#1251  
Old 02-22-2012, 08:42 PM
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Default Re: Return to Gender 101

I haven't had time to watch the whole video, but Guffman was primarily doing research on advertising and gender, and using it as another frame entirely.
Advertising, is how a culture that's primarily commercial, talks about itself and roles. It's not real life, it's a context in which we try to fit our actions and/or influence each other by presenting cultural markers to understand our place in our culture.
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  #1252  
Old 02-22-2012, 08:53 PM
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SUT JHALLY: Goffman argues that there is nothing natural about gender identity. That is, we don’t just pop out the womb with our gender identities imprinted in our genes; that it is part of a process whereby we learn to take on certain attributes that we think are appropriate to our understanding of ourselves in gendered terms. Therefore, we have to analyze how the society constructs the categories within which we fit. And to understand how that takes place, we have to first make a distinction between the terms “sex” and “gender.”
Okay, the bolded and underlined above I think are important. What "we think" is appropriate for our gender, and how the gender categories are constructed.
Okay, here's the thing.

His underlying premise is that gender identity does not exist except as a learned role.

So of course, when he talks about gender identity, he is talking only about the learned role -- because he's denying that gender identity has any other existence!

And that's the claim that is absolutely proven false.

You said he was not talking about individuals being assigned gender identity, but that's exactly what he was talking about. His premise is that "gender identity" is nothing but being raised to believe that you have a given role in your society.

But that's not true. If you assign people a gender identity which does not match their natural gender identity, they fix it or die.

There is such a thing as a natural gender identity, which does not consist of learned expectations about society, but the sense of self as male or female.
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Old 02-22-2012, 08:55 PM
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Default Re: Return to Gender 101

Exactly, Q. Commercial advertising has always been inherently cis-privileged and trans hostile. Trans people are not part of the communication taking place, being neither the author or the target audience.

In fact, commercially enforcing the gender binary is big business. Marketing to half the population at a time creates more opportunities to sell more products. Historically, as clothing became more and more of a large scale retail business as opposed to individual designers catering to individual clients, modes of dress for men and women diverged more and more.
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  #1254  
Old 02-22-2012, 08:58 PM
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However, Jhally does discuss the trans community in order to exhibit that despite societal pressures and policing on gender roles, they as outliers show that something else is going on and that gender CANNOT and SHOULD NOT be applied from the outside, even though those pressures exist.
Huh?

It seems to me that he cites to them as evidence that gender identity does not exist in and of itself, and that you will learn whatever gender role you are assigned, or perhaps choose.

Again:
There are some interesting cases where individuals born as one sex have been assigned to the “wrong” gender category. That is, someone born with male physical characteristics but assigned to the female gender, and they then grow up as that gender, despite the physical sexual origin.
This seems to strongly indicate that gender is an assigned thing, and that it is "interesting" when people are assigned an unexpected gender. I would not call "more than half of these people end up dead prematurely" so much "interesting" as "devastating". This paragraph carries the connotation that such experiments are successful, not disasterous.

Later:
It is starting to break down a little as transsexual and transgender people have challenged this binary distinction and insisted upon having a legitimate place in the culture – not on the margins but at the center of the society. And their example shows us that the two sex/two gender distinction is a socially created one – not natural.
While some trans people clearly fall outside the obvious two cases, the bulk of them identify very strongly as one specific gender, because "male" and "female" are real categories for gender, just as they are for sex.

The existence of intersex people does not mean that there is no such thing as male or female sex, and the existence of intergender people does not mean that there is no such thing as male or female gender.
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  #1255  
Old 02-22-2012, 09:01 PM
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It is impossible to escape Gender because it is so pervasive in our culture. I think most researchers in this field believe that without those external forces we would all be more androgynous. We would cease to be qualified and would instead be individuals.
I would guess that, even then, some people would very strongly qualify themselves.

Quote:
seebs earlier touched on gender reassignment cases similar to David Reimer, born as a "boy" and raised as a "girl" after his genitals were damaged. That case ended absolutely tragically with Reimer committing suicide. But I think everyone in this thread and Jhally and Goffman would all agree that the tragedy of Reimer's life stemmed from the external pressures placed on him as to what he was supposed to be. He should not have been raised as a "boy" or raised as a "girl" he should have been raised as "David." The huge amount of psychological turmoil and pain he went through was based on a crises of identity that came from his social frame not his natural one.
True, but!

That could not have been a problem, had there not been such any thing as an internal, natural, biological, gender identity.

My point is, if we really just got whatever role was assigned to us, if cases of raising kids as the "wrong" gender were merely "interesting", then there wouldn't have been a problem. That there was tells us that some component of gender identity is natural in many people.
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  #1256  
Old 02-22-2012, 09:16 PM
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Default Re: Return to Gender 101

I think you missed some of my posts, seebs.

As I said, I believe gender identity to be in the natural frame.

Additionally, in terms of Reimer I do not think that is necessarily in evidence. Reimer was given so many mixed messages that I do not think his case indicates anything other than unethical medical practices. While the doctors enforced female gender on him, eventually the family discontinued "treatment" and he had in essence, no genitals whatsoever. He had his male twin as a model for which he should have matched, which is a huge imprint. Most of his later surgeries as an adult were to reverse the procedures placed on him as a child. I don't think there is any way we can know what was going on in the case of David, who chose that name, because of the mess that was created of his life over which he had no control.

What is terrible to me is that his case has become so heavily politicized from both camps. That case, and those like it have been used as political footballs to argue against gender and even cited to indicate that trans does not exist and biological sex = gender.
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  #1257  
Old 02-22-2012, 09:18 PM
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Default Re: Return to Gender 101

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if cases of raising kids as the "wrong" gender were merely "interesting", then there wouldn't have been a problem
If there were no societal or cultural gender norms to conform to there wouldn't be anything to "raise" children "as" that would contradict their internal gender identity. It really is a chicken and egg thing.
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  #1258  
Old 02-22-2012, 09:25 PM
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Oh, I'm fine with tossing out the Reimer case. Since the 1970s, we've gotten thousands of cases to look at, and the results are quite consistent. People who aren't allowed to present as the gender they identify as generally die. The Reimer case was obviously a ludicrous outlier... but it turns out that the outcomes are pretty consistent. Untreated transgendered people are likely to commit suicide. (I can't quickly find exact numbers. The attempted suicide rate among transgendered people including both treated and untreated is 41%. It is much higher among untreated than treated.)

My complaint is solely about the material, early in the transcript, asserting that there is nothing natural about gender identity, that people simply acquire whatever gender identity is assigned to them from the outside, and that if you were to assign a child the "wrong" gender, the child would simply grow up as the assigned gender.

That's all stuff that was fairly widely believed back in the 1970s (which is why the Reimer case, and others, existed). But it's disproven. And although I am basically aware that, strictly speaking, the analysis of advertising and gender roles doesn't really rely heavily on that, it is very hard for me to take a series of claims about how gender works seriously when they start with the claim that gender identity is purely a result of societal pressure.
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  #1259  
Old 02-22-2012, 09:27 PM
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People who aren't allowed to present as the gender they identify as
And how does one determine how to present as their self identified gender?

I don't know who you think is supporting the idea of telling individuals what gender they should identify as, all I've been saying is that the gender categories themselves, the list of those criteria that demonstrate or express one's gender, are culturally dictated or derived.
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Old 02-22-2012, 09:28 PM
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if cases of raising kids as the "wrong" gender were merely "interesting", then there wouldn't have been a problem
If there were no societal or cultural gender norms to conform to there wouldn't be anything to "raise" children "as" that would contradict their internal gender identity.
First, even if this were true, it would not weaken my argument that the material quoted makes completely false claims.

Secondly, it's not true. Having the wrong body contradicts gender identity. Even if everyone accepts your presentation without comment, if you have the wrong bits, that's still upsetting.
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  #1261  
Old 02-22-2012, 09:32 PM
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Originally Posted by LadyShea View Post
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People who aren't allowed to present as the gender they identify as
And how does one determine how to present as their gender?
In ways many of which vary culturally. But that the expression varies doesn't change anything.

Okay, let me try an analogy.

Someone claims that there is no such thing as love, it's just a societal construct, and as evidence points out that different languages use different words for this.

I argue that the fact that every culture seems to have a word for it suggests there's a thing.

Your argument here is that, since the word you use for it depends on your culture, if we simply didn't have a word for it the thing wouldn't exist and being unable to express it wouldn't be a problem.

That is not how it works.

It doesn't matter what specifically you use to express gender. It doesn't matter whether you express it by clothes or posture or language. What matters is that the vast majority of humans have an internal awareness of themselves as male or female that exists no matter what their body type is or how they are raised, and that it is vitally important to them that other people percieve them this way. How that perception is obtained can vary; that it must be obtained doesn't seem to.
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  #1262  
Old 02-22-2012, 09:35 PM
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My complaint is solely about the material, early in the transcript, asserting that there is nothing natural about gender identity, that people simply acquire whatever gender identity is assigned to them from the outside, and that if you were to assign a child the "wrong" gender, the child would simply grow up as the assigned gender.]
There were two separate uses of the word assigned with different contexts for each use.

In this use, I interpret the meaning to be "The traits/characteristics you exhibit/posses are assigned by others to one of the culturally created categories". Which implies that in order to present as your gender you need to learn to exhibit the characteristics that make up the category of your gender. It was poor use of language, but I don't think he meant your gender identity is assigned to you.

Quote:
This does not mean that everything is about culture. The point is that while we are born with a set of different individual physical and biological characteristics, these traits are then made sense of through the categories of culture. In this way, there is nothing natural or biological about gender or our gender identities. We learn to inhabit the gender category that we have been assigned from outside, from the culture.

Last edited by LadyShea; 02-22-2012 at 09:46 PM.
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Old 02-22-2012, 09:45 PM
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Originally Posted by LadyShea
And how does one determine how to present as their gender?
Quote:
Originally Posted by seebs
In ways many of which vary culturally. But that the expression varies doesn't change anything.
What does "changes anything" refer to?

Quote:
Originally Posted by seebs
What matters is that the vast majority of humans have an internal awareness of themselves as male or female that exists no matter what their body type is or how they are raised, and that it is vitally important to them that other people percieve them this way.
If you want to be recognized or perceived as X or Y you have to learn to present yourself to society as X or Y. You have to possess or exhibit the traits and characteristics your culture categorizes as X or Y. You must conform to the cultural norms that say "X's or Y's are and do X, Y Z"

This is easier for some people then it is for others, but all people do this to some extent.


Quote:
Originally Posted by seebs
Okay, let me try an analogy.

Someone claims that there is no such thing as love, it's just a societal construct, and as evidence points out that different languages use different words for this.
Um, that would work if anybody here was a gender denialist. You are reading something wrong somewhere.
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Originally Posted by seebs
Your argument here is that, since the word you use for it depends on your culture, if we simply didn't have a word for it the thing wouldn't exist and being unable to express it wouldn't be a problem.
No, you have completely not understood anything I've said. That's not my argument at all.

I am not a gender denialist. I believe gender exists.
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  #1264  
Old 02-22-2012, 09:51 PM
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There were two separate uses of the word assigned with different contxts for each use.

In this use, I interpret the meaning to be "The traits/characteristics you exhibit/posses are assigned to one of the culturally created categories". It was poor use of language, but I don't think he meant your gender identity is assigned to you.
I am totally unable to comprehend this interpretation.

If I were to task someone with writing the clearest possible assertion that "gender identity" has no existence except as a learned thing, that there is no natural awareness of self as male-or-female in any human, and that gender identity is a thing you are told by the people raising you, I doubt I could get a better set of words to communicate this.

Let me go over this block again. (BTW, just checked with a couple of trans friends and confirmed: It is ABSOLUTELY FREAKY having the wrong body parts. Imagine having a highly sensitive six inch wart.)
Goffman argues that there is nothing natural about gender identity. That is, we don’t just pop out the womb with our gender identities imprinted in our genes; that it is part of a process whereby we learn to take on certain attributes that we think are appropriate to our understanding of ourselves in gendered terms. Therefore, we have to analyze how the society constructs the categories within which we fit. And to understand how that takes place, we have to first make a distinction between the terms “sex” and “gender.”
Fundamental thesis: There is no such thing as a gender identity in nature; it is a thing learned from society.
Sex refers to our different biological characteristics as we come out of the womb. Gender refers to the way those differences are made sense of within culture – in most cultures, by assigning it to one of two categories: male or female. And then each of those categories is further defined with a set of characteristics – that seem to be mutually exclusive – that are labeled as masculine and feminine.
What he's saying here is not "obviously most humans self-identify as male and female internally because brains are wired for that, so I am talking about something else." What he's saying is that, having denied that there is any such thing as an inborn sense of "being male" or "being female", he asserts that gender is purely cultural.

This is not talking about a different thing; this is making an assertion about gender.

Again. WRITTEN IN 1978. I put it to you that the interpretation you're coming to is wildly anachronistic for 1978. It's more true, but it is not something a researcher in 1978 would have been likely to believe or say.
This does not mean that everything is about culture. The point is that while we are born with a set of different individual physical and biological characteristics, these traits are then made sense of through the categories of culture. In this way, there is nothing natural or biological about gender or our gender identities. We learn to inhabit the gender category that we have been assigned from outside, from the culture.
And again here. He's saying that our concept of self as "male" or "female" happens when we "learn to inhabit the gender category that we have been assigned from outside, from the culture." So you can have individual traits like liking sports or liking dolls, but you interpret them through the culture's categories... But not in that you pick a category. You are assigned a category, by the culture, and you interpret yourself through that category.

Again, this is exactly what forward-looking researchers believed in the 1970s.
There are some interesting cases where individuals born as one sex have been assigned to the “wrong” gender category. That is, someone born with male physical characteristics but assigned to the female gender, and they then grow up as that gender, despite the physical sexual origin.
And again, he is absolutely, unequivocally, talking about assignment of people to a category. Not self-identification.

And the thing is, in the 1970s, when we were just realizing that gender was not as simple as we'd previously thought, and coming to terms with the existence of transgendered people, it looked like a great insight: What if gender didn't exist except as a social construct? What if all our concepts of "masculine" and "feminine" were social constructs? What if it were completely arbitrary whether you raised a child as male or female?

And at the time, the forward-looking view was that we had finally uncovered the truth, that gender was purely a social thing imposed on a brain which had no sense of itself as "male" or "female" except maybe in relation to body type.

This view, it turns out, was wrong. For the vast majority of humans, there is a sense of self as "male" or "female" which is absolutely unassailable primary experience. And in 99.9% or more of cases, that sense of self happens to agree with the physical body.

Some people don't have this sense. I don't. I'm sometimes male in dreams, sometimes female. I don't care; neither seems more like me or less like me. My spouse, by contrast, was raised female, grew up female in a female body... but never, ever, had dreams in which he was female. He was always male. Why? Because no matter what you tell people or raise them as, some people have a strong sense of gender identity.

So the theory that gender is purely a social construct and there's no intrinsic relationship between gender and sex? It's dead.

Yes, there are cases where the relationship ends up mismatched. But the fact that it's possible for it to be mismatched tells us that there is an expected alignment there.

Yes, there are intersex people. Nonetheless, the vast majority of bodies are unambiguously male or female. Similarly, there are people who have no gender identity or mixed gender identity. Nonetheless, the vast majority of self-images are unambiguously male or female.
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  #1265  
Old 02-22-2012, 09:53 PM
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Um, that would work if anybody here was a gender denialist. You are reading something wrong somewhere.
Jhally's writing denies the existence of biological gender, asserting that the biological component is sex, and gender is a pure social construct imposed on biologically occurring traits. That's the entire point of all this stuff about the gender "assigned to" people "from outside".

There is no sane way to read this (remembering that Goffman's writing was in the 1970s) except as an assertion that the cognitive experience of gender has no basis in biology, only in societal assignment of categories.

And that simply isn't true.
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  #1266  
Old 02-22-2012, 10:03 PM
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Okay let's step away from gender for just a minute, and discuss some other self identified traits and how they are or are not perceived by others.

I self identify as generous. If I never exhibited generosity in the way it is generally defined in my culture would others perceive me as generous? Same thing with honest, or intelligent, or cautious.

I naturally express my personal traits and characteristics, whatever they are, to the world. All people do. If, for some reason though, one's expression doesn't match the cultural collective's definition of that trait, then that person will not be perceived the same way they identify themselves.

It's easy for me to present as female because I have almost all the traits and characteristics culturally associated with females. There are people of both genders who's gender matches their birth sex, who self identify as both their sex and gender, who have a harder time than I do, whose gender is questioned, because they have traits or characteristics associated with the other gender by society.

That's why the term "effeminate" is used towards some men and "butch" used towards some women- even though they are not transgendered or intersexed in any way.
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Old 02-22-2012, 10:11 PM
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Gender is commonly defined as a social construct, seebs. That is not even remotely unusual nor a product of the 70's that is no longer useful.

Quote:
Originally Posted by The World Health Organization
Sometimes it is hard to understand exactly what is meant by the term "gender", and how it differs from the closely related term "sex".

"Sex" refers to the biological and physiological characteristics that define men and women.

"Gender" refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Psychology Today
According to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, "Gender is cultural and is the term to use when referring to women and men as social groups. Sex is biological; use it when the biological distinction is predominant."
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...im-so-confused (alot of interesting stuff at this link)
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Old 02-22-2012, 10:17 PM
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Okay let's step away from gender for just a minute, and discuss some other self identified traits and how they are or are not perceived by others.

I self identify as generous. If I never exhibited generosity in the way it is generally defined in my culture would others perceive me as generous? Same thing with honest, or intelligent, or cautious.

I naturally express my personal traits and characteristics, whatever they are, to the world. All people do. If, for some reason though, one's expression doesn't match the cultural collective's definition of that trait, then that person will not be perceived the same way they identify themselves.
Yes.

But the suicide rate among people who think they're generous, and other people don't agree, is not abnormally high.

Gender is magic. It is a special case. There is genuine neurological wiring for it.

And all I am saying is: The claims Jhally ascribes to Goffman about gender are:
1. Absolutely typical of forward-thinking gender research in the 1970s.
2. Totally false.

Quote:
It's easy for me to present as female because I have almost all the traits and characteristics culturally associated with females. There are people of both genders who's gender matches their birth sex, who self identify as both their sex and gender, who have a harder time than I do, whose gender is questioned, because they have traits or characteristics associated with the other gender by society.

That's why the term "effeminate" is used towards some men and "butch" used towards some women- even though they are not transgendered or intersexed in any way.
Right.

And again, I'm not disputing that many things, like "masculine" and "feminine" are social constructs.

I'm pointing out that the claims Jhally ascribes to Goffman are exactly what they look like at face value if you don't come to them with another 30+ years of research into gender roles. They are claims that, while there may be individual traits which are biological, the concept of self as "male" or "female" has no basis whatsoever in biology and is purely a social construct.

Back then, the existence of transgendered people was understood to be evidence that gender was not a biological trait, but a cognitive trait that could be learned or retrained. It was just whatever you were raised with; if you were raised as "a girl", then you were a girl. This was a really beautiful and enlightened response to the discovery that gender roles were more fluid than people had realized, and some people had "chosen" (this was believed to be a choice at the time) genders contrary to the only possible physical source of self-image, which is the outward body type.

At the time, no one really had the resources for thoughts like "I wonder whether there are differences in neuron differentiation" or "let's do MRI scans of people and watch how they react to things". The information you'd need to form those thoughts didn't exist. Furthermore, cases of people being raised with the "wrong" gender were new and hadn't gone far enough for anyone to form strong opinions about them.

Now, we know better. And it's so obvious to our modern eyes that of course people have an innate gender identity that it's easy to assume that researchers in the 70s were just talking about expression as distinct from the innate sense of self.

But they weren't. They were saying that the sense of self-as-male or self-as-female did not exist except as a learned thing. And from the information they had available, this wasn't a particularly stupid belief.
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  #1269  
Old 02-22-2012, 10:19 PM
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Originally Posted by LadyShea View Post
Gender is commonly defined as a social construct, seebs. That is not even remotely unusual nor a product of the 70's that is no longer useful.
T-Girl Blogger: A Genderbread Person

Current state-of-the-art is that people have a sense of gender identity which is not purely a social construct, but which does not necessarily align with genitalia or chromosomes.

And yes, the word can also be used to refer to the social roles of "male" and "female". But in the context of how we think about ourselves, it clearly refers to the sense of self.
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  #1270  
Old 02-22-2012, 10:20 PM
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This was an interesting take. Using female/male for sex and man/woman for gender

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Essentially, all you need to express sex vs. gender distinctions accurately in your writing is a clear understanding of the difference between sex and gender. As you are writing, ask yourself whether what you're talking about is someone's biological makeup or something about the way that person has been socialized. If you're referring to biology, use "male" or "female," and if what you're talking about has to do with a behavior or social role someone has been taught because of her/his biology, use "woman" or "man."

Thinking about the different answers to these two questions might help clarify the distinction between sex and gender:

What does it mean to be male?
What does it mean to be a man?

"To be male," as an expression of biological sex, is to have a chromosomal makeup of XY. "To be a man," however, expresses the socially constructed aspects of masculinity. Ideas of masculinity change across time, culture, and place. Think about the differences between what it meant "to be a man" in 17th-century France versus what it means "to be a man" today in the United States. Gender-Sensitive Language — The Writing Center at UNC-Chapel Hill
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  #1271  
Old 02-22-2012, 10:24 PM
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Default Re: Return to Gender 101

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But the suicide rate among people who think they're generous, and other people don't agree, is not abnormally high.
Um, what's this got to do with the discussion at hand?

I would assume that people who are othered socially, and discriminated against or ostracized or ridiculed or bullied or lonely because they don't fit into the cultural norms, suffer higher rates of depression and suicide. That's a big old "duh" for me.
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Old 02-22-2012, 10:28 PM
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Right. That kind of writing is super common, and totally debunked by the existence of trans people.

There is an internal awareness of self as "male" or "female" which has nothing to do with how you were socialized, and which can contradict both how you were socialized and your body type.

People ignore this. People ignore it because it only becomes an issue for a tiny tiny number of people (about one in ten thousand, last I heard). As long as your self-identity matches your socialization and body type, everything's happy.

So a lot of people have concluded that being socialized-as-masculine makes you gendered-male. But it doesn't! It's just that, nearly always, the people who are socialized-as-masculine are people who are also gendered-male, so the two are functionally equivalent.

Here's the thing. Imagine that you were to take a thousand XY non-intersexed kids, and raise them all as "girls". Consistently, throughout everything. You ensure that they get the right hormones so they develop like girls. You do surgery when they're infants so they don't have wee-wees.

If the "gender is just a social construct" meme were true, you would end up with 1000 self-identified girls, or maybe 995.

In reality, out of 14 cases studied, 8 had concluded that they were unambiguously male. And that's pretty typical.

The theory that the identity comes from socializing is a pleasant and plausible one, but it fails the key test: If we act on this belief, do a lot of people commit suicide? Why, yes. Yes, they do.
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  #1273  
Old 02-22-2012, 10:29 PM
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Quote:
But the suicide rate among people who think they're generous, and other people don't agree, is not abnormally high.
Um, what's this got to do with the discussion at hand?

I would assume that people who are othered socially, and discriminated against or ostracized or ridiculed or bullied or lonely because they don't fit into the cultural norms, suffer higher rates of depression and suicide. That's a big old "duh" for me.
No, that's the thing. It doesn't depend on being othered or not fitting or anything.

If you surgically alter an XY kid to be "female" and use hormones and raise them as female and NO ONE ever knows otherwise? They are still massively more likely than not to either "become male" or die.

Doesn't depend on being othered or ostracized or anything. Depends solely on knowing that you are one thing and everything else, including your body, says you're another.
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  #1274  
Old 02-22-2012, 10:32 PM
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OMG seebs, I am getting ready to call it quits I really am.

What does it mean to identify as female or male?
Quote:
No, that's the thing. It doesn't depend on being othered or not fitting or anything.

If you surgically alter an XY kid to be "female" and use hormones and raise them as female and NO ONE ever knows otherwise? They are still massively more likely than not to either "become male" or die.
They are not presenting as their self identified gender. Society treats them as someone they aren't. That is as othered as you can get
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Old 02-22-2012, 10:39 PM
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What does it mean to identify as female or male?
It means that you're a member of a species which has sexual dimorphism, and you identify as one side of that dimorphism.

Look, I spend like half my time talking to trannies. I sleep with one. Two more of my best friends are trans. You may confidently assume that we have all gone over all the socially constructed stuff millions of times.

It's not that.

It is a firm sense of what it should be like to be human, where you should have innies and where you should have outies. It also comes with the sense that if there are rules for "male" and rules for "female", you should be under one of those sets of rules.

Not everyone has this, but many (probably nearly-all) people do.

Again: If you had 1000 XY kids, and used surgery, hormones, and upbringing to raise them as "girls", if there was NEVER any hint of male to anything they learned about themselves, by the time they were twenty most of them would have declared that they were transgendered and were actually males. They would believe this no matter what anyone told them about acceptable interests or hobbies, no matter what their bodies looked like, no matter anything. The human brain has a wired-in awareness of "male" and "female" as kinds of things, and most human brains have one of those categories wired to the sense of self.

It's not a conclusion drawn from evidence or information; it's a primary experience.
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