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dandelion (she/her)
dandelion (she/her) @ dandelion @lemmy.blahaj.zone
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1 yr. ago

  • Hm, why would they be reaching out like this, is that typical? Is it an attempt to get me to pay for the concierge program?

  • They claim to be from the health insurance company that I have, which is Anthem BCBS.

  • I require updates.

  • something something timezones

  • this exactly, there are already rules against trolling, and for the trolls who haven't tipped their hand yet, the block button works great; one reason for this kind of trolling can be to incite division that gatekeeping rules would create - blocking a troll until they show their hand feels like a small price to pay to avoid that, and I'm proud of admins that are wise enough to understand this

  • in some cases the evidence of "gender" is inferred based on a blood test (the popular commercial tests I know of just looks for the presence of Y chromosome in the mother's blood and infers the baby is male if so, and if not that the baby is female), so people who throw a party based on a blood test would be throwing a "presence of Y chromosome" party ...

  • I claimed that the WHO article communicates a social constructionist view of gender (i.e. that gender is a social construct). This is based on how the WHO article specifically says:

    Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other. As a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time.

    Emphasis is mine.

    Furthermore, gender (as a social construct) is differentiated from sex, which is treated as biologically real, again from the WHO article:

    Gender interacts with but is different from sex, which refers to the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons, such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive organs.

    I am failing to see what doesn't track about my interpretation of this WHO page, which part of my interpretation do you think I am mistaken about?

    I feel like picking on an overview that explicitly acknowledges intersex individuals for not addressing the social construction of sex, while simultaneously being critical of it for addressing the social construction of gender is a bit nit-picky

    Hm, I don't yet see the connection you are making between intersex individuals and sex? Are you saying that the acknowledgement of intersex individuals implies sex is a social construct? The article explicitly says sex is the biological and physiological characteristics, and contrasts it with gender as a social category.

    Perhaps I am being nit-picky (I've been told I can be this way, lol), but I don't intend to be critical or harsh as much as just very clear about what the WHO article is communicating - which is the typical sex/gender distinction that I am trying to point out doesn't work.

    I really feel like there’s this persistent conflation of gender categories and gender identity in your interpretation of what others are expressing, and an insistence that talking about social constructs is an endorsement of social constructionism as a whole.

    It seems like we agree that the roles and attitudes we ascribe to gender categories are not objective, but socially constructed. “Gender” is regularly used to refer to both the category and the individuals identity as being to some degree a member of that category, and it’s expected that people know which is being referred to by context.

    I've been thinking about this. You want to distinguish gender, as social roles and categories, from gender identity and point out that gender is clearly a social construct but gender identity is not.

    Sure, the biology determines the gender identity (read: subconscious sex), but it also plays a role in behavior and physiology in a way that can't be cleanly separated from social roles, attitudes, categories, etc. Just to state the obvious, sexual traits have a bimodal distribution in a way that shows up in the binary quality of the social categories - it's not really a coincidence that the biology displays broad sexual dimorphism and the social categories reflect this, even if the biology is much more nuanced and complicated than our social categories imply. My point here is that the social categories are not entirely separate from the biology, there are obvious ways the biology influences the categories.

    Furthermore, the gender identity is a way that the biology has consequences on gender as social categories and vice versa, since gender identity seems to orient the person's gender and those social categories can either accord or conflict with that person's gender identity. David Reimer, a cis man, being raised as a girl felt conflict with being raised that way - he was rowdy and showed certain proclivities that boys commonly do, despite being raised as a girl. Trans people have similar experiences where their innate tendencies accord with the gender category they were not being raised as. Somehow a person knows they should be a man or a woman, despite those being social categories.

    I don't think the gender vs gender identity distinction solves the problem I am describing though it is an interesting argument. There are still biological components that play a role in what we call "gender" that we cannot claim only comes from socialization, even if some aspects of the social categories clearly are due to arbitrary socialization (like girls being drawn to pink and boys being drawn to blue).

    Meanwhile, we tend to think about the biology wrong too, we fail to see the way the biology itself is communicated and understood through scientific concepts which are created to be useful to a particular end, and are not perfect accounts of the underlying reality it is trying to describe. Our biological concepts are useful fictions in many ways, and in that sense the supposed objectivity of "biological sex" melts into the same arbitrariness of a social construct. Sex is not as objective as we would have thought, and gender is not as arbitrary as we might think. In fact the sex/gender distinction doesn't makes sense when we know the gender category a person lives as comes from the biology and the sex characteristics are oversimplified models.

    In your example involving race, I don’t think that’s a good comparison. In your example the person is saying words that generally minimize the importance of race while attempting to convey that they’re not prejudiced. Critically, everyone agrees to what the words are referring to. In the “gender is a social construct” case, I don’t think there’s agreement about what the word “gender” is referring to. The speaker means gender category, and the listener keeps understanding it as gender identity.

    I used this example precisely because it illustrates a case where the person is accidentally racist, and where the racist doesn't understand the nuance and racist side-effects of their supposedly progressive color-blindness. I think this is exactly like "gender is a social construct", since it has accidental transphobic outcomes that are not commonly understood and certainly aren't what people usually are trying to support.

    You don't have to think gender is gender identity to think "gender is a social construct" is problematic, hopefully I have managed to communicate the reasons why above.

  • Hopefully you can see that I'm not making "the biological argument" you probably had in mind, i.e. a biological essentialist account of gender. The biology totally supports non-binary people, and in fact the current evidence is that brain sex is largely "non-binary", with very few people having brains that fit into binary boxes.

    EDIT: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4687544/

    Our study demonstrates that although there are sex/gender differences in brain structure, brains do not fall into two classes, one typical of males and the other typical of females, nor are they aligned along a “male brain–female brain” continuum. Rather, even when considering only the small group of brain features that show the largest sex/gender differences, each brain is a unique mosaic of features, some of which may be more common in females compared with males, others may be more common in males compared with females, and still others may be common in both females and males.

    The lack of internal consistency in human brain and gender characteristics undermines the dimorphic view of human brain and behavior and calls for a shift in our conceptualization of the relations between sex and the brain. Specifically, we should shift from thinking of brains as falling into two classes, one typical of males and the other typical of females, to appreciating the variability of the human brain mosaic.

    Only around 1% of brains fit consistently with the binary "male" or "female" characteristics.

  • I think their point is more that if gender is socialization, then why would anyone ever have a strong and persistent sense that they are a gender other than they one they were socialized as? Gender is socialization means you are what your gender is what you were raised as. The idea is that it was the way you were raised that makes you a boy or a girl. This view absolutely has problems accounting for trans people, since trans people are generally claiming to be something other than the gender they were assigned at birth and then raised as.

  • lol, thanks - hopefully I'm actually helping, I feel so far like I'm just pissing people off

  • Sure, you have to realize - I spent several decades never questioning my gender and living as a man, and I certainly could have gone the rest of my life that way. It took a lot of change for me to even recognize the experiences I had were even gendered. You may actually lack the hermeneutical tools to interpret and understand your gendered experience, but it sounds like "agender" is already giving you a foothold. Feeling alienated from both genders is a thing that tells you "this is me". The evidence from the brain scans about subconscious sex shows that most people are going to not evenly fall into two camps like male and female, so why is it surprising that you wouldn't feel at home in either?

    What I mean about psychological self-conceptualization of my gender: when I dream, my brain sometimes generates a "me" that moves around and does things, interacts and experiences in the dream, etc. That "me" has a gender! I think of myself as a certain way, and it determines how I interact with other people, and how they interact with me. When I am stuck thinking of myself as a man, even when I feel dysphoria from being a man, it can be distressing - but I don't have direct control over my self-conceptualization. It's like a habituated way of thinking about myself.

    Sometimes in my dreams I will be interacting as a man, and then a sudden shift in my gender happens as I interact with a male stranger for example, shaking his hand I become aware of my breasts and suddenly I'm interacting with him as though I were a woman. It is a bizarre experience for me, and most of my life I never thought about my self conceptualization at all. Of course, the self concept is not just in dreams, and when I started voice therapy I realized my self-concept influenced how my voice sounded, and that I had to tackle habituating a voice partially by habituating conceiving of myself as a woman, by reminding myself over and over that I look like a woman and I need to navigate the world as a woman.

    You probably have a self-conceptualization as a woman to some extent, you probably have to for pragmatic reasons. I think socialization can play a big role in that psychology, the ways we acculturate and learn how to interact according to the gendered roles. To not do so is generally not adaptive and creates friction, for example I am learning that my habit from living as a man of holding doors open for everyone is starting to backfire as I learn that men would rather die than have a woman hold a door open for them. I am violating social norms when I hold doors open, and they rush forward to take over holding the door I'm trying to hold open for them.

    The socialization is still separate from the self-conceptualization, but I think they can be related in terms of the self-concept tapping into those social roles we have learned.

    Good luck exploring your gender!

  • I agree that the central problem here is that when the WHO or others refer to gender as a social construct, that it implies a social constructionist account of gender. However, I don't see another interpretation that makes much sense. I do precisely think that people can have intentions opposite of the content of their statement, like if a person wanted to reassure a racial minority by telling them that they don't even see race - it sounds supportive, but it communicates a racial eliminativist stance that undermines attempts at justice and repair. Sure, the well-meaning person may not be versed on the nuances of racial eliminativism vs racial constructivism, but it doesn't mean the sentiment isn't still problematic, or that the racial minority is just not understanding the interaction and there must be a mismatch somewhere.

    I think the mismatch is between the view being espoused and that person's understanding of the view. Sure, I might smile and nod trying to not soil the interaction, but I don't think the problem is that actually I am mistaken and they aren't communicating a social constructionist account of gender ...

    Also, the WHO article does communicate a social constructionist view of gender, and uses the typical gender/sex distinction on the typical basis that gender is social and sex is biological:

    Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other. As a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time.

    Gender interacts with but is different from sex, which refers to the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons, such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive organs.

    This distinction doesn't hold up, as sex is more socially constructed than is acknowledged here, and gender has more of a biological basis than is acknowledged. It is just inaccurate and out of sync with current evidence, as far as I can tell.

    Besides the readings I have suggested, another resource covering some of this territory is this lecture:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZymYiwoRoC0

    The chapter around 26 minutes in covers why the sex/gender distinction falls apart.

  • The closer you look at these things the more complicated they become. What we seem to know from the science is that:

    • the brain is not entirely neutral, there are sexual traits,
    • the sexual brain traits cannot be easily categorized into two boxes like "male" or "female", but are more like a constellation or mosaic of traits all in different configurations with very few brains fitting a category like "male" or "female", and
    • trans women seem to share overlapping sexual brain traits with cis women, and it seems like this is true of trans men as well.

    The science is just the current body of evidence we have, so we should expect our understanding to evolve as our evidence grows.

    To more directly answer your question requires some clarification. It is unclear whether you're asking how subconscious sex relates to agender people (no sense of gender), or to gender fluid people (a changing sense), or detransitioners (sometimes changing sense), or even just any normal person, since none of us has that kind of direct access to our subconscious sex, it is implicit. If we could inspect it directly it would certainly make the whole "am I trans" or "am I a woman" question much easier, wouldn't it? Maybe someday we will have the technology, or maybe we will find that our concept of "woman" simply cannot be mapped to a complex biological trait like brain sex.

    Subconscious sex is inferred, gender dysphoria and innate behavioral drives seem to give us footprints from which we can infer that subconscious sex from. Being a man and feeling the desire to wear a dress and skirt, how does he make sense of this? Maybe he assumes it's a fetish, but what if they enjoy it outside of sex, and maybe the sex when dressing up brings up so many complicated feelings (later she learns: dysphoric, even). Can it still be a fetish, can you be a crossdresser if you just want to wear a skirt around the house, but you have trouble extracting sexual pleasure from it? These are the kinds of investigating thoughts, the attempt to read between the lines. Some people might live their whole lives and never know their subconscious sex, they might successfully put off dealing with dysphoria or taking their crossdressing further. Some people have strong convictions from a young age and just know without as much ambiguity. There is quite a variety, just as the complex biology would imply.

    It is also worth noting that it is a complicated relationship between something like subconscious sex or an innate brain sex and something like a self conception of one's gender. I certainly experience fluctuations in my self conception and even my felt sense of gender. Testosterone can make it much harder for me to feel like a woman. Moving through the world as a woman and being seen and treated as one by others creates a social circumstance that bolsters a psychological self conception as a woman. Neither of these things directly tell me my subconscious sex, but when the testosterone makes me feel awful, or when being treated and seen as a woman makes me feel wonderful, or when estrogen gives me mild waves of buzzing bodily euphoric, I make inferences about my subconscious sex from that.

    So I don't know what you mean, but hopefully I have covered some of the ground you had in mind.

  • Rule

    Jump
  • Whort da heck

  • I agree, I am taking this way out of the original context, but I think the joke is maybe a straw breaking the camel's back here. I think Julia Serano's article communicates this well enough:

    If one more person tells me that "all gender is performance" I think I am going to strangle them. What's most annoying about that sound-bite is how it is often recited in a somewhat snooty "I-took-a-gender-studies-class-and-you-didn't" sort of way, which is ironic given the way that phrase dumbs down gender. It is a crass oversimplification that is as ridiculous as saying all gender is genitals, all gender is chromosomes, or all gender is socialization.

    She's frustrated, I'm frustrated. There is frustration that is generated by the "gender is just a social construct". The joke is literally about how the dumb cis people really just need an hour long lecture from an academic on how gender is actually just a social construct. I can't think of a better example of this condescending and ironically confidently-incorrect attitude.

    Maybe I think too much, but I guess my whole point is that people are not thinking enough. When they say gender is just a social construct they may not be familiar with gender theory or understand the nuances, and maybe stamping out biological essentialism is worth the oversimplifying, but there is something that feels wrong to me about penalizing a trans person challenging a view that invalidates their gender as an arbitrary fiction. I understand the intentions are not to be invalidating, and that most people don't understand the consequences of social constructionism, but that's exactly why I'm raising the problems and challenging it.

    To your point I could have done a much better job to not be confused with taking a biological essentialist view, but I think anyone who actually parses what I said and reads the articles I linked to will understand I am not endorsing biological essentialism. Still, that maybe is too high of a bar, and it would have been better if I did more to anticipate this knee-jerk reaction to my challenge. It's always good to make sure you are easy to understand, and this is admittedly a mea culpa because I was rushing and didn't have much time, so I wrote a much shorter comment and linked to articles to cover the extra ground for me (which was clearly not adequate).

    I don't know what to make of your claim that I shouldn't interpret "gender is just a social construct" as supporting social constructionism ... there is something compelling here about what people are trying to convey is more rooted in their intentions than any kind of theory, like a lot of times when people tell me "gender is just a social construct" it's because they are trying to signal they are trans-accepting. That said, I don't think there is any consistent or coherent view that we could really point to then, that is I'm not sure we could say "gender is just a social construct" actually communicates "the gender binary is not valid", for example, because some people will take the social constructionism more seriously than others, some people use it to actually mean, "I think trans people are valid", and others use it to mean "I will tolerate you as a trans person", and others still might use it to mean "you are dumb and don't understand gender, but I went to school and in my anthropology class we talked about how gender is cultural and sex is biological, blah blah blah".

    In summary, maybe you're right that I am inappropriately hijacking this joke to attack social constructionism, but I still don't think it's that crazy that I thought "gender is a social construct" was espousing some form of social constructionism.

    Thanks for putting up with me and reading my responses, and for challenging me - you have some compelling points that I should think about more.

  • Can I ask which parts you feel most skeptical about? I'm not sure what your standards are for "100% solid science", I might agree with you but I'm not sure.

    Thank you for the guidance on how to approach this topic, though I feel a little confused. I thought I clearly stated gender identity comes from a biological place and that gender is not just a social construct, linking to two articles that cover everything I was trying to communicate (esp. the Julia Serano article). I guess if you didn't read the articles and you just try to respond to my sentence it might not go well ... Maybe the idea is that I need to make it more about my own experience or something, since people might feel differently about those statements being made by a trans person, but that feels ... wrong to me somehow. We shouldn't necessarily care who says something as to whether it's a right view, even if who says what might be contextually relevant to interpretation. 🤔

    Or maybe your point was that I need to connect the biological basis of gender identity more to the way social constructionism is problematic. (I don't like focusing on validating / invalidating, since I think we can choose to be validating to something we don't think is real or true, and truth might sometimes be invalidating. We probably can't separate the moral concerns entirely from our theorizing, but it's an important point that gender theories don't succeed or fail based on whether they are trans affirming or not, but on whether they accord with reality and are backed by evidence. This goes for Ray Blanchard's theories as much as Judith Butler's.)

    Sorry, I feel like I'm missing your point, but I really appreciate the attempt and I think I am getting glimpses of your point. My original comment was admittedly too short and lacking a lot of important context, which I was trying to economically back-fill with the articles I linked to. (Admittedly, I was short on time, and since this was a joke tweet I wasn't taking it too seriously.)

    i would also include that i do not believe that invalidating your/others’ experiences as sort of innately biologically transgender people is the intention of those that say gender is a social construct.

    Oh of course, to the contrary I think a lot of people assume social constructionism is validating, so many people will tell me "gender is just a social construct" thinking they are signalling they are trans-accepting. It makes me cringe, it's not a small part of why this particular thing upsets me and I bothered even linking to the article in the first place. I can't stand the misinformation, and I also hate how it led to real world suffering, like with David Reimer. This is a view that needs to be revised, even if it is well intended.

    opening a post with “gender identity is biological” is just uhh, quite a strong statement to open a comment with (

    If someone hears a challenge to social constructionism they might assume I am endorsing biological essentialism, esp. if I'm talking about the biological basis of gender identity, so I get that. Partially I feel that is a problem with the reader, not a me-problem, but demanding people correctly parse and then read articles is probably a high bar and I should expect knee-jerk reactions if I'm not doing more work. Again, a lot of this was because I didn't have enough time and I was under pressure when writing the message.

    I think I'll edit the post and try to clarify a bit. 😅

    I can feel strongly about this issue, but it's also something I bite my tongue on over and over - it creates this instability where maybe I feel a building need to address it sometimes because I can only handle so much. I know most people are shallow in their understanding of most things and even though that bothers me, I feel like that's a problem with me, I am out of sync with everyone else. Still, when I'm not filtering or being quick I might accidentally slip into lecture mode. 😬

    EDIT: oh, and I wanted to say - thank you for being so nice and patient with me, lol - you're a real human and I appreciate that so much ✨ 💞 😊

  • A common anti-trans response would be: if gender is a social construct, then perhaps people are influenced by social media into becoming trans. This is the debunked notion of "social contagion", it assumes gender identity is subject to social influence.

  • I agree with you that the "gender is a social construct" is ultimately an ontological claim, about what gender is. When I hear "gender is just a social construct", especially from an anthropologist, I am entirely expecting a social constructionist account of gender, that's what they are communicating - what gender is.

    Clearly there are social elements to gender, like the color we associate with a gender, which has changed over time and is arbitrary. There is nothing intrinsic about gender-color associations, no reason "blue" means "boy" and "pink" means "girl".

    Regarding gender expression not only being performance: some people use Butler's performative theory of gender as a social constructionist account of gender. It's not really a coincidence in my mind that Butler shares some intellectual roots with the psychoanalytical sexologists who popularized social constructionist views in the 1960s, so while I'm sure you could parse several social constructionist accounts I don't think it's unfair to lump them together as a broad camp. The Julia Serano article I linked even does this:

    Look, I know that many contemporary queer folks and feminists embrace mantras like "all gender is performance," "all gender is drag," and "gender is just a construct." They seem empowered by the way these sayings give the impression that gender is merely a fiction. A facade. A figment of our imaginations.

    Notice how she lumps together views like "all gender is performance" and "gender is just a construct". I think this article is a relevant response to "gender is a social construct".

    And yes, it depends somewhat on what people actually mean when they say "gender is a social construct", but I generally take them to mean that they believe in a social constructionist account of gender, i.e. that gender is entirely arbitrary, the result of how we are raised, and the result of socialization. If you are raised a boy, you are a boy because of how you were raised.

    The idea that gender identity is biological, which is what that Safer meta-analysis concludes, contradicts the social constructionist account because it claims that a person's gender is intrinsic to them in some way, for example you can't just take a boy and raise them as a girl without problems (as the case of David Reimer illustrates, when the sexologist, John Money, who believed gender was just a construct and tested that theory by trying to have a boy raised as a girl).