Is gender 100% bullshit? Or not

@speakingwoman fascinating question- I don't see why it matters...
I'm female, and I have given birth. I've breastfed. I've been a stay home Mum.

Anecdotal evidence is not data.

Ops question weighed heavily on me for years, especially with its implications around Trans issues (don't want to derail thread here). And so I did a LOT of reading and have come out the other side feeling that if you assume more similarity than divergence between the sexes people and life make a lot more sense.

And really, the science is quite clear. Some divergence, a lot of it fairly superficial (some anatomical difference- remember all fetuses start female, sexual organs are equivalent- ie clitorus and penis are corresponding organ), brains show very little divergence. It's somewhat like racial divergence. People with more Chinese genetic material are likely to be smaller- people with African material darker skin. People on a western diet are more likely to be big... doesn't mean any of them are innately better at parenting.

Re testosterone. It's about sensitivity. Let's say my husband makes loads but his receptors are few. Let's say I make a little but have great receptors. The net effect is he will display fewer traits associated with T, and I will display more. I still have female sex organs- he still has his trouser snake, but in many ways I would conform to a more male set of behaviours and he may be more nuturing.

Post menopausal women often have far more testosterone than their husbands. It's a good explanation for why often men of that age want to nest while the women want to explore. The point is, biological sex changes with age, external factors such as diet and environment and so on.

Yes hormones carry innate behavioural instructions, but the thing you have in your pants doesn't necessarily tell you how those hormones work for you in your particular body.

However, society looks at what you have in your pants and tells you every day from birth how you should think, feel, behave without taking into account the fact that your junk isn't the whole story.

There are changes to the brain during pregnancy that have an impact on nurturing response.

Although surely anyone, male or female, who has no nurturing response to a newborn baby has a serious psychological impairment.

Except that we don't know whether the evolutionary echo of that nurturing gets passed on from brain to brain. Or if each woman learns anew to nurture. For example I can observe no difference in nurturing traits between my male and female children. If my ds has a child of his own and not my dd I wonder which will continue to develop their nurturing skills more.

Men nurture yes, but I really think you are denying the biological reality (and burden) that women exist with

There wasn’t formula 100 years ago

And we can’t wipe out that massive stretch of evolutionary biological development in a second

mooncuplanding If female nurturing skills were not based in any biology, I believe we would not be here right now, we would have become extinct a long time ago

Unless men are also naturally nurturing to their offspring of course...

Radardetector I'm not sure you've understand the meaning of social construct.

All day.. yes the more we think about people as human individuals the better.

However when we can identify a discriminatory trend against eg women or disabled people then it is useful to categorise people in order to counteract the discrimination .Ignoring the fact that weaker people suffer discrimination and focussing only on each individual case will not lead to changes. It's missing the bigger picture. the root cause.

It's also useful medically to identify men and women because we can make some pretty useful generalisations about diagnosis and treatment based on the sex of someone.

There was a really interesting thread a while back around class based analysis

If female nurturing skills were not based in any biology, I believe we would not be here right now, we would have become extinct a long time ago

I wonder why we don’t want to value this immensely valuable female behaviour

alldayinbed Now you're blowing my mind. Please no one tell me that isn't true. I love it.

I don't believe gender is a wholly social construct. Most of it is, skirts, football, pink all that stuff. But generally speaking there are some behaviours and traits that are more commonly associated with the one sex. Of course not all people fit in the boxes and not fitting in the box would not make you abnormal in any way. Examples of these gendered behaviours would be, men tend to be less empathetic, more physically aggressive, more sexually motivated/higher sex drives, bigger risk takers, less aware of danger. Women, more empathetic, natural parents, cleaner, more alert to danger.

If woman and men in general terms don't have some gendered differences, why don't we see the same number of female psychopaths? It could be because there aren't as many, which supports a "female" brain surely, or because female psychopaths behave in a different way stopping them being identified, again showing a behavioural difference between men and women in general.

But of course these are very general terms and as said not fitting the box doesn't mean your trapped in the wrong body of abnormal or ill.

At no point have I said culture doesn’t play a part

But it is not the whole picture, imo

What about sexual behaviour?

Do you think there is a gendered difference between the sexual behaviour of men and women based on biology, or is it simply due to culture and socialisation?

@mooncuplanding women's nurturing skills could be entirely culturally instilled.

Fun fact! Early humans ground a lot grain to eat, and as result women's physique was akin To that of a modern Olympic rower. There was an excellent recent study looking at arm bone density. In fact, it took until medieval times for the female upper arm to get its modern slender shape.

Just imagine living in a time when women were built like rowers! that's a society where men think twice before committing sexual assault.

The basis for ideas of gendered Hunter/ gatherer division in early humans is poor, and really based on modern gender biases. We just don't know. It's just as likely that early women who were adept at hunting hunted, and that early men who liked kids did a lot of childcare.

Here’s some:

scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=sex+differences+in+neuroticism+cross+cultures&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart#d=gs_qabs&p=&u=%23p%3DueSwTlOhATMJ

scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=sex+differences+in+neuroticism+cross+cultures&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart#d=gs_qabs&p=&u=%23p%3DYcgtjfAR8CYJ

scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=sex+differences+in+neuroticism+cross+cultures&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart#d=gs_qabs&p=&u=%23p%3DS7zcXL6sJHEJ

I’m not saying this proves my point. Again, what I’m saying is that saying gender is all cultural just isn’t proven and we have to be able to counter such evidence with a better argument than “it’s just not. It was how we were brought up”

Yep. You could fill an arena with humans and catagorise them by the presence of vulvas and testicles. But if you then tried to extrapolate details of personal experience, skill, personality, or anything else much based on that divergence, you'd find actually very little stacks up

Yes I absolutely agree. What I don't agree with is the idea that if I have more testosterone in my body than another woman, or less oestrogen, I am less of a woman and more of a man. As I said; the idea testosterone is a male hormone is incorrect. Sex is binary.

Face the facts that because girls are praised from birth for being kind and caring we see that girls focus on that aspect and develop that aspect of their character? That is cultural not innate.
It is innate that babies rspond to please the adult.

Face the fact that gender sterotype affects us from the earliest of ages and steers and influences our behaviours, reinforcing some behaviours at the expense of others.

@thebewilderness
Half correct. What if you have xxy chromosomes? What if you have xx chromosome but testosterone insensitivity. Indeed there are only xs and ys, but the interplay between chromosomes, hormones and hormonal sensitivity mean that just because you have xy chromosomes does not preclude any number of weird and wonderful things happening to your biological sex. Again, Simon Levay covers this much better than I could.

If you are inclined to more podcast listening OP This American Life did a fascistic show on testosterone, testing all their staff and finding that levels were unpredictable and surprising across both genders.

Yep. You could fill an arena with humans and catagorise them by the presence of vulvas and testicles. But if you then tried to extrapolate details of personal experience, skill, personality, or anything else much based on that divergence, you'd find actually very little stacks up. As I said, the statistical thresholds for divergence are incredibly low.

Put this another way- I feel the same way about my kids as most people from my gender feel about their kids. And most people from my opposite gender. I feel the same way about my family as most humans do. I enjoy food, sex and breathing, as do most humans. I feel the same way about death as most humans. My strength and speed puts me in the category of average human, my skill at maths and sport, also average for a human.

It's fairly liberating when you interact with other humans based on the assumption that you have more in common than not, and that divergence based on gender is probably bullshit instilled by the culture.

I was asking for research that proves some non cultural behaviour differences between the sexes that is not related to sexual repeoduction.

I think you are not prepared to face the facts if you even anecdotally see that in general women tend to be better at 1:1 nurture.

I see it as a strength not something to be denied

And thanks..

Oh is there some robust scientific evidence that there are behaviours that are more attributable to one or other sex that are not directly related to sex and are independent of culture? Please share.

Sorry, I don’t understand that question. Do you want research directly related to differences in behaviours attributed to sex or not?

the babies thing is sex related though So yes, mothers do nurture their child and in the first year or two that will be very different to the nuturevthat a father can give. And that's a key role for our species (and needs be more respected by society. )

That doesn't mean that women are more likely to be good at or enjoy nursing random strangers though.