Gender is not a social construct

[SheWhoMustNotBeHeard]

A very insightful interview with Debra Soh, the Canadian scientist on Triggernometry. She talks about the research in differences in male and female brains, trans people's brains being more female if they are tw and more male if tm but that results are confounded by their sexuality. She talks about transitioning children and why the affirmative approach is harmful.

She also disagrees that gender is a social construct. I didn't really understand what she was saying tbh. She didn't say what is was either. Can someone clarify it for me?

To suggest that there are mental capability differences between men and women is always difficult ,because as was shown earlier, the differences are so small and the distributions so strongly overlapping that many men and women become excluded or made to feel abnormal once people try to focus on the differences

My feminism wants to respect differences where they are material only. So female sports, female bodies in design and medicine.

Whilst some people who fit stereotypes are often wanting to discuss and emphasise mental differences , that is materially harmful to the significant ( approx half of both male and female population ) who fall out side those limits

Erm, yes, there are differences between the sexes: one has XX chromosomes, one has XY chromosomes; one has a vagina, one has a penis

Well yes I don't mean those differences. I mean differences in what we are interested in or our abilities (and I hasten to add ON AVERAGE).

The conservative position I described is: "There are pink brains and blue brains, but that only men have blue brains". That might or might not be your position

I don't believe in pink and blue brains.

I do believe that on average males are more prone to violence and I don't believe that this is purely social.

@merrymouse

If it is exclusive to a sex, it can be labelled male or female If it is present in both sexes, even if it is more prevalent in one, it cannot

Is it that simple though?

If somebody is 5' 3" they could be male or female, but a woman of 5' 3" is of average height and a man of 5' 3" is unusually small, because of sex.

(I'm not making an argument either way, just trying to follow the logic).

But we don't say there are 'male heights' and 'female heights'.

But we don't say there are 'male heights' and 'female heights'

No, but height is not irrelevant to sex - and is one (of many) reasons that there are male and female sports competitions.

Rightly or wrongly some people are suggesting not that there are pink or blue brains, but that some mental traits are more common in one sex or the other.

However it seems difficult to pin down what these traits are. (Perhaps excluding violence/agression, for which prison statistics seem to provide evidence).

I suppose that would make sense re hunter gatherer societies @DianasLasso.

And yes, silent abusers, that would be interesting.

On a previous thread, kesstrel mentioned an excellent linguistic paper about generic sentences, and how the difference between "some", "many" and "all" can be hard for people to fully grasp:

Generics: Cognitition and Acquisition
DOI: 10.1215/00318108-2007-023
www.researchgate.net/publication/253860204_Generics_Cognition_and_Acquisition

Ducks lay eggs' is a true sentence, and ducks are female' is a false one. Similarly, mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus' is obviously true, whereas mosquitoes don't carry the West Nile virus' is patently false. This is so despite the egg-laying ducks' being a subset of the female ones and despite the number of mosquitoes that don't carry the virus being ninety-nine times the number that do.

I haven't read all of the paper (on my To Do list), but it came up in response to a post of mine about how people seem to struggle with grasping the precise meaning of generic sentences about sex or gender.

I'm not feeling very articulate today, so apologies for my laziness but I'll pretty much C&P it here, as I think it's relevant.
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Language often fails to make statistics transparent.

The following sentences look very similar:
a) Men have penises
b) Men are better at maths than women
c) Men are rapists

But sentence (a) refers to almost 100% of men.

Sentence (b)... A male poster on one thread was defending this or a similar proposition with a graph showing two bell curves which overlapped except for the 0.1% at either extreme.

Supposing this graph were correct, and that it did indeed reflect pure biology not some other biasing factor, that would still leave ability in maths not having any correlation with sex except in some tiny proportion of the population (which blatantly didn't include that particular male poster!).

Sentence (c)... Blokes line up to yell NAMALT about that one. Though not so much about (b).

In (a) "men" = "all men".
In (b) & (c) "men" = "a tiny minority of men".

It's struck me that the language enables someone to say, "I'm a man so I have a penis; I'm a man so I'm better at maths than women," without experiencing any jolt as they shift from one assertion to the other.

Adding NAMALT occasionally doesn't seem to dislodge this mental elision of the two different uses of the word "men" from the discourse.

(And obviously the same is true of the word "women" and of any other word for a group.)

If somebody is 5' 3" they could be male or female, but a woman of 5' 3" is of average height and a man of 5' 3" is unusually small, because of sex.

But their argument is, that because they have a womans height, there's a good chance that this 5' 3" man's 'gender' is female therefore should be seen as a woman. The height trumps the gametes.

But their argument is, that because they have a womans height, there's a good chance that this 5' 3" man's 'gender' is female therefore should be seen as a woman. The height trumps the gametes.

I'm just talking about different arguments proposed by Simon Baron Cohen and Cordelia Fine not necessarily trans issues.

2. Whether a brain can be in the wrong body.

I think there is general agreement, on this thread at least, that the answer to point 2 is no, but perhaps a brain might lead somebody to be more likely to experience gender dysphoria.

Sorry, bit of a confusing post above.

I think there is a separate discussion about whether a brain can be in the wrong body, but there is general agreement on this thread that your brain is the same sex as the rest of your body.

2) Whether a brain can be in the wrong body.

This is the crux.

You get your own brain. Social expectations decide if you fit or not in with the "norm." Humans like norms.

The question regarding trans, gender, sex and and brains should be more about the perception of the body and self.

So more research comparing dysphoria types and brains, and those who've lost limbs but have ghost pain/ feeling within the lost limb, would be more appropriate. Including anorexia and appearance dysmorphia.

But that's transphobic so...

perhaps a brain might lead somebody to be more likely to experience gender dysphoria

Well, my brain leads me to be good at maths, not like emotion-led decision-making, prefer trousers over skirts, prefer blue over pink decor... and enjoy eating cheese.

Fortunately I grew up in a (localised) time and place that did not tell me that females "shouldn't" have these attributes. Had I grown up somewhere which told me that these "made me a man", I would probably have had gender dysphoria.

Would that be my brain leading me to having gender dysphoria? Or the crapness of imposing gender stereotypes on me leading to me having gender dysphoria?

PerkingFaintly, the point is that brain structure (nature) might make it more likely that somebody would experience gender dysphoria, in the same way that brain structure might make them more susceptible to an eating disorder, or indeed good at maths.

Jeeez

Soh from what I can tell And everything I’ve heard her say on the subject is basically a conservative when it comes to gender. I’ve never seen any evidence she identifies as a feminist.

I also find her extremely dogmatic and unscientific In her insistence that brain differences cause gendered behaviors rather than are an Effect of nurture. For a scientist this is extremely troubling.

I'm not an expert in the field but my opinion is gender has to be a social construct.
If there is a biologically driven difference between a male and a female that is a sex-based difference.
Any brain in a male body is a male brain no matter how 'femaley'. It would just prove the variation in male not a gender quirk.
A female foetus being exposed to higher testosterone just means they develop in a particular biological soup. Again just a variation in female experience.
Naff all to do with gender (IMO).
It only becomes that when you assign the effects to that. Which is a social construction.

PerkingFaintly, the point is that brain structure (nature) might make it more likely that somebody would experience gender dysphoria, in the same way that brain structure might make them more susceptible to an eating disorder, or indeed good at maths.

As the glass analogy above, it's likely to be multi factoral, with your basic natural personality and nature (eg how much are you naturally affected by what others think/ perfectionism / self esteem/) plus external influences (very stereotyped, rigid and binary environment, nor not) and throw in a trend or social contaigon and you've a perfect storm for dysphoria.

Brain structure will be a chicken and egg situation; basic natural personality plus environment could lead to dysphoria, which, as it's very much associated with anxiety and depression and an enhanced focus on the self, will show up in areas of the brain. Exactly as can be seen in brains of those with depression or anorexia etc.

But again, not a fixed point, as is shown in so many studies. Eg good mindfulness (carefully done) has been shown to affect the size of the amygdala, which is larger in those suffering from ptsd and anxiety.

What's more pertinent is the effect of hormone blockers on the development of the teen brain; as studies on sheep have shown to very much impact the structure there, with different impacts on male and female brains.

(Sheep brains are apparently the closest in structure to human brains and so often used rather than testing young teens.)

I agree broom. That's what Rippon says.

I'd love to see research on the brains of those who are members of cults.

Those followers of conspiracy theories are apparently generally "alternative" types and tend to have a hankering to be different.

The whole male female brain debate is a massive distraction imo, to many other aspects of the human condition, also sexist and a closed question.

When people talk about men's presumed superior mathematics skills as the reason why there are more men in STEM fields they use the extreme right-tail argument, i.e., that men and women are equally good at mathematics, on average, but that there are many more men who score extremely high in mathematics tests and that it is from that population the STEM scientists are drawn.

I saw one study which didn't find that actual people in STEM had scored in the extreme right-tail of any mathematics test. But more interesting is the fact that there are more women and girls in the extreme right tail of verbal tests, yet that is not reflected in a greater number of women writers and so on.

So even if the extreme right-tail arguments had some merit (not sure as test-taking behavior itself might affect those), something else intervenes and makes it easier for men to reach the top echelons in various fields.

And yes, I would be careful with concluding that our current knowledge is sufficient for determining what is innate and what is environmental in the brains of men and women. Though if anything, the trend in those research pieces has been toward less difference rather than more.

@Barracker Never seen it explained so clearer! Thank you, using this next time someone comes up with the female/Male brain. I’m a woman in STEM and unfortunately there are a lot of women that want to present as the exception. Lots are now claiming non binary ! I’m really insulted and bit saddened to be honest. What message does that send to young girls.

When people talk about men's presumed superior mathematics skills as the reason why there are more men in STEM fields they use the extreme right-tail argument, i.e., that men and women are equally good at mathematics, on average, but that there are many more men who score extremely high in mathematics tests and that it is from that population the STEM scientists are drawn.

There tend to be more men at the extreme right and left tails of any normal distribution.

For example, the average IQ for both men and women is 100. However, women tend to score close to 100 (+ or - a few points), while more men score over 120 or under 80.

In addition, some STEM areas (medicine, veterinary, biology in general) have a female majority, particularly among recent graduates. That doesn't discount the possibility that socialisation plays a role (could be that biological sciences are seen as more "feminine"), and it definitely doesn't mean sexism isn't a problem. But it does complicate the picture.

being exposed to higher testosterone levels in utero.

I keep seeing this claim but unless you are a female twin with a brother how can you know what levels of hormones you were exposed to? If your mother secreted the hormones naturally then surely they were natural levels of hormones.

For example, the average IQ for both men and women is 100. However, women tend to score close to 100 (+ or - a few points), while more men score over 120 or under 80.

IQ tests don’t exist ‘apart from society’ either.

But more interesting is the fact that there are more women and girls in the extreme right tail of verbal tests, yet that is not reflected in a greater number of women writers and so on.

Yes - and even if the argument is that men are more likely to be genius writers/mathematicians, you don't have to be a genius to do most jobs.

A lot of people work in STEM for mundane reasons like the desire for a well paid stable job that pays the bills, not because they believe they are going to cure cancer.