Before anything else, let me say that I applaud and admire your self-hack. What I have to say below is merely an expression of some of my personal thoughts on this issue, and is not intended as any sort of attack on your self-identity.
there was nothing intrinsically male (or female) left. I had dissolved my gender identity. Explained it away.
What do you mean by gender identity, exactly? One might disclaim any explicit, verbally-endorsed gender identity, while still retaining the psychological traits that others would categorize as characteristically masculine or feminine.
For myself, I don’t consider myself to have a strong gender identity, and am somewhat repulsed by the idea that some part of my core essence is intrinsically male. Thus, it is sometimes tempting to think of myself as agendered or androgynous, but I find myself rather persuaded by intellectual arguments to the effect that it’s simply not true, that as a question of simple fact, my psychology is intrinsically male, and that this remains the case no matter how I choose to verbally self-identify.
Sex isn’t just one trait; it’s a bundle of correlations between traits, a cluster in a high-dimensional configuration space. If I know the shape of your genitals, I can make all sorts of probabilistic predictions about your other features. The fact that these predictions are probabilistic in nature and that there are many exceptions (some men are shorter than most women, some men are gay, some men have two X chromosomes, &c.) doesn’t change the fact that they are doing useful cognitive work. You can think of this from a minimum-message-length perspective: if you’re trying to describe an adult human male in a limited number of bits, and the recipient of your message already knows a lot of things about humans, you can shorten your message by saying that you’re taking about a man and then describing the specific ways in which the man departs from the human male average, rather than describing every feature of the man from scratch without making any reference to sex at all.
Given that gender roles in some form have existed in every human society, given that there are clear evolutionary reasons to expect the existence of some psychological sex differences due to differing reproductive strategies, and given the experimentally-demonstrable fallibility of human introspection, I’m more inclined to interpret my personal feelings of disliking gender roles as more of a statement of values and of ideology than of my actually being ungendered in an empirically verifiable sense. I don’t think my mind feels intrinsically male from the inside—but it’s easy for me to say that, because I don’t know what it feels like to be female; any claim to androgyny that I might make could easily just be due to my ignorance of the real differences.
Thus, while I long for a transhumanist future in which people can self-modify to be whatever they want, and I celebrate and honor people’s rights to self-identify however they want, I tend to be respectfully skeptical of claims that a proper degendering can be accomplished with presently existing technology.
There is far greater psychological variation within each sex than there is between the sexes, is there not? Even if the space of all possible minds from XY-grown human brains and the space of all possible minds from XX-grown human brains do not perfectly overlap, I know of no evidence that suggests that the disparity is actually significant enough to be meaningful.
Is it even possible to reliably tell the difference between an XX brain and an XY brain just by looking at the structure of neurons? Has anything ever actually been found that was exclusive to one or the other?
There is far greater psychological variation within each sex than there is between the sexes, is there not?
It depends on what you’re measuring. Let me illustrate with a toy example. Consider some quantitative trait such that the trait value is normally distributed within each sex, and say that both distributions have the same standard deviation (call it s) but different means (call them x1 and x2). (Imagine two bell curves plotted on the same chart, partially overlapping.) We can measure the difference between the means in terms of s; this statistic is known as Cohen’s d:
d = (x1 - x2)/s
So if d is less than one, then there’s a sense in which we can say that the variation within a sex (as operationalized by the standard deviation s) is larger than the variation between sexes (as operationalized by the difference in means x1 - x2). But there’s nothing intrinsically special about d<1; if we chose some other way to operationalize the claim “more variation within a sex than between sexes,” we would get a different result.
As it turns out, d=1 is actually very large, as sex differences go: Janet Hyde reviewed a number of studies (PDF) and found d<1 for every trait measured except for throw velocity and throw distance (which aren’t even psychological).
Given that there is a large amount of overlap for every psychological trait measured, it’s tempting to conclude that there is there is therefore no such thing as psychological sex. Ultimately, however, I don’t think this inference is quite justified.
Why? Well, consider this diagram. In the diagram, if you look at any one particular trait in isolation, there is substantial overlap between groups, but if you look at the entire configuration space, the groups don’t overlap at all. I suspect this kind of phenomenon to apply to real-world psychological sex differences: the difference mostly isn’t in any one exclusive trait, but is buried in the correlations between traits.
If there were no psychological sex differences, you could learn any number of things about a person’s psychology, and yet still do no better than chance in trying to guess their physiological sex. But if there’s a statistical difference in some [ETA: statistically independent] traits, then as you learn more about a person, your probability of guessing wrong goes down exponentially. It might be an instructive exercise to explicitly construct a model and play around with the numbers a bit. Like, suppose hypothetically there were a sex difference of d=0.6 in ten different [independent] psychological traits, and consider a hypothetical individual who has the female mean value for all of these traits. The normal distribution peaks at a probability density of 1/sqrt(2pi) = 0.3989, and has a probability density of 0.3331 at plus-or-minus 0.6 standard deviations, so (if I understand the relevant math) we can predict that our hypothetical individual is female with probability (0.3989/0.3331)^10/(1 - (0.3989/0.3331)^10) = 0.86. Of course, this is only a model, and different choices of parameters will give us different results. What I like about this view is that we’ve reduced the issue to a quantitative one; the claim that there is such a thing as psychological sex can be interpreted as meaning that the probability of guessing a person’s sex correctly given adequate psychological information is close to one.
Is it even possible to reliably tell the difference between an XX brain and an XY brain just by looking at the structure of neurons?
I do not possess detailed familiarity with the neuroscience literature, but in my current state of incomplete information, my guess would be yes. See, e.g., this summary, which claims differences in white matter/gray matter ratios and in the relative sizes of different brain regions.
Has anything ever actually been found that was exclusive to one or the other?
As explained in my commentary above, I don’t think this question is as relevant as it first appears: it could be possible to classify brains by sex given a sufficiently large number of sufficiently large statistical differences, even if there is no particular feature possessed by all and only brains of one sex.
Before anything else, let me say that I applaud and admire your self-hack. What I have to say below is merely an expression of some of my personal thoughts on this issue, and is not intended as any sort of attack on your self-identity.
What do you mean by gender identity, exactly? One might disclaim any explicit, verbally-endorsed gender identity, while still retaining the psychological traits that others would categorize as characteristically masculine or feminine.
For myself, I don’t consider myself to have a strong gender identity, and am somewhat repulsed by the idea that some part of my core essence is intrinsically male. Thus, it is sometimes tempting to think of myself as agendered or androgynous, but I find myself rather persuaded by intellectual arguments to the effect that it’s simply not true, that as a question of simple fact, my psychology is intrinsically male, and that this remains the case no matter how I choose to verbally self-identify.
Sex isn’t just one trait; it’s a bundle of correlations between traits, a cluster in a high-dimensional configuration space. If I know the shape of your genitals, I can make all sorts of probabilistic predictions about your other features. The fact that these predictions are probabilistic in nature and that there are many exceptions (some men are shorter than most women, some men are gay, some men have two X chromosomes, &c.) doesn’t change the fact that they are doing useful cognitive work. You can think of this from a minimum-message-length perspective: if you’re trying to describe an adult human male in a limited number of bits, and the recipient of your message already knows a lot of things about humans, you can shorten your message by saying that you’re taking about a man and then describing the specific ways in which the man departs from the human male average, rather than describing every feature of the man from scratch without making any reference to sex at all.
Given that gender roles in some form have existed in every human society, given that there are clear evolutionary reasons to expect the existence of some psychological sex differences due to differing reproductive strategies, and given the experimentally-demonstrable fallibility of human introspection, I’m more inclined to interpret my personal feelings of disliking gender roles as more of a statement of values and of ideology than of my actually being ungendered in an empirically verifiable sense. I don’t think my mind feels intrinsically male from the inside—but it’s easy for me to say that, because I don’t know what it feels like to be female; any claim to androgyny that I might make could easily just be due to my ignorance of the real differences.
Thus, while I long for a transhumanist future in which people can self-modify to be whatever they want, and I celebrate and honor people’s rights to self-identify however they want, I tend to be respectfully skeptical of claims that a proper degendering can be accomplished with presently existing technology.
There is far greater psychological variation within each sex than there is between the sexes, is there not? Even if the space of all possible minds from XY-grown human brains and the space of all possible minds from XX-grown human brains do not perfectly overlap, I know of no evidence that suggests that the disparity is actually significant enough to be meaningful.
Is it even possible to reliably tell the difference between an XX brain and an XY brain just by looking at the structure of neurons? Has anything ever actually been found that was exclusive to one or the other?
It depends on what you’re measuring. Let me illustrate with a toy example. Consider some quantitative trait such that the trait value is normally distributed within each sex, and say that both distributions have the same standard deviation (call it s) but different means (call them x1 and x2). (Imagine two bell curves plotted on the same chart, partially overlapping.) We can measure the difference between the means in terms of s; this statistic is known as Cohen’s d:
d = (x1 - x2)/s
So if d is less than one, then there’s a sense in which we can say that the variation within a sex (as operationalized by the standard deviation s) is larger than the variation between sexes (as operationalized by the difference in means x1 - x2). But there’s nothing intrinsically special about d<1; if we chose some other way to operationalize the claim “more variation within a sex than between sexes,” we would get a different result.
As it turns out, d=1 is actually very large, as sex differences go: Janet Hyde reviewed a number of studies (PDF) and found d<1 for every trait measured except for throw velocity and throw distance (which aren’t even psychological).
Given that there is a large amount of overlap for every psychological trait measured, it’s tempting to conclude that there is there is therefore no such thing as psychological sex. Ultimately, however, I don’t think this inference is quite justified.
Why? Well, consider this diagram. In the diagram, if you look at any one particular trait in isolation, there is substantial overlap between groups, but if you look at the entire configuration space, the groups don’t overlap at all. I suspect this kind of phenomenon to apply to real-world psychological sex differences: the difference mostly isn’t in any one exclusive trait, but is buried in the correlations between traits.
If there were no psychological sex differences, you could learn any number of things about a person’s psychology, and yet still do no better than chance in trying to guess their physiological sex. But if there’s a statistical difference in some [ETA: statistically independent] traits, then as you learn more about a person, your probability of guessing wrong goes down exponentially. It might be an instructive exercise to explicitly construct a model and play around with the numbers a bit. Like, suppose hypothetically there were a sex difference of d=0.6 in ten different [independent] psychological traits, and consider a hypothetical individual who has the female mean value for all of these traits. The normal distribution peaks at a probability density of 1/sqrt(2pi) = 0.3989, and has a probability density of 0.3331 at plus-or-minus 0.6 standard deviations, so (if I understand the relevant math) we can predict that our hypothetical individual is female with probability (0.3989/0.3331)^10/(1 - (0.3989/0.3331)^10) = 0.86. Of course, this is only a model, and different choices of parameters will give us different results. What I like about this view is that we’ve reduced the issue to a quantitative one; the claim that there is such a thing as psychological sex can be interpreted as meaning that the probability of guessing a person’s sex correctly given adequate psychological information is close to one.
I do not possess detailed familiarity with the neuroscience literature, but in my current state of incomplete information, my guess would be yes. See, e.g., this summary, which claims differences in white matter/gray matter ratios and in the relative sizes of different brain regions.
As explained in my commentary above, I don’t think this question is as relevant as it first appears: it could be possible to classify brains by sex given a sufficiently large number of sufficiently large statistical differences, even if there is no particular feature possessed by all and only brains of one sex.