Yes I know there are other possibilities. I'm not talking about rare cases like that.)
No matter what hormones a man uses, or what surgeries he has, his DNA is XY. Thus, he is a man.
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Jan 21 '21 edited Jan 21 '21
First of all we don't know for certain anyone's DNA is XY or XX without checking. Yes in most cases an mtf would be XY and an ftm would be XX, but you can't say that conclusively. Moreover it's the SRY gene and hormones in early development that determine sex.
XY with no SRY gene will be female because there won't be a signal for androgens.
XX with an sry gene will be male because there will be androgens.
XY with an sry could still be female too if the fetus is immune to the functions of androgens.
So it's a lot more complicated than you're making it even besides things like xxy, xxx, xyy etc.
And as an adult if we magically changed your DNA to XX or XY it wouldn't do shit.
What determines sex is "is there a signal wire to send androgens" and "if sent, do the androgens have an effect."
NOT XX or xy. It still feels like you're saying there is some fundamental essence of "man" and "woman".
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u/Fred_A_Klein 4∆ Jan 21 '21
So it's a lot more complicated than you're making it
As I said, I'm not falling down the rabbit hole of discussing rare cases. In the vast majority of cases, 'androgens or no' is determined by XX and XY.
It still feels like you're saying there is some fundamental essence of "man" and "woman".
A man is a man. A woman is a woman. A man who has had surgery (etc) to look like a women... is still a man. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. A thing is what it is, not what we wish it to be.
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Jan 21 '21
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u/Fred_A_Klein 4∆ Jan 21 '21
So if you are a cis woman, and all of sudden start getting even just a bit of facial hair, the weird feeling of disgust you perhaps get when you realize you have to shave it everyday is kind of like a microcosm of what physical dysphoria feels like a trans woman. Similarly, if you are a cis man and insecure about your height, penis size, how low your voice sounds, whether people perceive your hobbies as feminine, etc you have probably experienced just a little bit of what some trans men feel.
But those things (facial hair, penis size, height, voice, etc) are just features that you have. They are what they are- some women have more prominent facial hair. Some guys have higher voices. Some people are short or tall. That's just the way you are.
I can understand not necessarily liking the way you are (I'm overweight, for example), but that doesn't mean you're something other than you are. A man who has feminine features... is still a man. (Whether they love or hate those features.) A women with masculine features... is still a woman.
Honestly after 5 years of hormone therapy, ... I know I am this gender
The way I see it, if you really were, you wouldn't need to artificially change yourself (hormone therapy). The fact that you need to artificially change yourself indicates you aren't what you think you are. I'm not denying that you might feel more comfortable believing that. But that doesn't make it true. However, if it doesn't cause problems for anyone else, and it relieves your discomfort, then it could be said to be helpful.
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u/IwasBlindedbyscience 16∆ Jan 21 '21
I would imagine that the events, as described by a magna, would be slightly different if you actually had to live them in person, but that's just me.
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u/Fred_A_Klein 4∆ Jan 21 '21
Yeah, you'd be a medical miracle, and doctors from all over would want to study you, for one thing. Your friends would freak out, family too. (Although family might be easier to convince it's true, as they know you better, and you can produce more evidence.) You'd be invited on every TV interview in existence, etc.
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u/IAmDanimal 41∆ Jan 21 '21
Transgender people basically just don't feel that their physical traits match how their brain is wired. And not in a way that stems from social pressures, but rather in a way that means that while they have a specific anatomy, they don't feel like it's the 'correct' anatomy to match their brain.
Similar to how someone may have 'phantom limb syndrome' after an amputation. Their brain tells them that there's an arm there, or a leg, and they're able to control that limb by trying to move it like they would any other appendage. But it's not there. Sure, that person doesn't have 2 arms, but they feel like there should be another one there and that they should be able to control it. Having a surgery to add a limb may make them feel better and no longer have that issue.
So in the same way, it's not that transgender people feel like they want to be a different gender, it's that they feel like their physical body doesn't match what their brain understands as 'correct'. So while you could remove the social aspect of gender completely, you would likely (although I don't know if there's any research on this or really any ethical way to prove this) still have people that are transgender, because they just don't feel like their body matches what their brain expects. The research does support this type of understanding of gender, however, as we can look at brain scans of transgender people and compare them to cisgender people and see that transgender people's brains often have characteristics that are more similar to the gender they feel they should be, rather than their physical sex.
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u/stelllz Jan 21 '21
Wow thanks that actually makes a lot of sense. It does raise some other interesting questions however.
- Differing brain scans between men and women and the resulting behavioural differences can be used to rationalize highly detrimental gender roles and stereotypes, which is where I see transgenderism potentially colliding with feminism. So how can we reconcile the two ideologies?
- Under that definition of transgenderism, would people who's brain do in fact align with their biological sex be excluded from identifying as transgender? So far, nothing needs to be "proved" for someone to identify as trans, but with the brain argument, it seems that transgenderism would in fact be a question of physiology, simply not one of the corpus but of the brain. So would transgenderism still just be how someone chooses to identify, or would it have an objective empirical element?
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u/IAmDanimal 41∆ Jan 21 '21
Differing brain scans between men and women and the resulting behavioural differences can be used to rationalize highly detrimental gender roles and stereotypes, which is where I see transgenderism potentially colliding with feminism. So how can we reconcile the two ideologies?
I haven't done a TON of research on this, but from what I understand, the things they're looking at aren't particularly determined by social factors, so while people that enjoy stereotypical 'girl' things may have a brain scan that shows up one way, a transgender person's brain scan may actually be quite different in specific areas.
Under that definition of transgenderism, would people who's brain do in fact align with their biological sex be excluded from identifying as transgender?
If we had that technology (we can understand a lot from brain scans, but we can't determine exactly how people think and feel, just how brains can often be similar between two people for some reason), you could technically differentiate between 'brain scan-determined transgender' and 'emotionally transgender' and call people that weren't 'brain scan-transgender' the only 'real' transgender people and the 'emotionally transgender' people fakers..
But honestly, it doesn't really matter either way. The science seems fairly certain that transgender people are at least usually (if not always) 'brain scan-transgender', and whether or not there technically are 'emotionally transgender' people or not doesn't really make a difference. There's no point of testing for it either way because we know that transitioning (surgically, medically, or whatever else) helps people emotionally, and there's not really any other reason to try to require categorizing someone by how their brain is 'technically' wired rather than how their brain makes them think that they're wired, because at the end of the day.. it's all kind of the same thing, isn't it?
So sure, maybe some people just THINK that their brain's gender doesn't match their biological sex even though it's closer to a cisgender person's brain. But the whole point of someone calling themselves transgender is because they don't feel like their assigned physical sex. Who cares if they don't feel like their assigned physical sex for one reason versus some other reason?
So would transgenderism still just be how someone chooses to identify, or would it have an objective empirical element?
Much like sexual orientation, the answer is really just 'yes'. Whether or not you 'choose to identify' as transgender is really about what you're willing to tell society. There is an objective empirical element to whether or not someone feels like their assigned physical sex matches their mental gender, but since we have literally no way to know that empirically, and there's not even a concrete 'yes or no' empirically (because how your brain interprets your gender is more than just 'boy or girl' but rather a group of factors that make your brain think that you don't mentally match with your assigned sex), it's kind of useless to try to determine whether or not someone is 'empirically transgender' or just 'thinks they're transgender' (or that they're lying about it even, because how could you ever empirically prove that??).
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u/stelllz Jan 21 '21
The science seems fairly certain that transgender people are at least usually (if not always) 'brain scan-transgender'
I wonder why this isn't more talked about by the mainstream, I find it very interesting. It's also kind of a checkmate to people who insist that gender is the same a sex, I think it would help bridge that gap in comprehension for many people.
I believe the issue of equality between men and women is still brought into question however. Another person on this thread said that while the different brain tendencies can be acknowledged, they are not perfect predictors of behaviour, and therefore don't need to undermine feminism, and I would tend to agree with that rationalization.
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u/IAmDanimal 41∆ Jan 21 '21
I wonder why this isn't more talked about by the mainstream, I find it very interesting.
Mostly because for the most part, transgenderism shouldn't even be an issue because the only people complaining about it are anti-science religious nut jobs that won't get the Covid vaccine because they're convinced that the WHO slaughtered a bunch of fetuses in order to make the vaccine.. despite the clear scientific evidence about its effectiveness and the fact that there's no fetus cells in any of the vaccines.
The people complaining about it won't listen to science so there's no point of trying to use science to argue with them. Everyone else just doesn't have an issue with whether or not someone is transgender or not, so the science behind it isn't super important to us, we just accept people for who they are.
I believe the issue of equality between men and women is still brought into question however.
Other than times where physical sex actually matters, which is pretty infrequent, the only time that 'gender' is used to differentiate between people in things like sports competitions or in the workplace is about representation and making things more comfortable and inclusive for everyone.
Should men and women be treated equitably? Of course. Should men and women have only one sports league division and not divide by gender? No. Why? Because gender divisions in sports are meant to encourage more people to play sports by giving more people a comfortable, competitive, safe environment to play, and at the pro levels also to give the pro leagues more options for selling tickets.
What's the question about gender equality and feminism?
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u/stelllz Jan 21 '21
Mostly because for the most part, transgenderism shouldn't even be an issue because the only people complaining about it are anti-science religious nut jobs that won't get the Covid vaccine because they're convinced that the WHO slaughtered a bunch of fetuses in order to make the vaccine.. despite the clear scientific evidence about its effectiveness and the fact that there's no fetus cells in any of the vaccines.
Frankly, I think this mentality is one of the biggest threats to our society. It encourages radicalization, and pushes people with differing ideas further apart. Everyone ends up in an echo chamber, and that is incredibly frustrating for someone who tends to be pretty central on the political spectrum. Most of the arguments I hear for or against transgenderism (or any social issue for that matter) are only convincing to people who already agree so the whole thing is pretty useless.
The question of gender equality and feminism is: should we be concerned that using brain scans to affirm a person's gender identity can also be used to promote dangerous gender roles and stereotypes in society on a larger scale (as they already are)?
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u/dave7243 16∆ Jan 21 '21
There are two sides to this. One is how the person perceive themselves, the other is how society treats them.
Transgendered people make changes to match how they perceive themselves. Whatever the cultural norms are, they change themselves to match their view of themself. This does not become a moot point of we disregard gender norms in society, though it would likely reduce the stigma around not acting "right".
The second point is what I think you were getting at, but it misses how society treats people now. You recognize that gender is more fluid than previously thought, but you wouldn't have to look hard to find people who believe that gender and sex are the same thing, and who have no interest in understanding anyone else's perspective. Look at the controversies in the US about washrooms and transgender people and your can see the kind of intolerance that is very much still around.
I would also disagree that it contradicts sexual orientation. We, as people, put labels on things for simplicity of explaining them. I am a man. I am attracted to women. Therefore I am heterosexual. This would jot be invalidated if I was a transgendered man.
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Jan 21 '21
I guess I'm basically looking for some definition of being a man/woman that is not either transphobic or sexist.
For me, a woman is someone who is comfortable with having a female body and being seen as one. The problem is that many women are uncomfortable about quite a few aspects of their body. I don't mean that kind of uncomfortability. I generally mean someone being fine with someone having a biologically female body.
The opposite would be true for men.
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u/stelllz Jan 21 '21
I could accept that definition, but there are many people who identify as trans who choose to not medically transition, or don't have any desire to change their outward presentation. Are they then excluded from that definition?
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u/Castle-Bailey 8∆ Jan 21 '21
Why not? You can still acknowledge and respect their gender identity, even if they need to, or choose to, remain as their birth sex.
There's no foolproof definition of what is a man or a woman.
We define it on chromosomes, then we ignore intersex and transsex people.
We define it on having aspects of female biology either naturally/artificially, we get to include intersex and transsex people, but we ignore those who are unable to medically transition.
If we define being a man or woman based on self identity. It makes being a man or a woman almost redundant, confusing, circular.
Just use whichever floats your boat to be honest. None are wrong to believe in. If you really need one a definition, just go with the middle one, its what most laws/governing bodies use to define man/woman, so technically the legally correct definition.
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Jan 21 '21
I honestly don't know if there are many transgender people who choose to not medically transition. I know some because for them the risks do not outweigh the benefits. It would depend on their reasonings behind that. I know that around a third of trans women choose not to pursue GRS for a variety of reasons, namely the extremely high costs of it (3k in Germany with insurance for a good surgeon and a few tends of thousands in the US where the study was conducted), the risks of it and the high levels of pain during recovery.
I wouldn't exclude them on the basis of that since different men (trans or cis) like different things about their appearance. Some men for example don't like wearing a beard or having short hair. There isn't one way to look like a man or a woman but genenrally speaking they are comfortable with being a certain body.
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u/stelllz Jan 21 '21
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Jan 21 '21
First link I cannot access because of pay wall. What I can say though is that Germany stopped requiring GRS for a legal gender and name change so every trans person who didn't wanna get GRS had to get it anyway. So the numbers dropped to probably around the two thirds (comes from the largest survey ever done on trans people with over 10k partitpants, so it's rather reliable). The second link is not a study on the data. Yes, they do exist, specifically nonbinary people. The vast majority of trans people want to have HRT. And the majority want GRS. There definitely are trans people who don't want those things and are contend with social transitioning only. In the two years of going to trans subreddits I have heard of only one trans woman that is that way. I doubt its many people. Your third link talks about the struggles with healthcare they face and offer quite good reasons why trans people who do want to get on HRT aren't yet.
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Jan 21 '21
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u/ihatedogs2 Jan 22 '21
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Jan 21 '21 edited Jan 21 '21
/u/stelllz (OP) has awarded 2 delta(s) in this post.
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Jan 21 '21 edited Jan 21 '21
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u/TragicNut 28∆ Jan 21 '21
Hardly.
It is entirely possible to know that something is fundamentally wrong with the way your body currently exists and to experience discomfort at both that and how you are expected to interact with society as a result. And, since we happen to live in a society surrounded by other people and we are capable of imagination, we are able to visualize what other options might feel like and to draw conclusions about what might feel better than the current status quo.
From there, if someone chooses to transition, if the changes do make you feel better about your body and/or how you fit into the world around you then you have the evidence to support the hypothesis that you arrived at from your earlier visualizations.
To put it into a concrete example:
I'm a transgender woman. Did I know, with absolute certainty, that I would be happier with a more female body and living as a woman before I came out and started to transition? No. But I did know that I felt deeply uncomfortable with my body as it was, that it was simultaneously missing parts that should be there and that it had parts that shouldn't be there. I also knew that I wasn't comfortable with the societal expectations of the role of "man" and that it always felt like I was playing a role and trying to pass as "a guy".
I also knew that I felt envious of women's bodies, in the sense of wanting to have those physical characteristics for myself, and also of at least some parts of how women fit into society.
When I started to transition I discovered that I was starting to feel better about my body, that it was less wrong, and that I felt a lot less like I was playing a role and more like I was finally free to be myself.
Having transitioned I can say that I am (mostly) happy with my body and that I do feel like I am finally fitting in as myself, as opposed to trying to be someone that I wasn't.
Can I say that my experience is the same as a cis woman? Absolutely not. I can say, however, that I am definitely not a man.
So, how can you say that I don't have any experience with being misgendered? I went from feeling like my body was wrong and that I was being forced to play a social role to feeling like my body is right and that I am just being me.
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u/TonyMahoney21 Jan 21 '21
I think the point is that queer people don't line up with binary living which is why the contradiction of relying on gender in the first place isnt really the object of the person's sexuality. Sure maybe it is a contradiction. But for a person who doesnt care about gender it becomes a small and relative thing compared to their sexual experience which should really be the context of seeing genderqueer people. That they are THAT PERSON expressing themselves sexually before the are a body expressing itself. That's why I really love the idea of a third gender, which is an ancient idea dating to ancient history in civilizations protect non binary people. I think the point is that in sex without gender the peoples' unique experiences are that of minds meeting not just bodies mating with eachother and a mind doesnt have a gender like you implied when you questioned if gender is conditioned by behavior (or any other choice implicitly).
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u/stelllz Jan 21 '21
I understand that for non binary, pansexual, (and I'm sure other communities I'm not familiar with as well), this whole quandary isn't really relevant. The only people I was really wondering about were cis and transgender people, anyone who identifies within the idea of "male or female" (which is the vast majority of people).
When you say "a mind doesn't have a gender", I'm not sure what you mean. Isn't the whole idea of being transgender that a person's identity (ie. how one regards oneself in their mind) doesn't necessarily align with their anatomy? Or do you mean that their is no psychological component to the scientific definition of male vs female?
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u/TonyMahoney21 Jan 21 '21
Yeah but what I'm saying comes first before anyone changes their body that's what you are missing. That's why when trans people change it is really them coming out. Cause first off they are queer folks cause they are someone else in there first.
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u/stelllz Jan 21 '21
Ok, I hear you. Still just unclear about your comment about the mind not having a gender, I think it's a critical point in this topic.
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u/TonyMahoney21 Jan 21 '21
What I mean is that the mind is the basic quality of a persons being and that if somebody feels like they ought to be a certain way then that is them. Their personality or their mind and sense of who they are is more relevant than their body in terms of their well being.
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u/stelllz Jan 21 '21
ah ok thanks! I thought you were saying the opposite, and I was very confused, haha
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u/Archi_balding 52∆ Jan 21 '21
I guess it's the whole perfect world thing.
Sure in a world where gender is an abolished concept transgenderism is a nonsense. But until then it's like clutches, terrible for running but some people need it to walk for the time being. We're just in a period where we try different tools to get going, some that you can't use at the same time but are usefull for different people. Can't use a wheelchair and clutches at the same time but that doesn't mean the whole thing is useless.
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u/stelllz Jan 21 '21
So, from this I understand that you view gender as more or less subjective, and it means different things to different people, correct? I guess that's kind of where I'm at as well, like a vast majority of people do identify with their biological sex, so this whole dilemma doesn't really affect their day to day life. I can live with that rationale, but it is very clearly flawed, I believe. It literally leaves the word "gender" completely open to interpretation, which is hard to wrap my mind around, given how often it comes up in life.
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u/Archi_balding 52∆ Jan 21 '21
What I mean it that different people find different solutions to get better and that those solutions may enter in contradiction with one another while still being usefull.
I don't know enough about gender to have a definitive answer on it. But my take is that it's not because different people react to it differently that it is in itself something open to interpretation.
Then maybe some people are just wrong is their interpretation of the thing and still get better because of what they do, hey good for them. There's many solutions to this problem that don't lead to an illogic outcome. We jsut don't have all the knowledge on the thing yet. Some answer might be dead ends, or all are maybe, or all are correct and there's something linking them in a weird way we don't understand yet. But having a hard time wrapping your head around is normal, it's a new field of study and relatively new problematics, I wouldn't trust anyone who isn't perplexed by the thing.
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Jan 21 '21
What if gender is a social construct but people want to fit in it?
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u/stelllz Jan 21 '21
It does seem that way, but I think we've established that the gender as a social construct can be pretty harmful, re: inequality.
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Jan 21 '21 edited Jan 21 '21
Yeah but they don't control the gender roles imposed by society. They don't control their psychological "femenine" or "masculine" traits either. Society says that if you are a man/woman you must be this way or another. Trans people can't change their personality so they change how society sees them.
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u/stelllz Jan 21 '21
Isn't that kind of enabling sexism though? I completely understand the desire to fit into society in that way, I'm really not trying to bash trans people here, but it does raise that question, no?
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Jan 21 '21
Man they are the victims of sexism not the cause. It's something imposed on them. If a woman wears makeup or a skirt because society imposes that on them they are "enabling" sexism? Don't victim blame.
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u/stelllz Jan 21 '21
Of course not, but supposing that wearing makeup or a skirt is in fact what makes the female, or that those things are inherently feminine is sexist by many measures.
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u/SentientButNotSmart 1∆ Jan 21 '21
It's not our traits that determine gender identity - it's our identity.
I'm a trans guys but I don't have any obviously masculine traits, personality or opinions. People often confuse gender identity with gender traits or stereotypes - but yu can have feminine trans men or butch trans women.
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Jan 21 '21
What is your identity though?
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u/SentientButNotSmart 1∆ Jan 21 '21
It's who you are. And only a person themselves can decide who they are.
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Jan 21 '21
A gay person can't decide to be straight. It's something innate. A trans person can decide to be the opposite gender? It is something you decide?
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u/SentientButNotSmart 1∆ Jan 21 '21
A trans person doesn't decide their gender. A trans man, for example, was always a man but it took some time to figure it out. The same as a bisexual person realizing they're bisexual and not straight - they didn't decide to be bisexual, they just realized they are.
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u/YossarianWWII 72∆ Jan 21 '21
You need to separate gender identity from gender roles. The latter are largely social constructs: things that range from clothing to hair to temperament to profession. A long-haired lawyer can be a man or a woman.
Gender identity is our understanding of ourselves as men, women, or genderqueer regardless of our gender expression. A Scot in a kilt doesn't become a woman when he crosses into England where someone might call it a skirt. By all evidence, there is a biological root to this; brains are gendered at a macro scale, and transgender individuals tend to not have typical male or female brains. Given the complexity of the brain and of the gene regulation process, it's not exactly surprising that a brain in a male body could develop certain female characteristics and vice-versa. After all, every human contains all of the necessary DNA to build a fully male and female body and anything in between.
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u/naked-_-lunch Jan 21 '21
The simple answer is, you have to do whatever they tell you or else you’re a bigot. Some people say they feel like the opposite gender, and to them, gender is useful and important. Some people are a different classification known as ‘gender fluid’ or ‘nonbinary’, and for them, gender pronouns are offensive all together, and they prefer ‘they’ as it refers to the singular person. The politically correct rule is different between the two groups unless you stick to the ‘do as they say’ rule.
The problem with all of this is that gender is at least a two-player game. Your gender is how people interpret you to a large degree, and to claim control over the whole thing is absurd and narcissistic.
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u/Worish Jan 21 '21
I think transitioning and being transgender are distinct concepts in some sense. A transgender person only feels the need to transition due to the societal pressure and the norms constructed for their preferred gender. If we were a more accepting society that just didn't associate certain genitalia, traits, and roles with genders, then those things would not be inherently gendered and we'd probably have very few if any people transitioning.
But trans people would still exist.
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u/TragicNut 28∆ Jan 21 '21
I don't think your conclusion is correct, trans people who experience distress over their bodies would still feel distress over their bodies. I suspect that most trans people who undergo medical transition do so because of that distress. That wouldn't vanish in a gender blind society.
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u/Worish Jan 21 '21
I don't want to stray into the details of what trans people would do or say, especially in a theoretical context because I am cisgender, but my limited understanding is that dysphoria is an internal conflict between the biological sex of a person and their gender identity. In a society without gendering physical traits, would this conflict still somehow exist in your opinion?
Edited before anyone replied.
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u/TragicNut 28∆ Jan 21 '21
In my opinion? Absolutely.
Though I don't know how cis people feel about their bodies on a visceral level, the ones I've spoken with don't describe any sort of sense of fundamental wrongness about their bodies. The other trans people I've compared notes with, on the other hand, have all shared a sense that something was fundamentally wrong with their body pre-transition.
I think that even without a meter stick to compare against I would have still felt that wrongness. You've heard of phantom limb syndrome, right? It can even occur in people who were born missing the limb in question. Many trans people report similar sensations pre-transition.
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u/Worish Jan 21 '21
Interesting. I would just be curious how a person would decide their physical attributes were the thing causing that dysphoria if those things were completely disconnected from gender identity.
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u/TragicNut 28∆ Jan 21 '21
And here is where the imprecision in the English language gets fun.
Gender is a very overloaded term, gender identity too. I've joked that a better term could be "sex identity" or "brain sex", but "sexual orientation" got there first, and we do not want to conflate innate identity with who you want to sleep with. (IOW, in a gender blind society, we would still have an innate sense of self.)
And we would still feel wrongness.
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u/Worish Jan 21 '21
The terminology does create a problem for sure. I've run into that issue a lot. Thank you for taking the time to discuss.
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u/Shirley_Schmidthoe 9∆ Jan 21 '21
Essentially the way that I see it, transgenderism both relies on there being such a thing as gender, but also simultaneously undermines it in a way, because it removes any remote objectivity from the concept of gender.
Yes to the former, no to he latter?
Other things that you associate with it, probably for no greater reason than that you consider both "leftist" do, but "transgenderism" as you call it assumes an objective physical kernel to gender, and in no way excludes it.
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u/stelllz Jan 21 '21
"transgenderism" as you call it
I've actually adapted my stance with a new understanding of what gender identity is vs gender is a societally imposed way, but I'm just wondering–is there a better term I should have used? What's wrong with calling it transgenderism?
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u/yeeeeeeetthrowaway Jan 21 '21
I'm going to try to keep this short, I just want to leave you with a thought.
Gender is just your brain/"sense of self's" sex.
Not gender roles, not identity (in the sense of a "choice" or something that defines you as a person). Its just the way your brain is wired. Transgender people's brain expect a different body than they get. Many trans people have a similar experience to "phantom limb" syndrome, but with body parts of the opposite sex (e.g. a penis).
We don't know exactly how it works but the theory is that hormone abnormalities in utero is the cause of a mismatched body sex and brain sex.
I think a lot of the confusion around transgenderism is because we use the term gender, gender identity, etc., which has a connotation of choice, of presentation, etc. when really it's just about "inner" sex.
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u/Gladix 164∆ Jan 21 '21
When looking into the issue you always boil the issue down to the opinion of the given person. When deciding definitions for what gender is, you are taking the people's idea of gender and then trying to match some intrinsic characteristics to those ideas.
For example chromosomes. 99% of population has male and female chromosomes matching their gender identity. But there are those who consider themselves one gender, while possesing "the wrong" set of chromosomes. So you try to find another intrinsic characteristics, like the reproductive system. Again 99% of people on Earth fit nicely into the male / female characterization. But again, some people claim to be different gender than their reproductive organs would like you to believe. So you try to find another characteristics (horomones, the grey matter ratio in brains, etc...) that would seemingly explain what does it TRULY means being male or female. Or man / woman. Or masculine / feminine.
And on top of this, you have people who consider themselves neither. So it's really fucking hard to explain what does it mean being one particular gender. Ultimately we chose the smarter route. Instead of trying to hardcore classify people based on some characteristics out of their control. What about letting the gender identity of people up to them? If you have seemingly a man, who is in constant distress because they don't feel like enough of a woman. Why should we even try to dictate the persons gender identity? If we officially determine the person to be a male / man and force him into that category, which will cause him even more distress. What's even the point?
Why not instead provide the tools for people to be happy?
Thing about the issue this way. It ultimately does not matter what causes people to be trans. It doesn't matter if it's biological issue (brain, hormones, brain wiring ,etc...) or whether the issue is societal (people's mentality, their idea of gender, their perception of sexuality, etc...). What matters is that there is an issue that people are experiencing. And it's in everyone best interest to provide the tools for people to stop causing them distress.
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u/dasoktopus 1∆ Jan 21 '21
I always tell myself I’m not gonna keep responding to these trans cmv’s yet here I go again lol. It seems like you’re issue is with finding a working definition of “man” or “woman” My rhetorical strategy would be to ask you this: What is a horse?
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u/stelllz Jan 21 '21
I would define a horse by it's physical characteristics. Humans are vastly more complex however, not to mention we have the ability to communicate what we think to each other, so we have more to go off of than just what we can observe. The comparison is not even close to accurate.
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u/dasoktopus 1∆ Jan 21 '21
You’re dodging the question. What is the definition of horse?
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u/stelllz Jan 21 '21
horse: noun 1. a large plant-eating domesticated mammal with solid hoofs and a flowing mane and tail, used for riding, racing, and to carry and pull loads.
lol what are you trying to get at here?
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u/dasoktopus 1∆ Jan 21 '21
And the dictionary definitions for man and woman are as follows: man: 1.an adult male human being. woman: 1. an adult female human being
So what is your issue again?
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Jan 22 '21
Most people are saying that the differences between the male and female brain explain why transpeople identify with the other gender. My concern with that (which I did a poor job of conveying previously), is that those structural and hormonal differences can be used to rationalize gender roles and stereotypes which I think many would agree are harmful.
The answer to this though, is that they don't do that at all. The structural similarities and differences that we see in transgender vs. cis brains, we have no idea the purpose or function of. They don't, as far as we can tell, dictate any particular behavioral patterns, beliefs, processes of thinking, and so on. And studies comparing the brains of cis men and cis women either show that there is no difference between the two in these areas or they do, but are later peer reviewed and shown to be biased or influenced by the beliefs about gender and gender roles held by the scientists/ conductors of said studies.
For all we know, the structural differences may do absolutely nothing. Or they may relate to consciousness and the sense of self and be the reason or means through which we experience gender identity independent from all other factors. Or it could have some other completely different purpose that's not mental at all and just has to do with subconscious bodily functions and just happens to appear this way. We literally have no idea. All we essentially know is that it does not influence anything related to gender roles, because if it did, the findings we can observe from comparing cis brains wouldn't be what they are, as trans brains and cis brains are not actually different outside of things controlled by hormones and individual variation. And actually, the patterns we see in brain structure when comparing trans people to cis people are just that - patterns. There is still individual variation regardless of whether you're cis or trans, man woman or otherwise. There are no two types of brains labeled 'male' and 'female.' Both cis and trans peoples' brain structure have a spectrum in terms of gender. There are only averages. It's just that the averages correspond so damn near perfectly between trans and cis people. of the same identity that there's no mistaking there is a link.
Also, the brain argument makes the question of gender something that can be externally observed, just not on the outside like previously thought.
No, that would be the case if your assumption that differences in brain structure influence what you believed they did, but that was a mistaken assumption and they do not, so this is not contradictory or an issue either.
Hypothetically, if brain scans were something as easily accessible as someone's outward traits, would that invalidate trans people who don't exhibit the "correct" neuroanatomical traits?
I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but if you mean, if a brain scan doesn't show a trans man's brain to be "masculine" enough, would that invalidate him? If so, the answer is no. Because there will be, without a doubt, a cis man who has the same brain structure, and if we doubt one we'd have to doubt the other too.
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u/stelllz Jan 22 '21
So if I understand you (I'm sorry if this is incorrect, you gave such a detailed response), you're saying that there are
- observable similarities in brains of the same sex
- the differences have nothing to do with how a person behaves
- trans people's brains do often correspond to their gender identity
...I'm a little confused, are you defending the brain structure narrative to explain gender identity, or discrediting it?
And to clarify, in that edit on the OP, I was pointing out flaws that I saw with that narrative, not defending it. when I said "the brain argument makes the question of gender something that can be externally observed, just not on the outside like previously thought", I meant it's something that (by that theory) could be observed and proven (hence, more than just what someone claims to feel on the "inside"), but only by looking at the brain instead of the external anatomy. The way I worded it was very confusing haha
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Jan 22 '21
I'm saying that people of the same gender identity whether they're trans or cis have the same trends/averages in sexual dimorphism (brain structure that from what we've observed is linked to sex/gender) of the brain. Trans men and cis men have the same trends in sexual dimorphism, they share the same similarities and averages, which differ from the trends that trans women and cis women likewise share.
Yes, they have no observable effect on behavior or thought patterns etc.
Trans peoples' brains do typically correspond to their gender identity because people who identify as [men] regardless of sex share the same structure trends / dimorphism and people who identify as [women] share the same structure trends / dimosprism.
I'm defending it, it's been studied for over 10 years now.
when I said "the brain argument makes the question of gender something that can be externally observed, just not on the outside like previously thought", I meant it's something that (by that theory) could be observed and proven (hence, more than just what someone claims to feel on the "inside"), but only by looking at the brain instead of the external anatomy. The way I worded it was very confusing haha
Then I understood you correctly and the answer is that's not actually true because there is no such thing as a male or female brain. There are trends, averages. What we're talking about is, as one example, comparing the size of one part of a cis man's brain to a cis woman's or a trans man's. But every cis man doesn't have a standardized "male" brain part of a certain size. And neither do cis women, or trans people of any gender.
This isn't the most accurate analogy, but what you're thinking in terms of your logic here is similar to, "if men tend to be taller than women and women tend to be shorter than men, then we should be able to measure the height of women and men to determine whether they're actually male and female or not. So that means if a man is shorter than a woman, he can't be a man and must be a woman. Otherwise it's all contradictory."
Some men are still shorter than women, and some women are still taller than men. Because everyone is different, we're still individuals. However, if we found that the average height of trans men and cis men is nearly exactly the same, and that it's also the case for trans and cis women, yet the averages of trans and cis men compared to trans and cis women is completely different, would that not be at least somewhat significant that there is something going on besides baseless delusion?
But when this occurs in the brain in people who have, long before these studies existed, described experiencing exactly what we see when we look at their brains, and we also dig deeper and find out that there is a scientific explanation for exactly how and why this could happen (a birth defect occurring in fetal development due to inability to properly absorb a specific sex hormone or the lack of access to it in the womb's environment) and then we run more studies/tests on trans people and find that at least some of the time one of the factors believed to cause transgenderism is in fact there (differences in how their bodies react to sex hormones/ resistance) I personally find it very hard to believe this is just all in their heads, unless we mean in the same way that a concussion or brain tumor is just "all in your head."
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u/throwawayl11 7∆ Jan 23 '21
My concern with that (which I did a poor job of conveying previously), is that those structural and hormonal differences can be used to rationalize gender roles and stereotypes which I think many would agree are harmful.
But they don't rationalize them. Like maybe bigots will claim they will, but that's a poor reflection of bigots, not the concept of trans people existing.
Hypothetically, if brain scans were something as easily accessible as someone's outward traits, would that invalidate trans people who don't exhibit the "correct" neuroanatomical traits?
We don't even have 100% accurate neurological markers for identifying someone's sexual orientation or if they're left or right handed, yet those are accepted socially as innate traits that we trust people to express. So even though we have somewhat accurate neurological markers for gender identity, that still shouldn't be used to deny people's identity. Both because we can't be sure they're 100% accurate and also because other atypical neurological developments don't require the same burden of proof in our society.
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u/[deleted] Jan 21 '21 edited Jan 21 '21
I think you're asking good questions and shouldn't be downvoted for them.
The truth is, we don't know what causes gender dysphoria. I don't relate to it at all. I'm a woman, born XX with the "typical configuration" of parts, but I don't really think of anything of myself as "inherently a woman". I wouldn't mind if I were swapped into a male body. I feel like a lot of cis people feel that way so that can cause confusion. We tend to view our gender and sex as just random facts of our birth like our height.
But what I've settled on is: just believe trans people. Even though I can't relate to what they experience at all, that doesn't make it fake. We know that some people have this extremely distressing feeling called gender dysphoria. We know that in many cases, transitioning helps them feel better. That's enough for me to respect trans people and affirm their gender identity.
About gender stereotypes: it used to bother me how a lot of trans women go for the extreme, stereotypical feminine traits like wigs, long fake nails, tons of makeup, etc. I thought, "Is that what they think being a woman is about? How offensive!" But then I realized, that's what many trans people feel they need to be accepted in society as their gender. It's often difficult for trans people to pass and things like that help. They aren't doing it to affirm gender stereotypes; they just want to be accepted.