My introduction to social justice (as a whole) was through the lens of intersex conditions (wherein people with ambiguous genitalia are assigned a gender at birth, most often female because the surgery is easier). A major problem was that raising male children as female or vice versa ends up causing psychological problems.
The main [unethical] case study was a pair of identical male twins, one of whose penis was accidentally cut off during circumcision, and then got female reassignment surgery, grew up very confused and depressed and eventually committed suicide. (Other case studies are less clear cut but generally indicative of the same problem, not to mention transgender people). Gender clearly has a biological component.
It also does clearly have a environmental component, and I don’t know where those elements interrelate, but ignoring the biological element causes as many problems as ignoring our problems with how we raise children.
...or the knowledge of that child’s parents, doctors, and everyone around him lead to them (the adults) treating that child as a freak rather than a woman.
One of the ideas I like in radical feminism is that masculinity is very much defined by the ability to impregnate women (one of the reasons why intersex infants are virtually always assigned female). Conversely, femininity is defined by the ability to be impregnated. Seeing as this child could do neither, and their caregivers knew that, I would hardly expect this child to have typical gender socialization.
The only experiment that could demonstrate this to my satisfaction is a double-blind study where infants are adopted by parents that know only that infant’s current assigned gender, and nothing else.
ignoring the biological element causes as many problems as ignoring our problems with how we raise children.
Okay, fair enough. It’s very plausible to me that most of our problems relate to socialization rather than biology. But you seem to be implying they are 100% sociological, which seems wrong.
I’m not totally sure, and I notice that it’s a confusing topic.
Okay, fair enough. It’s very plausible to me that most of our problems relate to socialization rather than biology. But you seem to be implying they are 100% sociological, which seems wrong.
Since humans can’t think quantitatively, I prefer to just say “gender is learned” rather than “gender is almost entirely (95-99%) learned but the remaining part is biological.”
In fact, it might be that gender is entirely non-biological. But I’m sure it’s mostly social.
(This is not me setting up a followup ambush argument, just asking)
To what extent would it alter your philosophy if we learned that gender was 70% social? 50% social? Right now, these questions are vague and difficult to test, but they may not always be. And I think it’s much sounder (both from an instrumental and epistemic standpoint) to think in advance about how your philosophy should shift if different facts were confirmed.
I don’t know what the answer is but the existence of transpeople (and genderqueer people and others who don’t fall neatly into the gender binary) suggests to me that it’s unlikely to be 95%+ social. But even if it turned out to be as low as 50% social, dealing with those social issues properly still requires a radical upheaval of the popular consensus on how we should socialize people.
My introduction to social justice (as a whole) was through the lens of intersex conditions (wherein people with ambiguous genitalia are assigned a gender at birth, most often female because the surgery is easier). A major problem was that raising male children as female or vice versa ends up causing psychological problems.
The main [unethical] case study was a pair of identical male twins, one of whose penis was accidentally cut off during circumcision, and then got female reassignment surgery, grew up very confused and depressed and eventually committed suicide. (Other case studies are less clear cut but generally indicative of the same problem, not to mention transgender people). Gender clearly has a biological component.
It also does clearly have a environmental component, and I don’t know where those elements interrelate, but ignoring the biological element causes as many problems as ignoring our problems with how we raise children.
...or the knowledge of that child’s parents, doctors, and everyone around him lead to them (the adults) treating that child as a freak rather than a woman.
One of the ideas I like in radical feminism is that masculinity is very much defined by the ability to impregnate women (one of the reasons why intersex infants are virtually always assigned female). Conversely, femininity is defined by the ability to be impregnated. Seeing as this child could do neither, and their caregivers knew that, I would hardly expect this child to have typical gender socialization.
The only experiment that could demonstrate this to my satisfaction is a double-blind study where infants are adopted by parents that know only that infant’s current assigned gender, and nothing else.
This is the fallacy of gray.
So what is your opinion on transpeople?
Okay, fair enough. It’s very plausible to me that most of our problems relate to socialization rather than biology. But you seem to be implying they are 100% sociological, which seems wrong.
I’m not totally sure, and I notice that it’s a confusing topic.
Since humans can’t think quantitatively, I prefer to just say “gender is learned” rather than “gender is almost entirely (95-99%) learned but the remaining part is biological.”
In fact, it might be that gender is entirely non-biological. But I’m sure it’s mostly social.
(This is not me setting up a followup ambush argument, just asking)
To what extent would it alter your philosophy if we learned that gender was 70% social? 50% social? Right now, these questions are vague and difficult to test, but they may not always be. And I think it’s much sounder (both from an instrumental and epistemic standpoint) to think in advance about how your philosophy should shift if different facts were confirmed.
I don’t know what the answer is but the existence of transpeople (and genderqueer people and others who don’t fall neatly into the gender binary) suggests to me that it’s unlikely to be 95%+ social. But even if it turned out to be as low as 50% social, dealing with those social issues properly still requires a radical upheaval of the popular consensus on how we should socialize people.