NBC are quoting a police chief in Nashville...

[FusionChefGeoff]

That's all I'm saying - Google is your friend and it's in the byline.

That's fascinating @CaveMum. The societal factor is way bigger than I would have expected.

I suppose the upside is that violent crime can actually be reduced. It's not some default setting or consequence of the Fall as the gun lobby would have us believe.

I agree, which is why 'gender is just a social construct' seems evidently untrue and unhelpful to me.

Unless you are defining gender as only those behaviours ascribed to purely socialistion as gender.

But I don't think most people are, and I don't think it's workable.

^Also when you start ascribing some behaviours to pure biology it becomes narrow and prescriptive and leads to...so if you are an aggressive female you are male etc. At least logically
^

no this logic doesnt make sense. - another example - it is only women who have wombs, does not logically mean that women without wombs are men.

But maybe I am wrong about my definition of gender, wrong as in it is not the official definition. But I am not sure there is a official definiton anymore.

It all got confusing when peoole replaced the word gender with sex, to be more polite. Then it got confusing and people use the word gender to mean male or female.

I worked for an NGO teaching sexual health in East Africa and we spent alot of time helping the girls distinguish the difference between

'sex roles' and 'gender roles'

sex roles were giving birth, menstruation, motherhood.

Gender roles were 'only women carry water on their heads' and 'only women clean'. Of course men could do these things.

Gender was a very easy way for men to get out of responsibility!

I have always taken gender to mean this.

It shows violent crime can be reduced but the biological discrepancy remains.

There are many interesting studies on how context effects the manifestation of increased testosterone.

Violence is one way increased testosterone can manifest but it's also linked to risk taking, status, competition, physical action, all which can be channelled to be exhibited in socially acceptable or advantageous ways.

Did you tell them male violence was because of sex and not linked to gender?

@Abhannmor the figures are very dramatic in that particular example because of the wide gulf between the two countries.

I looked up the murder rate per 100,000 head of population for more context:

Singapore - 0.17
Honduras - 38.6
(U.K. - 1.2)

So whilst yes it is startling to see that a woman from Honduras is x50 more likely to commit murder than a man from Singapore, the murder rate itself is almost 21,000% (if I’ve done my maths right!) higher in Honduras than in Singapore in the first place.

Did you tell them male violence was because of sex and not linked to gender?

Meant to add:
Because this seems like a dangerous message to give but consistent with your view and definition?

Thinking back, i definitely stood in front of the class and said (something along the lines of to:

Some of what is expected of you is due to sex and some of it is due to gender. These are sex roles and gender roles.

If we go by your previous definiton of gender meaning 'any behaviour related to ones sex, biological or socially expected', then what I taught makes no sense.

Gender roles are used to opress women all accross the world. Women should cover themselves, women are not allowed to read, women are the only ones that clean. Its really good to be able to define what is a real, unavoidabel aspect of being one's sex, and what society is expecting or you.

Also, based on previous definition of gender meaning '^any behaviour related to ones sex, biological or socially expected'
^

Then terms like gender role and gender stereotypes have bo meaning, and mean that sex role and sex stereotype also have no distinction in relation to the previous terms.

So it really comes down to - does gender mean 'behaviours' or does it specifically mean society's expectations of a sex unanchored from biology.

No of course I didn't say this, because as I have stated now for maybe the 5th time, I think violence is due to both sex and gender.

Nature and nurture

You can't have it both ways though.

Either gender means a biological sex class - as per all dictionary definitions until quite recently - or it is a subjective feeling. The latter concept seems to have caused enough mayhem and outlived whatever usefulness it may have had for sociologists.

I dont all think behaviours are exclusively gender or exclusively sex.

Menstruation- exclusively sex

High heel wearing - exclusively gender

Violence - a mixture of both

I dont think gender is a subjective feeling! I don't think the girls in Zambia were feeling like they wanted to carry the water for the whole family whilst their brothers played.

There is also nothing written in their biology that states females are the water carriers.

It is a social/cultural expectation of the female sex, to the detriment of the girls.

Menstruation and pregnancy are biological processes and not behaviours.

They are processes exclusive to female biology.

Behaviours such as violence or wearing high heels are not exclusively linked to biology but to varying degrees are more associated with some sexes, for biological and cultural reasons.

Which means gender is not just a social construct.

We don't seem to have a shared understanding of what gender is.

And therein lies the rub.

While there is no consistent definition of gender then it’s easy to end up talking at crossed purposes.

My belief is that women’s oppression is rooted in our sex and therefore our biology.

At a purely biological level our XX chromosomes mean that as an embryo and then a foetus we develop ovaries, uterus etc. During and after puberty the predominant oestrogenisation of our bodies mean that (generally) we develop physical characteristics designed for gestating and nursing young. Pubertal changes in Males on the other hand are designed around being able to hunt and find food, defend themselves (and potentially their female mate and young) from other males and to be able to find other females to mate with in order to ensure survival of the species. Early humans did this in the same way, broadly speaking, all mammals do.

In humans however, evolution means we have developed a complex series of social rules that have changed over time but were initially rooted in our biological reproductive functions. So again, even as we became hunter gatherers, farmers who domesticated animals etc the roles in society (what we could call gender) were linked to the our reproductive functions.

As time has gone on, more complex social rules are added that say ‘men should be strong’ ‘boys don’t cry’ ‘girls are delicate and aren’t as clever as boys, ‘women’s brains aren’t able to do science,’ ‘women are too emotional to hold senior positions in society.’ These come from societal ideas that originally started with fallacious ideas about human biology that we now know is untrue, just as many things we believed about human biology we now know to be false. These are societal expectations and (I think) are at least what some feminists mean when they talk about gender.

Of course, the fact that we exist within society and within these expectations (such as telling boys not to cry or girls they can’t be doctors) means that some of our behaviours are the product of our internalisation of societal norms. Boys may be more aggressive in part due to inherently higher levels of testosterone but are influenced heavily by societal expectations that they are not supposed to cry or show physical weakness as to do so is to be considered less male.

Feminists like me (what might be broadly considered ‘radical’ feminism) argue that our oppression is rooted in biology (the fact that only we can gestate and nurse babies and the inherent vulnerabilities and changes to life’s structure that brings with it) but that the other behaviours expected of us by society are not inherent to our sex and therefore should be ignored.

TLDR: Human behaviour is rooted in our evolution but subject to the prevailing attitudes of what a society dictates those sexes should do (gender). Some feminists argue that the important, inescapable features are the biological ones and the rest (gender) should be abandoned.

Gender says girls like pink and boys like blue. Gwnder says real men don cry. Gender is oppressive.

Trans genderism is the performance of the stereotypes of the other sex.

Why do we need to medicalise this? It makes no sense

How on earth is wearing high heels anything to do with biology?? In the same vein how is carrying the water for your family anything to do with biology?? These things are socially constructed norms.

Feminists like me (what might be broadly considered ‘radical’ feminism) argue that our oppression is rooted in biology (the fact that only we can gestate and nurse babies and the inherent vulnerabilities and changes to life’s structure that brings with it) but that the other behaviours expected of us by society are not inherent to our sex and therefore should be ignored.

Yes truly, our opression is rooted in our biology, hut we come from a progressive western society where it is easy to ignore gender constraints.

Imagine having the same biological vulnerbalities and living in a country where you cannot work, learn, read, wear trousers, and have to wait on all your male relatives every need.

I also think we need to look at the difference between ‘gender’ and ‘gender identity.’

Gender identity theory says we all have an innate gender identity. It argues that certain behaviours such as liking having long hair or being caring or wanting to be strong or brave are not created by historical societal expectations but by an innate identity. That regardless of one’s physical sex characteristics if one has a feeling of wanting long hair, to wear dresses and to be caring then that is because one’s innate gender is that of ‘woman.’

Those of us who are Gender Critical (whether we consider ourselves feminist or not) say that is nonsense. That those behaviours are what historical society has labelled as ‘man’ or ‘woman’ behaviours but this is not innate. It is socially constructed. We would generally say that what unites the people who are classed as woman’ or ‘man’ is our reproductive biology and nothing else, in the same way a mare is a horse with female reproductive organs not a horse that behaves in a certain way. Similarly, no longer having, or never having had those organs due to medical conditions or treatment doesn’t mean they are not women or men any more than a gelded stallion is a mare rather than a gelding.

Some 'stereotypical' behaviours are more obviously linked to biology, some are more obviously cultural (although culture obviously did not develop separate from biology) which is why it makes little sense to state 'gender is socially constructed' unless you are able to establish and separate the subset of stereotypical behaviour and roles associated purely with cultural socialisation.

@Faffertea I agree with everything you said. I have to quietly add to this conversation that this was absolutely not the position of very vocal feminists on this board a decade ago. I tried to make your very points only to be set upon. At the time, we all had to agree that there are absolutely no differences between the sexes other than external genitalia and to think so was biological essentialism gone mad.

Gender identity then literally means 'identifying with the social expectations/stereotypes of a particular sex'

Therefore if your gender identity is 'woman' it has nothing to do with actual womanhood, but with stereotypical woman performances (see dylan mulvaney).

Similar with man.

And to bring thread back to it's topic-
I wonder in what parts Hale was affected by testosterone and to what extent she was performing man gender.

I agree gender is different from gender identity, although I think the insistence gender is purely socially constructed allowed for the development of the gender identity concept.

Imagine having the same biological vulnerbalities and living in a country where you cannot work, learn, read, wear trousers, and have to wait on all your male relatives every need.

Exactly. Some societies (and I’d argue those with strong patriarchal structures) continue to exploit physical differences between sexes to prop up their societal expectations (gender) and argue that this is what is innate.

Ive never got a satisfactory answer from gender identity believers as to why gender identity and strict patriarchal societies have this is common.

Nor why those arguing innate gender identity of ‘woman’ never have those oppressive characteristics that actual women experience in other societies.

Almost as if it’s made up.

This is the point - to seperate these thing. For women to be able to pick apart what she does and doesnt need. For the Women of Zambia to stand up and say yes the men can move the goddamn water too.

For women to not have to wear high heels to the office, for women to be allowed to be pilots and drivers. For girls not to have to feel like they need a face full of make up to be a proper woman