Ok, guess we're doing this.
@Ereshkigalangcleg What you're doing with this GCSE-level biological sex essentialism is repeating the same mistakes that led to pink and blue toys and brains in the past. You're taking a complex dynamic system and assigning it an essential property while claiming that science says so.
The scientific community absolutely and categorically, at every level, has so far determined that 'it's not that simple'. You're swapping one mystical dualistic entity for another and then saying that the data structures that reside within our brains and encode everything about ourselves as people have no relevance to the discussion.
It's starkly clear to anyone who has formally studied or worked with neural networks, either biological or artificial, at a serious level that the notion that there's anything essentially and completely male or female about the end result of growing out a trained connectome under an enormous range of varying environmental factors is deeply flawed and I feel embarrassed for anyone who tries to seriously claim otherwise in light of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
I don't believe in gendered souls. I don't believe in sex essence. It's an illusion - a simplification of a complex, disordered reality. I believe in arrays of pattern generators organised into feedback networks functioning as behavioural simulators to extrapolate and generate future actions based upon their classification of a history of past actions and events using clouds of statistical relationships that encode a compressed form of the world as they have encountered it so far. Our minds are simulators constantly generating the actions of the person we recognise ourselves to be. That's it. There's no magic gender soul there. Just the awkward, fuzzy, imperfect outcome of billions of tiny biomachines carving up a statistical landscape.
Is the self-classification my brain has maintained throughout and since childhood wrong? Possibly. Should I have internally 'naturally' resolved my dysphoria and become a male adult? It's a nice neat compelling argument but I'm afraid I'm rather allergic to teleology, as every other feminist should rightly be as well. I'm an adult human, and I recognise within myself a constellation of data points that I identify as female.
The GC philosophical stance that there is no such thing as a gendered soul - which I agree with - rightly demands that neural networks do not magically know what they are - they have to work it out - but then in the same breath...assigns an immutable, sexed essence to every neurological structure that has ever lived. There's no magic sex here, I'm afraid. The god of the gaps has shrunk once again, and this 'biological sex' claim only works on people who've never thought critically on the subject since school.
Either:
- Sex is an inherent, binding property that always applies in binary totality to the entirety of a human organism from the moment of conception, and people do not 'become' male or female - they just magically hold this essential essence. Growing up as and existing within a female body is thus just irrelevant window-dressing - you already have a female essence and the concept of socialisation is irrelevant. Genetic mutations are deviations from the essential sex from which all humans are derived. What you are may as well be written into the stars.
- Sex is a convenient shorthand we use to summarise the enormous constellation of statistically linked states that can arise from the expression of the specific structures of complex polypeptide chains that form a human organism's genetic code. Gender identity - a component of sex - is a convenient shorthand we use to summarise the enormous constellation of statistically linked states that can arise from the expression of emergent behaviours in interlinked biological neural networks grown in line with a genetically defined connectome and trained through decades of exposure to environmental and societal factors as part of embodied existence.
I know which one makes sense to me.