Please help me untangle why gender is such an issue

[nomorecrumbs]

I see myself as an old-school feminist, I believe that people should have equal opportunities regardless of their sex, and if people do not want to conform to gender stereotypes then more power to them. In fact I reject a lot of gender stereotyping as it’s socially, not biologically, prescriptive to me and I don’t think gender scripting should be pandered to.

Where I get muddled is trying to understand why trans people seemingly want to change their gender. In doing so, aren’t they conforming to societal notions of what it means to be a “woman” or a “man”? Why isn’t this just biologically based rather than socially, as to me the social aspect can be a load of bollocks?

E.g. I would love to ask a M2F trans why they “feel like they are more female”. Is it because they prefer pink, long hair, feminine clothes, traditional womanly traits? If so, why not stay a biological man and do these social things anyway? Is it fear of peer rejection? I don’t see why they have to just conform to gender stereotyping, basically, and wish any sex could just wear and do what they want without being pigeonholed into “genders”.

I’m concerned all this talk over gender is just reinforcing potentially damaging social stereotypes of what it means to appear male or female.

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.

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.

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.

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

*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.

@allmywhat

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.

Which shows femininity is not a characteristic exclusive to women.

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.

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

Homophobia wants to make it so, though.

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?

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.

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 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.

@Blibbyblobby

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.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3610447-Pink-Brain-Blue-Brain-Some-research-on-radicalisation-and-brains

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...

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).

Positrans, how can you really say as a biological male you felt like a girl/female, when 99% of the 51% of the population who are born female dont feel 'female, we only know we are different to boys due to our bodies and the way we are socialised. There is no gendered brain at birth and going forward any differences arise through hormones /socialisation. You may not have felt like the other boys and may be happier being percieved as female, but what you dont have internally is a female body , neither a female mind as it doesnt exist. Funnily enough thats because all have individual minds

If a child is constantly being told by blue/pink, gender-mad, parents that he or she is "playing with the wrong toys, liking the wrong colours etc...

..Then over a period of time wouldn't it be reasonable to expect that child to come to the conclusion that merely liking stuff is what makes a man a man (or woman) and that if he or she likes the "wrong" stuff, well...

..only one conclusion - born in the wrong body - or whatever daft thing they're calling it this week.

Also if we know that the brain switches off reasoning due to echo chambers and political radicalism and creates 'sacred values' that might lead to people dying for a cause i will pose the following questions:

What if a parent (or any other adult or peer) tells a child over years that they are 'born in the wrong body' or 'aren't a proper girl/boy/man/woman'?

Or

What happens of the trope of if you don't get treatment you will die by suicide is repeated over and over again in gender identity echo chambers - again particularly thinking about children? Why might this be immoral and actively dangerous?

Hmm.

My point is that if there any differences between brains due to 'pink or blue brain' or due to political radicalisation and the effect of echo chambers?

If we are seeing the same type of effect in other areas then its hard for the pink blue brain theory of gender identity being innate to stand up to proper scrutiny.

@RedToothBrush

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).

Depressing thought, since some of those people are our political representatives.

*@nauticant**
Not everyone has a sense of their gender identity mind - some people are agender

It means this:

Some people don't believe in gender identity. For these people we apply to them the gender identity "agender". Everyone can have whatever gender identity they want but they must accept at least one of them.

@nauticant if you have a gender identity, you don't have the luxury of not believing in gender identity.

"Agender" means lacking a gender identity - if you don't have one, that's the word for not having one.*

@Positrans An analogy of why people reject this, in my opinion, is that it is like someone religious telling me that because I do not subscribe to religion, I will therefore be labelled as a member of the A-God religion, which others will define for me. It implicitly demands that others accept your belief system and categorisation, when that is exactly what their beliefs reject. Which is particularly ironic given the emphasis on "self-identification".

If I do not believe in religion, then my answer to "which religion do you belong to?" is "none".

If I do not believe in gender as anything more than a harmful societal construct that oppresses people, then my answer to "what gender are you?" is "none". It is not "agender", because that would implicitly validate the concept that I reject: that people have a "gender" at all.

This "male/ female brain" nonsense particularly riles me because I have Aspergers. Many of the older books/ research on this (now discredited) describe it as having a "male brain". I absolutely do not. I am a woman. This is just biological reality and frankly, fairly irrelevant to who I am (except in terms of the impact it has had on my life except due to societal prejudice, which is why gendered ideas are so harmful). I don't subscribe to any gender stereotypes: my brain is just as female as the rest of me because it is composed out of my cells which contain female DNA in every single one of them.

Imposing gender labels on people who think the whole thing is a load of crock is offensive.

If identity is based on the right to self identify then why is it imposed - particularly on women, lesbians and those whose religious identity attaches importance to sex?

@RedToothBrush that is so interesting about radicalisation. It's like an extreme form of confirmation bias? I do think to a lesser extent this seems to apply to all of those indoctrinated by religion: even if well educated, conflicting facts are ignored and reasoning abandoned. Very insightful: I shall read your posted thread. Thank you.

If identity is based on the right to self identify then why is it imposed - particularly on women, lesbians and those whose religious identity attaches importance to sex?*

It's almost as if there's an assumption of inferiority 🤔

Good old Andrea covered this in the dim and distant past

Men have the power of naming, a great and sublime power. This power of naming enables men to define experience, to articulate boundaries and values, to designate to each thing its realm and qualities, to determine what can and cannot be expressed, to control perception itself

Thanks for sharing Sophocles