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When investigating the intersection of unconscious attitudes (often shaped by culture) and performance, gender is more relevant than sex. It's not whether you h

by kaitai 10y ago

When investigating the intersection of unconscious attitudes (often shaped by culture) and performance, gender is more relevant than sex. It's not whether you have this equipment or that but what groups you are perceived to belong to and what groups you see yourself as belonging to. In some cultures there are third genders with different cultural expectations: the Hijra in India, Kathoey in Thailand, some other groups in Indonesia. One would expect different stereotypes about their math, science, and reading talents, so it would probably be quite interesting to study stereotype threat there. That's not the case in this French study (probably) but there's no need to collapse the terminology artificially. That's the crazy thing about stereotype threat and related psychological phenomena: you can manipulate the same people to perform better or worse simply by manipulating their perception of the situation. Thus the effect really can't be about biological sex. Check out reducingstereotypethreat.org for a comprehensive rundown of studies.

golemotron 10y ago
Not really. Boys have about 14 to 17 times the amount of serum testosterone as girls and that does affect their felt incentives for things like competition. Culture can mute this but at great cost to boy's and men's health. The idea that gender is separate from biological sex is very recent. When you examine its origin you find that it comes from Foucault and Judith Butler. Both were gay. It's unsurprising to me that that idea would come from that lineage. If you are gay you are confronted with a difference between what you feel and what society tells you from a very early age. In general straight people do not have that issue and would never consider drawing that distinction unless the concept is introduced to them.
- boosting7669 10y ago
  Isn't caitlin Jenner straight?
- drumdance 10y ago
  Differences in testosterone levels don't really show up until puberty. This study was done on pre-pubescents.
  - WalterSear 10y ago
    They show up in the womb, fwiw.
- LanguageGamer 10y ago
  Your second paragraph seems to be suggesting that Foucault and Butler's idea is wrong because of their sexual orientation. This seems both unjust and irrational. If you believe the distinction has no scientific merit, you could cite or propose relevant studies. If you believe it has no cultural merit, you could discuss how the distinction functions in society.
  - mafribe 10y ago
    This seems both unjust and irrational. Why? As a rule of thumb, humans start thinking about something when it doesn't work for them. And for gays in particular, the traditional structuring of gender roles has been deeply problematic, indeed even today there are many countries where gay sex is illegal. So it's no surprise that homosexuals have though more deeply about gender and its relationship with sexuality than those for whom it works. Foucault is intersting. In contrast, Butler's work is weak. She really doesn't have a meaningful handle on the relationship between sex and gender.
  - devishard 10y ago
    > Your second paragraph seems to be suggesting that Foucault and Butler's idea is wrong because of their sexual orientation. That's not how I read it. I read it as, Foucault and Butler's idea is unproven because it's based off of their anecdotal experience rather than based off of any scientific evidence.
  - candu 10y ago
    I don't see where GP claims that the idea is wrong: they're simply pointing out that it's a relatively recent distinction, which implies (reasonably, IMHO) that we likely don't understand it very well yet, or that it may ultimately not be a meaningful distinction to draw once we better understand the underlying mechanisms. Perhaps near-future advances in genetics and neurology will expand our definition of biological sex to explain gender identity. In that case, our current sex vs. gender distinction would simply be another way of saying "we don't understand how this works yet". There's a lot of this "transitional stuff" in science history, where we have credible anecdotal evidence that our previous understanding is wrong but don't yet know how to coherently explain it. (See: Greek attempts to explain the nature of matter; the infamous cholera map by John Snow; etc.) That doesn't make the "transitional stuff" wrong: an idea doesn't have to have solid theoretical underpinnings to have merit. It does, however, mean we should continue searching for an explanation.
mafribe 10y ago
gender is more relevant than sex No it's not. The underlying biological reality is that humans reproduce sexually. All gender roles are social elaborations and heuristics that evolve(d) to regulate and structure the biological reproduction of humans. All gender roles directly or indirectly refer to the sexual binary between males (= can father children) and females (= can give birth to children). E.g. the concept of Kathoey doesn't make sense except as an inversion of the biology-based distinction between males and females. After all, a substantial part of the Kathoey lifestyle is to look and act exactly like a biological female (including permanent genital modification), and have sex with a biological male. Clearly that's an extreme identification with the biological binary, except from an unusual angle. By imitating biological females and their conventional gender roles, by trying to look exactly like somebody who can give birth to children, the Kathoey reinforces the binary between male and female. stereotype threat It's deeply questionable that "stereotype threat" actually exists. The 'studies' that claim its existence are methodologically dubious.
- SolaceQuantum 10y ago
  The binary between female and male is kind of awkward to say, especially if you're using biological terms. I'm pretty sure that intersex is considered a very normal, if relatively rare,variation of human sex biology. Intersex isn't extremely rare either and isn't a defect so the idea of a biological binary confuses me.
  - mafribe 10y ago
    intersex is considered a very normal To a quantitative biologist, maybe. But that's the wrong point of reference, as they don't make mainstream culture. Sexual reproduction so as to perpetuate humanity is the single most important function a society executes. All human culture directly or indirectly relates to this task. One of the key tasks in this context is the choice of partner(s) whom to reproduce with. Alas, not any two humans can reproduce together. Indeed, an exact determination who can successfully reproduce with whom is still not possible in 2016, although we are much better at this task than say 1000 years ago. Given that we can't predict mate compatibility perfectly, humanity needs heuristics to make this decision efficiently. The following heuristics are being used in practise: - Divide humans into two, male and female, based on the shape of their genitalia. - Have sex with members of the opposite group. Humans use additional heuristics for deciding with whom to mate, e.g. social status, age, but the male/female binary is by a large margin the most important. As you correctly point out, not all humans neatly fall into the genital-shape based classification between. But it doesn't matter, because the heuristic works so well that humans can reproduce successfully by ignoring those outliers. That means outliers must be infrequent enough (say > 99% fit the binary). I can't overemphasise this: the heuristic has been extremely successful. The very concept intersex makes sense only in contradistinction from binary normalcy. To see this, consider the fact that most humans have 10 fingers, but not all. Yet, there is no socially relevant concept of 'interhanded' people, no pressure groups, nobody claims to have been born with the wrong number of fingers, no finger reassignment surgery etc. That's because the number of fingers is not all that important. In the future we might have a refined classification, as our understanding of human reproduction has improved immeasurably in the last century. But note that a finer classification still relates to biological facts about human bodies. It would probably be something along the lines of - Can give birth to children, i.e. falls in the category woman, despite non-standard genitalia. - Can father children, i.e. falls in the category man, despite non-standard genitalia. - Can neither father children, nor give birth to children. In other words, it would be a refinement of the male/female binary.
YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
>> It's not whether you have this equipment or that but what groups you are perceived to belong to and what groups you see yourself as belonging to. The problem with that is that most of the time the group you're perceived to belong to and what groups you identify with do have everything to do with your "equipment".
devishard 10y ago
> When investigating the intersection of unconscious attitudes (often shaped by culture) and performance, gender is more relevant than sex. This is a very broad statement which is trivial to prove false. Look at powerlifting: men perform better than women, and testosterone plays a well-understood role in this performance. This is a function of sex, not gender. And while it's most numerically provable and obvious in powerlifting, this is true for a lot of sports. At a more fundamental level, I question whether the gender/sex divide is scientifically valid. One can point to the example of a transman and say, "Their female sex didn't align with their male gender at birth" but that seems like a very surface assessment; it's also possible that chemicals released by (for example) their brain or pituitary, are causing the dysphoria they experienced. Are we to claim that ovaries and testicles are sex, and the brain and pituitary is gender? Or might it make more sense to broaden our understanding of sex to realize that genitalia aren't the only organs regulating sex, and instead say that the transperson wasn't born female, but was instead born with a mixture of sex characteristics, and only the most obvious sex characteristics were female, while the characteristics which more fundamentally defined their identity were male. In a larger sense, this seems related to the categorization error of separating mind and body as if they are two different things, a separation which seems more clearly false. NOTE: Please don't construe anything I say as negative toward transpeople. I think humans have an inherent, fundamental right to define their identities and modify their bodies in any way they choose. People don't need excuses or justification to exercise that right. Certainly we don't need an abstract distinction between sex and gender to let people dress and socialize with people the way they want or change their bodies.
- groovy2shoes 10y ago
  > Are we to claim that ovaries and testicles are sex, and the brain and pituitary is gender? That about sums up the usual definitions, yes.
  - devishard 10y ago
    Why make that distinction when they are fundamentally interconnected?

by kaitai 10y ago

golemotron 10y ago

Not really. Boys have about 14 to 17 times the amount of serum testosterone as girls and that does affect their felt incentives for things like competition. Culture can mute this but at great cost to boy's and men's health. The idea that gender is separate from biological sex is very recent. When you examine its origin you find that it comes from Foucault and Judith Butler. Both were gay. It's unsurprising to me that that idea would come from that lineage. If you are gay you are confronted with a difference between what you feel and what society tells you from a very early age. In general straight people do not have that issue and would never consider drawing that distinction unless the concept is introduced to them.

boosting7669 10y ago
Isn't caitlin Jenner straight?
drumdance 10y ago
Differences in testosterone levels don't really show up until puberty. This study was done on pre-pubescents.
- WalterSear 10y ago
  They show up in the womb, fwiw.
LanguageGamer 10y ago
Your second paragraph seems to be suggesting that Foucault and Butler's idea is wrong because of their sexual orientation. This seems both unjust and irrational. If you believe the distinction has no scientific merit, you could cite or propose relevant studies. If you believe it has no cultural merit, you could discuss how the distinction functions in society.
- mafribe 10y ago
  This seems both unjust and irrational. Why? As a rule of thumb, humans start thinking about something when it doesn't work for them. And for gays in particular, the traditional structuring of gender roles has been deeply problematic, indeed even today there are many countries where gay sex is illegal. So it's no surprise that homosexuals have though more deeply about gender and its relationship with sexuality than those for whom it works. Foucault is intersting. In contrast, Butler's work is weak. She really doesn't have a meaningful handle on the relationship between sex and gender.
- devishard 10y ago
  > Your second paragraph seems to be suggesting that Foucault and Butler's idea is wrong because of their sexual orientation. That's not how I read it. I read it as, Foucault and Butler's idea is unproven because it's based off of their anecdotal experience rather than based off of any scientific evidence.
- candu 10y ago
  I don't see where GP claims that the idea is wrong: they're simply pointing out that it's a relatively recent distinction, which implies (reasonably, IMHO) that we likely don't understand it very well yet, or that it may ultimately not be a meaningful distinction to draw once we better understand the underlying mechanisms. Perhaps near-future advances in genetics and neurology will expand our definition of biological sex to explain gender identity. In that case, our current sex vs. gender distinction would simply be another way of saying "we don't understand how this works yet". There's a lot of this "transitional stuff" in science history, where we have credible anecdotal evidence that our previous understanding is wrong but don't yet know how to coherently explain it. (See: Greek attempts to explain the nature of matter; the infamous cholera map by John Snow; etc.) That doesn't make the "transitional stuff" wrong: an idea doesn't have to have solid theoretical underpinnings to have merit. It does, however, mean we should continue searching for an explanation.

mafribe 10y ago

gender is more relevant than sex No it's not. The underlying biological reality is that humans reproduce sexually. All gender roles are social elaborations and heuristics that evolve(d) to regulate and structure the biological reproduction of humans. All gender roles directly or indirectly refer to the sexual binary between males (= can father children) and females (= can give birth to children). E.g. the concept of Kathoey doesn't make sense except as an inversion of the biology-based distinction between males and females. After all, a substantial part of the Kathoey lifestyle is to look and act exactly like a biological female (including permanent genital modification), and have sex with a biological male. Clearly that's an extreme identification with the biological binary, except from an unusual angle. By imitating biological females and their conventional gender roles, by trying to look exactly like somebody who can give birth to children, the Kathoey reinforces the binary between male and female. stereotype threat It's deeply questionable that "stereotype threat" actually exists. The 'studies' that claim its existence are methodologically dubious.

SolaceQuantum 10y ago
The binary between female and male is kind of awkward to say, especially if you're using biological terms. I'm pretty sure that intersex is considered a very normal, if relatively rare,variation of human sex biology. Intersex isn't extremely rare either and isn't a defect so the idea of a biological binary confuses me.
- mafribe 10y ago
  intersex is considered a very normal To a quantitative biologist, maybe. But that's the wrong point of reference, as they don't make mainstream culture. Sexual reproduction so as to perpetuate humanity is the single most important function a society executes. All human culture directly or indirectly relates to this task. One of the key tasks in this context is the choice of partner(s) whom to reproduce with. Alas, not any two humans can reproduce together. Indeed, an exact determination who can successfully reproduce with whom is still not possible in 2016, although we are much better at this task than say 1000 years ago. Given that we can't predict mate compatibility perfectly, humanity needs heuristics to make this decision efficiently. The following heuristics are being used in practise: - Divide humans into two, male and female, based on the shape of their genitalia. - Have sex with members of the opposite group. Humans use additional heuristics for deciding with whom to mate, e.g. social status, age, but the male/female binary is by a large margin the most important. As you correctly point out, not all humans neatly fall into the genital-shape based classification between. But it doesn't matter, because the heuristic works so well that humans can reproduce successfully by ignoring those outliers. That means outliers must be infrequent enough (say > 99% fit the binary). I can't overemphasise this: the heuristic has been extremely successful. The very concept intersex makes sense only in contradistinction from binary normalcy. To see this, consider the fact that most humans have 10 fingers, but not all. Yet, there is no socially relevant concept of 'interhanded' people, no pressure groups, nobody claims to have been born with the wrong number of fingers, no finger reassignment surgery etc. That's because the number of fingers is not all that important. In the future we might have a refined classification, as our understanding of human reproduction has improved immeasurably in the last century. But note that a finer classification still relates to biological facts about human bodies. It would probably be something along the lines of - Can give birth to children, i.e. falls in the category woman, despite non-standard genitalia. - Can father children, i.e. falls in the category man, despite non-standard genitalia. - Can neither father children, nor give birth to children. In other words, it would be a refinement of the male/female binary.

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago

>> It's not whether you have this equipment or that but what groups you are perceived to belong to and what groups you see yourself as belonging to. The problem with that is that most of the time the group you're perceived to belong to and what groups you identify with do have everything to do with your "equipment".

devishard 10y ago

> When investigating the intersection of unconscious attitudes (often shaped by culture) and performance, gender is more relevant than sex. This is a very broad statement which is trivial to prove false. Look at powerlifting: men perform better than women, and testosterone plays a well-understood role in this performance. This is a function of sex, not gender. And while it's most numerically provable and obvious in powerlifting, this is true for a lot of sports. At a more fundamental level, I question whether the gender/sex divide is scientifically valid. One can point to the example of a transman and say, "Their female sex didn't align with their male gender at birth" but that seems like a very surface assessment; it's also possible that chemicals released by (for example) their brain or pituitary, are causing the dysphoria they experienced. Are we to claim that ovaries and testicles are sex, and the brain and pituitary is gender? Or might it make more sense to broaden our understanding of sex to realize that genitalia aren't the only organs regulating sex, and instead say that the transperson wasn't born female, but was instead born with a mixture of sex characteristics, and only the most obvious sex characteristics were female, while the characteristics which more fundamentally defined their identity were male. In a larger sense, this seems related to the categorization error of separating mind and body as if they are two different things, a separation which seems more clearly false. NOTE: Please don't construe anything I say as negative toward transpeople. I think humans have an inherent, fundamental right to define their identities and modify their bodies in any way they choose. People don't need excuses or justification to exercise that right. Certainly we don't need an abstract distinction between sex and gender to let people dress and socialize with people the way they want or change their bodies.

groovy2shoes 10y ago
> Are we to claim that ovaries and testicles are sex, and the brain and pituitary is gender? That about sums up the usual definitions, yes.
- devishard 10y ago
  Why make that distinction when they are fundamentally interconnected?