Please help me untangle why gender is such an issue

don't know how to make people see such obvious conflicts if they are determined not to.

You can't.

Its that simple.

And their brains may not be able to process it or reason it out. (See above).

I started this thread previously about political radicalisation and the effect on the brain and how there are parallels with the 'pink brain / blue brain' theory and how research into extremists shows that echo chambers and the concept of 'sacred values' actually alter how the brain works:

You’re then told the reason for the survey is to find people suitable for a brain scan. And those few people would be the most radicalised ones we could find; a fact that would only be revealed in the post-experiment debrief. To our surprise, the part about the brain scans piqued people’s interest.

The responses varied from concerned: “You think there’s something wrong with my brain?”, to pride: “There’s definitely something different about my brain.”

and perhaps more crucially:

Scientists have looked for the first time at the brain patterns of Islamist radicals, showing that the part of the brain associated with deliberative reasoning deactivates when a person is willing to fight and die for a "sacred cause" — and that the opinions of their peers can change that way of thinking.

Researchers from the UK, Spain, and the US carried out brain scans on groups of men at various stages of radicalisation for Artis International, a research group that studies the role of "sacred values" in violent conflicts around the world.

The study, published in the Royal Society Open Science journal, found that when a subject was willing to fight and die for what they considered to be "sacred values", activity in the areas of the brain associated with deliberative reasoning decreased. Instead, they showed high activity in a different part of the brain: one associated with subjective perceptions of value, such as what a person finds beautiful.

and

After learning their "peers'" responses, the subjects were asked the same question again. The second time, they altered their answers. Crucially, if they were told that their peers were less willing to fight and die for a cause than they were, the subjects expressed outrage, but ultimately lowered their willingness, as well.

Simultaneously, the part of the brain associated with deliberative reasoning was activated once more.

In that context, putting teens who are suffering from an gender identity crisis in groups, would potentially be a very bad idea...

It doesn't really support the idea that "gender identity" is a meaningful concept when its neural correlates vary depending on the sexual orientation of the gender-identity having person.

It's still meaningful, just horribly misapplied, I think.

Back in the 90s tw were considered effeminate gay men who wanted to attract straight men. It's not illogical to note that homosexuals can be subdivided based on whether they're comfortable being seen as gay or not.

So back then, separate words for "male-attracted male who wants m/m sex" and "male-attracted male who wants m/f sex" made sense. It still does. But they're both subsets of the same class (m-attracted ms), so you'd expect similarity in whatever bit of the brain reflects orientation.

But considering "gender identity" as a sort of euphemism for sexual identity makes a hell of a lot of sense. Covers the agps (Woman is the one that performs submissive sexy object for men: yes please) and the hsts (Man is the one that does sex to women) and the rogd kids (bit of both).

The trouble is the denial of the body. If we're not allowed to note that and subdivide accordingly we end up with the sexual identity "lesbian" being reduced to 'female-attracted person' and suddenly we're back in corrective rape territory; and the biological-sex identity "woman: adult human female" being considered just cause for a public witch-burning.

Plus we really could do with a word for women who want to have m/m sex, cos letting them call themselves gay men isn't working out too well for the gay male community, and while they fall under the heterosexual umbrella they're still distinct from women who want to have f/m sex.

just fyi, I was doing a bit of a bait and switch with the "look, trans people have different brains" thing, I explained more in the rest of the comment. The linked study doesn't support the idea of "gender identity" as an innate property of human beings, or even as a coherent concept.

It was brought home to me a few years ago when DH was telling someone that I was afraid of the dark. I said I'm not afraid of the dark. And he said well why you won't walk the dog in the woods after dusk...

Had a conversation a good few years back with my dad where he was talking about walking round to his local for a drink late at night, and I commented how I wished I'd felt able to do the same, he couldn't understand why I wouldn't. Didn't even occur to him to have to plan a safe route home/ ensure he has cash for a cab/ make sure he knew he wasn't going to be sat on his own in the pub.

Thought experiment:
Supposing gender identity did exist. Supposing for the sake of argument every baby was born with a little gauge in their heads pointing somewhere between mix and fix, except for a few of us without them. Not related to physical bodies, not related to stereotypes, not learned, inborn.

Now, parents can't see those gauges. They dress the child according to physical sex. They tell them they're a girl or a boy according to physical sex. The child goes to school, sees other children dressed like them, with male or female bodies just like them, called a girl or a boy just like them. So they learn that girl/boy is to do with physical sex or (mistakenly) that it is about stereotypes.

What causes them to say aha, actually this gauge in my head pointing at fix means I am female even though my body is male? Bearing in mind in the thought experiment fix is not associated with either bodies or stereotypes? How do parents explain the concept of gender to the child so they know how to associate the flavour of their gender gauge with a sex?

Right, now let us transport ourselves to gender utopia. Parents now know that being a girl or boy is about your mix/fix gauge, nothing to do with your body, and we've ditched stereotypes. Women can have beards and short hair. Men can wear lipstick and stilettos. Noone bats an eyelid.

Now kids are referred to with gender neutral pronouns until they declare their gender. How do they know whether their mix/fix gauge reading should be attached to the word "male" or the word "female"? Some male adults have the same body as them, some don't, so that doesn't help. Some male adults like trains and football, some like dressing up and handbags so that doesn't help. Now how are adults to explain the concepts of male and female to their kids. And more importantly, why does it even matter?

Likewise androphilia. Clearly it's not just the purview of women.

Homophobia wants to make it so, though.

You get feminine men.

A man who is feminine is a feminine man. Not a woman.

It's society that has decided femininity should remain firmly within the purview of women. It clearly doesn't. And society really, really wants it to. Because if a man displays it, hey presto perhaps they're a woman after all.

You get comment after comment on here about women whose sons are feminine, from one end of the spectrum to the other. It's clearly not that unusual.

*there is an enormous blind spot in not recognising that 'any man is a woman if he says he is' could be harmful to women.

I don't know how to make people see such obvious conflicts if they are determined not to.*

Determined not to is quite right. A deliberate decision not to engage with the facts. I watched a video on a different thread about another matter and won't derail this thread with its contents, but in it students were refusing to engage with facts evidenced in written texts and accusing the person reading from those texts of bigotry, simply for sharing facts.

That report says that transgender people showed sex-typical values ( they even put it in italics!) except in self-perception.

The fundamental problem is the failure to recognise the fact that there are conflicting interests and that they impact on each other, even if thats not malicious / does no harm.

The most basic principles of Human Rights Law is to a) recognise where these conflicts occur and to acknowledge this may cause an issue b) to identify situations or issues which may cause harm to particular groups c) to identity the most vulnerable / powerless group in that dynamic and to act to give them power / properly represent their real interests on their behalf d) to balance the interests of both whilst seeking primarily to do no harm (where this is possible, otherwise to do as little harm as possible).

The first step is to make people see that there is a conflict, and as you say, there seems to be a widespread failure to recognise that this conflict exists.

Every time a man says he has a female/feminine/womanly identity, he is saying something which is deeply unpalatable to many women, that being a woman is about something other than biology, and is based on something that 'all women' are expected to do, or some look that 'all women' are expected to have. This is reducing being a woman to some sort of two-dimensional fantasy from the mind of a man, and to not see the effect of this appropriation on women is an enormous blind spot.

The other conflict, of course, is about the idea of accepting any man's word that he has such a female/feminine/womanly identity and that this means he should be treated as a woman for all purposes. Again there is an enormous blind spot in not recognising that 'any man is a woman if he says he is' could be harmful to women.

I don't know how to make people see such obvious conflicts if they are determined not to.

Look, trans people have different brains from "cis" people of their sex.

And London cab drivers have different brains to non-cab drivers and Buddhist monks have different brains to people who aren't Buddhist monks, because what you do with your brain influences how it is structured

Find evidence of brain differences in new borns that predict whether the child will grow up trans (and not correlated to a third factor like autism) and I'll accept there's a biological cause.

Idk if anyone posted "evidence of gender identity" yet but here's some.
www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17352-8

Look, trans people have different brains from "cis" people of their sex.
And TW actually have "feminine" brains... if 'one brain area is "feminised" in exactly the same way that it is "feminised" in gay men' counts as that, which I guess it does because a lot of people go on and on about how TW have feminine brains. Historically most TW have been same-sex attracted so perhaps it's not surprising that they have historically been found, as a group, to have brains that are similar to the brains of gay men.

HOWEVER. TW who are attracted to women also have some atypicalities in their brains, that are completely different from the way in which male attracted TW are atypical. Almost like being trans isn't just one thing. You could even say there are "two types" of transwomen, as Blanchard theorised. It doesn't really support the idea that "gender identity" is a meaningful concept when its neural correlates vary depending on the sexual orientation of the gender-identity having person.

Anyway, the brains of TW who are attracted to women show some atypicalities in areas associated with sense of self - they're actually more male-typical than other male brains in that area.

Similar findings apply to TM - the brain atypicalities depend on what sex they're attracted to.

There's no reason that a non-trans person would have a "gender identity" as it seems clear that gender identity is a function of how either same-sex attraction or a disrupted sense of self interacts with wider society.

Just inserting how much Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender has influenced my thinking on gender and how much socialisation is key to the trouble we are in.

So now imagine waking up in a male body. It's not just the average extra height; it's the lung capacity, the heart capacity, the upper body strength, the body density, the muscle mass, the shift in my centre of gravity -- all the messages my body sends me about the world would change dramatically overnight, and all that would affect my psyche in an enormous way. I would become a different Packing very quickly.

Can you imagine?!

It was brought home to me a few years ago when DH was telling someone that I was afraid of the dark. I said I'm not afraid of the dark. And he said well why you won't walk the dog in the woods after dusk...

Indeed, even before birth, females are routinely aborted. Because they're female. 'Lesser than'.

A boy baby kicking in the womb will draw comments like he's going to be a footballer, whereas a girl baby comments like I bet she's going to be trouble, or she's feisty.

All of us, every man and woman is growing up in a sexist society. And we are all subject to the sexism. It's impossible for an individual to escape the socialisation.

So, you can't effectively separate what has socialised you into 'feeling like a woman', from the biological facts that actually make you a woman.

However, a bit of analysis as to why you feel like a woman, will often produce an answer that you realise is very likely due to socialisation.

Realising that 'the way you are' is due to a lifetime of being shaped that way often comes as a huge revelation.

And, of course, this is where transgenderism comes in. Unfortunately, deciding that these behaviours are completely innate to one sex or the other, is what perpetuates the sexism that causes the conflict in the first place.

I'm sure there are some behaviours that might be specific to a certain sex. Depending on hormones, and other physical differences.

I believe that eyesight is different in women for instance. Which is why I can critically judge the aesthetic of cushions that are ecru, bisque or oatmeal, whilst DH will roundly dismiss them as 'all beige'.

The transplant metaphor doesn't work for one simple reason: there can be no distinction between body and soul/psyche.

Your body is the interface to the world. Now trans activists understand this in terms of how the world perceives their "psyche", but, in actuality, the body is the method by which the "psyche" perceives the world.

The body is eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hands, skin, muscles, nerves, bones, tendons -- all these senses and physicalities affect how an individual experiences reality. You change one of them, and the way you perceive the world will change, and that, in turn, will change your psyche.

Think of it this way. Say we all went to bed tonight and woke up tomorrow morning a foot taller. For me, I'd wake up 6'3.

That additional foot would radically change every moment of my life from that point. In the first hour alone, I'd have to navigate a world where everything was lower. I'd have to learn how to move appropriately, sit and rise, pick things up, how to dress and wash a body that was longer, I might find I needed to breath, eat, drink and sleep differently.

Everything that I am programmed to navigate in my life is based on being a 5'3 adult. You change that and all that programming, over years, goes out the window because it no longer works -- and that would change my psyche.

Because if I were taller, the world would be a far easier place to live in: driving, furniture heights, physical capabilities ... I'd be able to reach more, see more, move greater distances in shorter times. And that ease would percolate into my psyche, my personality. I'd probably feel a greater sense of "dominion" over the world.

And before you know it, I'm not Packing anymore. I'm a "Master of the Universe" Packing, who finds life easy, fairly safe (because who really wants to attack a 6'3 Amazonian? ), and can dominate any environment purely by virtue of my tallness.

And that's just with an extra foot of height.

So now imagine waking up in a male body. It's not just the average extra height; it's the lung capacity, the heart capacity, the upper body strength, the body density, the muscle mass, the shift in my centre of gravity -- all the messages my body sends me about the world would change dramatically overnight, and all that would affect my psyche in an enormous way. I would become a different Packing very quickly.

To do it the other way, from male to female ... I doubt many males would cope with it because, lets be honest here, women got the biology shit card, and most men have no idea just how shit it is.

This is where trans-ideology that fixates about transition falls down. You change the body, you change the interface you have with the world, which, in turn, changes the psyche through changing the messaging you receive about the world.

There is no "femaleness" without a female body because "femaleness" is built on the experience of reality delivered through the medium of the female body.

Excellent post on Human Rights and Safeguarding Red, if a bit depressing! I fear the same.

That's going to be a rabbit hole of a link, isn't it, Red?

Its part of their fundamental identity and the clue is in the relational prefix 'trans'.

Yep. You know how some tw claim to be "cis women*? I always think 'no, mate, you've got an uncommon type of male-specific identity, and the more we accept you as an example of the male spectrum the more of a cis male you become.'

You can never truly escape where you come from.

Agreed; it was a hard realisation though, because when you've had a horrendous childhood you get all sorts of people telling you to move on and not let it define you etc etc. Which is pretty much impossible when you're talking early and ongoing horrors that have affected you on a fundamental level. The idea seems to be that you can just... become someone else, someone less broken, through sheer force of will.

Never got that impression from therapists, mind. Only from the general public. It's less than helpful.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_formation

Identities are formed on many levels, namely: micro, meso, macro, and global. The micro-level is self-definition, relations with people, and issues as seen from a person or individual perspective. The meso level pertains to how identities are viewed, formed, and questioned by the immediate communities and/or families, whereas the macro level would be the connections among and between individuals, issues, from a national perspective. The global level, on the other hand, interrelates with the connections among and between individuals, issues, and groups from a worldwide perspective.

The real problem with gender identity is how it focuses on the self and perhaps on membership of a group of like minded individuals who share the same gender identity, to the complete exclusion of all other types of identity and identity formation.

So for example, its dismissive of how you grow up and identities within a family unit are so closely tied together. If a fundamental element in the identity of one member of the group changes suddenly or signicantly it ALWAYS has a massive psychological impact on the other members because of the relational nature of it. Instead it blames family members for rejection before considering how a change in identity is not a neutral thing and has consequences which need to be addressed in various ways and to different degrees. It seems to be the case that psychological breakdown in the transwidows is very common but unrecognised for example. Unfortunately no one is really looking at relational identity, and is only prioritising certain individual identities. This is why, in an era of neo-liberalism and ultra-self interest, trans identities have been able to take such a hold. Its not been possible in the same way in other societies or in different time periods - not because of prejudice - but because of the wider political forces of the age.

Gender identity goes further in not recognising the validity of other identities as being equal too. They tend to be seen as a collective threat through 'othering' rather than being framed as legitimate but different. The language of trans v cis sums this up nicely.

Its really interesting and I do wish that there was a lot more thought given to the concept of identity formation and where it comes from and how its not purely about individualism.

You can never truly escape where you come from. The idea that you can, is a rejection of how identity forms which is utter nonsense and a rejection of material reality whether we like it or not. Its how we deal with it and acknowledge that identity is multi faceted thats important.

Some one who is trans will ALWAYS be the same sex they were born. Its part of their fundamental identity and the clue is in the relational prefix 'trans'. Even if we moved past this, it would still be the same as your bodily experiences would be aligned with your sex. Again inescapable material reality.

when people are treating us as lesser/other because of our biology and the associated stereotypes.

Probably bad form to quote myself, but rereading this can see how a tw would say 'Yes, that was my experience too; we are the same' - but their experience was of being measured against masculine stereotypes and found wanting, whereas ours is of it simply being assumed that we conform to feminine stereotypes.

For them, the assumption of failed masculinity; for us, the assumption of successful femininity. Based on the body. So not the same at all.

but I become very aware of my disability when I run into limitations or thoughtless design

In much the same way, I'm not very aware of the size of my arse, until I try to squeeze out between pub tables and send someone's pint flying!

That's the first time I've heard a poster on these boards call women non-trans women.

Sadly not the first time I've seen it, and I think the previous use was by a trans person as well.

It highlights the problem with changing the meaning of words to fit an ideology. The reality behind the words doesn't change and sometimes still needs to be expressed even if the words to do so have gone.

Body-based sex classes are real, observable, true of all humans and have a material impact on the lives of all humans. That reality doesn't change even if the words we use for it do.

Oh, and the answer to the question "why is gender such an issue"...?

It is made up nonsense.

Not all women with beards do that, but most non-trans women are uncomfortable sporting a beard, and trans women are the same, except it's more than a beard.

That's the first time I've heard a poster on these boards call women non-trans women.

As for "feeling your nationality" - interesting parallel. Those who were around in the days of the Spartacus threads may remember that common consensus was we only feel like women (as opposed to people) when people are treating us as lesser/other because of our biology and the associated stereotypes.

Those spartacus threads feel like a long time ago now!

But yes, this exactly. Plus there's an element of feeling like a woman when I am made aware that I am not seen as a default human, that moment of "oh yeah, that's not designed with people like me in mind". It's a similar sensation to being disabled, I can spend most of my time not feeling disabled (I'm just me living in my body) but I become very aware of my disability when I run into limitations or thoughtless design.