8 Bit Philosophy: Is Gender Real?

[nomotog_v1legacy]

I realize this is a philosophical conundrum, relating questions of perception and personal identity, but I feel the biology of the matter sort of answers it right off. Humans (and other lifeforms) reproduce with two beings combining their DNA to produce offspring. Humans might debate this, but many animals won't be. Gender kind of outs itself in nature.

That is why people often use sex to refer to the biology of it XX XY and use gender to refer to the sociology of it. Sex is a thing in nature, but the fluff we build around sex is entirely our own imagination. Like there is nothing in our DNA that says pink is a XX color, or that the Y hates long hair. That is all stuff that we made up for one reason or another. Gender is about as real as we want it to be in that respect.

But all that is about looks and preference and about how these aspects are universal. That isn't gender. Girly men and buff women do not the other sex make. When someone says they're a woman in a man's body or vice versa and they're serious about it, their appearance is only the surface of the issue they face. Their biology is what's important. To change genders, you need to physically alter parts of your body AND the body chemistry. If it's only the mentality your changing, then a man is still a man, but he's decided to go homosexual, say. Essentially, I saw this, and I imagined two dogs in heat during the lecture, and realized that the nature of the beast defeated the argument right off. It's an interesting topic, but I can't agree.

You got to understand the divide between gender and sex here. or your going to be stuck. Normally they can be used interchangeably, but in this talk, you can't just swap between them.

Sex isn't that important. People kind of assume it is because they associate sex with gender, but I have never had a DNA test and I don't take my genitals out at work.. (Mostly ) Your sex barely plays into your day to day actions well your gender comes up may more form what you wear to whether people will give you their seat on the bus, to weather people will think it's odd when you talk about getting your nails done.

 

[Terminal Blue]

So you are arguing that since we don't know if this reality is "real" we can not determine if gender is "real", correct?

No, and I don't think it's particularly useful to ask whether or not reality is real.

What I am interested in is how we can know things, and if we're going to go around declaring something is real then we need to have a working standard for what constitutes "reality", under what conditions would any given phenomena be real or not real. In this case, that's actually very complicated.

So do you have evidence that, in this case, the subject was hormonally female or just your assertion that he was?

What does it mean to be "hormonally female?"

If by that you mean "was producing levels of androgens equivallent to that of a woman" then yeah, that's a pretty well observed consequence of someone losing their testicles. It's why men who do so generally take hormone supplements.

As for your contention that any effect of his own hormones must have been done prenatally well,

When bodies change, it's usually because they are told to change by hormones. That's why testosterone and other androgens are important, because they bond to the DNA in cells and tell the cells to start behaving differently. Without hormones, cells wouldn't be able to "talk" to each other, so this change could never happen.

Now. Where do hormones come from and why are they important to sex determination? Oh look, here's a chart which helpfully tells us!

Spoiler: Chart

You see. Men have cells in their testes which produce androgens, which then send signals to the rest of the body telling it to masculinize. This is the source of all "essential" physical differences between men and women.

But what happens if the testes are removed?

No more androgens (save those produced elsewhere in the body in organs which everyone has anyway)

Which means..

No further masculinization.

In regards to your spectrum; taken to its logical conclusion, that means we can in effect measure "femininity" and "masculinity" based off hormones.

Nope. We can measure maleness and femaleness based off hormones. That is one way of doing it. Sadly, it's one that doesn't actually work. On one hand, sometimes the receptors which receive androgens don't respond (a condition called AIS) and sometimes, for various reasons, people who are already physically masculinized experience sudden drops in hormone production (the most obvious being from losing their testes). It doesn't necessarily have any impact on their sex, their gender identity or their behavior.

And on the "god of the gap" by that same logic you use to dismiss the gender is biological one can do the same with your gender is social.

Except that "the social" doesn't really have any gaps. It's entirely present and visible. I go out and I see men and women going around being men and women, I don't see testes and ovaries, I don't see XX and XY, I see men and women. They have bodies, sure, but even those bodies are experienced in a way which is primarily social. We don't generally walk around naked, and even when we do there are particular social contexts, arrangements and rules.

We don't need biology to explain the social world. It may help sometimes, but we don't need it. The reverse is not true.

 

[Terminal Blue]

What about all the intersex people who get equally ineffectual genital reconstruction at a young age that never have gender identity issues? Roughly half of them will, yet roughly half of the people who experience the same ineffectual surgery will not develop the same gender identity incongruence even though their genitals are similarly disformed. Half and half, roughly the sex ratio of birth.

It wasn't my intention to present this as an inevitable conclusion of partial reconstruction. What I'm attempting to dispel more generally is the idea, commonly circulated, that Reimer was raised entirely unaware of being anything but a "normal girl" and yet somehow the magic of biology cut through it all and made him esoterically aware of the truth of his own gender identity.

Frankly, I think if there's a lesson to be learned from Reimer's story it's that the desire for normalization and to avoid the presumed stigma of "failing to perform" can actually be incredibly destructive and can end up reinforcing that same stigma.

The point is going over your head by a mile about the positive/negative reinforcement Reimar experienced. He was punished for expressing non-feminine behaviors, so why would a child continue to express them if they were going to be punished for it? There exist plenty of women who are fine with expressing only stereotypical gender behavior, after all.

Again, my point is to counteract the notion that Reimer's upbringing was in any way a "normal" upbringing, or typical of that of his female peers even in the 1960s and 70s. Essentially, both Money and Reimer's parents projected their own deeply insulting and stereotypical view of femininity onto him and forced him to conform to it in the belief that he would eventually come to like it simply through repetition. We now know that doesn't work, it's stunningly obvious that it doesn't work, children have a much more dialectical relationship with authority than Dr. Money assumed, but this was the age of conservative psychoanalysis when noone thought twice about the idea that being a woman meant learning to tolerate powerlessness and humilation.

Plenty of people are exposed to sexual abuse from an older person of another gender, why don't all of those people express gender identity incongruence?

Well, for one, because unless you're going to take a radical feminist stance that all sexual abuse represents normalization, then sexual abuse generally does not occur as an explicit attempt to normalize gender appropriate sexual behaviour.

The closest we get today is probably gay conversion therapy.. which employs remarkably similar strategies as we know also doesn't work. In fact, the analogy is very relevant and telling. Money simply assumed that making Reimer a healthy girl would mean making him a heterosexual girl, and that developing submissive sexual desire towards men was somehow integral to the success of the project of making Reimer a girl. That's far more revealing of his psychology than it is of any deeper point about gender or human psychology more generally.

There's been a plethora of scientific evidence demonstrating physical differences between the brains of the two sexes, which is furthermore highlighted by transgender people tending to have brains physically more similar to the gender identify as then the cisgender counterparts of the same assigned sex, eg transgender women's brains are more physically similar to a cisgender woman's brain is than a cisgender man's brain.

What people don't realize, however, is that a) much of this research is contradictory, and b) quite a lot of it involves measurements which are arguably too small for modern instruments to measure.

The idea of neurological differences between men and women and that this can somehow shed insight into "abnormal" sexual or gendered behaviour has been an obsession since Victorian times. Victorians were utterly convinced that men and women's brains were so different that some early Darwinists honestly argued that men and women should be treated as separate species. As our understanding of the brain has increased, the proposed differences have shrunk and shrunk and shrunk but somehow never gone away. I don't use the phrase "god of the gaps" lightly, but it really is kind of scary in this case. The definitive proof that men and women are different, that all the ways in which we treat them differently are somehow vindicated by some essential difference between them, has always been just on the other end of the next microscope, the next anatomical study, the next hormone analysis. These differences have been "discovered" thousands of times, and then forgotten as they either fail to repeat or turn out to be less relevant than the expectations of sexual difference researchers require.

The real story is not the differences between "male" and "female" brains, of which there are a few, but our overwhelming similarity, both in terms of neurology and cognitive functioning, and how out of line it is with our constant, unshakable conviction that we must be irreconcilably different. How long are we going to hold on to that, how small do the "differences" have to get before we finally accept that they may not be as definitive as we all assumed they were?

There have been plenty of people without genital deformities who questioned their gender identity, even far back before transgender medical care really existed.

I'm not making some Marxist point about social control or normalization, here.

People need identity. Even identities which are persecuted or transgressive or painful are still preferable to not having identity at all. Lacan's point was that what really frightens us is not the possibility of being persecuted, but the possibility of being nothing, of losing what we think we know about ourselves. Identity is us inventing stories about ourselves to attempt to hide from ourselves the fact that we came into this world as squealing indistinct blobs without the ability to even distinguish ourselves from anything else. We build up a sense of who we are and more importantly who we are not as an ordering function to allow us to exist and feel secure, but the problem is that these things are just stories. They're fictions which we nonetheless can't live without.

Then you're not paying attention. We're pushing for more and more research of the brain every year, and we're getting more results every years.

Right, but that's not answering the questions.

"Is gender real?"
"Let's find out by doing research into gender!"

Do you see the problem. The possibility of doing research into gender already assumes that gender is real.

Again, we're back to this weird divorcing of gender from its own conditions of emergence. If the purpose of your research is to discover "gender differences", then how do you determine the gender of your sample when you haven't completed your research yet?

 

[Terminal Blue]

Welcome to quantum mechanics, where we both exist and don't exist.

Well, there are multiple possible levels on which a thing can be said to exist. If there weren't, I could say that unicorns exist because the word "unicorn" exists.

So you do admit that masculinization does happen. That before birth there is a physical change to make a fetus male. Which I do believe is an "essential" difference.

It's a difference.

As I've said several times now. I have no problem with the notion that bodies exist and are different from each other. But that isn't really an answer to the question of whether gender is real or not, it's merely responding to the question of what "causes" gender, which relies on us assuming that gender exists.

Furthermore, I would say that a difference can only be "essential" when it is definitive of a category, and I don't see how physical masculinization is definitive of maleness.

That is an extreme outlier.

But an essential definition has to be essential.

You can't have an essential definition which excludes outliers.

You have that backwards. Our "social" world is defined by our biology as is every species on this planet. Take a look at primates species. You have bonobo whose females have no clear estrus and chimps who do. These species have clearly different social worlds.

Do you have any evidence that bonobos experience a thing called "gender". Did the bonobos tell you about it?

There's a literal truth to what you're saying which I've never disputed, which is that the world is only ever experienced through the medium of bodies. However, gender is not bodies, in the same way that the word unicorn is not a literal unicorn. Gender is to do with the meaning of bodies, and that's something we can only experience socially.

 

[beastro]

My head hurts...

Yours isn't the only one that's hurting.

The more this postmodern bullshit keeps going on the more I await it's massive crash down, despite all the devastation it'll unleash on society.

 

[Callate]

I think it's fundamentally the wrong question, and sadly, one on which way too much energy and ire will be spent.

To give the short version (for once), it's far more important how we treat people who behave in ways regarded as not "traditional" to their sex.

Instead of trying to set or move the goal-posts for what constitutes "normal", we should ask what's wrong with not being normal. Take enough factors into account, almost no one is "normal"; I'm certainly not. At least half the strife regarding many social issues would go away if we just demanded a higher standard of proof for what constitutes doing harm.

Male and female are useful and real, and they're not going away just because it would be handy to believe the discrimination that occurs is based on factors that are actually illusory, arbitrary, and trivial. We have to engage that discrimination head-on, not try to loophole it away semantically. Particularly if, as it often seems to me, we're clinging to "normal" as insurance that we will be able to broadly discriminate in the future.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

Or perhaps we can take the Beauvoir kind of opinion that people's personal identity exists outside a strictly scientific causal examination, given the infinite complexity that arises from being human? That maybe we should assume that existence precedes essence, and that the clumsy means by which we implement science to dictate the meaning of a person tends to miss the important facet that 1000 humans is actually 1000 different humans?

By all means, scientific examination matters in terms of health, but I doubt anybody here wants to live being constantly poked and prodded to determine how people should treat you in common society. You know ... basic liberty? Right to self-expression...? All those lovely things that we'd have less of if we continue to try to justify how a person is to be ... that tends to miss the very quizzical applications that maybe science belongs as a means to explain a phenomena, not as a means to justify personal prejudices.

You know ... like most scientists out there would agree.

After all, I'm waiting to hear the argument that humans have 46 chromosomes be transformed into; "all humans must have 46 chromosomes". Because then I'm not human. If you're using arbitrary numbers or goalposts to determine what someone is, then the real question is; "Why are you doing that?"

Perhaps most galling is the fact that people seem to ignore outlying examples of self and existence as if to try to argue against its existence of that oulier sense of self and existence that you are quizzically saying doen't exist... in which case; "Why are you doing that?" also applies.

 

[Dalrien]

Im wondering what sort of response you want from me, a part from insulting you.

Something along the lines of: "You are right, I'm a simpleton who's information on the subject consists solely of internet videos. I've never read an academic text on the subject, and never will. I like my simple worldview and am scared of nuance."

Jimmies were rustled this day.

 

[FalloutJack]

Snip

I'm sorry, but I believe the real problem here is that people want to separate the two. That's where you're stuck, making a big complicated problem about something that isn't. If you're a man and you decide to be a woman, putting on a dress and acting like a woman doesn't make you a woman. You might be mistaken for one if you're really good at it, but it isn't true. The truth is that you're just acting until you follow through.

 

[Terminal Blue]

If biology has nothing to do with it, then it would reason all intersex children would experience the same feelings.

No, it wouldn't. That's a total non-sequitur unless the experience of intersex children is somehow identical.

Are you feeling alright today? I normally enjoy your posts and have a lot of time for them, and this seems a little out of character.

Yet what about the intersex kids who do accept socialization as a boy or as a girl? Half don't reject it.

And half do, I still don't see what you think you're saying.

In that way what Money did was hardly unique.

Every instance of abuse is unique.

Again, what's up?

A difference is a difference. Same and similar do not mean the same thing.

Right. But noone is, strictly speaking, the same.

Cut open a hundred heterosexual cisgendered men and you will find their brains are different. Similar, but different.

Why is difference suddenly important here? Why does it matter more than any of the other differences? Why is this categorization more meaningful than any of the potentially infinate number of categorizations which could be made on the basis of insignificantly tiny similarities and differences between bodies or brains, because those are confusing and messy things.

Which actually came first, the biological difference or the social difference? Which actually constitutes the condition for the emergence of gender?[footnote]This is actually kind of not a rhetorical question, but it also kind of is..[/footnote]

Newsflash: People with gender dysphoria still generally have a gender identity.

Yeah, you aren't listening..

As I said, not having identity is impossible, because the process of signifying a lack of identity would be the the same as the process of signifying an identity. They are the same thing.

If it is real, its in the brain.

Why?

We didn't need to examine and understand the brain 100% to find the answer because we came across the evidence beforehand.

And how did the studies which produced that "evidence" select their samples, given that there was no gender before they defined it..

Oh wait, there was!

Anyway, I love a good debate on the internet, but this is still not relevant to the question of whether gender is real, because you aren't asking that question, you are asking what causes it on the assumption that it is real. This is the whole thing which queer theory is trying to get away from, because it's fucking circular. Gender isn't bodies. Bodies are bodies. Gender is gender. Explain the connection between these things in terms of what they actually are,[footnote]Or rather, the conditions under which they emerge, or become intelligible[/footnote] not some assumed site of convergence which must exist. There is no "must" about it. We don't need some hitherto undiscovered brain magic to explain the apparent existence of gender.

 

[Vanilla_Knight]

My head hurts...

Yours isn't the only one that's hurting.

The more this postmodern bullshit keeps going on the more I await it's massive crash down, despite all the devastation it'll unleash on society.

Hahaha. Yeah, post-modernists are always a pain. I come back and people are writing essay responses, so they've probably handled it better - like Smilomaniac. The main problem that this video has and the topic it's trying to address, is that 99.999..% of the world has no such problems when it comes to "gender identity" and "fluidity" and that it either ignorantly or purposely misaddresses the ideals that people actually have. It's also making an extremely small percentage of the population the center-point for a 'discussion', yet it isn't any 'discussion' it's a dictation from people who believe they have it all figured out based on a slim portion of society. The narration concludes that people have set ideals of what a man is and what a woman is. "When you think of a woman, you think ---" What? No I don't. But because I don't have that ideal and that others don't have that ideal, it concludes that gender is fluid. It takes it to the extreme opposite of "traditionalist" values.

Does it even occur to people like this that the social norms that SOME people have when it comes to the ideals of man and woman are not inherently wrong or misplaced? Are people so entrenched that they deny even the possibility that sex (biological) and gender (social) are not entirely discrete? That because FACT: Men are on average physically stronger than women, that the social aspect would reflect upon the biological? Are they that deluded?

If people are openly throwing out biology on the matter then it isn't a discussion worth having.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Its almost identical for the overwhelming majority of intersex people.

Right. But almost identical is not identical, or as you put it.. similar is not the same.

Because some differences are consistent among people of a gender identity.

Okay. At this point we aren't going to get any further unless you have a list of citations. I can't respond to an appeal to a scientific consensus that doesn't exist, or which I've certainly never heard of despite being in a position to be highly aware of it.

A trend existing on the basis of gender identity.

Which is it? Are there consistent differences between people of different gender identities, or is there a trend? Those are different things.

This is what you said.

This is also what I said:

"They're fictions which we nonetheless can't live without."

I don't know what your problem is today, but please don't quote me out of context so you can accuse me of an argument I never made.

Because thats where we exist as human beings. Our brains are us, period.

Until we become corpses, at which point our brains are no longer us.

I'm sorry for pointing out the absolutely bleeding obvious here, but if you're cutting people's skulls open and removing their brains, then the brains you're looking at are not people any more. They are corpses. They do not have gender identities. They don't understand the concept of gender, because they don't understand anything, because they're dead.

Being able to look at a brain and measure the relative dimensions of its parts or crudely map the broad distribution of tissue does not imply the ability to understand the cognition of the person to whom that brain belonged. That isn't science, that's magic. You may as well claim you can divine the future by looking for patterns in the cortical folds.

Which was defined by the individuals, not the people performing the research.

Firstly, that's not how sampling works. If you choose to use people's self definition as a sampling tool, then that is a decision of the researcher, not the participants. The researcher is always responsible for their choice of sampling methods..

Secondly, what is this entirely unrelated variable doing in supposedly biological research? If gender identity is biological, why the hell does it matter how people think about themselves? Why can't we just look into their biology and say "you're male" "you're female", "you're third gender", "you're non-binary", "you're male, but at age 30 you will experience a sudden shift in your gender identity and become female". If gender is biological then it should be observable purely in terms of biology..

..But it isn't, because our only consistent, reliable point of contact with gender is social. The condition for the emergence of gender is in social context. The social existence of gender precedes any of the questions you are trying to ask of it with biology.

There really is no escape from that, because if you were correct and if gender could be separated from its social context then it would be meaningless, just like all the other meaningless "differences" between people.

 

[Terminal Blue]

:| hm....

Well you see when people are born...

..a doctor looks at their genitals and makes a decision about whether what he or she is looking at looks more like an arbitrary ideal type of male or female genitals.

The decision is what establishes gender. Not the genitals. The criteria for the decision are dictated by a set of medical priorities decided by whatever is considered to be culturally important at the time.

Are those criteria the same as the bodies to which they apply? Obviously not, otherwise it would never be necessary to whip out a scalpel and cut bits off people to make their bodies fit the judgement.