[Related: Silphium; Trans-Positive Gender Abolitionism Is Totally Possible, Yes It Is]
In Favor of Gender Abolitionism
By the ancient law of Chesterton’s Fence, when one sees a fence in a field for no reason, one should by no account knock it down. People don’t build fences for no reason. If you don’t know why that fence is there, then you should figure out why, in case the answer is “it is a necessary part of preventing Cthulhu from rising from sunken R’lyeh and destroying us all.”
So let’s talk about why people built this here gender fence.
There is one obvious difference between human men and human women: namely, with a few exceptions, women are the ones who have babies and who breastfeed. The second obvious difference is that (again, with a few exceptions) men are stronger than women.
Gender-related human universals include:
- females do more direct childcare
- males dominate public/political realm
- males engage in more coalitional violence
- males more aggressive
- males more prone to lethal violence
- males more prone to theft
- males, on average, travel greater distances over lifetime
- division of labor by sex
So let’s pretend we’re designing a society with two groups that are entirely identical, except that one of them is physically stronger and one of them has babies. Obviously, you’re going to have a division of labor by sex: you want women to perform work that can be easily done while pregnant or nursing a child, and men to do any work that requires physical strength. Women are going to do more childcare, because they’ve already nursed the children so they have more of a connection, and taking care of children is an obvious example of work one can do while pregnant or nursing. Men will be more aggressive, violent, and prone to theft, because they’re stronger and more likely to win. Men will travel farther, because they don’t have to carry children and with all the strength and concomitant violence they’re more able to take care of themselves in strange territory. The public/political realm is disproportionately likely to involve (a) violence, (b) going far away, or (c) things that are hard to do while pregnant or nursing, explaining male dominance. Besides, men are the violent and strong sex; even if women wanted power, the men would be more than capable of violently enforcing that women couldn’t get it.
If you have all those sex differences in how your society works, it affects how you’d socialize your children. After all, if you’re certain Jane is going to take care of children as an adult, you should probably teach her the necessary skills when she’s a child. Similarly, you’d also want to inculcate different values in men and women: John, who might grow up to be a soldier, needs to be taught the importance of bravery.
The thing is that, thanks to technology, very few of these considerations apply in our current society. A sexually active woman before birth control and low infant mortality rates could expect to be pregnant or nursing for most of her life; after birth control, she can expect to have one or two children. Thanks to bottlefeeding and breastmilk pumping, fathers can take a nearly-equal role in the early years of a child’s life. Physical strength is an advantage for fewer and fewer jobs. More and more jobs can be easily done by a working mother.
Therefore, there is less need to socialize men and women differently.
However, gender socialization also has fairly significant costs. Enforcing particular norms requires punishing people who deviate from them: hence, oppositional sexism. Even those who are not punished might end up in worse situations than they would have without gender roles: a man who’d be happier as a stay-at-home dad might end up working full-time because that’s what’s expected of them.
Some people have proposed that we end gender roles without ending gender. That is fairly plausible if you have a trans-exclusive viewpoint: you just let “gender” mean the same thing as “sex.” However, if you have a trans-inclusive viewpoint, then you have this mysterious Essence of Gender floating about that doesn’t indicate anything about a person. I predict that that is an unstable situation and what will happen is people not caring about gender at all.
It’s true that ending gender socialization would cause a decrease in neurodiversity: fewer people would have a strong sense that they are a particular gender. However, one can imagine gender clubs springing up like kink clubs do today: consenting adults may enact byzantine gender roles in private, without the costs associated with gender roles today. That preserves the “has gender” neurotype. And there might even be a net increase in neurodiversity. Right now, thanks to gender socialization, all the ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ traits are correlated, creating two primary neurotypes. If we ended gender socialization, they would become much much less correlated, allowing for a far wider array of possible neurotypes.
Against Gender Abolitionism
However, as I said, I’m only in favor of gender abolitionism on even-numbered days. On odd-numbered days, I have some other thoughts.
First, there may be more sex differences than strength and ability to bear children. My analysis above assumes that those sex differences are either too small to be usefully predictive or irrelevant to socialization. If it turns out men are slightly better than women at math, then you should probably ignore gender and just look at quantitative IQ. Women are significantly more capable of multiple orgasms than men, but that doesn’t affect anything interesting about socialization. However, if sex differences turn out to be tremendously important, as important as strength and childbearing, then my analysis is overturned.
(Note that the existence of very important sex differences does not imply the necessity of strengthening those sex differences through socialization. If men are more violent than women, then you should socialize men into androgyny– at least on that trait.)
One category of sex differences I find really interesting is sex differences in preferences about the other sex. If women as a whole are much more attracted to men with long hair, then you can improve women’s overall happiness by socializing men to want to have long hair. I find it pleasingly counterintuitive to think about a society in which men and women are basically the same but taught to be different because of their different desires about each other.
But the question that puzzles me most is:
Has anyone else noticed that social dysphoria is really weird?
People often have a preference about what category they’re put in. Maybe one category is treated better than another category; maybe one category more accurately reflects their experiences; maybe people in one category are expected to behave in a way that it’s easier for them to behave in. Social dysphoria is a preference about what category one is put in that is totally unrelated to any of those reasons. I agree that I have breasts, a vagina, a uterus, female-typical hormones, etc. and that many people consider “woman” to mean “a person who has breasts, a vagina, a uterus, female-typical hormones, etc.” Being nonbinary empirically involves all the nonsense involved with being a woman, with bonus tedious conversations about my gender and risk of being disowned. And people expect women to cry a lot, wear skirts, and watch Legally Blonde, and I am a total fan of all three of those things.
Nevertheless, I want people to put me in this imaginary “nonbinary” category I made up, rather than the “woman” category.
I have put a lot of effort into thinking about an analogous experience to social dysphoria, and the closest I can find is whether you identify as a “Michigander” or a “Californian” if you’ve lived in both places. Even that’s a bad analogy because it probably does relate to what “Michigander” means (a person with a connection to Michigan) and anyway if someone misstates you you are likely to shrug rather than to frantically google “Michigander passing tips assigned Californian at birth.”
Like, no wonder people keep thinking we transition out of a sexual fetish or a desire for male privilege! If I didn’t experience it I would be confused too.
Sometimes I explain social dysphoria as a product of the existence of constant gender socialization that sometimes misfires. But sometimes I wonder if what’s actually going on is that people have some sort of drive (of varying strength) to find their local gender role and execute it as best they can, regardless of what that gender role is.
There’s some evidence that cis people also experience that drive. Anecdotally, children often have amusingly flawed understandings of gender difference: a child whose mother is a doctor may conclude that boys can’t be doctors, while a child whose mother drinks coffee and whose father drinks tea may decide that girls like coffee and boys like tea. That certainly looks like children are trying to figure out what men and women are supposed to do in their own culture.
Children seem to acquire rigid gender stereotypes around age five and become more flexible around age seven. On one hand, of course, this might just be children noticing that a lot of our society is gendered; dividing children into two random groups is enough to create stereotypes. Children might just be looking for information about their own place in society, and noticing that gender is a pretty major division. On the other hand, as far as I know, there’s been no research showing that children acquire rigid race stereotypes around age five and become more flexible at seven. If gender rigidity is solely a product of children looking for firm roles in society, one would also expect to see race rigidity.
Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender alerted me to the research of primatologist Frances Burton. She argues that there is significant within-species variance among primates about gender roles: in some groups, males are involved parents, while in others, they are hands-off. Primates seem to “learn” gender roles from observing other primates within their local group. Since it is unlikely that primates were socialized into caring about gender by the patriarchal mass media, it seems that my hypothesized drive may be present in primates.
So if there is such a drive, what do we do?
Gender socialization still has fairly significant costs. However, leaving that drive unfulfilled seems likely to both make everybody unhappy and to not work. I would suggest keeping gender socialization to traits that are relatively unimportant and changeable by society. For instance, we might preserve women wearing skirts, liking pink, and listening to pop music, while eliminating the pressure on men not to cry and encouraging women to enjoy STEM fields.
blacktrance said:
People have a drive to prefer those who look similar to them. Should this drive be satisfied. Would a color-blind world make people unhappy? Even if it does, is the extent to which it would make people unhappy worth preserving social differences between races?
Why would gender be different? To the extent that it’s natural for children to pattern-match to a gender, it seems like another bias.
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Susebron said:
There’s a missing part at “If gender is solely a thing
Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender”.
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yacheritsi said:
Some trifling comments:
1) Body Integrity Identity Disorder seems like the closest thing to gender dysphoria. Though some people have thought that people with that disorder express it out of a sexual fetish or desire for privilege as well.
2) Regarding kids and their rigid categories, last year, my then six year old daughter told me that I shouldn’t watch Frasier, because “It’s a kids’ show.” It was her favorite show at the time.
3) I enjoyed Legally Blonde as well. The local entertainment weekly’s review said that it “reads like a racist tract.” They would call any movie which dealt with race but didn’t toe the line “racist” but that one really stuck with me.
4) I’m struck by the number of SJ-people who only have even numbered days. That is, they only consider socialization, rather than nature as possible causes for why people are the way they are. I suspect it’s because it makes a better crowbar.
(If gender roles made pragmatic sense throughout virtually all of human history, why would our fixed natures not “wear into the groove”?)
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ozymandias said:
BIID is an analogue to physical dysphoria, which is *substantially* less confusing than social dysphoria.
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bem said:
Re: 4, I suspect that there are a pretty high number of people in SJ who are gender non-conforming, and this is likely to affect their opinions on gender a lot. I know that I frequently have a visceral negative reaction to conversations about innate gender differences from an evolutionary standpoint, because the usual descriptions of the way -women just innately are- really, really fail to match up with my lived experience. So I get stuck at either:
1-gender is a primarily a product of socialization, and my socialization was noticeably different from that of many women
2-there are some innate realities to gender, but these are much more variable across the population than people are giving them credit for
or
3-okay, fine, women are that way, and therefore I cannot correctly be described as a woman, please stop insisting on counting me as one.
Like, it’s really frustrating to be repeatedly told, “No, really, you -are- this way, your statements about yourself must be incorrect.” And the vast majority of the “gender differences are natural and innate” discussions aren’t nuanced enough to avoid doing this. And I really suspect that any gender ideology that doesn’t honestly attempt to recognize and make room for outliers is going to cause a lot of harm in the long run.
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yacheritsi said:
So people use the language of universals to talk about modes, and this irks?
It seems like a convenient shorthand sometimes, though I agree one needs to keep the outliers in mind.
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glenra said:
I have that problem with terms like “gender-fluid”. It was explained to me as “well, sometimes I feel really inclined towards girly things (say, wearing dresses), and other times I’m more drawn to masculine things (say, wearing pants and climbing trees)” and I thought “don’t we already have a word for that? The usual word is “woman”. Or better yet, “human”.
To say that we need a NEW SPECIAL WORD for “takes some attributes from both of the traditional binary categories, either simultaneously or at different times” seems to strongly imply something that seems on the face of it obviously false about what cismale and cisfemale people are like.
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mdaniels4 said:
I agree. As a human i have likes and dislikes that some are probably innate and some learned from experiential observation. But just bevause i am cis doesn’t mean that i categorically reject things jut because they might be traditionally associated with the opposite cis style. That cis female can be more accepted for this than cis males tells me this is more social construct than anything and if so then can be changed at will.
For example, I paint my toes because i think it looks better than when not and it makes me happy to see a spot of color. Probably women feel the same when their toes are polished. So am i gender fluid or just a human who decorates themselves? It hurts no one and says nothing of my gender or sexuality although many would make up all sorts of ideas about who i am and most likely due to incomplete information would be so totally off base but they wouldn’t think that odd at all.
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InferentialDistance said:
Think social dysphoria, not gender as an internal property. Some days they want to be perceived as male, so they’re drawn to masculine signifiers and behaviors. Other days they want to be perceived as female, so they’re drawn to female signifiers and behaviors.
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glenra said:
Huh. I’m probably suffering from Typical Mind Fallacy – I have no idea what it feels like to “want to be perceived as” a gender.
I’m male in much the same sense that I’m brown-haired. If I go bald or turn grey or dye my hair green I’ll stop being brown-haired but won’t stop being /me/. Similarly if some magic spell or whatever made me female I assume I’d adapt to that new reality.
In _Excluded_ (p.118), Serrano said: “As a result [of thinking gender is a social construct], gender artifactualists have typically dismissed transsexuals’ claims of having a deep, profound, subconscious self-understanding of which sex we belong to.”
Whereas I’m cismale and I’m pretty sure *I* don’t have “a deep, profound, subconscious self-understanding of which sex I belong to.” It’s just an attribute. I have blue eyes; I have a certain height or weight; I have male fiddly bits. When I do something males often do (eg: program computers) it’s not because I’m male or want to be perceived as male that I do it and when I refrain from doing something males often do (eg follow sports) it’s not despite being male or because in that moment I don’t want to be perceived as male that I refrain – gender presentation doesn’t enter the equation.
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Nita said:
@ glenra
Don’t worry, Ozy has invented a term for people like us — “cis by default”. Welcome to the club!
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MugaSofer said:
>I’m struck by the number of SJ-people who only have even numbered days. That is, they only consider socialization, rather than nature as possible causes for why people are the way they are.
Well, it’s an obvious explanation, isn’t it? You see a bunch of people acting according to gender roles, you see a bunch of people telling kids they have to follow gender roles, you see a bunch of people chafing under gender roles and getting yelled at … it seems intuitive that A–>B.
Of course, this doesn’t explain why people enforce these gender roles – or rather, why they started, since it’s essentially self-sustaining – but Chesterton’s Fence is a new thing, and anti-outgroup bias is an old one.
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John said:
The nationality example probably works as an analogy. If you go to certain pubs in Glasgow and describe people as “English” you may lose several teeth, and much of European history has been fought over similar arbitrary caegories.
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Ghatanathoah said:
I am reminded of something I read somewhere (I think it might have been by Bryan Caplan, but I’m not sure) where some Catholics voiced disagreements with the Church, and were asked why they didn’t transfer to a Protestant church that was more in line with their way of thinking. They got upset and replied that being Catholic was part of who they were.
There might be some people who assign value to being in certain national, religious, ethnic, and gender categories separately from the value they assign to having the properties those categories represent. I am not sure if this is a coherent preference or an incoherent one based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how categories work.
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ninecarpals said:
The analogy I use for explaining social dysphoria is how I feel about dresses:
There’s nothing wrong with dresses. They look great on other people; there’s plenty of variety to them; they’ve got a lot of things going for them in terms of comfort; but, no matter how hard I try, they look really stupid on me. Even when I had tits, and hips, and long hair, I looked awful in dresses. I couldn’t tell you why that is, except a vague ‘dresses just aren’t me‘. If you can pull dresses off, good for you!
That’s more or less how I view being a woman: Works great for other people; looks stupid on me.
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Evelyn said:
I am a cis woman but I feel the same way as you about dresses. They just look horrible and awkward on me, even though I have the standard “female” body-shape (large breasts, hips, long hair, etc).
I actually think dresses are really pretty and I’d like to wear them more often, but they’re just so uncomfortable and make me look…weird, so I don’t.
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Maxim Kovalev said:
Does that preference apply to dresses only, or to all aspects of unambiguously feminine fashion?
My mind doesn’t bother telling me anything beyond “this looks pretty on me” or “this makes my silhouette look so cool”, but I realize that the odds of me independently developing aesthetic preferences for so many unrelated things considered feminine in our culture are so low, I’m assuming my subconsciousness just wants to signal femininity by all means available.
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ninecarpals said:
Dresses only. I can rock skirts, for example – there’s something about combining a skirted lower half with a connected upper half that looks terrible on me.
(And pieces of clothing cut for different body types will look silly now as well, but the point is they didn’t pre-transition.)
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skiesalight said:
People seem to take men being stronger than women for granted, but I’ve seen one study against (admittedly, between professional athletes, which aren’t representative of the population), and no studies for. Do you know of any offhand?
Also, does the drive-towards-a-role need for that role to be tied to gender? Why can’t the roles be more like classes, like healer/ranger in RPGs or LuminousAlicorn’s Jokers/Bells/so on?
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Toggle said:
Height and weight differences alone would do it, I think. Even if muscle mass were proportionately identical, men would have more muscle mass in absolute terms.
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Evelyn said:
Yes, here is a study that confirms that men are (on average) stronger than women.
Click to access -ENG-Hand-grip-strength-in-judo.pdf
This study compared regular men, regular women, and highly trained female athletes. The men were stronger on average than both groups of women.
Here’s a good graph they included that shows the difference. Blue is the regular men, red is the regular women, and black is the female athletes. I’m not sure if or how we can embed images on wordpress, so I just uploaded it to imgur.
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Evelyn said:
Ah, looks like it embeds the images automatically! That’s great.
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tailcalled said:
Try finding someone of the opposite gender to wrestle arms with. You’re going to find that the testosterone-filled person wins, usually by a big margin.
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Ghatanathoah said:
Now I want to know if female hyenas are stronger than males, even after controlling for increased size. If I recall hyenas have extremely weird hormone balances compared to other mammals (hence the large masculine females).
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Alex Godofsky said:
The effect size on this one is so enormous that even casual observational studies of the form “look at the people around you” should be convincing.
If you need more, note that the difference in population means for height is about twice the within-population standard deviation.
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Patrick said:
It’s an odd day, so I get that you’re not doing this.
But WOW is the counter factual world in which we don’t “have gender” a big assumption.
I view that sort of thing like I view fellow atheists who declare that they get why people like religion, but it’s out of date so it should stop now. Ok…? Even if through some science fiction-y mechanism you eliminated all religions, people would just make new ones.
We can’t even stop people from imputing essentialist character traits to video game fandoms. We’re not about to stop them from doing it to a massively visible sexual dimorphism that touches on their sex drives, e.g., on the thing that takes up like 85% of their brain cycles in their most formative years.
I think we can craft what gender roles we want. We can prune them. We can teach people to be accepting of those who do not or cannot fit into them. But I think that’s about it.
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Toggle said:
I notice that you didn’t mention the neurochemical consequences of sex hormones- all the sex differences you mention are consequences of gross physical characteristics. Evolutionary psychology is, um, but I do try to be a good little materialist and d remember that thoughts are made out of atoms just like breasts and deltoid muscles.
Brains are pretty plastic, so it’s hypothetically possible that you could (socially) greatly mitigate or erase the behavioral consequences of sexually dimorphic neurochemistry. But all other things being equal, I’d be shocked if a lifetime of testosterone exposure didn’t cause any predictable changes in behavior. I mean, that’s what the receptors are there for.
It’s not particularly novel to suggest that behavior isn’t completely a consequence of socialization, but the absence of that viewpoint is fairly conspicuous in this post.
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ozymandias said:
Trans people who take hormones typically report various sexual changes and some sort of emotional change (the latter is, unfortunately, confounded by relief of dysphoria). Neither of those seems like it would cause interesting differences in how people should be gender-socialized.
It is possible that increased male violence is related to sex hormones (since that would be harder to detect in trans people’s self-reports, given low base rate of violence), but I did discuss how that would affect gender socialization.
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Toggle said:
Male violence was also the one I was thinking of most explicitly, yeah.
If we (provisionally) accept that behavior and worldview are a partial product of sex hormones, then we’re in a situation where social attitudes are quasi-biological phenomena. That is, you’d expect ‘gendered’ behavior in the absence of socialization or your civilization’s tech levels- two somewhat distinct modes of thought and action, roughly predicted by biological sex.*
Of course, there is no absence of socialization. Not if you want a fully functioning human being, anyway. But this would imply that, if a)we want to abolish gender, and b)some part of gender follows from sex, then you can’t just not teach gender. You have to use socialization in an active, deliberate fashion to erase the gendered divisions that will pop up regardless. Thus, gender abolition becomes an ongoing project with no resting state.
(*Differences among populations are greater than differences between populations. Not to be used proscriptively. If you maintain discriminatory gender practices for more than four hours, please consult a doctor.)
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Marcel Müller said:
“Trans people who take hormones typically report various sexual changes and some sort of emotional change (the latter is, unfortunately, confounded by relief of dysphoria). Neither of those seems like it would cause interesting differences in how people should be gender-socialized.”
At the time trans people start taking hormones the developemental window for 90 to 99% of the neurological sexual dimorphisms is allready closed. Even at birth >>50 % of these developemental windows is allready closed. (Disclaimer: These are estimates I pulled strait out of my ass but I would bet at least 5:1 on them.)
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ozymandias said:
What evidence brought you to this conclusion?
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ADifferentAnonymous said:
I’ve definitely read an account of estrogen changing the effect of sec on feelings of attachment, which could at least affect the kind of relationship advice one should receive.
Do sex hormones affect desire to parent?
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Marcel Müller said:
A lot of developemental stuff is time crittical. If you have dwarfism and take growth hormones as an adult you will not get any bigger [citation needed].
If you have a female pelvis and start testosterone you will not get a male one [citation needed].
If you could remove the Y Chromosome form every cell of a male and duplicate the X he would not grow a uterus, ovarys and so on (or vice versa) [citation needed].
Generally speaking the developemental plasticity is cygote >> embryo >>> child > adult > none. I would be very surprised if neurological sexual dimorphism were exempt from this rule.
Then there are morphological brain differences between males and females which will not go away (entirely?) when starting with the opposite sex hormones.
Further on I remember rading that gayness and probably transness are possibly caused by certain sex hormones being too high or too low during certain developemental windows during pregnancy, though I am not sure if this is scientific consensus.
[citation needed] = I know this to be scientific consensus but not where to look it up quickly.
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Maxim Kovalev said:
@ADifferentAnonymous
A lot of cis women report vast psychological changes during pregnancy and shortly after, so the answer is probably “yes, they do, but this has nothing to do with neurological sex differences”.
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veronica d said:
Well, there are hormone receptors spread throughout your brain, and one naive-but-easy model of “trans brains” is they have structures optimized to be bathed in the one type of hormone, but they get the others. This causes your brain to work consistently not-quite-right. Getting them back to the correct hormone balance eases this distress.
But yeah, I seriously doubt my brain is *precisely* what it would be had I developed as a cis woman does. But that said, something very important happened, and I suspect it was in utero. I doubt it has much to do with genetics — perhaps a bit — and more to do with hormonal stuff. It has effected me in countless ways, which suggests to me that gender really does “live in the brain” in a way that contradicts the “it’s all mostly social” theories.
But then, I think people like David Reimer leave those theories in the dust.
For me, all kinds of things changed when I suppressed testosterone and began estrogen. But we can ask, are these things *singularly* a property of those hormones, or is this what happens when my brain finally gets the hormones it was optimized to have?
I don’t know how to answer that. Certainly we know that cis people respond to hormonal changes in various ways, but the specific experience of transgender HRT does not show that “T versus E does precisely this thing in every brain.” Our brains are special.
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bem said:
“On the other hand, as far as I know, there’s been no research showing that children acquire rigid race stereotypes around age five and become more flexible at seven. If gender rigidity is solely a product of children looking for firm roles in society, one would also expect to see race rigidity.”
The ages vary a little, but there’s definitely research on kids’ acquisition of racial stereotypes. I do not think that this works exactly the same way that gender roles work, and there are a lot of possible reasons for that, but it’s definitely something that exists and has been studied.
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Anon said:
Well, one thing: I imagine the reason kids would be more likely to pick up strict gender roles than strict race roles is because, at least in the US, it is significantly more socially acceptable to separate kids based on gender than on race. I mean, there are different bathrooms based on gender, different sections in clothes and toy stores, and half the time teachers split kids up based on gender for standing in line or group projects or whatever else. Kids are going to pick up on the fact society acts like gender is a very important division, and that’s not even taking into consideration adults that go around actively telling kids that boys and girls are different in various ways. I imagine in societies/time periods where it is considered okay to do this for race result in kids picking up a lot of racial stereotypes, but I don’t have any studies on hand for that.
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Evelyn said:
In areas that are racially diverse, kids are also likely to have classmates who are visibly mixed race, which would (theoretically) make them less likely to have ideas about strict race roles. Kids don’t see other kids who are visibly intersex very often, though, which makes it much easier for them to split the world into two discrete gender categories.
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Kathy Moreau said:
Thank you for having the courage for writing about this. Sometimes I feel the same way but I’m afraid nobody would believe me. I’m a cis-feminist trying to make sense of the world.
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Adam said:
Thanks for this. I tried hard (and failed) a few days ago to express something close to this level of confusion about this topic and you did a much better job.
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Evelyn said:
I fully support the idea of not harassing or being horrible to people who don’t fit into the gender role that goes along with their assigned sex at birth, but I don’t think it’s possible to get rid of them altogether. I’m skeptical of the idea that socialization has a strong enough effect on our brains to enable a significantly wider range of neurotypes should we remove it.
The fact that (cis) men and women have had different social roles due to their physical capabilities (with women bearing children, men hunting and fighting, etc) for so many thousands of years would have selected for people whose neurotypes are more or less congruent with the social role their body has made them suited for. Afab and amab people with neurological traits that enabled them to do the tasks their physical bodies were suited for would have been more successful right up until the modern day when it finally became possible to switch roles.
Obviously there will be outliers (including trans people and cis people who don’t fit their gender role*); this selection clearly hasn’t completely purged these people from existence or no one would be upset about gender roles. And people who don’t fit their gender role should absolutely be able to live how they want without negative comments and actions from other people.
But I think that the majority of people probably fit the standard gender roles well enough that they’d be less happy if those gender roles disappeared. I have no idea if the amount of unhappiness these people would experience would outweigh the happiness the gender-role-nonconforming people would experience should gender roles disappear, but I just wanted to put it out there because I’ve met a lot of people (both men and women) who would be extremely unhappy if gender roles disappeared.
Additionally, since so many people fit gender roles I think they’d reappear pretty quickly even if we did find a way to completely remove them. People would continue to notice that amab and afab people tend to have different preferences and interests (though of course, only on average). I think we’d still see engineering and mathematics departments filled with amab people and nursing and child psychology departments filled with afab people, though perhaps to a lesser extent than we do today, and these realities would cause the same gender roles to reappear.
*I am one of these cis people; I don’t fit my gender role very well at all. I just wanted to mention this so people don’t think I’m being insensitive to the challenges that people who don’t fit their gender roles go through. I am aware of how much it sucks to not fit the gender role that people of your sex are “supposed” to fit.
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code16 said:
I really, really strongly favor the trans-inclusive “end gender roles without ending gender” option, ‘mysterious Essence of Gender floating about’ and all.
(And as a strongly cisgender person who hates everything about gender roles and very much does *not* have the drive you’re hypothesizing this is very important to me!)
I agree that it’s weird that this seems like such a one-of-a-kind thing, but tend to respond basically ‘yes, it’s weird, that doesn’t change anything’.
re “what will happen is people not caring about gender at all”, my answer to that would be fighting it, but also that fighting it is actually part of the kind of thing we should do anyway, since it’s part of ‘respect people’s self things (regardless of whether or not they seem weird to you)’. So someone experiences a qualia (is that the right word?) that you (generic you, not you) don’t? OK, well, they live in their head and you don’t, respect them.
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Rangi said:
So many questions of psychology and sociology could be answered if we abandoned ethics and let “mad scientists” run a few experiments. Is there an innate drive toward gender roles? Let’s start a test town of 1,000 households, raise the infants with non-traditional concepts of gender (e.g. it doesn’t exist, or there are seven arbitrary ones corresponding to the shape of your belly button), and see what happens.
I suspect that there’s more to gender than just strength differences and pregnancy-related issues — even in rhesus monkeys, different sexes have different toy-playing preferences (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/). (Actually, I may have heard about that study from you.) Do transgender people show preferences corresponding to their psychological gender or their biological sex? What about edge cases like XXY individuals?
Of course, if technology is enabling us to escape the negative consequences of these gender roles, that’s a good thing no matter whether the roles are biological or “merely” social. But if there’s a significant biological basis, ending gender roles will require more than just societal changes.
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Drew said:
I bet you’d find that there are feedback-loops with people’s tastes.
Maybe one group has a few of children who — by random variance — happen to really like handball. They set up a weekly handball game.
After a couple years, I’d expect that group’s members to be more knowledgeable about handball than the other group. Often people just want to do /something/ social, and handball is as good as anything else.
By the time the children grow up, I’d expect their group to have a legitimate interest in handball.
Sex differences seem like they’d be similar, except with some real (if small) effects on top of random noise.
A minor testosterone effect could make certain sports slightly more appealing to the median man than the median woman. Add a feedback-loop and time, and you’ve got a strongly-gendered preference.
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Maxim Kovalev said:
They kinda tried it in kibbutz – http://www.tau.ac.il/~agass/judith-papers/kibsx.pdf – didn’t quite work, but then again, they weren’t exceptionally gender-conscious either.
Not answering this exact question, but there’s this famous N=1 study: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer
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MugaSofer said:
Excellent article.
I suspect this “gender drive” has to be somehow related to heterosexuality/homosexuality. In that people’s attractedness to androgynous-looking people can change drastically depending on whether they assign them the seemingly-arbitrary category of “male” or “female” (or some third gender, possibly.)
I think this can even happen with people who are physically identical to typical members of “male” or “female”, considering some people’s responses to learning a trans woman is “really” a man. (Although I can’t verify that effect myself.)
If people are dividing humanity into rough categories and deciding to be attracted or not based on that – which would be one way for evolution to do it, I guess – then it would be valuable for people to ensure they’re “sorted” into the right category, and this drive could misfire. Although I just made that explanation up.
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Lambert said:
What attributes do people use to determine whether people are qompatible with their sexuality? I am attracted to those who present and identify as female. (I’m fine those who present kinda androgynously)
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MugaSofer said:
It seems to vary widely, which is why I’m suspicious that there’s a connection here.
Some people report a sudden surge of revulsion when they “realize” a person is “really” the wrong gender/sex, even (especially?) if they’re presenting as the “correct” gender and don’t have, say, the wrong genitalia for that person. On the other hand, some people report being attracted to people who identify with the “right” gender, even if they present pretty much identically to the “wrong” gender.
And then, somewhere in the middle, you have people who’re interested in having sex with someone who presents as he “right” gender, even if they have the “wrong” genitals; which is extremely common, but which I can personally testify isn’t universal.
In short, there seems to be a lot of variation; and I’d bet it’s connected to how people conceive of sex and gender, although I haven’t much proof of that.
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tailcalled said:
Gender is *weird*.
I think part of the problem is that people are talking about many different methods of grouping people, but pretending it’s a single method. You are probably used to most of these, but having a list make it easier to keep track of:
* We’ve got chromosomal sex, which is not really that useful, but it is the causal root of it all. We might as well group this with other factors, like androgen insensitivity.
* This determines various other things, the most obvious one being physical sex.
* However, physical sex is obviously not the only thing affected; sexual orientation is most likely also dependent on gender (I have seen claims that everyone is bi, etc., but really, it seems unlikely)
* Transgender stuff seems to have correlates in newborn children, so this also seems to have a biological root. We could call this brain gender, though there is no obvious “objective” reason that orientation and socialization shouldn’t also be called brain gender. As for subjective reasons, it’s going to make a lot of stuff easier.
* The separate terms for social and body dysphoria suggest that we might have a social brain gender and a body map sex.
* Assigned sex at birth is caused by physical sex at birth.
* Social gender is how other people view your gender.
* Legal gender is how the law views your gender.
* Socialization is caused by assigned sex.
* Are gender roles = gender socialization? This seems obvious at first, but in terms of the virtue of narrowness we might want to limit gender roles to the things that are ‘obligatory’; we could imagine a society that has strong gender socialization in terms of expectations, but praises anyone who breaks those expectations and adopt the norms of the other gender.
* It is not obvious whether interests are caused by socialization or something before. I would guess a mixture, because of various studies that have been done on monkeys and babies. According to one of your blog posts (the assigned sex at birth gap one), they correlate stronger with assigned sex than with brain gender. Because of stereotypes (for example ‘gay hairdressers’), one might suspect they are determined by/determine sexuality.
* Since a lot of people on trans-related forums say that you are a gender iff you want to be that gender, I’ll also add terminal gender: the gender that you, as a terminal value, want to be.
Now the question is, for gender abolitionism, what parts do you want to abolish? Gender roles seem obvious, and for now I’m just going to assume those. Physical sex is probably hard to abolish, and I’m pretty sure you’re not arguing for that. (It seems like) you only notice body map sex when it doesn’t match your body, so it’s not relevant most of the time. Social brain gender confuses me. I’ve heard people suggest that you abolish assigned sex at birth, but I don’t actually believe that is possible. However, it’s a political spot where you can do tons of signaling, so that’s nice.
Where it becomes interesting is social and legal gender. As long as people stay mostly monosexual, you can’t remove social gender, at least to the degree that it is relevant to peoples sexuality. The correct solution to this is obviously to support the gay agenda. 😛 So, in the magical world where everyone is bi- or asexual and language is gender-neutral, is there still social gender and social brain gender? My guess, probably, as long as you have other statistical differences like interests and physical sex. I suspect this is impossible to abolish unless you make fundamental changes to how people’s brains function, but I may be mistaken.
Legal gender should be gone. Why isn’t legal gender gone yet? Didn’t we all agree not to do gender discrimination? Oh yeah, military stuff, the police need to know who to arrest in case of DV, and the courts need to know who to give children to… Yeah abolish away.
You already mentioned socialization, and I don’t think I have much more to say on that.
Interests.
I’m going to stick my head out here and say that interests are probably related to biology in some way, since there are monkey studies that have been done which seem to indicate it. Abolishing gendered interests would mean changing peoples interests. For convenience’s sake, I’ll assume we get the technology to decide the interests of any fetus before it’s born. How much should we change them? I suspect the utilitarian answer is that economic productivity is going to outweigh all other concerns, until we have FAI, in which case the utilitarian answer is going to be that fun is good, so let’s maximize diversity. (or maybe that social is good, so let’s minimize, or at least reduce, diversity?)
Terminal gender, is it a thing? Of course it’s a thing, by the heuristic “of course it’s a thing”. How common is it? Well, we could decide it’s the same thing as identifying strongly with a gender (i.e. being not-cis-by-default), in which case a LessWrong survey suggests it’s a thing in roughly half the population, but LessWrong might not be a representative sample. I could mumble something about the utility function not being up for grabs, but we can consider the possibility asked in the previous paragraph: if you could decide for unborn fetuses whether they should be terminally cis (heh), cis-by-default or trans, what would you choose? Chesterton’s fence would probably be relevant here: WHY IS HALF THE POPULATION CIS-BY-DEFAULT AND HALF THE POPULATION NOT?! THIS MAKES NO SENSE AAAAAAA!!
Essentially, split the question up into different meanings of ‘gender’ and it’s mostly going to solve itself. I kinda hopped over social brain gender, but one might suspect it’s the same as terminal gender. Maybe. I’ll leave it up to empiricism (or anecdotes, I guess; good data is expensive) to answer that question before I fry my brain trying to come up with an answer.
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tailcalled said:
Of course, most of the genders I mentioned here are of statistical nature, and can be split further.
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Vamair said:
I’ve always thought about gender abolition as something like “you continue to do the things you want to, but no one is telling you they don’t fit your sex-assigned cluster”. That is, if we abolish gender, there still can be statistical “is” sex differences, because biology, but no “should” about them.
As a wild never-to-be implemented idea, instead of abolishing gender we take some personal qualities (married/single, feeler/thinker, athletic/bookwormish/artsy, male/female, a parent/wanna-be-parent/childfree, child/adult/elder etc.) and make a gender out of all these qualities combined by assigning a letter to them and then combining all into a single word. And this kind of gender will tell much more and be much more fluid.
And I’m still confused about what’s left of gender if we abolish gender roles and put all the relevant differences under the labels of “sex” (some people can get pregnant, some can make others pregnant, some are neither – or maybe prefer not to, and maybe children, so four), “sex preferences” (asexual goes here) and “individual differences” (art preferences, physical abilities, etc). What’s left? It feels as if someone strongly prefers to be called “athatora” and not “feleara”. Some weird phonetics fetish?
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tailcalled said:
What you’re describing in your first paragraph seems to essentially be removing gender roles and probably socialization.
In your last paragraph, you seem to be speculating on what social brain gender is. speculated that it might best be treated as closely related to terminal gender, but that still leaves open the question of how it makes sense to have that kind of preferences.
In principle, there’s no requirement that it should make sense, as long as it increases inclusive genetic fitness or has high memetic fitness (depending on whether it’s gene or meme). I have no idea how to deal with it if it turns out to not make sense.
I feel like I’m avoiding it a bit. Here some hypotheses to what it could actually be:
Perhaps, in a functional sense, it could be related to your sexual orientation: a wish to be seen as a specific gender could be because that makes you do stuff that makes you more attractive to people attracted to that gender. This can probably be checked if we compare how attractive cis-by-default people are compared to terminally cis people.
It could be an artifact of how brains work. I once read an article that claimed that chickens trained to recognize humans prefer how conventionally attractive humans look, which makes sense if attractiveness is mostly about looking average, which makes sense given how brains work. Something similar could be the case for social brain gender. The most obvious ways this would work would imply that contrarian people get less social dysphoria.
Some TERFs have suggested that it is an artifact of transgender activism, but I doubt it, since terminally cis (I love that expression so much 🙂 ) people exist. Some other feminists (including ozy, I think) have suggested it is an artifact of socialization, but I feel like that would predict that there are no people whose social brain gender doesn’t match their assigned sex, which is obviously false. Perhaps an artifact of how brains work can swap it around under some circumstances, but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard something similar.
I can’t help but think that it could be an artifact caused by body comfort. Being confident in your body could make you create a strong gender identity, and having dysphoria could create a flipped one. Is there a strong correlation between terminal cisness and positive body image? This probably can’t explain every case I’ve heard about, but…
… it could be a combination of any of the above. There’s no guarantee that it has to be simple. However, many of these seem like they aren’t “abolishable”, and even if the real answer isn’t one of these, it might be a similar, “non-abolishable” answer.
An obvious, important question is whether social dysphoria would disappear if we removed everything gender-related from the way we act. Does anyone have anecdotes/data on this?
I like your proposal in the middle of your comment. It seems kinda related to how we’ve both got Mr. Ms. Mrs. and Dr. as titles.
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tailcalled said:
In a way, I think my first hypothesis works really well.
Suppose we have three properties, which we’ll call brain gender, body map sex and social brain gender. Body map sex and social brain gender is determined by brain gender. Brain gender is determined by some hormones or something. If we assume there is some noise, they are all going to be highly correlated, but can be flipped independently.
Once you restrict yourself to transgender people, there’s some statistics paradox that comes in and makes body map sex and social brain gender anticorrelated. This explains why various people have noticed two groups of transgender people. This also predict that there’s going to be a continuum, which explains why various other people have attempted to debunk the ‘two-group’ by showing there is a continuum.
If I’m correct in the hypthesis, you’re going to notice that one group is going to score higher on the ‘I-want-to-be-attractive’ scale, which for MtFs is, as far as I understand, core autogynephilia. For the other group, you’re going to find, well, higher rates of incompatible body map sex. This would explain why various researches have found this kind of stuff. (Note: anyone who thinks this is an argument against the transgender movement needs to learn how, well, everything works.)
If this is correct, you should expect terminally cis women to score higher on core AGP. Heh, it would be fun if it turns out that core AGP turns out, in fact, to be an indicator that you are strongly female*. The anti-trans-people are going to look extra stupid in that case.
*note: core AGP != interpersonal AGP. Interpersonal AGP is already known to be a big part of female sexuality.
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Ghatanathoah said:
> But sometimes I wonder if what’s actually going on is that people have some sort of drive (of varying strength) to find their local gender role and execute it as best they can, regardless of what that gender role is.
I wonder if this is related to people’s more general drive to find a “meaning” or “purpose” in life. I have never ever felt this drive but enough people complain about feeling purposeless that it must exist (although when I was a child I just assumed that everyone except me was being whiny and overdramatic). Maybe the same way that some people feel a need to find and execute their gender role, other people feel a need to find and execute a general “life role.”
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Wirehead Wannabe said:
You know, I wonder if there isn’t actually an axis of “how much you identify with your race” like there is for gender. That’s probably one of the things I find most confusing when listening to discussions about race, is that some people just really seem to care a lot about identifying as black or latino. The ordinary explanation is that I’m just privileged and don’t see my race in the same sense that a fish doesn’t see water, but people say that about cis people too. There’s observably a large number of people who care a lot about identifying as a subgroups of “white” (Irish, Italian, German) despite never having spent much time in the culture of that subgroup at all. Based on a few conversations I’ve had, there also seem to also be people that strongly wish they could express their identity as white. Many of the most vocal advocates have rather distasteful politics, but others don’t seem to, so I’m not sure I can attribute 100% of this to racism any more that I can attribute a cis man’s pride in being a man to sexism.
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NN said:
One thing that I never see brought up in these sorts of discussions is that there actually have been large scale attempts to create societies without different gender roles, often using social engineering methods that would raise serious ethical concerns today. And as far as I know, they’ve all failed.
For example, the early Israeli kibbutz movement included as one of its goals the creation of a society with complete gender equality, which for them meant that men and women would perform the same jobs and duties. In order to liberate woman from child care duties, children were raised in communal nurseries. In these nurseries, extensive efforts were made to raise children in a gender blind way, making them wear the same clothes, teaching them the same way, exposing them to both male and female role models in various jobs, etc. There were even attempts to create a social stigma against makeup and other traditionally feminine things.
The results, in terms of creating a gender-blind society, were dismal. When researchers revisited the kibbutzim in the 1970s, after a new generation had grown up under the aforementioned conditions, they found that pretty much everything had been undone. The communal nurseries had been abolished, more traditional family structures had been restored, and women predominately worked in service industries while men predominately worked in productive industries.
There are, of course, possible sociological explanations for this failure. Maybe the attempt was corrupted by the influence of wider Israeli society, or doomed from the start by remnants of the original generation’s own upbringing. But even if any those explanations are correct, I don’t think it changes the implications of this for attempts to bring about a gender blind society. The fact remains that some of the most idealistic people in history attempted to bring about such a society using measures more drastic than anything that has been widely discussed, much less attempted, before or since, and they couldn’t do it. Just because something is culturally determined doesn’t mean it is easily mutable.
Before I researched the Israeli kibbutzim and similar things, I had been agnostic on the possibility of a gender-blind society. Now I’m of the opinion that unless somebody can think of something that the kibbutz founders didn’t, attempts to make such a society are probably doomed to failure.
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Protagoras said:
And how unlikely is it that someone can think of something the kibbutz founders didn’t? History is full of evidence that people can change dramatically. It is also full of examples of efforts to change them on purpose which did not have the intended effects (though they sometimes have other effects). Now, it might be reasonable to conclude from this that changing people on purpose is so hard it isn’t worth trying, but it is a pet peeve of mine that so many people seem to conclude from the many failures of deliberate interventions that people just can’t change at all, despite the fact that they have historically changed enormously. And since apparently we don’t know how it works, perhaps we should wait until we understand how it works better before we rule out the possibility that anybody could ever deliberately introduce desirable changes?
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bem said:
Yes, exactly. This kind of argument also never seems to take into account the fact that gender roles -have- changed pretty radically in the last century or so (just to give an example), despite the fact that we’re far from being a genderless society. ’50s middle class gender roles aren’t the true north to which all compasses inevitably point, and things can change quite a bit as a result of people just fumbling around.
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Illuminati Initiate said:
Think of something that the kibbutz founders didn’t”
Transhumanism:)?
Which, yeah, I know involves technology that might be quite a while off, but if sex is pretty much a result of whatever you feel like this year/month/day, I imagine that will do a lot of damage to gender roles.
Though a much-nearer future thing that could help erode gender roles is widespread virtual reality and use of digital avatars.
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Ghatanathoah said:
> In order to liberate woman from child care duties, children were raised in communal nurseries.
This seems like the big mistake here. I think most people, male or female, would prefer traditional gender roles+mostly raising their children themselves to gender abolitions+ strangers raising children. They might have been more successful if they’d found some way to give women more time to work while still allowing their children to live with them. Maybe assign all the people without young children nanny duties or something like that.
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mdaniels4 said:
Personally i think the good old fashioned need to fit in by using conformity is the root of the bifurcation in an age where gender roles have such much less importance. I think it interesting that most folks want to be seen as an individual yet make dang sure everyone else is conforming to the rules set up by someone for not alot of discernible reasons for it to continue. Gender structure has so many variables that it would be difficult at best to separate the influences. Some are innate but i think most are educated in by the world around the growing cherub. And enforced so the trend continues and so since the ramifications of being non conforming can be rather negative a cost benefit analysis goes on internally to the individual.
There is great reward for the successful by conforming standards of success to the non conformist. They make life way interesting and generally better for all and whatever their nonconformity is, they are generally accepted as being eccentric. But woe to the unsuccessful nonconformist as they shall be cast out and labelled weird or worse.
What i’d like to see is to just leave folks alone so you can freely be however you want to externalize your inner belief of self and let everyone else do the same assuming no harm is done. Why do people care so much is my question?
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Sniffnoy said:
This is a really good post. It gets at a bunch of things that I mostly haven’t really seen elsewhere.
The second obvious difference is that (again, with a few exceptions) men are stronger than women.
It’s worth noting here by the way that this is more consistently true than many people realize! See Evelyn’s link.
Some people have proposed that we end gender roles without ending gender. That is fairly plausible if you have a trans-exclusive viewpoint: you just let “gender” mean the same thing as “sex.” However, if you have a trans-inclusive viewpoint, then you have this mysterious Essence of Gender floating about that doesn’t indicate anything about a person. I predict that that is an unstable situation and what will happen is people not caring about gender at all.
I’m going to restate my usual point of disagreement: I predict that this isn’t merely an unstable situation but an unreachable one, and if you try to run right up that hill you’re going to find yourself tumbling down the “gender roles, no longer sex-based but still rigid” side.
It’s true that ending gender socialization would cause a decrease in neurodiversity: fewer people would have a strong sense that they are a particular gender.
It’s not clear to me in what sense this is a meaningful decrease in neurodiversity, if having a strong sense that they are a particular gender doesn’t necessarily entail anything in particular.
Social dysphoria is a preference about what category one is put in that is totally unrelated to any of those reasons. I agree that I have breasts, a vagina, a uterus, female-typical hormones, etc. and that many people consider “woman” to mean “a person who has breasts, a vagina, a uterus, female-typical hormones, etc.” Being nonbinary empirically involves all the nonsense involved with being a woman, with bonus tedious conversations about my gender and risk of being disowned. And people expect women to cry a lot, wear skirts, and watch Legally Blonde, and I am a total fan of all three of those things. Nevertheless, I want people to put me in this imaginary “nonbinary” category I made up, rather than the “woman” category.
I don’t have an argument to make here, but — this is why the whole idea of social gender dysphoria makes me uneasy in a way similar to how the idea of wireheading does; I think the best way of describing how I feel about it is that it’s a perversion of what it means to have preferences or want something in the first place. Because after all, considering…
But sometimes I wonder if what’s actually going on is that people have some sort of drive (of varying strength) to find their local gender role and execute it as best they can, regardless of what that gender role is.
…isn’t that kind of, well, exploitable? Security hole, needs to be engineered out. 🙂 (OK, one could probably sensibly respond that it’s not much more of one than everything else identity-related in the human mind.)
There’s some evidence that cis people also experience that drive.
Well, y’know, some cis people, as you’ve written before. 🙂 So…
So if there is such a drive, what do we do?
…cis-by-default separatism, anyone? 😛
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Ghatanathoah said:
>I think the best way of describing how I feel about it is that it’s a perversion of what it means to have preferences or want something in the first place
I think I see what you mean. Essentially a person is saying “I would prefer to be in category X, but I am indifferent to whether or not I have any of the properties that define category X.” This is incoherent, what makes something be in category X is what properties it has.
I am very pro-transgender for the most part. I think transpeople should have access to hormones and surgery, and not have to fulfill the traditional roles of whatever gender they were assigned at birth. But I wonder if extreme social dysphoria, where someone would prefer to be a gender without preferring to have any of the properties associate with it, is not a coherent desire. It’s like wanting a square circle, or wanting to be warm without any of your molecules moving. It’s confusing the label for the thing it represents.
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Toggle said:
I also throw this kind of does-not-compute error, incidentally. If gender predicts nothing, then why care?
But that may be a fairly rare problem in the population at large, since the sentiment of ‘categories are made for man, not man for the categories’ is an uncommon sentiment overall. The LessWrongosphere tries to incubate it, and it’s probably more common in technical types, but most people on the street just don’t use that framework. In other ontologies, it may be perfectly consistent to demand inclusion in a category with no qualities.
That said, there are a number of self-identified rationalist trans folks- more than the expected number, although sample sizes are admittedly low. So a trans identity is actually more common in a ‘categories are made for man’ culture. Might be something in the subjective trans experience that I can’t access, but mixes well with LW’s rationalism culture, that causes it to make sense. Could just be that confounder where trans women really like computer programming for some reason.
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ozymandias said:
Look, if I could get rid of this preference by doing philosophy to it, don’t you think I would have *done* that?
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Toggle said:
That hasn’t been completely clear from your previous posts (particularly the eugenics-themed ones), but I’m happy to believe you when you say so.
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Ghatanathoah said:
@ozymandias
>Look, if I could get rid of this preference by doing philosophy to it, don’t you think I would have *done* that?
I totally believe that you can’t philosophize away your preference. I’d also believe someone who told me they have a preference for drawing square circles, and can’t philosophize it away. I’m just not sure how to deal with satisfying a preference that isn’t logically coherent. The only thing I can think of is to make sure I refer to you using your preferred pronouns, since that is one of the only ways categories can impact the real world independently of the properties they represent.
@Toggle
>That said, there are a number of self-identified rationalist trans folks- more than the expected number, although sample sizes are admittedly low. So a trans identity is actually more common in a ‘categories are made for man’ culture.
In addition to the possibly incoherent “category” type preferences, most transpeople have perfectly coherent preferences that exist independent of categories, such as wanting to have a different body and hormone balance than they currently have, and wanting to not have to fulfill the traditional social roles of their assigned-at-birth gender. Rationalist culture tends to be more accepting of this than other cultures. I think this is partly because they believe that “categories are made for man,” and therefore do not have any normative belief that one should act like a stereotypical member of one’s category.
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osberend said:
@Ghatanathoah: I think that one way to resolve the incoherence is to interpret “I have a terminal preference to be perceived as being in category X” as an approximation to/rationalization for “I have a terminal preference to not be dysphoric” + “I have a flaw[1] in my brain wiring that causes perceiving not being in category X to make me dysphoric.” This turns an incoherent preference into a coherent preference + a material fact. The fact in question is arguably rather bizarre, but so are a lot of facts about brain wiring. Azathoth is a blind idiot god, news at 11.
[1] In the sense that any feature of brain wiring that causes one pain that does not serve purely as a motivator not to do something with long-term consequences that are worse than pain is a flaw. Related: Note that this analysis applies just as well to (much rarer) cis social dysphoria as to trans social dysphoria, although the former has other analyses that could be applied instead.
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Creutzer said:
It seems to me that social dysphoria is a preference for other people to (not) put the subject into a particular category in their brain; where the category is referenced by name and not by the algorithm that determines membership. Effectively, this is a preference for others to change their algorithm for determining membership in the category in question.
This is coherent if referencing mental categories by name (as opposed to membership conditions) is coherent. This is certainly something that not only trans people do; everybody does it when they disagree about what determines membership in the category that a given word refers to. That doesn’t mean it’s coherent, though. I have a feeling that it isn’t, but at the same time, it’s obviously possible, so there must be some way of making sense of it in terms of how categories are implemented in the human mind/brain.
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Sniffnoy said:
This may be off topic a bit, but, basically, it looks to me like people trying to increase acceptance of socially-dysphoric transgender people, that is to say, increasing acceptance of gender self-determination while keeping it separate from sex self-determination, face the following dilemma:
There seem to me to be two obvious approaches for this — one from weakness, one from strength. The first is to be totally upfront about the fact that it doesn’t really make sense — to say, “Look, I realize this doesn’t make a lot of sense, but just go with it, OK?” But taking this approach would mean to appear have been given rights rather than to have taken them, or reclaimed what was rightfully yours all along. It would likely mean settling for being merely tolerated rather than accepted. It might even mean, in the worst case, giving up such principles as “don’t misgender people you don’t like”. Even without that worst case, I doubt the movement is ever going to go this way. (Although having a segment do this, while others take a more strength-based approach, might work well.)
The second approach is the one you mostly currently see, and the one I’m afraid of the consequences of. The second approach is to attempt to justify why you’re right. The problem is, well, the whole thing doesn’t make a lot of sense, which basically scuttles attempts to justify it within most people’s frameworks. So you don’t see people trying to push that; instead you see people trying to push a justification which people might actually accept, but is wrong. Now maybe that’s OK, but the specific justification you see — something something social categories roles something something — seems to me to basically be the way to reinforce rigid gender roles (even if they’re no longer tied to sex). Hence my continuing claim that the advance of socially-dysphoric transgender people seems to be coming at the expense of gender-non-conforming people, even as the proponents claim otherwise.
The thing to realize here is that unlike, say, Ozy or Scott, most people won’t accept “Well, it’s really important to me, I’ll get really upset otherwise” as a justification — you can say that, of course, but it will only be successful if you do it while acting from weakness, not strength; it’s not a “justification” in the same sense as above, that compels people to join your side rather than merely tossing you a sop. Because I think most people have an intuitive sense that if you allow that sort of thing as a justification, you become exploitable. And if everyone does, then you end up in an emotional arms race, and man, nobody wins those. Ozy may not be worried about power plays, but other people are, and I’m not at all convinced that they’re wrong to be so — even if this particular case is, in fact, not one.
This seems like a good time to take another look at “Eight Short Studies On Excuses”. Where you want to get, essentially, is to the position of “The Peyote-Popping Native”. Where everybody agrees this is important and must not be questioned, even if personally they think it’s silly. But that’s a hard position to get to, because people are on the watch for Well-Disguised Atheists, who may want some concrete benefit or may just want to jerk people around.
I mean, at this point, the evidence seems convincing that the Well-Disguised Atheist is not what we’re dealing with here. Because, you know, trans people have a long history, not dealing with the problem does not make it go away, etc. The “born this way” argument, the argument from numbers — the argument which is usually left implicit but that the governor in “The Peyote-Popping Native” makes explicit. Personally I think this is the most convincing argument, assuming of course we exclude “Here is an actual trans person who you trust, do you really think this person is just jerking you around?” as an argument; I’m assuming that if you’re in a position where you can make such an argument, you’re in a position where you don’t need to. So perhaps that’s a third approach — present that argument directly. This might actually be the best option; and I think I’ve actually seen it used on occasion. Not a lot, though. And, of course, some people are going to object to anything smacking of “born this way” by stating that it shouldn’t matter if it’s a choice or not, this is too close to acting from weakness, etc. Also, because the argument relies on numbers, it potentially leaves out the “nounself” population and such.
There’s a fourth possibility, which we might call acting from extreme strength — perhaps I should have called the “strength” option earlier the “equal power” option and reserved “strength” for this one. Which is to just to state the position as if it’s obvious, never attempt to justify, and just demand people go along. That’s certainly out there, too. But, like… if the movement were strong enough to pull this off without assistance from other strategies, it’d be powerful enough that you should be scared of it, I think.
So I guess that ended up as a tetralemma instead of a dilemma, and also the strategies can be combined and may interact, and also I ended up basically endorsing one of the possibilities. Oh well. Hopefully there are possibilities I missed, too. But the prevalence of the second and its potential strengthening effect on gender roles continues to worry me.
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veronica d said:
@sniffoy — I think people will have a hard time completely overriding system-1 thinking about sex and gender, but nevertheless getting pronouns right is a worthy goal. Likewise is deciding how we talk about trans people, what social norms we encourage. No one is perfect, but people can get it right much of the time.
As an analogy, my system-1 tells me to be cruel to autistic people. Is it too much for autistic people to ask for me to make a special effort to override that? Should I not work carefully do “do right” by autistic people? (And note I *am* an autistic person. But still…)
I find in practice good faith goes a long way, and yes, it does not always go all the way. But so what? In the scales of things to care about, an occasional offended cis person is a small issue compared to the effects of cruel sexist bigots in the world.
The world is a vast ocean of irrationality and unjust power. Trans folks are such a small part of that, working within it, with varying degrees of success. It seems unfair to single out *us* instead of the system as a whole. Likewise, it is unfair to note our attempts to use power, but not to notice the power used relentlessly against us.
And indeed, any sex/gender system is a form of social power, and to assign a gender to me is to to assign a role to me, and that in turn is a form of social power. There is no “neutral” or “default” stance. Instead, there is historic contingency, along with neurological categorization. But history can change course, and brains are fairly plastic. We don’t know the boundaries, if there even are boundaries. But right now we are collectively shaping the attitudes of future generations.
But this is exactly was cis people do all the time every day. Is it okay when they do it?
You are presupposing that trans people should step up and meet some extra criteria. Which, fine. I understand the history of this. I understand why cis folks have that power and we do not. But you take it as a *given* that gender should work the way it does.
Would it be crass to point out that one-hundred years ago it was a *given* that blacks were rather bestial, perhaps even ape-like, and that whites were naturally more civilized, erudite, and sophisticated?
This is nonsense, but it was a fight blacks had to have, which whites did not have to have. It was a vast cultural preconception that was entirely unjust. But there it was, a fact of historical contingency.
History has produced societies that treated trans folks better, just as it has produced societies that treated various races better. No society has been perfect. Ours is not, but we are pretty darn good by historic standards. We might get much better on gender.
Maybe.
(We could stand to get better on race also. Obviously. In fact, we could be better on many things.)
Right now, with regard to trans stuff, you are taking a role similar to a nineteenth century intellectual discussing the theories that blacks are lesser than whites, a more primitive form. You are not committing to either position. (I’m not accusing you of that.) But you are accepting the debate as *given*. That assumption is itself part of the oppressive structure.
Have you read Serano’s *Excluded*?
In fact, there are no good responses to oppression. Instead, there are a variety of double binds, in which we are caught. How we fight against them is personal, and often less than effective, but in the end this is the only way to make our lives work.
You get to chose what role you play in this, if you play any role at all. Had you been an intellectual during the nineteenth century, regarding the question of race, what role would you want to play?
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Sniffnoy said:
We seem to be talking about pretty different things, so I hope you don’t mind if I just don’t respond to most of your comment.
I think you’ve misunderstood what I’m saying here. I’m not talking about what is or isn’t OK. I’m talking about what works. Or, like — I’m not talking about arguments regarding truth, or even a arguments regarding action in the usual sense, which, are ultimately correct or not. I’m talking about the sort of justification you give when you say “Here’s why you should give me your resources” — how do you convince people that this is a finite problem, that it is strongly distinct from other problems, and that doing what you say is not opening the path for you or others to keep making more demands of them? Basically, how do you convince people that your case is special?
The existence of social gender dysphoria may be a perfectly good reason once you have sufficient information, but if you don’t have that information, it really does look like a power play. I mean, just look at all the claims people make about “infantilization”; they’re saying, the SJers have started an emotional arms race. (Which, to remind everyone, does not rely on deliberate or conscious self-modification.) They may be wrong, but how do you convince them of that?
Like I said, I think the right answer is option 3, which, conveniently, relies on the truth. But option 3 doesn’t fit the usual script, and — I’ll admit — is still more likely than option 2 to set off people’s power-play detectors; numbers are nice but it’s not like it’s impossible for people to start a new religion and gain converts. So instead we get… well, I could continue but I’d be repeating myself.
Also I do not think it is some terrible thing that if you agree with the existing consensus of course you don’t need to constantly explain your position? Like, sure, you could characterize that as “stating the position as if it’s obvious, never attempting to justify, and just demanding people go along”, I suppose, but I don’t really think that’s accurate. It’s just relying on the well-known justifications you are presumed to already know. You might just say that I’m just restating the problem and that I haven’t really gotten what you’re saying, but, like, what alternative are you proposing?
…you realize I’m on the gender abolition side, right?
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veronica d said:
@sniffoy — Oh yeah, well regarding strategy, the best moves tend to be making liking trans folks seem super cool and not liking trans folks seem really uncool. Like, if you wanna hang with the popular kids you have to be totes pro-trans, and if you are anti-trans you are like really stupid and gross and no one will invite you to the dance.
BTW, I expect you to dislike this. I dislike it. But it seems to be how the world works. Thus it seems unfair to blame marginal queers for trying to figure out how to play the cards we’re given.
Don’t blame the player — or something.
On the other hand, we on this forum might choose a different approach. And yes, I believe I can justify trans stuff on the facts. And yes, I think we should talk about that, among audiences who are willing to look at evidence. But for those out there fighting the big fight, we should attack the whole structure of the fight instead of focusing on a marginal subgroup who is fighting a “come from behind” kind of game.
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Cade said:
How do you respond to the argument that white gender abolitionists are racist because they are ignorant of the ways that imperialism + colonialism destroyed indigenous ways of gender?
I’ve seen this argument brought up a lot with non-white trans women bloggers.
I have also seen gender abolition with a “down with the Western gender binary” stance from a trans latina.
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ozymandias said:
To be honest, my opinion about indigenous ways of gender is “not my circus, not my monkeys.”
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fnc said:
I think this contains an error: “while a child whose mother drinks coffee and whose father drinks tea may decide that girls like tea and boys like coffee.”
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Matthew said:
Whenever the subject comes up, I get upset by blog titles endorsing gender abolition, only to find that the content of the post is fairly unobjectionable.
I have, as should be apparent from my comment history, a very strong sense of gender identity. But my gender sense is entirely about body characteristics and sexual behavior. To me, eliminating most distinctions on the division of labor, or what clothing people wear is almost entirely incidental to gender. If someone suddenly decreed “Henceforth, all men must wear dresses,” this would be distressing to me in the short term, but I fully expect I’d adjust because it’s obvious to me that clothing is socially contingent. On the other hand, if you forcibly imposed a female body on me, I would be in permanent extreme distress, and would terminate myself as soon as my children were old enough to care for themselves.
Perhaps relatedly, the one sentence of this post I strenuously disagree with:
“If men are more violent than women, then you should socialize men into androgyny– at least on that trait.”
As someone who has, I imagine, a really high testosterone level, yet manages not to be violent outside of appropriate contexts, I’d argue for teaching men to channel aggression productively. On the other hand, if you tried to “make me more androgynous,” I would resist (omits the obvious adverb here).
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unimportantutterance said:
Epistemic warning: my real objection to this is that I get stong negative feelngs when people see me as male but few commensurate positive feelings when people see me as female or nonbinary, so I’d personally be much happier if gender ceased to be a thing.
That said, even if people naturally conform to gendered expectations of whatever their brain thinks is ‘their’ gender,that doesn’t necessarily mean people will be dissatisfied by their absence. It might mean that they will reëmerge from the vacuum, but that’s a poor argument against gender abolitionism as a policy goal, since if gender abolitionists are right about the other stuff, it’s still beneficial to eliminate as much of gender as we can, even if we can’t eliminate all of it, and the only way we can find out how much we can get rid of is to try to destroy everything about gender and see what will or won’t die.
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Maxim Kovalev said:
Unfortunately, the author doesn’t provide the breakdown of the observation data by societies – only by species. Nonetheless, I did some simple analytics on the data:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oODCcym8yVuTkpiHiN-vCwoRP34TUT3GZ2MH8MJ2lQw/edit?usp=sharing
For each gender role I compute the number of species for which this role is fulfilled by males, then by females, and than divide one by the other. Then I select whichever ratio is higher. Simply put, I’m computing how dominant the dominant gender for this role is. For a uniform distribution (i.e. gender roles are selected by a fair coin) this ratio will be 1, and for strictly deterministic roles it would approach infinity.
I got the average ratio 2.99, median 2.75, and standard deviation 1.24.
I’m not computing p-values because it’s 3AM, and the data is incomplete anyway – we don’t have the most precious within-species data. But even that gives us some insights. Namely, although gender roles aren’t predetermined and same for all species, they’re far from being random either. For every gender role, it’s very clear which sex it’s more characteristic of.
This fits well intro the model of path dependence and positive feedback loops. That is, in the absence of culture and traditions, a certain sex is more likely to assume one gender role than the other, but isn’t guaranteed to do so. Once the choice is made, however, it becomes a tradition, and overrides the free choice of every individual. But it’s important to remembers that in this model, once you remove the tradition, the distribution may get closer to the uniform, but it won’t actually be uniform – either because of overshooting or undershooting.
In terms of human societies that would mean that the level of gender policing should be measured not necessarily against the uniform distribution, but against the natural distribution, that may or may not be uniform, and that I don’t really know how to measure.
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ADifferentAnonymous said:
This is excellent. You’ve nailed my reservations about gender abolition and made them clearer than they were in my head. If you ever compile a top posts list, put this on.
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T. H. Rowaway said:
“Has anyone else noticed that social dysphoria is really weird?”
Thank you. I feel like this is the elephant in the room in a lot of conversations. And I say this as somebody who is increasingly under the impression that they experience social dysphoria. I just can’t make heads or tails of what it even is or how it’s even conceptually possible for it to exist, but here I am.
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Dread Lord von Kalifornen said:
“drive to find their local gender role and execute it as best they can, regardless of what that gender role is.”
This is what my gender feels like from the inside.
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