FemQuant (ref: academia, quants, social science)

[leafinthewind]

Brand new (to me) insanity. I'm a quantitative methods nerd in a UK University (one of the ones named in the link below).

There's a group of Early Career Researchers (ECRs) who have organised a conference called Beyond the binary variable: Feminist quantitative analyses of gendered inequalities

I can get alongside researching under-researched groups. I can get alongside asking more accurate survey questions. I can get alongside asking more survey questions. But when demographers study populations they had better be able to tell the difference between male and female.

These are scientists you say?

Well gender probably shouldn't be a binary variable

I could imagine interesting questions

To what extent do societies with more flexible gender structures differ in their discrimination of women / aggressiveness of thier society

What are the correlations between gender none conformism in adults and childhood experience of body dismorphia , and how might that inform treatment

Sex should be a binary, though. Asking for self-IDed gender might be interesting/useful for some research questions. For the relationship between gender non-conformism and anything, you're definitely going to need to know sex, plus a lot of other things. Those are going to be specific surveys about gender, probably.

I'm thinking about the census, and other large social science surveys like the British birth cohort studies and the Family Resources Survey and indeed administrative data like births, marriages and deaths, and the crime statistics.

Well since gender is so important to some people it might be good to collect sex and gender identity for many of those things just to see if/when gender is at all relevant
But yeah under the starting conditions sex is binary

@leafinthewind I saw this too (I'm also a quant researcher at a UK university). I vaguely know a few of the people involved and am frankly a bit disappointed that they have been drawn into this. I have registered for the conference but will decide nearer the time whether I trust myself to actually attend without 'outing' myself as GC. But I actually think it is important to 'know your enemy', if you see what I mean?

I though the plenary looked interesting:

What is gender, anyway: a review of the options for operationalising gender

Could this go beyond "It's subjective. You can't!"? Dare it get into actual definitions? I suppose it has to, as the speaker is taking 75 minutes for it. Seriously, I hope that plenary gets Youtubed.

@midgemagneto

Well gender probably shouldn't be a binary variable

I could imagine interesting questions

To what extent do societies with more flexible gender structures differ in their discrimination of women / aggressiveness of thier society

What are the correlations between gender none conformism in adults and childhood experience of body dismorphia , and how might that inform treatment

Could I respectfully add to your question, @midgemagneto

What are the correlations between gender none conformism in adults and childhood experience of body dismorphia , childhood ACE's, and how might that inform treatment

Or, more straightforward:
What are the correlations between gender non-conformism in adults and adverse childhood experiences?

@JustSpeculation

I though the plenary looked interesting:

What is gender, anyway: a review of the options for operationalising gender

Could this go beyond "It's subjective. You can't!"? Dare it get into actual definitions? I suppose it has to, as the speaker is taking 75 minutes for it. Seriously, I hope that plenary gets Youtubed.

If it is based on this published article, they argue that gender should be operationalised based on four aspects:

"(a) physiological/bodily aspects (sex); (b) gender identity or self-defined gender; (c) legal gender; and (d) social gender in terms of norm-related behaviours and gender expressions"

But beyond that it is just the usual woolly arguments, 'what about intersex people?', talking about masculinity/femininity without actually defining what those terms mean, etc.

They also suggest that if you are interested in 'bodily/physiological aspect' such as menstruation, you should just ask about that specifically and not refer to sex OR gender.

They also seem to advocate using free-text responses to questions about gender in surveys because "it is preferable to give all participants the opportunity to make a satisfying response to the question about their gender identity, instead of forcing them to choose between response categories that may not be adequate for them. We also aim at operationalising ‘gender identity’ as a self-defined category, in order to avoid measurement error".

Make of that what you will...

Ooh look, a random, new inconsistent definition of "cis".

Cisgenderism refers to the idea that it is possible to visually see the gender identity or infer bodily characteristics of an individual based on their appearance

Thanks @CormorantStrike for that. I am going to read that quite carefully because a quick skim suggests it only needs a tiny sentence of the "If you don't conflate sex and gender you find that you don't actually need a concept of gender at all" type to be rather useful for researchers.

“Visually see”

@Ereshkigalangcleg I have actually seen the term 'cisgenderism' used quite a lot recently in academic circles. I found a definition here:

"Cisgenderism refers to the cultural and systemic ideology that denies, denigrates, or pathologizes self-identified gender identities that do not align with assigned gender at birth as well as resulting behavior, expression, and community."

Which sounds quite reasonable - these kind of structural inequalities are clearly a bad thing. But the term tends to be used in such as way that it prioritises gender over other sources of inequality like, oh I don't know... sex? So 'c*s' women are inherently privileged over trans women and they can't do anything about it .

But the term tends to be used in such as way that it prioritises gender over other sources of inequality like, oh I don't know... sex?

Yes that's always been my objection to it, whether coming from academia or not, as it's used to create a false hierarchy of oppression where women are the oppressors of males rather than the oppressed. It's self-indulgent, gaslighting TRA nonsense.

Cisgenderism refers to the idea that it is possible to visually see the gender identity or infer bodily characteristics of an individual based on their appearance

This definition goes further than the one you quote. This is completely circular, presupposing a biased ideological worldview which gives primacy to gender identity as axiomatic in all questions.

If I don't believe in innate gender identity where do I fit in in this worldview? That's not what I have been told "cisgender" means. Many people say it's simply not being "trans" therefore I cannot reject it as a label as I would otherwise have to identify as trans.

I have read the article @CormorantStrike linked to, and it's worth a read. The authors highlight a lot of the problems in using gender theory in the social sciences. They correctly identify conflation of sex and gender as a problem. They question the necessity of asking about gender, suggesting it's not really very useful a lot of the time. They come up with this complete humdinger:

Researchers in the social sciences are rarely interested in the physiological/bodily aspects (i.e. genitalia, chromosomes, bodily attributes) or legal gender, but are more often interested in how individuals identify or express themselves from a social perspective

• which suggests to me that they don't think social research has much crossover with medicine, engineering, architecture, nutrition and, well, pretty well everything else.

They point out how incredibly diffficult it is to operationalise something so nebulous complex. But what they don't do, is look at the irrational, confected, bewildering monstrosity they have created and just decide to dump it.

And that would be such an easy step to take.

Ahh, social science, deciplines that 'identify' as science.

They are going to be throughly de-scienced now.

@JustSpeculation thanks for this summary - I didn't have time to read it properly earlier but the bits you mention are the parts that jumped out at me too. So close to getting it but not taking that extra step...

I think Anna Lindqvist (the first author of the paper) is a psychologist - so she will have quite a different view to people in other branches of social sciences. I was actually quite offended by that sentence that you quoted! Social sciences is a broad church - eg. my colleagues working in social epidemiology and population health are very much concerned with physiological/bodily aspects!

Cisgenderism refers to the idea that it is possible to visually see the gender identity or infer bodily characteristics of an individual based on their appearance

It’s sort of clever to make a normal basic ability, natural to almost every human being, sound like some bizarre new theory. Sort of clever, but mainly stupid.

It’s sort of clever to make a normal basic ability, natural to almost every human being, sound like some bizarre new theory. Sort of clever, but mainly stupid.

Indeed.