Then you are perpetuating cissexism.
And no it doesn’t, there are brain areas that are statistically different in the small population of trans brains donated to science, but there is no brain scan for trans and it would be useless anyway, because if you experience yourself as trans and the scan says “nope” it’s the scan that’s wrong. The individual is the sole authority and the diagnosis is by telling a shrink what you experience.
Don’t ask for a source of something that clearly is an interpretation of observation not a study. That’s pretty clearly acting dismissively.
And you know what I mean about claiming ownership too. Those comments are said by men to women in a particular way that is more intrusive and different from the way they are said to you. You are being dismissive here too.
whereas it is still so for men.
So break it.
Are you saying gender identity is not determined by biology? Because I have some transsexuals who would like to talk to you.
The etiology of trans is unknown. There are suggestions that hormones in the womb may play a part, with the brain and body controlled by hormone flushes at different times, resulting in something like “intersex of the brain”. But what I meant was more simply, that social categorization of bodies as “male or female” doesn’t determine their gender identity. Bear in mind I say social categorization here, because society looks at some things (penis length, particularly) and not at others (brains, particularly) about the body to put people into categories.
And no, I meant cross-gendered in the specific sense of “person socially assigned gender A in clothes socially assigned gender B”.
BTW: trans being inborn and immutable is a political thing. It is easier to get rights if your discriminated-against attribute is “not your fault” so you can’t be “blamed” for it. This doesn’t affect the rightness of the cause, only the ease of implementing it in the face of religious (sin focused) transphobia.
There’s an element of “claiming ownership” in cat calling and in “how are you doing” and “smile baby” too. It means “I have the right to your time, I have the right to your attention, I have the right to have you be pretty for me by smiling” Replying politely only confirms that, they think they have you trapped in a conversation now. And witness how this “right” is backed by indignation “bitch, think you’re all that” and gendered tear-down-confidence insults “slut” and “fat ugly cow” as soon as the man is refused. Which is why women learn counter strategies that don’t throw back his claim in his face (as he rightly deserves).
The reactions are driven by social instinct reacting with defensive in-group cohesion to out-group threat, so they have effects without feeling like attempts to achieve effects. They feel like righteous indignation, or wanting someone who looks like us, or fear, or moral disapproval, or dismissal as uninteresting, etc.
When somebody’s born, they don’t identify as a gender. By the time they reach talking infancy, they do and will tell you. They will probably want to adopt gendered clothing and behaviours. Those might, or might not match their anatomy. If they pick cross-gendered ones, that might last, or it might go away, or it might turn into gay/lesbian identity. If you aren’t being pushy about any of this, they will find their own level. I am not proposing “never permit them a gender”, I am proposing “never assign them a gender, coercively”.
Unfortunately with strangers, I have less evidence about their genders than I might like. That is because people don’t feel very free to express cross-gender presentation, and in fact it takes such an immense crushing need that people dare the taunts, for them to even be visible. So there are lots of tans women walking around looking like men, and there are lots of trans men walking around looking like women. And it is because of dismissive attitudes like yours about the skirt, which easily translate into ridicule and ostracism. A boy in skirt is not like a boy with underpants on his head, he’s like a girl in jeans. That used to be scandalous. But we accepted it more readily, because dressing “like a girl” is seen as degrading while dressing “like a man” was seen as upgrading.
You are strawmanning “ignoring the biological gender” (and building upon an assumption that isn’t true; biology isn’t gender, it isn’t even oversimplified binary sex—but that’s a story for another day). I am not suggesting “ignoring” it, I am suggesting “not treating it as the thing that determines gender”.
That refers to “I still think your previous comment was too simplistic”.
People don’t see their attitudes as anything but “normal” because being a sexist or a racist doesn’t feel like villainy, doesn’t even feel like a moral choice, it just feels like facts.
“Until the child tells you their gender identity”, I said—you wait in a state of openness to all alternatives, and they tell you. A child is not cis until proven trans. It’s “no data”. They will say.
Yes, ultimately, this is not enforcing stereotypes. But that phrase primes you for vastly underestimating the scope of what you need to do. Like, it primes you to think in terms of “offer Jane a dinosaur as well as a Barbie” rather than “do not assume that Cody would prefer jeans rather than a skirt”.
Children raised to assume they have control of their gender presentation and the right to assert their gender identity, will not be inclined to make assumptions about, or tease and ostracise, other people’s gender.
I’m claiming he chooses women who have attributes that shift blame onto the victim. There is correlation, but the causation goes the other way from what you’re thinking.
I think it’s not. Basically, I think what I called “racists and sexists” are people of whom only a minority foams on /r/mensrights and A Voice For Men, or listens to right wing talk radio, or believes in “male headship under God”, or attends the local Klan. The majority are people who think they are normal, whose biased ideas don’t even show unless provoked by a situation where their privileges are under threat (AKA “political correctness gone mad”). Feminism that isn’t about shopping provokes them. Anti-racism that is neither anodyne nor cap-in-hand provokes them. And they react, often in ways that look like incidental decisions, to exclude the threat. Such as, here, by marginalizing equality for half the species into an academic backwater.
They might be full blown trans, whether the kind that’s so intense it forces people to transition despite all the grief they get, or the kinds that are less intense or more messy (and probably loads more common, like bisexual is more common than gay).
They might want to pick and mix their gender presentation or have a non-traditional way of expressing their identity. Like being a “tomboy” or a boy who likes dresses.
They will learn to behave in a non-assuming, non-policing way themselves.
Except in the real world it’s not a “risk factor” because if anything the causation works the other way around. People treat it like “asking for it” → therefore nobody looks further than her to assign blame → therefore she won’t even bother to report it because the police would laugh at her → therefore I will get away with it, again and again and again.
You hear “sexists” and think terrible people, I think ordinary people. Giving a higher salary offer to Mike Smith and judging his work better than Mary Smith. Picking “someone like us” for promotion the board, so you end up with single digit female representation at CEO level. Having to do orchestra auditions behind a screen, or you won’t hire any women. Catcalling or saying “smile luv” on the street, and then calling her a bitch when she won’t respond. Taking “no” as “keep asking”. Bothering her in Starbucks when she’s trying to read. Having a dress code that requires a shower and a suit from guys, but an hour’s makeup and high heels from women. Interrupting her and ignoring her in meetings. Treating women as a “special interest group”. Getting angry about “political correctness” and “man hating feminists” when somebody tries to start a women’s studies class.
Sexism saturates this culture. It feels normal. It’s accepted by men and laughed off by women who don’t want to be the party pooper. If you are not female and have not been following feminism, your inferential distance may be large indeed.
Until the child tells you their gender identity, don’t assume it matches their body, and even after then don’t police it. Any sentence that begins with a paraphrase of “girls do” (talk politely, their homework,...) or “girls don’t” (wear spiderman suits, climb trees,...) is nearly certainly sexist, wrong, and harmful. Learn the standard ways that parents treat children differently by gender (assuming girls are upset where they’d assume boys are angry, for example) and proactively refuse to do, or permit them done by other adults.
Massive ongoing discrimination that affects half the species and that could be, if not necessarily remedied, at least dragged into the open and ridiculed, surely deserves universal lessons.
The reason this doesn’t happen is the same one that keeps anti-racism off the curriculum: racists and sexists are the board, the concerned parents, the local news editor, the elected representatives and the voters.
There are probably pure-win half steps, like the kind of farming where you plant in the seasonal area you always come back to at a certain time of the year, as you follow the herds, or the kind where game is so plentiful you can afford to settle, hunt, and dabble in farming vegetables beside your settlement (such as in the American Pacific north west). Farming seems to be tied to settlement. Farms stabilize settlements; settlements nurture farms. And farms domesticate crops, making farming easier and supporting a larger population.
In the Mesopotamia region, there were settlements in the rainy hills where the local wildlife was conveniently easy to domesticate but farming was hard. Those moved down centuries later into the rainless flood plain between the Tigris and Euphrates, where only group effort could ensure irrigation, and group surpluses were needed to stave off bad harvests, but farming worked well. The “Ubaid period” (neolithic) was pretty egalitarian, but centralization emerges in the “Jemdet Nasr period” and kingship in the “early dynastic period” (Sumerian for king is “lugal”, “lu”=man, “gal”=big, and initially it seems to have been just a word for “boss”). With centralization and kingship, empires follow fast. Civilization was co-existing with non-farming groups, but civilization tempts even non-farmers to switch from hunting to raiding. Sumer got sacked repeatedly by nearby tribes.
I am thinking there was a demographic transition point, probably quite early, when the number of people that could be kept alive—not as healthy, but alive—by farming or equally by raiding the surplus of farmers, exceeded the carrying capacity of the local game and wild plants. At that point walking away from the fields was not possible. Therefore agriculture has a ratchet effect.
The trouble with epigenetic IQ drop as a theory is that hunter gatherers were (IIRC, anthropologists please confirm) better fed, taller and healthier than early farmers. This being due to a combination of better diet (not a monoculture of one or two staples) and also due to the beginnings of the peasant/ruler classes and taxation of surplus. You would expect the farmers to be the ones with epigenetic lower IQ.
On “dust specks”, I think there are trivial dis-utilities whose infinite sum has an asymptote that is finite and small, and thus I disagree with the LW consensus on this.
You don’t have experience, and you turn away vicarious experience—the inferential distance is too large.