What if we rethought gender?

[bonfireoftheverities]

Only 7 minutes long, but I have yet to make it through. Perhaps you're made of stronger stuff.

"How about we challenge the idea that sex is about biology and biology is just fact."

Its just a lot of words to distract from the fact they want to disregard sex as a class, especially for safeguarding.

They might as well have said 'rather than looking at sex and age, lets concentrate on a persons height instead'.

There are times when sex expectations are interesting and how those who step outside them are treated, but it has nothing to do with hospital wards or sports.

The idea that sex is not binary would be relevant to the gender debate if trans people were people with DSD. But, as far as i know, theres no evidence to suggest that is the case. It looks as if this link was made be people who wanted to reclassify trans as a dsd.

Absolutely spot on, @ZuttZeVootEeeVo!

So gender could depend on your job and hormone levels? Okaaaay. We’re going to need a LOT more flags…

So you identified as agender (an identity that falls under the trans umbrella) and he tried to convince you that you are 'cis'?

That's conversion therapy - isn't that going to be illegal soon?

Even if you think there is a significant, distinct difference in various parts of men's and women's brains, then a 'woman'-type brain existing in a man's body surely proves nothing beyond the fact that that type of brain isn't actually solely a 'woman's' brain but can be either men's or women's?

The logic on this absolutely baffles me. It's like saying "All male sheep are white, and female sheep are black" "But I've found these female sheep that are white, doesn't that mean your categorisation is wrong?" "No, it means they're male"

The idea that sex is not binary would be relevant to the gender debate if trans people were people with DSD. But, as far as i know, theres no evidence to suggest that is the case.

It used to be standard to test people presenting to gender clinics for DSDs. They stopped bothering because the incidence was identical to that in the general population.

blackcabbiegender - this gender can actually be proven in brain scans: Brain changes seen in cabbies who take 'The Knowledge' - BBC News

This is always the issue; the conflation of sex, gender and gender identity.

Ha ha ha! Indeed. Although technically I said I didn't identify as anything at all. But that's definitely how a gender identity believer would have interpreted my answer.

The differences in the brain scans is interesting. As is the difference in black cab drivers.

I'm assuming that sex-based pressures and expectations do influence our life choices, meaning some professions typical "attract" men, others women. Then once the need for a specific knowledge has gone, the influence and impact is lessened.

I'd like to add swimofficialgender to the request list for the flag please. In "honour" of Anne Coombes and Anne's 15 minutes of fame at the British Swimming Championships (a couple of months ago?) In Sheffield.

Yep, this is bonkers. What about before people work? They are genderless until they leave school or uni and all partake in gender-free sports, for example? It must be a joke.

*the difference in the brain scans
*typically attract

Brain scans are always talked about, but never used in diagnosis.

@BonfireLady thats interesting what you’ve said about the psychological and social roots. I’ve been learning that there could be a biological basis caused by chemical contamination in our food and water and I’m just finding it so confusing. If that were the case -and these men really did have female brains we should help them and affirm them but if it’s a psychological issue then they should have treatment and we shouldn’t have to say they are women. Not for the individual, but because socially we shouldn’t have to speak falsely

@Annaishere

I’ve been learning that there could be a biological basis caused by chemical contamination in our food and water and I’m just finding it so confusing. If that were the case -and these men really did have female brains we should help them and affirm them

I'm going to ask you to think about that.

When people make suggestions like "chemical contamination could cause men's brains to be feminised", what are they really saying?

That there is a blueprint within the brain that tells it what type of body it's suppoed to go into? So the person with a "wrong sex" brain spends their lives looking down and seeing the wrong body?

But brains don't work like that. They grow within the body and are part of the body. They aren't like car chips that are fully programmed before they are fitted! And even if they were, that still wouldn't mean you could just drop a brain into the wrong body and it would just work any more than you would expect the control chip of a VW Golf to just work if you dropped it into a Corsa!

And of course human bodies are far more complicated that cars. Imagine all the nerve pathways, hormonal controls and so on that link the brain to the body. A "woman's" brain in a "man's" body would in reality be a load of unconnected control systems - I mean, how would (s)he even be able to pee when the brain is wired up for parts the body doesn't have!

So it's not really a "woman's" brain at all. It's a man's brain. If he looks down and sees the "wrong" body that's not because some blueprint in his brain went wrong in the womb and somewhow wired his eyes to expect to see tits, it's because he has decided (consciously or unconsciously) that something about his personality or sense of self is more aligned with what he believes about women's bodies and lives than his own.

Maybe there are chemical basis for some of our gendered differences, but remember, when we study actual people with an open mind instead of looking for proof of what we already believe to be true there are very clearly plenty men and women who exhibit some or all of the gendered differences "usually" associated with the opposite sex, or no particular gendered pattern at all. So a so-called "feminised" brain, even should such a thing exist, has always been something occuring naturally within the bounds of normal variation within men and therefore even if men like this genunely are more common due to environemntal pressures they are still 100%, entirely men, not anything to do with womanhood and we should be looking for ways to accomodate this change in men within manhood, not push them into being a new type of womanhood.

So the question we should always be asking when someone comes up with the suggestion of a "woman's" brain in a "man's" body is "what exactly is this thing you are labelling a "woman's" brain, and why does that make a man in any way "really" a woman to the degree we need to utterly redefine the basis on which women understand themselves and all the social and political rights and protections that come with that definition to accomodate this thing occuring within the body of a man?"

Exactly. The whole 'wrong brain/wrong body' idea is logically nonsense. Even Stonewall dropped it ages ago.

Thanks for doing the transcript, SuperStripeyNova.

It’s weird that transgenderists use the same points feminists have always made, about how pointless and harmful sex stereotypes are, and yet somehow do a backflip to claim that everyone has a gender identity, ie we all have to fit a sex stereotype.

Transgenderism is founded on those sex stereotypes. It couldn’t exist without them, as there would be no way anyone could claim to be the other sex.

Have any of the people in this video actually met any children?

Little Evie might get bought a wonderful Lego set, but she's much more interested in her doll's House.

Kids are attracted to what they are attracted to and in my experience seem to find their way to it.

My DS was never bought any cars or truck toys as a baby, but developed a fascination purely from observing them on the road from the buggy or car seat. When I was told he was socialised into this, I had my own experience first hand to disagree.

So are they suggesting we call all babies it or they and wait until they have graduated and decided what career paths they are going to follow.

Hells bells it’s tricky enough now what with middle aged men deciding they are women , be even more confusing if every career change was accompanied by the appropriate gender change. “ Hi darling, great news, I got the job, bad news is I am now female, so officially that makes you a lesbian. Will you tell the kids or shall we wait until I have sorted out a new wardrobe.”

Children have their own, individual interests. Nothing to do with their sex.

Some boys like cars. Some girls like cars. Some girls like dolls. Some boys like dolls. It's all good.

Pushing them to like or dislike something because it's unsuitably gendered - or worse, to change their gender because of what they like? Not OK.

The first person I knew who talked about feminising chemicals in food was someone lamenting that German men were less manly than they had been in the 1930s (look at their wrists!) and that it was the fault of the British and the Americans putting stuff in the water.

He was a horrible man, quite open about the fact that the only reason he hadn't been a Nazi was because as a non-German he couldn't join the party. He never stopped admiring them. Also very admiring of Herbert Jankuhn, the archaeologist whose views on homosexuals influenced Himmler, and through him, Nazi party attitudes from the late 30s on (up until then they'd been all about 'inverts', cross-dressing licenses, and exploratory sex-change surgery - kind of proto-Iran).

“ Hi darling, great news, I got the job, bad news is I am now female, so officially that makes you a lesbian. Will you tell the kids or shall we wait until I have sorted out a new wardrobe.”

I know you get this, but having seen the degree to which Genderists are able to utterly misinterpret and misstate gender critical views it should probably be said:

The Genderist's point in this video (if one removes the conflation of sex and gender) isn't that your career makes you male or female, it's that classifying people by something other than sex makes at least as much sense as classifying them by their physical sex. (Furthermore, that lumping a load of physical attributes together into a binary classification and calling it "sex" is wrong anyway because intersex).

I think there is a lot to be said for the idea that we disconnect gender from anything associated with physical sex (including the names of and the social stereotypes around physical sex) and instead see it as something like spirit animals where people find a metaphor to express how see themselves and yes, possibly arrange well targeted social events and support for people like them.

I don't think that means physical sex isn't a thing, nor that appropriating the supports female people have to mitigate the social, physical, economic and cultural consequences of being female as validation for a male's self-metaphor is ever justifiable.

Have any of the people in this video actually met any children?

If I understand the video presenters, they'd know by your user name that you have inbuilt biases that confer relevance on age demographics. They are ready to correct any outmoded assumptions in re: the arbitrary categorisation of adults/parents and children with different levels of experience and understanding of consent.

Don't despair. It's nothing that a stay in Goldsmith's gulag cum holiday camp won't sort out for us…(if I recall 2018 accurately).

Hi @Annaishere , @FlirtsWithRhinos really nails it on this one IMO, summarised as:

When people make suggestions like "chemical contamination could cause men's brains to be feminised", what are they really saying?

When gender identity belief is picked apart and scrutinised, non-believers find what they perceive to be holes in it. Believers are then put in a position where they can either simply say "I believe and that's good enough for me"* (an analogy would be an atheist trying to unpick how Mary got pregnant and a Christian saying that their faith gives them the only answer that they need) or they come back with something that is offered as evidence. The more the non-believers ask questions, the more the believer has to dig in to whichever approach they have gone for.

It's really difficult finding any evidence in this field that doesn't have a bias towards proving that gender identity is real. Attempts to test hypotheses in a rigorous way get shut down through protest. Although there seem to have been a few rays of hope on that front recently.

*Typically it's not as polite as this 😉 Variations more commonly seen in the wild are "Nazi", "Bigot" and so on. Any insulting way to shut things down with a no-debate twist seems fair game.