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I didn't state any hypotheses or claim gender is easily tackled by science. I expressed an interest.

• omginternets 11y ago
  Well please excuse me for assuming your interest was based on some form hypothesis, stated or otherwise. What exactly are you looking for?
  • mkrfox 11y ago
    I expressed an interest. That's all. No judgement, claims, or assertions. I picked no nits and made no points. I value scientific exploration for its own sake. I don't need an agenda to wonder what we'd find. I look at the stars for the same reason.
    • omginternets 11y ago
      I think you misunderstand me (and I do apologize if my previous comment came off as disrespectful -- I've edited it to be a bit nicer). You're expressing interest in a potential study, which is nice, but my point is that the study you're proposing is infeasible because it hinges on a non-scientific concept. When I say that it's epistemologically difficult to find evidence for gender/sex orthogonality, I don't mean that it's a difficult study. I mean that it's difficult (if not impossible) to empirically observe gender (in the sense of "gender theory"), thus precluding any meaningful study from taking place. In other words: we could do the measurements you're propose, but then we have no way of knowing what it is we're actually measuring. Gender, as defined by gender theory, is inscrutable. So again, what are you interested in discovering? What do you see as the possible outcomes of your proposed study and what conclusions would you draw from those results? Maybe there's a better way of answering those questions, and maybe these questions are better suited for a different academic field (e.g. sociology).
      • mkrfox 11y ago
        I want to see if the experience of gender has an effect if explored by a similar study to the submission. For example: Do nonbinary people have the same brain development as the people in this study, or do they diverge from cisgendered people of the same sex? Until they look at nonbinary and genderless people, we won't know whether sex or experience of gender is more significant in brain development. Even throwing in gender nonconforming people might produce some interesting findings.
        • omginternets 11y ago
          > For example: Do nonbinary people have the same brain development as the people in this study, or do they diverge from cisgendered people of the same sex? Then I rest my case: this can't be done in any meaningful way. To give you an intuition as to why, how do we control that our nonbinary group actually corresponds to the gender theoretical definition of nonbinary? One could argue that this problem can be tackled by assuming two things: 1. people are being truthful when we ask them to categorize their gender 2. all nonbinary participants are categorizing themselves as such as a result of the same underlying process. If we do this, then we might observe a difference between the nonbinary group and the control group, but point 2 is a thorn in our side: we can't know that this difference actually corresponds to what is being claimed. For all we know, we could be measuring some general effect of sexuality that deviates from the norm. Hell, it could be some sort of process related to being primed as "not normal", i.e. the study reminds these people that they don't fit in and we pick that up in the form of anxiety or self-monitoring signals in fMRI. Again, the claim "my gender is of X" is unfalsifiable, and thus un-scientific. To summarize, you can certainly produce effects, but those effects won't meaningfully contribute to any understanding of sex/gender experience.
• tdkl 11y ago
  What would be the point of the results, if they aren't scientific ? Except who would pay for them and their agenda.
  • mkrfox 11y ago
    "Hard to tackle by science" is not the same as "not scientific." Confounding variables are notoriously hard to control for in social science, but people manage to find useful information when they go in without agendas.
    • omginternets 11y ago
      You've missed my point: my claim is that your study is necessarily non-scientific, given the epistemological problem associated with gender/sex orthogonality.
• tomp 11y ago
  The problem is that gender cannot be tackled by science, insofar as it's not objectively defined (or definable). Sex is.