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

[Garrick]

www.mirror.co.uk/news/real-life-stories/im-girl-meet-twin-boy-6348318?

Summary: Twins Alfie and Logan, 4yo, are both boys. Logan has insisted on wearing girly clothes, doing girly things, and that he is a girl since the age of two. His mother, who sounds brilliant, reports him wishing his willy would fall off.

I'm somewhat flummoxed. When I were a lass, little boys like this were described as camp (behind their fathers' backs) and, as far as I know, mostly grew up to be camp and fulfilled their rightful destinies. Rather like Ugly Betty's brother.

But this is what some transwomen say they felt like as children, isn't it? And I have rubbished it because I find it hard to believe in gender as an innate feeling. I'm not sure whether I think little Logan proves me wrong

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

Got to get back to work now.

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!

x post again!

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.

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.

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?

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

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?

nino
Aren't you asking the eternal nature/nurture question there When

Yes I guess so. I'm not the only one interested though.
There's lots of areas where what happens to someone is down to a mix of their biology and their environment.

Eg your biggest risk factor for developing schizophrenia is having an identical twin with schizophrenia. But it's not a guarantee that you will - just it's more likely.

That seems to suggest a mix of biological and environmental factors. Both of which should be looked into.

I don't think it's that those studies aren't incredibly revealing, useful pieces of research into pathologies whoknows. It's more that they form a part of a picture, and that they are subject to the same caveat of 'this is the best we know right now, and is inevitably as limited by current assumptions about the world and universe as any other piece of knowledge is right now'.

Let's run with your example of schizophrenia - this is not my area, so I'm deeply out of my comfort zone. I'm also thinking aloud here, so what I say is to be treated with a huge handful of salt!

Firstly, a point from within the current scientific way of thinking. Scientifically, we "know" (subject to above caveats) that a number of genes play a role in schizophrenia. Howeer, genetics as far as I understand it (which isn't that far - I have a biology degree but that's not exactly specialist) is moving away from the old "one gene, one protein, one function" hypothesis towards a much more complicated view of biochemical interactions, in which the difference between terms like 'environment' and 'genes' are no longer that clear. If a synaptic receptor in the brain of a small person (sensitive period unknown) is in a biochemical environment that includes lead, then that person is more like to get schizophrenia later on. But that lead is in the 'environment' of the gene at every level from the molecular right up to the fact that the foetus/baby is being brought up in inadequate housing where lead pipes haven't been replaced, which in turn is 'caused' by ideologically-laden ideas of the inequality of housing and prospect that we accept (scandalously, in my view) in our society. So the presence of the lead is biochemical, but it's also social and political. Similarly, the exposure to stress in young adulthood that can increase the risk of schizophrenia is simultaneously biochemical and social in nature: we find something stressful because of social and cultural factors. So at a biochemical level, even within our current scientific paradigm, our bodies are shaped by the social and economic, which seems to challenge any easy opposition between nature and nurture.

Secondly, a point that relativizes science. Nowadays, we describe this in terms of biochemical interactions, but formerly, in the nineteenth century, it would probably have been seen as a pattern of heredity, and in the eighteenth century as a condition of oversensitive nerves or overstrained sensibility (in the middle class, at least - though there were some nods towards inherited madness too). Three very different paradigms for disease - and they are not isolated from the surrounding culture but very much grow up out of the wider politics of the time. There's a relationship between eighteenth century philosophy about perception, the nervous openness of the body to the world, colonialism and broadening trade links; nineteenth century ideas of race, madness, disease and eugenics, heredity and imperialism abroad, with the rise of spatial control and surveillance at home; twentieth century ideas about biopolitics and the inevitability of neoliberalism (believe it or not, there is a huge literature on this, with which I am almost entirely unfamiliar ). My point is that in no case is the scientific paradigm outside of the political (understood in this broad sense), because the very limits of what we are able to think are defined by the ideological.

I guess what I'm saying is that science, as a practice, can't escape its own historicity.

There being such a thing as schizophrenia is socially created. Who has schizophrenia, what the definition and diagnosis of schizophrenia is have a particular meaning right now, which no doubt will be different in the future.

That means we can do all kind of studies, both scientific and other, on the causes of schizophrenia, because somebody has defined schizophrenia and stated who has it and who does not.

You can't do any scientific study on gender identity unless somebody decides what defines the different gender identities.

If somebody asks me to be participate in a schizophrenia study, I can meaningfully state that I do not have schizophrenia.

If asked to participate in a neurological study on gender identity, Neither I nor the vast majority of other people can meaningfully state what our gender identities are, because nobody will give a definition of the different gender identities.

There have been scientific studies done on femininity and masculinity but to do that, psychologists had to define what the characteristics of those two concepts were.

Again great post holly

I'll stick with schizophrenia as it is pretty clear that both biological factors have an influence.

From the NHS
^Evidence the disorder is partly inherited comes from studies of twins. Identical twins share the same genes. In identical twins, if one twin develops schizophrenia, the other twin has a one in two chance of developing it too. This is true even if they are raised separately.
In non-identical twins, who have different genetic make-ups, when one twin develops schizophrenia, the other only has a one in seven chance of developing the condition.
While this is higher than in the general population (where the chance is about 1 in a 100), it suggests genes are not the only factor influencing the development of schizophrenia^

I do agree that it is useful to view the biological and the social as factors that are not entirely separate but that interact and affect each other. (Eg taking drugs incresses the risk - now obviously whether or not you take drugs is a social thing (maybe there's a small part of biology too but I personally think the social factors are most important regarding drug taking)).

You can't do any scientific study on gender identity unless somebody decides what defines the different gender identities

Well that's kind of the problem with stuff that goes on in the brain.

If are diagnosing someone with depression you don't do it by a blood test. You rely on the patients own self reported symptoms.

Hi slug - I'm just glad this is on the Internet, that way no one can see the dictionary I keep referring to

When, but those symptoms are codified. The patient gets a questionnaire and rates their feelings in answer to various questions. "Do you look forward to things more/less/the same as before" eyc.

Is there a similar questionnaire for gender identity? What questions does it ask? What score means matched/mismatched/neutral?

The PND checking one that health visitors used to ask had 16-20 questions IIRc.

Yes, as Yonic says. There is a social definition of what depression is. You can't self report that you have depression if you think depression is a blue bicycle stored in a shed. You have to be self reporting symptoms from the agreed current definition.

yonic

I have a sneaking suspicion its quite an in depth process.
Definitely harder to get hormones for sexual dysforia than to get antidepressants.

A gender identity isn't the same thing as being diagnosed with sex dysphoria.

Having a gender identity is not a medical condition. Having sex dysphoria is a medical condition which requires diagnosis.