5 ms·

> For instance, biological sex is binary/bimodal for all intents and purposes. It is discrete, and very much not a spectrum. This is such an interesting exampl

> For instance, biological sex is binary/bimodal for all intents and purposes. It is discrete, and very much not a spectrum. This is such an interesting example for why free speech protections are important, but good faith discussion culture is even more important. The first sentence is correct, the second isn't, when taken literally. The overall thrust of the statement still has merit, but it pays to be careful about one's phrasing. To be clear, biology is messy and there are exceptions, which is why biological sex is not literally discrete in the sense that, say, binary logic is discrete. But it's also fairly reasonable to say that this is one of those cases where the exceptions confirm the time: There is a spectrum, it's just incredibly focused around two points. The two extreme groups around this discussion both completely distort this nuanced observation. On the one side, you've got people that pretend that because the bimodality isn't perfect, it doesn't matter at all (and saying that it matters is hate!). On the other side, you've got people who pretend that there is no nuance to the bimodality (and many of them do actually hate people who don't fit perfectly into the binary). It's pretty frustrating (to put it mildly), and free speech or lack of it has nothing to do with why it's frustrating.

yodsanklai 4y ago
> The two extreme groups around this discussion both completely distort this nuanced observation. AFAIU one group think gender should be a social construct, rather than a biological one. I don't this whole debate has even been about the 0.1%(?) who are not XX or XY.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > AFAIU one group think gender should be a social construct, rather than a biological one. No, one group, pretty much without exception, recognizes that gender always has been a social construct, and that it has historically been socially constructed differently in different culture. The other side may or may not recognize that; that’s not actually the point of disagreement. The point of disagreement is that the first side things that the proper social construction of ascribed gender is to align it with the subject’s gender identity. The other side, whether they frame it in terms of “gender isn’t real, only biological sex is”, “gender should reflect biological sex”, or in any of a variety of other terms, believes that the correct social construction of ascribed gender is that it should be based on some aspect or combination of aspects of biological sex (often based on a stereotype that elides the fact that choosing different aspects of biological sex for this purpose would result in different assignments.) [Members of the first group may, in fact, view gender identity as a biological sex trait, in which case their disagreement with the second group can be viewed as a disagreement over which aspect of biological sex should be the basis.] > I don’t this whole debate has even been about the 0.1%(?) who are not XX or XY. Not being XX or XY isn’t the only biological divergence from simplistic stereotypes of biological sex that occurs.
  - dumpsterdiver 4y ago
    If gender is separate from biological sex then what meaning does it have for someone to say they identify as a man or a woman? What is a man? What is a woman? Are they a grouping of mannerisms? If we engineered ourselves to have no sex and then we all selected our genders, how would we quantify what those genders represent without any biological context?
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > If gender is separate from biological sex Its important to separate three things: “Gender” in the broad sense is one of several possible social constructions of divisions of people into groups and associated distinct expectations and roles; it is a feature of the social context. While there is considerable variation in between social milieus, it is always grounded, to a greater or lesser degree, in current or historical stereotypes associated with some subset of anatomical sex traits; in fact, that’s part of what we use to identify which of the many socially constructed divides in a society is gender. “Ascribed gender” is how other people treat a person with regard to gender. “Gender identity” is how a person sees themselves and prefers to be treated with regard to gender. None of these things are disconnected, in either practice or the theory of the major factions, from biological sex (the last is arguably itself either a biological sex trait, a set of biological sex traits, or an interaction of biological sex traits with the social context; for it to be anything else either requires dualism, or an arbitrarily restrictive definition of “sex”), except that maybe the side opposing recognizing gender identity as the basis for ascribed gender thinks gender identity is divorced from biological sex.
    - gumshift 4y ago
      It depends on who is doing the identifying. When a woman identifies as a woman, or a man identifies as a man, they are making a statement about their sex, on whether they are female or male. When a man identifies as a woman, he is expressing his desire to be a woman, based on his ideal of what a woman is. Similarly, when a woman identifies as a man, she is expressing her desire to be a man, based on her ideal of what a man is. Neither have any direct experience of actually being the opposite sex, of course, so this ideal is based around gendered stereotypes and superficial cosmetic traits, particularly those related to sexual attraction.
- implements 4y ago
  > AFAIU one group think gender should be a social construct, rather than a biological one. No, gender critical people very much don’t want gender to be a biological construct - they find the idea of innate biological masculinity or femininity appallingly regressive. They prefer to think of men and women as primarily unique individuals, ones who are incidentally sexed purely for reproductive purposes ie not for social ones.
  - MrScruff 4y ago
    If gender is a social construct (an idea which I'm sympathetic to), shouldn't it just go away entirely? I'm happy to move towards a society where we abandon stereotypes of masculine and feminine behaviour, I just don't understand how that's compatible with saying 'I wish to identify as a different gender because my behaviours match the stereotype of that gender.'. Doesn't that just reinforce those stereotypes?
    - notSupplied 4y ago
      I agree. I wish to go away from traditionalist views “Alice should stop playing with trucks and play with dolls because she is a girl” to “Alice can with trucks if she wants”. But I was shocked to find that instead, some people now believe “Alice is really a boy if she likes playing with trucks”
  - concordDance 4y ago
    Then why the fuss about transgender people? It's all about treating them as a different gender, no-one seems to care about adults getting bottom surgery on their own dime.
    - tixialu 4y ago
      Mostly because some places - prisons, for example - need to be segregated by sex, and the transactivists want to abolish that. And because they're also pushing a large-scale redefinition of the terms "woman" and "man", and trying to make it law, which most people don't agree with.
- atq2119 4y ago
  > AFAIU one group think gender should be a social construct, rather than a biological one Gender is a social construct by definition. This all starts with the purely descriptive observation that when you analyze the informal man/woman distinction that exists de facto in society, there is a component that is inherently biological (visible traits, hormonal differences, etc.) and a component that is arbitrary social convention (clothing, color schemes, etc.). Having different terms for those components helps, and so the first one is called sex and the second is called gender. This is all purely descriptive and I don't think anybody reasonable has major disagreements about it on either side of this topic. The question is whether and what kind of normative conclusions one can or should draw from the observation. For example, very conservative folks would make the normative statement that gender expressions must align with sex (women can't wear pants, men can't wear dresses, that sort of thing). There are two major strikes against this position as far as I'm concerned: first, it's clearly very illiberal; second, even ignoring the illiberalism, it doesn't leave room for the few people who, through no fault of their own, don't fall neatly into the sex binary. Those folks are left in a Kafkaesque situation of having no real way of complying with such a rule. Some trans activists also make questionable normative statements, such as "transwomen are women". That's a normative statement because it implies that the word "woman" should be used to refer to a person's gender instead of a person's sex. It's no wonder they clash with some feminists who point out that, while there may be significant overlap, the life experiences of transwomen are generally not the same as those of women (in the sex sense), and there are situations where the distinction matters.
- tzs 4y ago
  It's not just about XX or XY. It is about many other biological features that are correlated with XX and XY, but not 100% correlated. Besides the big one (penis vs vagina) there are things like the rest of the reproductive system, breast size and functionality, brain structures, muscle function, bone structure, facial features, and others. These develop at different times during fetal development, and don't have to all come out "male" or "female". In programming terms it is like XX/XY is a master setting for a complex distributed system, and then there are a bunch of flags that control implementation of that master setting in various subsystems of the distributed system which are "supposed" to all be set if the master setting is XX and all clear if it is XY, but sometimes you end up with some set and some clear.

yodsanklai 4y ago

> The two extreme groups around this discussion both completely distort this nuanced observation. AFAIU one group think gender should be a social construct, rather than a biological one. I don't this whole debate has even been about the 0.1%(?) who are not XX or XY.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> AFAIU one group think gender should be a social construct, rather than a biological one. No, one group, pretty much without exception, recognizes that gender always has been a social construct, and that it has historically been socially constructed differently in different culture. The other side may or may not recognize that; that’s not actually the point of disagreement. The point of disagreement is that the first side things that the proper social construction of ascribed gender is to align it with the subject’s gender identity. The other side, whether they frame it in terms of “gender isn’t real, only biological sex is”, “gender should reflect biological sex”, or in any of a variety of other terms, believes that the correct social construction of ascribed gender is that it should be based on some aspect or combination of aspects of biological sex (often based on a stereotype that elides the fact that choosing different aspects of biological sex for this purpose would result in different assignments.) [Members of the first group may, in fact, view gender identity as a biological sex trait, in which case their disagreement with the second group can be viewed as a disagreement over which aspect of biological sex should be the basis.] > I don’t this whole debate has even been about the 0.1%(?) who are not XX or XY. Not being XX or XY isn’t the only biological divergence from simplistic stereotypes of biological sex that occurs.
- dumpsterdiver 4y ago
  If gender is separate from biological sex then what meaning does it have for someone to say they identify as a man or a woman? What is a man? What is a woman? Are they a grouping of mannerisms? If we engineered ourselves to have no sex and then we all selected our genders, how would we quantify what those genders represent without any biological context?
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > If gender is separate from biological sex Its important to separate three things: “Gender” in the broad sense is one of several possible social constructions of divisions of people into groups and associated distinct expectations and roles; it is a feature of the social context. While there is considerable variation in between social milieus, it is always grounded, to a greater or lesser degree, in current or historical stereotypes associated with some subset of anatomical sex traits; in fact, that’s part of what we use to identify which of the many socially constructed divides in a society is gender. “Ascribed gender” is how other people treat a person with regard to gender. “Gender identity” is how a person sees themselves and prefers to be treated with regard to gender. None of these things are disconnected, in either practice or the theory of the major factions, from biological sex (the last is arguably itself either a biological sex trait, a set of biological sex traits, or an interaction of biological sex traits with the social context; for it to be anything else either requires dualism, or an arbitrarily restrictive definition of “sex”), except that maybe the side opposing recognizing gender identity as the basis for ascribed gender thinks gender identity is divorced from biological sex.
  - gumshift 4y ago
    It depends on who is doing the identifying. When a woman identifies as a woman, or a man identifies as a man, they are making a statement about their sex, on whether they are female or male. When a man identifies as a woman, he is expressing his desire to be a woman, based on his ideal of what a woman is. Similarly, when a woman identifies as a man, she is expressing her desire to be a man, based on her ideal of what a man is. Neither have any direct experience of actually being the opposite sex, of course, so this ideal is based around gendered stereotypes and superficial cosmetic traits, particularly those related to sexual attraction.
implements 4y ago
> AFAIU one group think gender should be a social construct, rather than a biological one. No, gender critical people very much don’t want gender to be a biological construct - they find the idea of innate biological masculinity or femininity appallingly regressive. They prefer to think of men and women as primarily unique individuals, ones who are incidentally sexed purely for reproductive purposes ie not for social ones.
- MrScruff 4y ago
  If gender is a social construct (an idea which I'm sympathetic to), shouldn't it just go away entirely? I'm happy to move towards a society where we abandon stereotypes of masculine and feminine behaviour, I just don't understand how that's compatible with saying 'I wish to identify as a different gender because my behaviours match the stereotype of that gender.'. Doesn't that just reinforce those stereotypes?
  - notSupplied 4y ago
    I agree. I wish to go away from traditionalist views “Alice should stop playing with trucks and play with dolls because she is a girl” to “Alice can with trucks if she wants”. But I was shocked to find that instead, some people now believe “Alice is really a boy if she likes playing with trucks”
- concordDance 4y ago
  Then why the fuss about transgender people? It's all about treating them as a different gender, no-one seems to care about adults getting bottom surgery on their own dime.
  - tixialu 4y ago
    Mostly because some places - prisons, for example - need to be segregated by sex, and the transactivists want to abolish that. And because they're also pushing a large-scale redefinition of the terms "woman" and "man", and trying to make it law, which most people don't agree with.
atq2119 4y ago
> AFAIU one group think gender should be a social construct, rather than a biological one Gender is a social construct by definition. This all starts with the purely descriptive observation that when you analyze the informal man/woman distinction that exists de facto in society, there is a component that is inherently biological (visible traits, hormonal differences, etc.) and a component that is arbitrary social convention (clothing, color schemes, etc.). Having different terms for those components helps, and so the first one is called sex and the second is called gender. This is all purely descriptive and I don't think anybody reasonable has major disagreements about it on either side of this topic. The question is whether and what kind of normative conclusions one can or should draw from the observation. For example, very conservative folks would make the normative statement that gender expressions must align with sex (women can't wear pants, men can't wear dresses, that sort of thing). There are two major strikes against this position as far as I'm concerned: first, it's clearly very illiberal; second, even ignoring the illiberalism, it doesn't leave room for the few people who, through no fault of their own, don't fall neatly into the sex binary. Those folks are left in a Kafkaesque situation of having no real way of complying with such a rule. Some trans activists also make questionable normative statements, such as "transwomen are women". That's a normative statement because it implies that the word "woman" should be used to refer to a person's gender instead of a person's sex. It's no wonder they clash with some feminists who point out that, while there may be significant overlap, the life experiences of transwomen are generally not the same as those of women (in the sex sense), and there are situations where the distinction matters.
tzs 4y ago
It's not just about XX or XY. It is about many other biological features that are correlated with XX and XY, but not 100% correlated. Besides the big one (penis vs vagina) there are things like the rest of the reproductive system, breast size and functionality, brain structures, muscle function, bone structure, facial features, and others. These develop at different times during fetal development, and don't have to all come out "male" or "female". In programming terms it is like XX/XY is a master setting for a complex distributed system, and then there are a bunch of flags that control implementation of that master setting in various subsystems of the distributed system which are "supposed" to all be set if the master setting is XX and all clear if it is XY, but sometimes you end up with some set and some clear.