People with full androgen insensitivity syndrome (never responding to androgens produced by gonads) or gonadal dysgenesis of various stripes (gonads fail to develop properly and don’t make any hormones) usually wind up more or less externally normally female regardless of the state of their sex-associated karyotypes/genoypes (with the internal plumbing variable depending on the exact details). In this way, the pre-pubescent female state is probably the closest thing we have to a default inasmuch as that means anything.
These people do, however, fail to naturally go through most of puberty (a few androgens are usually made by the adrenal glands in everyone regardless of sex but not much) which is an active switch being thrown regardless of sex. As such, the secondary female sex characteristics of sexual maturity are not exactly ‘default’ themselves in the same way.
Not sure how the following anecdotal observation relates but it seems to me female gender expression is far more fluid. That is, if situation is tough, poverty and all that, and women end up doing hard physical labor and facing similar challenges of deprivation and difficulties, they end up pretty close to becoming tough-guys, even including things like having insults develop into fist-fights.
The opposite does not seem to be true, it is pretty rare that circumstances make men adopt feminine traits, it is more like they either like them on their own or will never pick up.
However the situations are not exactly parallel because any sort of deprivation and difficulty is generating an obvious response to toughen up with moves people naturally towards masculine roles while there is no such similarly compelling force that could force men towards feminine roles.
Or is there? It would be interesting to examine 1) what fathers do if their wives suddenly die, do they manage to simulate the motherly role as well 2) do more or less cis/straight men sometimes adopt gay traits in prisons?
This is a bit of a chaotic comment, I probably need to organize my thoughts better. My thoughts are roughly like, put women into a tough environment and their testosterone goes up and adopt masculine traits. But there is not really such an environment for men that would make their estrogene go up, except xenoestrogens. However it is possible to create testosterone-lowering environments e.g. schools with an anti-competitive ethos.
I don’t think that women doing hard physical labour is a consequence of ” female gender expression” under certain circumstances. If you need to do physical labour to survive, you do physical labour to survive and gender has nothing to do with it.
As to feminization of men, it’s a popular topic (google it up), usually in the context of political correctness / rise of feminism / anti-discrimination policies / SJWs / etc. in the first world countries.
By the way, for feminization you don’t need estrogen to go up, all you need is testosterone to go down. And, hey, look, testosterone seems to be decreasing in late XX century…
I am not convinced that “is the biological default” is a meaningful concept.
If (a) then b else c
is the same thing as if (!a) then c else b
The point is that !a (not testosterone) is just the lack of testosterone, but not the presence of estrogen.
People with full androgen insensitivity syndrome (never responding to androgens produced by gonads) or gonadal dysgenesis of various stripes (gonads fail to develop properly and don’t make any hormones) usually wind up more or less externally normally female regardless of the state of their sex-associated karyotypes/genoypes (with the internal plumbing variable depending on the exact details). In this way, the pre-pubescent female state is probably the closest thing we have to a default inasmuch as that means anything.
These people do, however, fail to naturally go through most of puberty (a few androgens are usually made by the adrenal glands in everyone regardless of sex but not much) which is an active switch being thrown regardless of sex. As such, the secondary female sex characteristics of sexual maturity are not exactly ‘default’ themselves in the same way.
Not sure how the following anecdotal observation relates but it seems to me female gender expression is far more fluid. That is, if situation is tough, poverty and all that, and women end up doing hard physical labor and facing similar challenges of deprivation and difficulties, they end up pretty close to becoming tough-guys, even including things like having insults develop into fist-fights.
The opposite does not seem to be true, it is pretty rare that circumstances make men adopt feminine traits, it is more like they either like them on their own or will never pick up.
However the situations are not exactly parallel because any sort of deprivation and difficulty is generating an obvious response to toughen up with moves people naturally towards masculine roles while there is no such similarly compelling force that could force men towards feminine roles.
Or is there? It would be interesting to examine 1) what fathers do if their wives suddenly die, do they manage to simulate the motherly role as well 2) do more or less cis/straight men sometimes adopt gay traits in prisons?
This is a bit of a chaotic comment, I probably need to organize my thoughts better. My thoughts are roughly like, put women into a tough environment and their testosterone goes up and adopt masculine traits. But there is not really such an environment for men that would make their estrogene go up, except xenoestrogens. However it is possible to create testosterone-lowering environments e.g. schools with an anti-competitive ethos.
I don’t think that women doing hard physical labour is a consequence of ” female gender expression” under certain circumstances. If you need to do physical labour to survive, you do physical labour to survive and gender has nothing to do with it.
As to feminization of men, it’s a popular topic (google it up), usually in the context of political correctness / rise of feminism / anti-discrimination policies / SJWs / etc. in the first world countries.
By the way, for feminization you don’t need estrogen to go up, all you need is testosterone to go down. And, hey, look, testosterone seems to be decreasing in late XX century…