So ... Does this indicate that you CAN be 'born the wrong gender'?

Aren't you asking the eternal nature/nurture question there When? Correlation not being causation and all that. If a woman's brain has a part that is bigger/smaller/different than a man's, how do we know a) that it is gendered and b) that it's not caused by a gendered society?

You can't control for the gazillion other things that go on in people's lives and it's certainly extremely unethical (and prohibited) to perform experiments on babies and foetuses.

I'm not sure anyone has come up with a definition of gender that doesn't rely on stereotypes or biology. We'd need that before any hypothesis could be formed and tested, wouldn't we?

Surely the best option is improved reporting - not limiting research?

Now back to the gender question. I'm getting the impression that some see gender as too complex/affected by social factors to be measured by things like

Effect of hormones in the womb
Differences seen in brain scans
Etc

Almost as though to even try and look at these things is unethical?

holly thanks for that post really useful.

deianira I was just going to say something similar. The theory of evolution is not something that has been tested using controls and P values. But I would say it is established as a fact due to the overwhelming volume of evidence put forward.
And of course it is a science.

Same with the physics. But what you do see is language like physicists - think / have hypothesised / believe. So you know that this has not been tested enough to establish it is true yet but it is what (most) physicists believe is the most likely explaination. You are right very much still science.

Thanks again to holly and Buffy for some fascinating and very helpful posts here, and I'd absolutely agree with everything they've said so far. When, I'd also like to add a minor point to the thinking about what science/knowledge is, by arguing that there are whole branches of science too which are mostly about just thinking about things - e.g. theoretical [there's that word again!] physics.

The fact that an experimental model can't be applied to test something doesn't necessarily mean that it can't then be discussed in terms of a reality - theoretical physics uses mathematical modelling to explain situations and consider how something happens, for example, and that's not so far off from the types of modelling and ways of considering a particular event or phenomenon which occurs in 'social' sciences or what you are calling 'soft' science - but I think lots of theoretical physicists would be unhappy to discover that their method is considered somehow less useful or not a proper science as a result!

It's also worth saying that a lot of theoretical approaches in the Critical Theory sense don't just involve 'thinking about things' without evidence. While I disagree with almost all of Freud's arguments, his theories weren't just randomly developed in a vacuum, but by analysing 'evidence' of a sort, including by working with patients and discussing e.g. dreams. As Buffy and holly have shown, critical theories, including those of Freud, often do look at a lot of evidence, but this evidence has to be considered through methods other than the experimental - by analysis, discussion, etc., for the theory to be developed.

x post again!

There are loads of different methods and lots and lots of debate about which of them yield the most interesting results! By definition, though, none of the qualitative ones will give you a P value at the end. The mode of certainty is not the same .

Change - social change, historical change - is a complicated thing. Let's take a distant historical example, like the French Revolution because it's sometimes easier to see things when they are not right in front of you. I'm just going to tell you how I approach this, because it's only one way and there are lots of others! (Buffy has some really, really interesting thoughts on ethnography, which is a very different method but revelatory in terms of the way that it can get inside what's going on in a situation).

Now there is such a thing as quantitative history - researchers can go in and can analyse, say, correlations between the quality of the harvest, grain prices, and social disorder to try to pinpoint whether there was a relationship between these things. This is a method that would give you a figure for certainty about the correlation between grain price and riots.

But the trouble is it doesn't actually tell you much because the moving and shaking of the times: because the cause of the revolt might not just be 'hunger' because there is never, ever just raw 'hunger' that is uninterpreted in the social domain. All of our emotions and feelings are only interpretable within a social context. From this perspective, what starts to matter is the way in which those at the time understood and interpreted the hunger. If someone thinks their hunger is a personal punishment from God, for instance, they may be less likely to get up and revolt than if they think it's because an aristocrat up the road is sitting on a lot of grain and waiting for prices to increase.

So we begin to slot into much wider debates about how class structures are understood, how oppression is conceptualised etc. which are really shaped by a person's structural position in relation to power - and here's where things like race, gender, culture start to shape perception. The perspective of a peasant whose family is starving to death is unlikely to be the same as that of a grain merchant or an aristocrat landowner with grapes and a glass of wine in his hand! Women may occupy a different place with different possibilities to men. So position within wider power structures starts to matter - it's not something that you can 'edit' out as if there is just one viewpoint on events. If you tried to have a universal perspective that simply got rid of the ways in which these positions shape the understanding of events (which is part of what science tries to do with replication and repetition), you would lose a lot about what's really interesting. This is the basis of a lot of feminist arguments against conventional histories of the 'this happened then this happened then this happened' type. You lose a sense of the fact that not everyone agrees - the fact that you have interpretations that are particularly popular with one segment of the population and particularly unpopular with another.

On top of all that, you get particularly influential nodes where people come along and invent new ways of talking about what is happening that either dampen or ignite sentiment - so the way that the thought of Rousseau is used in the 1780s becomes very inflammatory (and contested) - and you could argue that a lot of the debates in the 1790s about which revolutionary faction should have power come down to claims about which is the most truly Rousseauvian!

So in this model, it's not that there is, at one level 'reality', and at another level 'language' or 'discourse' - reality is fundamentally the shared ways in which events are understood and discussed. And, at the same time, the limits of discussion are very much the limits of reality (and possible alternatives). So a lot of the historians and critics now take a topic and they investigate the many ways in which it was spoken about at the time, building up a kind of picture of the discourse which is also simultaneously a picture of events. (It's not that 'stuff happened' and 'was then understood' - the two are indivisible and simultaneous).

And of course, the historian's own work is shaped by the assumptions and discourses of their own time - so it's never objective or outside of its era.

Though I've given a historical example here, there's no reason the same techniques can't be applied to contemporary events. I just chose a distanced one because I think sometimes things are easier to see with historical perspective.

Hope this is helpful!

But surely ethnography is a science, kind of a bit like anthropology.

Got to get back to work now.

So I guess where I am falling down Buffy is that I'm not very familiar with exploring questions using a none scientific framework.

How do you look at social systems that doesn't just involve having a really good think about a subject? That's not goady it's a genuine question.

I brought your tea Buffy, and those biscuits you like....

...oh.

whenshewas - I agree that evidence is needed, but my whole point is that the evidence is entirely different in nature! It's not simply that there are 'too many variables' for the scientific method to work in the social domain, it's that the scientific method can't touch the structural and ideological levers that are in play (it has been explicitly designed to ignore their existence, in fact!)

"
So with economics it is an incredibly soft science. The variables are so massive and changeable you can't really make any firm conclusions about economics."

That is not true. I'm getting the feeling that people making these comments on this thread have not actually studied this subject so it's perhaps best to move on to others.

The question why that isn't so, rather.

"My problem with the - why is my fear of violence less valid than theirs? Is that you end up having an arguement about which group is the biggest victim. "
"My problem with the - why is my fear of violence less valid than theirs? Is that you end up having an arguement about which group is the biggest victim. "

I disagree. "Which group is the biggest victim" has no relevance. The answer is that both women and transwomen should be protected from the violence they fear, regardless of who has suffered more in their lifetime. And that transwomen should not be coddled at the expense of women.

The question what that isn't so makes a good point, imho.

Thanks Buffy, I understand what you mean. (Might need to go back and reread some big words )

WhenSheWas - (I think that safe spaces, women's toilets etc have been covered a lot so sorry for repeating) but who do you think should be allowed to use women's public toilets? Which people exactly? Anybody who feels like it at the time? Because they aren't really man-free anyway, so they might as well be a free-for-all is kind of what I'm taking from your post.

The thing is, there is a massive confounding factor that means that the methods that are useful in a chemistry lab aren't really useful in society - and that is the social itself. People are not molecules and they do not behave in completely predictable, rational ways

I think again we kind of agree (at least in part).

Now you obviously can make very firm conclusions about what happens in the chemistry lab.

Yes when you apply the scientific method to a social system the huge number of variables make it much harder to reach firm conclusions.

So with economics it is an incredibly soft science. The variables are so massive and changeable you can't really make any firm conclusions about economics. But I still think social sciences are worth perusing even if any evidence provided is on decidedly shaker foundations than for example chemistry.

I still think it's important to try and provide evidence to support your position. Otherwise you risk going down the Freud route - "I've had a jolly hard think about this topic and this is my conclusion"

Again it's bordering on semantics. My main point is why is my fear of male violence less valid a reason than theirs

It does sound like a bit of a semantic arguement. Kind of a Schroeder's penis arguement (you don't know it's there unless you actually check inside the underwear).

My problem with the - why is my fear of violence less valid than theirs? Is that you end up having an arguement about which group is the biggest victim.
With some saying look at women as a group, they suffer high levels of rape and violence.
But then others point out that trans people as a group also suffer high levels of violence and have horribly high rates of suicide. And the arguement kind of stalls.

I'm also not massively convinced by the arguement that women's spaces are safe from men anyway. In most female spaces there isn't actually anything there to stop a man from wandering into a toilet / changing room.
A lot of these places have male cleaners (and signs to warn you they are there).

If someone feels that they are safe in a women's toilet it's a bit of a false sense of security. Sadly there isn't actually anything stopping a man wandering into a public loo and assaulting a woman.