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Popular Thug Drink posted:i think it's pretty safe to say there's some kind of inborn gender because humans are sexually dimorphous and we see largely consistent concepts of gender across human societies. it's just that this inborn gender can be disconnected from your biological sex, and the way that gender interacts with society is also complicated, such that ultimately one can't assume a connection between sex and gender Correlation is not causation and even when it is causation can be artificial rather than natural. Differences, for example, in male vs female math scores between societies and in the same society over a few generations of social change show the power of social pressure over expression of innate abilities. Studies of difference in aggression by gender in annonymized situations are also enlightening as women are as or more aggressive than men when sheltered from social retaliation. If society treated aggression in men the way it treats aggression in women then men would be less aggressive as the social cost of such displays would be higher. http://m.psp.sagepub.com/content/20/1/34.abstract
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Apr 18, 2016 18:54
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Talmonis posted:These bolded [risk taking and emotional display ] would seem to be covered under the typically high levels of testosterone in males. I bolder the important word there. Male children show feelings much more readily but are socialized to stop as they grow older. Suck it. Be a "man" ( with the implication that men don't feel ). http://www.academia.edu/19569177/Im_Not_Going_to_Be_a_Girl_Masculinity_and_Emotions_in_Boys_Friendships_and_Peer_Groups Girls of the same age are encouraged to think about and accept their emotions. This is a much better practice IMO and one of the places where we should be treating boys more like girls instead of the other way around. The way we socialize boys stunts their social IQ's and may be why they take so much longer to reach emotional maturity. As for excitement and risk taking ... Go to google and find the nearest place offering riding lessons to girls that has "vaulting" courses. Then drive down and watch a class. http://www.abc.net.au/local/videos/2012/08/28/3577345.htm Or Google wing walkers. Not female wing walkers. Just wing walkers. Since they were predominantly women. Hell, watch this clip of Gladys Ingle repairing a biplane's landing gear in flight. Imagine what the soundtrack would be if she had been a man. But since she is a woman - and we have socially decreed that women aren't risk takers and don't have an enjoyable adrenaline kick from danger like red blooded boys do - we have to downplay the danger instead of celebrating it. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8oAzdbd0J2A Back to horses. Horses are a wonderful way to see how social attitudes rather than innate differences between the genders are feeding this myth that testosterone makes people adventurous. When horses were boy things then women were compelled to ride side saddle for decorum and thus limited in terms of access and mobility to horses. The guys hogged them much like they hog the home gaming consoles today limiting girls access to certain gaming platforms. And back then much ado was made about how big and scary and dangerous horses were and how delicate women couldn't be trusted to handle these strong giant beasts! Now we have cars. And the boys don't dream of owning their own destrier anymore. And horses have become a girl thing. And in barns all over the first world girls and teens and young women are reveling in doing all the trick riding that was once the domain of men. ]And this is far more dangerous than cars. A race car with a gazillion horse power has way more safety features than a mare with just the 1. And my Mazda at 90 doesn't feel as fast as a Tennessee Walker at 30 because you don't have the wind and the motion and the feeling of effort. And - unlike boys/men - we don't do it to impress the opposite sex. You rarely see a guy in a barn and when you do they are usually lost. I love my husband dearly and he reads this forum ( hi Hun ) but I still get a chuckle out of trying to get him to ride with me and having an 11 year old stable girl step in to get his uncooperative horse in cross ties to saddle up. Girls - not boys - are socialized to want horses now. Horses are now culturally feminized and portrayed as gentle and safe. But horses haven't changed. And girls haven't changed. Just our societal notions have changed. And an inner city 7 year old girl dreaming of charging through a barrel racing course on the back of a mustang she gentled herself like in the books is expressing the same risk taking adventurism that a 7 year old boy wanting to be a fighter pilot is. The identical basic impulses are channeled in different directions by society. But if the two the girl is actually far more likely to actually live the dream. As there are more equestrians than fighter pilots running around.
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Apr 18, 2016 21:57
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Talmonis posted:These are excellent points. I would really like to find out if the women and girls drawn to equestrianism and other high risk activities exhibit higher levels of testosterone than the average. One of the interesting things I've come across on the subject of hormones, was that fathers have increased levels of Estrogen. Is the need for more empathy and protectiveness due to the birth of your own child driving that increase? Testosterone shmestosterone. When I look at a vaulting class today I remember being a girl at horse camp learning bareback riding and how much more fun/scary it was than saddled riding due to lack of stirrups. And I feel the ghost of a longing to join in. But then I remember I'm nearly 40 and I weigh more than I did then and a break harder and take longer to heal. My hormones haven't changed. I got older and I got injured enough that I lost my youthful assumption of my own invulnerability. Most people of both genders are like me. "Whhhheeeeeee! Ouch!!!!! Ok, let's take it easy from here on out". A few people of both genders find the highs to be worth the risk. To approach the issue from another direction take a minute to contemplate how deep our societal resistance is to even acknowledging that women do risky jobs. If I asked readers to name the top 5 most dangerous jobs in America - how many would list nursing? But it is one of the most injury prone jobs out there as well as the a hotbed of workplace violence. http://www.hrsa.gov/advisorycommittees/bhpradvisory/nacnep/reports/fifthreport.pdf quote:
http://www.workingnurse.com/articles/Healthcare-is-America-s-Most-Dangerous-Industry quote:
But it's women's work so we culturally decide it is safe except for brief interludes when something scary like an Ebola outbreak happens that nurses are on the front lines for. Many women go into it expecting it to be safe. When they learn it isn't some leave and others stay. Are you going to posit that every nurse in America over 30 has high testosterone - thus leading to her continuing in a job that mixes incredibly stressed out/angry people with sharp objects and contagious diseases? Or maybe testosterone fixation is a cultural strategy to try to justify our arbitrary gender roles. Find a reliable difference between two groups and declare that it is a physical proof and justification of their social caste. Like ... You do realize that women with high testosterone have massively less than men with testosterone deficiencies, right? And paternal estrogen may be up for a father but is at practically homeopathic concentrations compared to female levels. http://www.hemingways.org/GIDinfo/hrt_ref.htm I am a woman with highish testosterone. That means I'm at the upper end of the female 6-86 ng/dl range. Ok. Great. The male range is 270-1100ng/dl. If testosterone is magical fairy dust that makes people whatever we've decided is masculine right now then how the hell is my tiny relative amounts of the Y-ambrosia enough to get me to not only out-competitive most guys but do so against tremendous social push back and dislike of female ambition? Even if we attribute to testosterone all the magical properties gender essentialists would like I don't have enough of it to explain me. And neither does Betsy Ingles. If the T was what made her climb out onto the wing of that plane then every man alive would do it too as they have way more testosterone than her. And we know drat well that the vast majority of men would not do what she did in the video I linked. Ergo, Testosterone shmestosterone.
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Apr 18, 2016 23:18
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falcon2424 posted:Trans people seem to be able to figure out that they've been sorted incorrectly by society. I thought I was a trans man for awhile but eventually realized that it was society that was wrong. Not me. I am who I am. The fact that society can't accept that without an Addams apple and a crotch bulge is society being stupid. Everything I do is feminine because I'm XX and I'm doing it. When your cultural tells you that what you are doing would be fine if you had a different set of genitals ... Well it's a hell of a lot easier to change your body than it is to change society.
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Apr 18, 2016 23:23
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falcon2424 posted:It sounds like you made the right decision for you. And like you're not trans. I could make 30k more a year as a man. I could get promotions more easily. I would inspire trust to get to work on more interesting projects. I have literally been in a meeting where an argument by a rival was made that I shouldn't be assigned to a team was that it was a multi-year commitment because I could get pregnant and leave them in the lurch. To my face. When I was 16 my dad told me he wasn't sending me to college because educating women is a waste of money eu. When I tried to join the army for college money I scored a 99 on the absvab and then was told to take a hike by the recruiter because they didn't want women. I had to emancipate myself before I could apply for aid because my parents made to much money. Presenting as female has curtailed my opportunities tremendously and for nearly two decades of my life my argument was that I was abnormal and really a guy on the inside and this should be treated as a guy instead of a girl because I wasn't one. Not really. If trans surgery had been an option I realized existed at 15 I would have been first in line.
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Apr 19, 2016 01:11
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falcon2424 posted:And you're suggesting that this is a common reason for people to transition? If who they are doesn't line up with whatever masculinity is right now then they too get hit with endless micro aggressions telling them that who they are is unacceptable in the body they have. Again, you either change your presentation/body to match what society expects or you pay a price for non-conformity. I know two trans women and the one I've talked to said her motivation was maternal bliss. She's the stay at home step mom of her wife's two natural born kids. Presenting as female she gets to chat with other mothers at the playground without having folks get weird. A lone guy staring at a playground full of kids gets pushback. I have an aunt and uncle that have also flipped the norm ... She's a phd with a long hours job and he teaches stage combat part time while doing stand up comedy occasionally. He's the primary caregiver stay at home dad and he always has stories of the bullshit he gets for being a married man doing the woman's job. Imagine shopping with your 4 year old and her having a temper tantrum melt down involving the phrase i want my mommy when you are the dad and your child's coloration favors your spouse. Uncle R had a nice chat with the police after that.
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Apr 19, 2016 01:31
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rudatron posted:(Men can't breastfeed, so it would be natural to place women into a child-caring role, and then associate women with 'caring' more generally, even if there's no inherent behavioral difference w.r.t caring). So let's take this and step back in time a couple hundred years to when the basic economic unit of society was the family farm. The family farm has two very important features that are different from modern day life. Firstly it openly and actively utilized everyone's labor including wives and children of both genders. Secondly, it included common work that everyone did as well as gender specific work that only one gender knew how to do where instruction passed from mother to daughter and father to son. In the parlance of our times, men spent millennia working from home and being intimately involved with child rearing as they took responsibility for their male children at a very early age and worked side by side with them all day teaching them the XY reserved skill sets. Modern fathering is a pale and weak imitation of the deep involvement of men in parenting duties for the bulk of human history where intensive agriculture was practiced. Sending men away from the family to work and excising them from a primary caregiver role is actually a very new thing that just feels old to us because it is slightly longer than living memory. By the same token, denying adult women economically productive activities is also a modern phenomena since the separation of the workplace from the home is very recent. So appealing to history to justify the current social structure which is failing to satisfy the common human desires of either men ( to nurture ) or women ( to pull our own weight economically ) is wrong because this poo poo is new. It hasn't alway been like this. Not even close. Hell, if you want to go pre-agriculture it flips our modern notions even further on their heads because hunter/gatherer fathers in modern primitive tribes do virtually no provisioning of wives and children. Adults feed themselves. Mothers, siblings, and maternal grandmothers feed children. The loss of a maternal grandmother increases the likelihood that a hunter/gatherer child will die before maturity significantly. The loss of a father not at all. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/21225/1/Who_keeps_children_alive_(LSERO).pdf But hunter gatherer men do spend a lot of time playing with hunter gatherer children and playing is a form of nurturing/teaching. And nurturing is a universal human impulse. Not masculine. Not feminine. Human. I can grant you a premise that I flatly disagree with and still make my case. I think all human beings are incredibly adaptive and the very few "hard wired" mental traits are present in both genders about equally but channeled differently by society - ie a girl that loves to build things gets sent to hobby lobby while a boy with the same tinkering instinct gets sent to RadioShack and the goods at each store direct the expression of the universal human impulse in different directions. And then society pays the boy more since they were channeled to a higher paying expression. But for the sake of argument I'll entertain the notion that holding one social arrangement for a very long time can "hardwire" us for gender roles. But that supposition alone isn't enough to demonstrate that current gender roles are rooted in biology since you must also show that it's been that way for a very long time and it hasn't. Just like the magical testosterone argument falls down when you realize that very masculine/adventurous/competitive women have less than a tenth of of the testosterone that the average man has. These bio truths arguments don't stand up even if you grant them their overly complex/sketchy assumptions. And given that we can very clearly see/test/reproduce the effects of social pressure on people there is no real need to find other explanations except as an attempt to defend the current social order.
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Apr 19, 2016 17:28
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Quite a bit of my hostility is due to people assuming they know more about my lived experiences than I do and all the times in my life that being XX was held against me. Talmonis posted:The desire to understand something is not supporting it. True. However starting with the assumption that an intrinsic difference exists between populations and then trying to understand the mechanism that causes it to prove it exists is both circular and a historic pattern used to "scientifically" justify caste systems throughout history. Take girls and mathematics ability ... Which until recently was on the list of things people insisted testosterone magically made people better at. When the burden of proof all along should have been on gender essentialists to prove that the difference in expressed math ability historically was innate rather than social. Something they can't do because it isn't. Talmonis posted:Now, that out of the way, are you really trying to say that hormones have no impact on human behavior? Nope. I'm specifically calling out the people imbuing sex linked hormones with magical powers that coincidentally justify our current sexual stereotypes. We have lots of hormones and most of them are running around in both men and women in similar amounts doing the same things. Some of them influence behavior. some of them dont. Or don't in the ways people are claiming. So let's recap: 1: A claim was made linking the hormone testosterone to risk taking and aggression to explain our arbitrary social claim that observed differences in risk taking and aggression between the genders were due to inherent differences between men and women rather than social pressures. 2: I provided multiple examples of women exhibiting risk taking behavior both historic and modern. I linked a study showing that in anonymized situations women are just as aggressive as men to back up the claim that differences in public aggression are due to social pushback rather than innate differences. And linked a video of a woman talking about what a rush vaulting is as well as recounting some of my own riding experiences to rebuke the claim that women just aren't wired to find danger thrilling like men are. 3: The response to that was to speculate that women like myself and the women in the links have abnormally high levels of fairy dust --- scuse me testosterone --- causing us to behave like men. 4: I responded showing that even women with high testosterone have over an order of magnitude less than the average man, a fifth the T of a low T man, and 1/20th of a high T man. If testosterone causes this stuff, and we have so little of it, how can we be the way we are? It doesn't make sense. quote:Without the testosterone especially, my libido dissapears completely as a 34 year old man (though it started in my 20's). I'm a different person without them. There! You just made an argument for an effect of testosterone that is reasonable! It's verifiable. We can double blind test it. We can see how the libido develops in adolescence with the onset of sex hormone production. And when I say, "hold on, I've got way less testosterone than you even without your boosters but my libido is fine" there is a simple explanation for it. In women different hormones regulate libido than in men. So I can have a libido without lots of testosterone because I'm getting it from my sex hormones. Same result, different mechanism. Now back to aggression and risk taking. We have observed no difference between men and women in either of those things that can't be explained adequately through socialization. So either the hormone that most directly regulates that isn't sex linked or women get it through a different sex-linked mechanism than men such that our testosterone levels are irrelevant. You can't claim that a hormone is the root cause of something when people with virtually none of that hormone have the result too. When you do you are being no different than the people who claimed math ability was linked to testosterone.
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Apr 19, 2016 19:09
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OwlFancier posted:Hormones as a dictator of human behaviour is infinitely less interesting and worth discussing than simply the end behaviours themselves. This exactly.
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Apr 19, 2016 22:19
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JFairfax posted:Don't be surprised, there are people who have limbs removed because they want to be disabled Hell, we are a species that commits suicide. Our capacity for emotional pain is such that we occasionally choose to voluntarily end our lives to stop feeling horrible. A little cosmetic surgery ain't nothing compared to killing yourself. Note: I did know that hysterectomies existed in the 90's but was unable to find a doctor willing to perform one on me as a healthy childless twenty something woman. I know men of that age who were able to get vasectomies at that time. They got a moderate amount of pushback and couldn't get the first doc they called to do it. But in the end their control of their fertility was respected in a way mine wasn't.
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Apr 19, 2016 22:28
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Guavanaut posted:Wouldn't tubal ligation be the female anatomy version of vasectomy though? Would still leave me with really bad cramps and blood so not my first choice. They wouldn't do that either. You see I just thought I didn't want kids but hormones would have their way and any minute now I would surely discover that education and independence and money weren't what I wanted at all and I'd go baby crazy. Any minute now. Men are rational beings making reasoned decisions. Women are animals controlled by instincts/hormones. So I was told over and over and over a thousand different ways growing up. Like lessons. As a child I was sent without consultation to piano, ballet, skiing, gymnastics, riding, and sewing lessons. I wanted to take karate. This was forbidden on the grounds that I was too fragile. I found out the YMCA was offering karate lessons for $7 a month and enrolled myself, then walked down to the Y to take them as a tween. When this was discovered I was ordered to stop. Having been doing the lessons just fine for months I knew I wasn't to fragile. And speaking of danger do you even watch my gymnastics class? The uneven bars are more dangerous than anything I'm doing in karate! Ah! But the uneven bars don't make me think I can defend myself. Karate is dangerous for me because the false sense of confidence it would give me can endanger me. And I'm a girl. I need to understand how soft and helpless I am ( ballet dancers kick like mules by the way ). Then they turned to my brother and tried to get him interested in it cause $7 a month is an awesome price. He wasn't. They made him go to a few classes to try it out then let him stop. He got to stop lessons if he didn't like them. Boys have agency and can decide what they like. Girls don't know what they like and will appreciate it later. I wanted to be a boy soooo much. I dressed as a boy, cut my hair short, refused to wear make up or jewelry. I wanted respect, control, agency, opportunity, and my drat female body was denying me all of it. Then puberty hit and it got so much worse.
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Apr 20, 2016 17:10
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NathanScottPhillips posted:This is a very, very interesting set of posts to appear. The first claims that "an obsession for physical basis for such bahaviors and feelings" is a immoral pursuit. The second flippantly mentions suicide in the same breath as a sex change procedure as if they are on the same spectrum. You are missing the point. I wanted to be male because the way other people were treating me was causing me tremendous distress and they openly admitted that they wouldn't be treating me like poo poo if I were a boy. I could easily observe boys being praised for things I was chastised for and encouraged to walk through doors that were closed to me on the basis of my genitals. The problem wasn't in me for not being happy with being treated like poo poo. The problem was with society for treating me like poo poo on the basis of my genitals. Having people constantly tell you that your wants and desires are wrong/abberant/weird and that you are wrong is incredibly stressful. Esp for adolescents. I'm sure neuroscience could come up with a way to inject me with something to make me ok with being treated as lesser and denied agency in my own life but I disagree profoundly that this would be a good thing to do to people. Suggesting this is like arguing that instead of stopping bullies from bullying we should dose the bullied kids with something that will make them not mind being bullied. Then they won't commit suicide as much either.
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Apr 20, 2016 17:27
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"Popular Thug Drink" posted:medical science disagrees with you and treats gender dysmorphia as a disorder caused by an internal self-image disagreement with society, meaning that it's easier to transition a person rather than expect society to relax, Exactly. I've got a mental constitution that lets me handle society's bullying without going suicidal. I don't give a poo poo about people's opinions of me provided they aren't barring me from or compelling me to do things. Now that I'm an adult the ways in which societies bullshit notions can control my life is greatly diminished and the pain it causes me is manageable. It is not coincidence that my desire to be male and suicidal ideations waned as my independence waxed. My desire to be male ( expressed as early as kindergarten by the way because I was asked to write a card for my dad on Father's Day and I wrote that I wished I was a son so he'd love me ) was a perfectly rational response to the way I was being treated by people who had complete control over my life. It wasn't a disease or a disorder because nothing was wrong with me. And I'm fully aware of the irony of saying I'm right and society is wrong while simultaneously arguing that I'm not crazy. But in this case it's true. Society is wrong to say that a given personality trait is a virtue in one gender but a vice in the other.
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Apr 20, 2016 18:09
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Talmonis posted:
I think I had it but I don't anymore. I believe that gender dysmorphia is a rational response to being told that who you are isn't ok in the body you have but would be ok if you were the other sex. Now I do still dislike my womb for logistical reasons of pain and blood to no purpose. But I no longer hate my breasts, thighs, neck, hair etc because I am no longer trying to make nice with gender norms and the only reason I hated my other lady bits was because of the way they make people treat me. Like, in 2014 I had an interviewee mistake me for a secretary and ask me to be a dear and get him some coffee while he waited for ( male pronunciation of my unisex name ). When he realized I was his tech interviewer he apologized. I accepted. When I flunked him the business guys decided I must have done so for emotional/womanly/petty reasons due to his gaffe about the coffee and hired him anyway cause they liked him. He was fired three weeks later for gross incompetence. I'd flunked him because he was bad. Really bad. But my judgement wasn't trusted due to my gender. Which I'm used to. I have to back everything up to the nth degree because I work in a male dominated industry and if something comes down to trust rather than definitive proof I will always be viewed as less competent and thus less trustworthy thanks to my curves. The difference between me-now and me-then is that now I externalize my anger on society for this instead of internalizing it into hatred of my own flesh. When I hated my genitalia for the way others treated me I was gender dysmorphic. Let's put it this way. Have you ever met a transwoman who - when she had a dick - kept accidentally sitting on it or catching it in a zipper because her mental image of her own body didn't include a dick? Or is it mental traits that told her she was actually a woman because society kept telling her that her personality and aspirations would be ok for a woman but were shameful in a man? Actually come to think of it I know three transwoman. Two in real life and one on the Internet. So in addition to the one who wanted more than anything to be a stay at home parent I know one who was horribly physically abused as a child in a highly religious environment where XYs were expected to become abusers in turn and abusing others was defined to her as an intrinsic part of masculinity as well as a literal duty to God for men. Transitioning isn't a disorder, an imbalance, or a disease. It's a coping mechanism.
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Apr 20, 2016 19:31
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You've had a rough time of it. You deserve all the things you've bolded, regardless of being a woman or a man, and your parents (I assume?) were bastards for denying it to you while giving it to your brother. But I ask in all seriousness, do you actually have gender dysmophia, or do you just want to be treated with the respect you deserve in the body you have?