You've left out the bit where you explain why things that stem from a culture lack validity. Also, it was our perception of pink which has changed, not our feelings towards either gender.
8 Bit Philosophy: Is Gender Real?
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Wait.
You mentioned GENDER on THE ESCAPIST?!
YOU FOOL! You've unleashed a beast none can hope to stop!
RUN, little philosopher, run! People are going to hate you and call you an SJW unironically! And they'll probably mention that it is some how Anita's fault!
You mentioned GENDER on THE ESCAPIST?!
YOU FOOL! You've unleashed a beast none can hope to stop!
RUN, little philosopher, run! People are going to hate you and call you an SJW unironically! And they'll probably mention that it is some how Anita's fault!
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.FalloutJack said:
I think you mean "What the cluck"... I'll show myself out.Dynast Brass said:
The issue is that hormones are produced by many things and interact in a complex soup. The liver, ovaries, testes and many other glands and tissues all produce or regulate the hormone levels in the human body so to say that it's all down to the brain is a little oversimplified. I agree that separating the human brain from the human mind is tricky, but ti's only tricky in the same way that separating a computer program from the hardware it's running on is tricky. You change the hardware in some way and that will heavily affect the program. The difference for humans is neuroplasticity where our "Hardware" is constantly shifting to create new memories and associations between them.kimiyoribaka said:
Then again, I've always preferred picking out the individual over the group but people do act differently alone than they do as a group which is why group psychology and sociology are separate to psychology.
However, maybe I was overdramatic, but I did couch my point with a "May be" since not proving something does not disprove that it exists, Newton thought that Light was particles, then everyone thought it was a wave for a good while, and now we know it's both. So a theory which seemed wrong can be proven right with evidence in time. I'm going to keep an open mind on this as much as I can but as far as my vision sees, the evidence for gender being more socially imposed than biologically determined in some way is not looking good.
Considering the content of the thread so far, let me know when that happens.Objectable said:
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.nomotog said:
"Should the category of boys and girls even exist?"
These people can't be for real can they? Do others take this seriously when they gloss over the biological foundation that humans are sexually-dimorphic and that, yes, women and men are comparably different in many ways objectively through the lense of biological sciences? "Gender fluidity" has arisen out of the cultural creation of the distinction between sex and gender. "Gender is a social construct" is a statement in itself a social construct. One of the setbacks to this discussion is that in some camps people believe that identity > biological sex. That if one calls oneself a "male" they are male regardless of the more concrete facts.
My head hurts...
These people can't be for real can they? Do others take this seriously when they gloss over the biological foundation that humans are sexually-dimorphic and that, yes, women and men are comparably different in many ways objectively through the lense of biological sciences? "Gender fluidity" has arisen out of the cultural creation of the distinction between sex and gender. "Gender is a social construct" is a statement in itself a social construct. One of the setbacks to this discussion is that in some camps people believe that identity > biological sex. That if one calls oneself a "male" they are male regardless of the more concrete facts.
My head hurts...
It's kind of sad to realise that while most 8-bit philosophy videos explain (partially or wholly) opposing ideas from several different thinkers this subject only gets the one thinker. Makes it feel like political propaganda more than philosophical debate.
The issue is that hormones are produced by many things and interact in a complex soup. The liver, ovaries, testes and many other glands and tissues all produce or regulate the hormone levels in the human body so to say that it's all down to the brain is a little oversimplified. I agree that separating the human brain from the human mind is tricky, but ti's only tricky in the same way that separating a computer program from the hardware it's running on is tricky. You change the hardware in some way and that will heavily affect the program. The difference for humans is neuroplasticity where our "Hardware" is constantly shifting to create new memories and associations between them.vallorn said:
Then again, I've always preferred picking out the individual over the group but people do act differently alone than they do as a group which is why group psychology and sociology are separate to psychology.
However, maybe I was overdramatic, but I did couch my point with a "May be" since not proving something does not disprove that it exists, Newton thought that Light was particles, then everyone thought it was a wave for a good while, and now we know it's both. So a theory which seemed wrong can be proven right with evidence in time. I'm going to keep an open mind on this as much as I can but as far as my vision sees, the evidence for gender being more socially imposed than biologically determined in some way is not looking good.
Considering the content of the thread so far, let me know when that happens.[/quote]
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the plasticity of the brain decreases as humans age doesn't it? Meaning that the formative years are actually just that, there are examples of how one hemisphere of the brain compensates if the other loses function or is lost entirely, however I believe that those examples all involve rather young people. This can easily encourage the interpretation that gender does indeed exist, however there is also hormones to consider. A hormonal imbalance might change the reactions we have to certain stimulus which could, hypothetically, be perceived as veering from common gender roles. I would probably conclude that gender does exist, and that it is both nature and nurture since the sexes are geared towards different roles in society ad those roles will invariably shape the individual. Sex would be a bit more vague seeing as physical attraction is almost entirely hormonal and chemical which makes it subject to greater fluctuations than something dependent on neuroplasticity.
But what the heck do I know, I only did a couple of classes on the stuff and follow what I perceive as a reasonable track of thought.
What about David Reimer?slo said:
Are you telling me that if I take a person with no genitals who has to urinate through a hole in their belly button and will be relentlessly teased and mocked for it, constantly monitor and punish them for any form of behaviour which contradicts my deeply insulting view of femininity and force them to act out a submissive role in mock sex acts with their brother they might somehow develop the idea that being socially female is not something they want.
I'm sorry, I'm afraid I must stitch my skull together now because my mind has been blown. I mean, what could possibly have given them that idea?????
Obviously though, biology wins.. even though David Reimer actually had no testes and was therefore hormonally indistinguishable from a female-bodied person. It must be biology, right?
As an outsider to the whole notion, I find the endless search for "evidence" that what we do socially is the product of essential biological mandates to be somewhat.. neurotic, for want of a better word. Where does this need actually come from, what produces it, why are cases like that of David Reimer held up as paragon examples even when the basic facts of the case have to be altered to make them mean what people need them to mean, while the incredibly vast weight of gender ambiguity in the world around us goes ignored?
Jacques Lacan, who was one of Butler's biggest influences, suggested that preserving a stable sense of self requires us to reject the possibility of alternatives. To be male, we have to reject or cut out the possibility of us ever being female. This serves to conceal from ourselves the actual instability of our own identities by dodging any difficult epistemological questions about how we come to know our own identities in the first place, about how we actually arrive at the point of looking in the mirror and saying "I'm a man" or "I'm a woman".
If I ask the question "does gender exist" and someone answers "well, men on average tend to have better spatial awareness than women", that may or may not be true, but actually it isn't an answer to the question, because the question was not "do men (on average) have better spatial awareness than women", it was "does gender exist". To answer the question in that way relies on the preexisting assumption that it does, and that assumption is presumed to be self-justifying. Who are these men in the first place, why does the fact that they may or may not have better spatial awareness (on average) constitute the basis of a meaningful social distinction? In what way is that basis reflected in the conditions of emergence for the category of gender itself?
In my experience, people have a remarkable investment in not answering these questions.
I know exactly which study you're referring to here (by Baron-Cohen) and the results have been thoroughly debunked by multiple sources. To start with, the study was critically flawed: it wasn't blind, and both the subjects parents and those performing the experiment knew the purpose, which infants were male and which were female, and the (intended) result. Baron-Cohen's own graduate students used the mobile, and analysis of his recordings showed that they - intentionally or otherwise - moved it faster and more vigorously for male infants. Secondly, the results have been widely misreported: it wasn't the case that female infants stared more at faces and male infants the mobile; both stared at faces more than the mobile, but male infants stared at the mobile slightly longer than female infants, which stands to reason, since the experimenters made it a more attractive object for the male infants (because they knew what outcome their PI, with his "male-brained" vs "female-brained" theory of autism, expected/desired). When asked to respond to these critiques of his experimental procedure, Baron-Cohen declined to defend his results, and instead slandered his detractors as "agenda-driven" and "feminists."vallorn said:
This is similar to the study that purported to show that young infants were "hard-wired" to prefer female faces as almost all infants did so; yet, when it was performed by young infants with primary caregiver fathers, they overwhelmingly preferred male faces (surprise, most primary caregivers of infants are women). The fact of the matters is that very young infants/newborns can't even distinguish between living and non-living objects (see: mirror neurons), to say that there are ingrained differences between male and female infants before even the most minute cognitive development has occurred is absurd and almost certainly agenda-pushing (see: Baron-Cohen, above).
How so?slo said:
Firstly, what is gender? Secondly, what is the basis of ontological reality? Thirdly, under what conditions could gender be observed as ontologically real? Fourthly how does David's life actually meet these conditions? Fifthly, can all theoretically consistent possible alternatives be eliminated?
Unless you can demonstrate that sex differences in the hypothalamus (which themselves have to be produced prenatally in this case) are capable of compensating for the absence of functioning testes, it really isn't. "Female" is a spectrum, not a fixed point. Some women produce a relatively large amount of testosterone (through excercise, for example), it doesn't magically cause them to develop a male gender identity. If gender identity is essential, it must therefore be linked to something essentially different between men and women.ethurin said:
I will concede that it wasn't a completely serious point, just a reflection on the ludicrousness of some of the "god of the gaps" thinking requires to sustain essentialism. The need to appeal to unknown and unobserved features of biology which must exist even if they're invisible is pretty weird, to be honest.
As for snark, I apologize. That is something I could stand to improve on.
As in, do sexual features influence what societies consider to be a "masculine" and "feminine" behaviour? Oh, almost certainly. Are but are they also influenced by society, and are many aspects of gender entirely performative (especially those which differ across societies - e.g. in American society women are perceived to be more "group-oriented" whereas in Japanese society women are perceived to be more "individualistic", the commonality in both cases being that the opposite is the ideal, and the feminine =/= the ideal)? Yes. Clearly.
There's honestly not even that much debate about this anymore, in scientific circles. There is no "is it nature or nurture?" - it's obviously both. "To what extent" of each is the question, at this point. The influence of both has been demonstrated beyond doubt. The only debate you get in terms of "no social influence, it's all genetic" or "no genetic influence, it's all social" is either the extreme feminist or anti-feminist factions, or people shirking honest debate in an attempt to strawman their opponent into one or the other. (E.g. "I don't think that's sufficient evidence that (insert behaviour here) is genetically 'hard-wired' as you haven't ruled out social factors" -> "Oh? So you think ALL gender is NURTURE, do you?!?!?" and vice versa).
There's honestly not even that much debate about this anymore, in scientific circles. There is no "is it nature or nurture?" - it's obviously both. "To what extent" of each is the question, at this point. The influence of both has been demonstrated beyond doubt. The only debate you get in terms of "no social influence, it's all genetic" or "no genetic influence, it's all social" is either the extreme feminist or anti-feminist factions, or people shirking honest debate in an attempt to strawman their opponent into one or the other. (E.g. "I don't think that's sufficient evidence that (insert behaviour here) is genetically 'hard-wired' as you haven't ruled out social factors" -> "Oh? So you think ALL gender is NURTURE, do you?!?!?" and vice versa).
I'm not so sure that's obvious, or rather, I think the question you're answering is not exactly the same as the question being asked.Ariseishirou said:
What I think we can't be in doubt on is that bodies exist. Sometimes they are different to each other and sometimes they are the same. But this doesn't necessarily entail preexisting conclusions about precisely what the existence of bodies means.
Butler's point is not really "is nature or nurture the real basis of gender", but rather "is there a real basis to gender at all?" Pick any two human bodies and you will find an astonishing range of both "natural" and "nurtured" differences between them, irrespective of whether they are of the same "gender" or not. The point is, therefore, why this classification system and not others? Why look at human bodies, which are all astonishingly different from each other, and decide that these differences are socially meaningful. Why do we assume that the categories of sex and gender remain fixed and stable constants even as we recognize the substantive content of those categories varies across space and time?
Furthermore, if gender is something that "exists", then how do we know it exists? We don't all carry around a personal laboratory and team of sexual difference researchers ready to prod and probe anyone we meet. The problem with all these "scientific" justifications of gender is that they tend to assume that gender can be generalized beyond the conditions under which it is observed. As if a researcher can make a statement about male and female behaviour and suddenly that behaviour becomes part of the definition apparatus by which we all live and identify gender in the real world. Actually, it's easier to make the reverse claim.. How does a researcher know that his or her female participants are female before he or she has done the research? The answer is obviously that there is a way in which gender is lived which precedes the nature/nurture debate altogether.