Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Belinda]

Yes, it's as good here as anywhere and I see no point in moving it. The issue has many facets including the biological, the psychological, the social, the political and the ethical. All of which are legitimate subjects of philosophical discourse and all of which have been touched on in this thread. Thus the sub-forum it "should" be in could be debated endlessly and pointlessly.

I like your naming of "facets" of discussions around 'gender'. My interest is on the connection between the psychosocial and the biological causes of gender identification. This is because notions about gender depend on how tribes maintain themselves in whatever economic circumstances prevail

[Lagayascienza]

I knew nothing about the John/Joan case until I read about it in this thread and so I looked into it online. It’s really heartbreaking what that poor guy had to endure (before he died by suicide) because of a botched circumcision and misguided treatment by a psychologist/sexologist who believed gender identity was learned/socially constructed rather than innate and who used this child in an attempt to prove his theory. This case demonstrates that gender identity is innate and not learned. It has a biological basis and will be there at birth waiting to develop into awareness. It’s horrible to think that, until 2013, John, because of his gender dysphoria, would have met the DSM criteria of someone with a psychiatric condition when all he had was the normal developing awareness of his innate gender. Gender dysphoria should never have been listed in the DSM as a “psychosexual disorder” just as homosexuality should never have been so listed in the DSM.

The specific cause of gender dysphoria remains uncertain but what does seems clear that, as with non-gender dysphorics, there is also a biological basis, rather than a psychological/social basis to gender dysphoria. Indeed, neurobiological research into gender dysphoria has demonstrated “distinct gray matter volume and brain activation and connectivity differences" in people suffering from gender dysphoria when compared to controls; and this "leads to the concept of brain gender”.*

So, the science seems to indicate that gender identity is there at birth waiting to develop into awareness and that it is not learned or due to psychosocial factors. Since it is not possible to address the underlying biological cause of gender dysphoria, the result will be that the small percentage of children born with gender dysphoria are likely to experience considerable suffering because of it and that, therefore, gender reassignment rather than trying to force a kid to be what he/she does not feel him/herself to naturally be, is the best option.

I don't know enough to say what age is optimal best for gender reassignment in people with gender dysphoria but I imagine fairly early intervention would reduce suffering.


*ltinay M, Anand A (August 2020). "Neuroimaging gender dysphoria: a novel psychobiological model". Brain Imaging and Behavior. 14 (4): 1281–1297. doi:10.1007/s11682-019-00121-8. PMID 31134582. S2CID 167207854.

A recently published study (Colizzi et al. 2014), where 118 patients were followed before and 12 months after HRT revealed that 14% of the patients had comorbid Axis-I psychiatric diagnosis. Psychiatric distress and impairment were found to be higher in the beginning phase of the study but after HRT, there was a significant improvement in major depressive disorder, anxiety and functional impairment.

Similarly, Fisher and colleagues' (Fisher et al. 2013) 2013 paper suggests that the dysfunction and impairment in the transgender population is highly associated with lack of HRT, which may suggest that at least a fraction of the impairment that was documented as comorbid Axis-I psychiatric disorders could in fact be impairment from GD. Finally, a metanalysis done by Dhejne and colleagues (Dhejne et al. 2016) reviewed 38 longitudinal studies that investigated psychiatric comorbidities pre and post gender affirmation treatments in transgender people with GD. The results of this analysis indicate that depression and GAD do have higher prevalence in transgender population but this finding was isolated to baseline (pre-gender affirmation treatments) where after gender affirmation therapies, rate of psychiatric comorbidities decreased to cisgender population levels”

[Consul]

Gender self-knowledge (= knowledge of one's sex) is not innate! Babies aren't born with innate knowledge of their sex.

This is confused.

No, not at all. No newborn baby knows whether it's female or male, a girl or a boy, especially as the concepts of femaleness/girlhood and maleness/boyhood aren't innate.

[Belinda]

Gender self-knowledge (= knowledge of one's sex) is not innate! Babies aren't born with innate knowledge of their sex.

This is confused.

No, not at all. No newborn baby knows whether it's female or male, a girl or a boy, especially as the concepts of femaleness/girlhood and maleness/boyhood aren't innate.

That is so. By the same token no newborn innately knows whether it is a baby , an adult, or an old person, or a human or a dormouse .Likewise no newborn knows it is a socialist or a conservative, a Muslim or a Jew.

There is evidence that a newborn mammal knows it is the same individual as its mother. However some newborn animals have to be ' imprinted' before they know what their mother is. I understand there is an age and stage at which 'imprinting' happens. I don't know if human mammals have to be 'imprinted' or if they recognise the teat by its smell. In any and all cases it is obvious gender is not innate.

[JackDaydream]

The idea of imprinting is an interesting one in the extent to which gender is innate. ersonally, I am inclined to think there is such a complex mixture of nature and nurture in so many respects of human understandin, gender and otherwise. In speaking about a child recognising their mother and that is interesting, and it does seem that the first grasp of words is mama and dada. That may be the first distinction between male and female, or at least where there is a female and a male caregiver in early life experience.

Of course, with humans there is so much difference from animals, although I don't have a great deal of experience with animals. However, from what I do know there is an instinct and it questionable how much of this does continue in human life still, in spite of language and logic.

One idea which may be important in considering imprinting is the biologist, Rupert Sheldrake's idea of morphic resonance, which is a form of memory in nature. It has mixed reception in mainstream thinking because it is at the juncture between science and spirituality, like a form of Jung,'s idea of the collective unconscious within nature as opposed to more idealist views of conceptual ideas.

Getting back to the idea of gender and whether it is innate in humans, does raise the issue of how the many different animals see sex or gender. They have biological sexual attraction but it could simply be instinctual without any conceptual understanding, especially as formulated in language as opposed to direct sensory perception. It is unlikely that there is much sense of gender identity in most animals although chimpanzees look in the mirror, which may be a rudimentary aspect of self-image as the starting point for identity formation.

The conceptual aspects may be learned gradually.i guess children who grow up with animals may know about reproduction long before those who don't. I remember knowing the differences between males and females as an early child but not about sexual reproduction until much later in the playground when someone told me and I didn't believe it at first.

But, the idea of imprinting may be important as inherent in biology as well as social learning. It may apply to gender and other forms of knowledge and where it comes from. This also relates to John Locke's idea of the 'mind' as a blank.slate, or those who don't see it as blank, such as Steven Pinker.

[Sy Borg]

I knew nothing about the John/Joan case until I read about it in this thread and so I looked into it online. It’s really heartbreaking what that poor guy had to endure (before he died by suicide) because of a botched circumcision and misguided treatment by a psychologist/sexologist who believed gender identity was learned/socially constructed rather than innate and who used this child in an attempt to prove his theory. This case demonstrates that gender identity is innate and not learned. It has a biological basis and will be there at birth waiting to develop into awareness. It’s horrible to think that, until 2013, John, because of his gender dysphoria, would have met the DSM criteria of someone with a psychiatric condition when all he had was the normal developing awareness of his innate gender. Gender dysphoria should never have been listed in the DSM as a “psychosexual disorder” just as homosexuality should never have been so listed in the DSM.

The specific cause of gender dysphoria remains uncertain but what does seems clear that, as with non-gender dysphorics, there is also a biological basis, rather than a psychological/social basis to gender dysphoria. Indeed, neurobiological research into gender dysphoria has demonstrated “distinct gray matter volume and brain activation and connectivity differences" in people suffering from gender dysphoria when compared to controls; and this "leads to the concept of brain gender”.*

Good. I want more people to know about the John/Joan case. My brain blew a fuse when I first found out about it.

There has never been a more clear example of the reality of mental gender. With John, his feelings can't be argued to be delusional, which is the standard lazy position regarding transpeople (and gays in some circles too), that is becoming increasingly popular today and yesterday's knowledge is forgotten.

It is ironic that humans, who leverage pluralism to create stronger societies, has an instinctive distrust of those who are different, as if variation comes as a surprise rather than inevitable.

[Sy Borg]

Getting back to the idea of gender and whether it is innate in humans, does raise the issue of how the many different animals see sex or gender. They have biological sexual attraction but it could simply be instinctual without any conceptual understanding, especially as formulated in language as opposed to direct sensory perception. It is unlikely that there is much sense of gender identity in most animals although chimpanzees look in the mirror, which may be a rudimentary aspect of self-image as the starting point for identity formation.

They certainly smell it. Dogs will happily stick their noses directly into your crotch to get a whiff and find out about your gender, diet, associations and emotional state.

However, unlike us, they don't much care about such things, in much the same way as young children don't care (until they are taught to care). Female dogs regularly hump other dogs, and males will hump other males, and they will both hump the head end, toys, other species, cushions and anything else that can be rooted. The line between sex and dominance/submission is less distinct for dogs. It was once less distinct for humans too.

[Consul]

He remained certain and convinced that he was male—and he was right, because he was male! So what we have in John's case is sexual self-belief & self-certainy that amounts to sexual self-knowledge (since he truly believed to be male). There's no need for the ambiguous and nebulous term gender identity!

He didn't know he was male, except for his gender identity. No one told him he was born male. QED.

I don't know, but I know that the concepts of femaleness/womanhood/girlhood and maleness/manhood/boyhood are not innate; so he must have acquired them through learning on the basis of perceiving the differential sexual appearance and behavior of others. In spite of what others told him, he then started believing (truly) and being certain that he was a boy/man.

[Consul]

Good. I want more people to know about the John/Joan case. My brain blew a fuse when I first found out about it.
There has never been a more clear example of the reality of mental gender. With John, his feelings can't be argued to be delusional, which is the standard lazy position regarding transpeople (and gays in some circles too), that is becoming increasingly popular today and yesterday's knowledge is forgotten.

What you call "mental gender" is sexual self-representation—species of which are sexual self-conception (self-image), self-perception, self-cognition (self-knowledge), self-conviction (self-belief), self-interpretation (self-understanding), self-identification/self-classification.

Sexual self-representation is part of a person's mental reality, but it's not a "gender". In the case of transsexuality, one's sexual self-representation doesn't correspond to one's sexual facts, but that is not a mismatch between different genders.

[Consul]

There are frustratingly many different definitions of "gender" and "gender identity" in general dictionaries, scientific ones, and scientific textbooks & papers. If you think "gender identity" defined as "the (inner) sense of one's gender" doesn't mean "the (inner) awareness/consciousness/knowledge of one's sex", then what do you think does it mean?

"We scientists take pride in being methodologically rigorous. We are very picky about how we design our research projects, collect data, and statistically analyze the findings. But we can be less meticulous about how we interpret what it all means. This shortcoming was expressed well in 1995 by the personality psychologist Jack Block at the end of his career:
—
I urge the field of personality psychology to resolutely confront its severe, even crippling, terminological problems. Many of the difficulties that beset assessment derive from the hasty, hazy, lazy use of language. Psychologists have tended to be sloppy with words. We need to become more intimate with their meanings, denotatively and connotatively, because summary labels and shorthand chosen quickly will control—often in unrecognized ways—the way we think subsequently. In part, this problem is inevitable, but we can do much better.
[Block, Jack. "A Contrarian View of the Five-Factor Approach to Personality Description." Psychological Bulletin 117/2 (1995): 187–215. p. 209]
—
Block’s plea to his colleagues could be directed to many areas of psychology and neuroscience, including, of course, studies on the self. Indeed, I believe that, in no small part, confusion about how to characterize, and understand, what and who we are is terminological. Some might say, “Oh, it’s just semantics,” as if that means it’s not important. But it is. Words matter. They dictate meaning and underlie our conceptions. This is especially a problem with the words used in psychology."

(Le Doux, Joseph E. The Four Realms of Existence: A New Theory of Being Human. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023. pp. 33-4)

"…the hasty, hazy, lazy use of language" – Yes, that's a real and nontrivial problem, especially in the context of gender philosophy/psychology/sociology!

[Sculptor1]

Gender self-knowledge (= knowledge of one's sex) is not innate! Babies aren't born with innate knowledge of their sex.

This is confused.

No, not at all. No newborn baby knows whether it's female or male, a girl or a boy, especially as the concepts of femaleness/girlhood and maleness/boyhood aren't innate.

This is not relevant to the discussion; just a smoke screen.
Foetuses have no langauge, so obviously they do not even know they are "human", let alone a boy or a girl.
And whilst humans are possibly the mammal which has the blankest slate. We are NOT born with a tabula rasa, to be impressed with a pure choice for such things as gender..
Not only is gender part of the structure of new borns, but the potentiality of language is too, such that meaning structures of verb, object, subject are facilitated so that a child can learn any language; but not so structred to be restricted to only one.

It is so obvious given what we know and understand about child development and primate studies that the basic langauage of gender is fully understood. If rhesus monkey babies are attracted to dolls and toy trucks as befots their gender than it should be no surprise that human babies come into the world gendered. And so it is.
Dress up boys in pink dresses and adults will try to get them to play with dolls; girls with blue outfits, they will try to encourage them to play with trucks. But the child knows better.

Ernest Hemingway's boys were brought up with no doubt about their maleness. They were given guns from the eariliest possible age, taken out on the boat for fishing, gutting fish and cooking them on the campfire. Yet the thrid child was never happy with this.

Little Gregory Hemingway was an athlete and crackshot. But despite all the male conditioning that he was impressed with, was never happy as a boy and would eventually chage his sex to female. Gregory Hemingway becaome GLORIA.

I find it puzzling what it is that you find so difficult to accept?

[Sculptor1]

THE STRANGE CASE OF GLORIA HEMINGWAY
Foetuses have no langauge, so obviously they do not even know they are "human", let alone a boy or a girl.
And whilst humans are possibly the mammal which has the blankest slate. We are NOT born with a tabula rasa, to be impressed with a pure choice for such things as gender..
Not only is gender part of the structure of new borns, but the potentiality of language is too, such that meaning structures of verb, object, subject are facilitated so that a child can learn any language; but not so structred to be restricted to only one.

It is so obvious given what we know and understand about child development and primate studies that the basic langauage of gender is fully understood. If rhesus monkey babies are attracted to dolls and toy trucks as befots their gender than it should be no surprise that human babies come into the world gendered. And so it is.
Dress up boys in pink dresses and adults will try to get them to play with dolls; girls with blue outfits, they will try to encourage them to play with trucks. But the child knows better.

Ernest Hemingway's boys were brought up with no doubt about their maleness. They were given guns from the eariliest possible age, taken out on the boat for fishing, gutting fish and cooking them on the campfire. Yet the thrid child was never happy with this.

Little Gregory Hemingway was an athlete and crackshot. But despite all the male conditioning that he was impressed with, was never happy as a boy and would eventually chage his sex to female. Gregory Hemingway becaome GLORIA.

I find it puzzling what it is that you find so difficult to accept?

[Sy Borg]

Good. I want more people to know about the John/Joan case. My brain blew a fuse when I first found out about it.
There has never been a more clear example of the reality of mental gender. With John, his feelings can't be argued to be delusional, which is the standard lazy position regarding transpeople (and gays in some circles too), that is becoming increasingly popular today and yesterday's knowledge is forgotten.

What you call "mental gender" is sexual self-representation—species of which are sexual self-conception (self-image), self-perception, self-cognition (self-knowledge), self-conviction (self-belief), self-interpretation (self-understanding), self-identification/self-classification.

Sexual self-representation is part of a person's mental reality, but it's not a "gender". In the case of transsexuality, one's sexual self-representation doesn't correspond to one's sexual facts, but that is not a mismatch between different genders.

Mental gender is part self-perception, part inclinations and, I expect, part aptitude. I'm not interested in this plethora of distracting labels you are applying to the situation. In your effort to invalidate what you appear to see as postmodern delusion, you over-complicate things, adding extra criteria that's simply not necessary.

Brains are obviously gendered, whether you like the term or not. The evidence provided by history (and simply observing people and animals, as per the above post) makes this obvious. Mentally, there is overlap between men and women, much more so than physically. The most masculine female will be enormously more stereotypically mentally masculine than the most feminine male. Some people's brains are oriented so far in the direction of the opposite physical gender that they decide it's more comfortable to live in that gender, and not be subject to expectations they can't deliver.

I don't see why they should be invalidated by people who know precious little about them - but that's their situation.

[Consul]

No newborn baby knows whether it's female or male, a girl or a boy, especially as the concepts of femaleness/girlhood and maleness/boyhood aren't innate.

This is not relevant to the discussion; just a smoke screen.

What could be more relevant to the discussion than a direct answer to the question Is there such a thing as an innate sense of gender? (which is the title of this thread)?!

Foetuses have no langauge, so obviously they do not even know they are "human", let alone a boy or a girl.

If all natural verbal languages such as English are acquired through learning, and (propositional) knowledge depends on verbal language, then human newborns know nothing, because then there can be no innate knowledge. It would also follow that (even adult) nonhuman animals know nothing because of their lack of a verbal language.
However, most cognitive psychologists think this is not the case; so they have drawn a distinction between verbal language and mental language (aka language of thought or "Mentalese"), the latter of which is said to contain nonverbal (verbally non-expressed) concepts ("ideas") as a sort of mental representations. If (propositional) knowledge depends on such concepts rather than on words, then it can be had by nonhuman animals as well; and then knowledge can be innate both in humans and in nonhumans, even if all verbal languages must be learned.
So if there is such a non-/pre-verbal "language of thought", innate knowledge (such as knowledge of one's sex) is not ruled out a priori. This is not to say that newborn babies actually know already which sex they are. They arguably don't.

The Language of Thought Hypothesis: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/

And whilst humans are possibly the mammal which has the blankest slate. We are NOT born with a tabula rasa, to be impressed with a pure choice for such things as gender..
Not only is gender part of the structure of new borns, but the potentiality of language is too, such that meaning structures of verb, object, subject are facilitated so that a child can learn any language; but not so structred to be restricted to only one.

Right.

It is so obvious given what we know and understand about child development and primate studies that the basic langauage of gender is fully understood. If rhesus monkey babies are attracted to dolls and toy trucks as befots their gender than it should be no surprise that human babies come into the world gendered. And so it is.
Dress up boys in pink dresses and adults will try to get them to play with dolls; girls with blue outfits, they will try to encourage them to play with trucks. But the child knows better.

There obviously are mental-behavioral sex differences in addition to the physical ones. The question is how many of them are innate or hardwired.

Ernest Hemingway's boys were brought up with no doubt about their maleness. They were given guns from the eariliest possible age, taken out on the boat for fishing, gutting fish and cooking them on the campfire. Yet the thrid child was never happy with this.
Little Gregory Hemingway was an athlete and crackshot. But despite all the male conditioning that he was impressed with, was never happy as a boy and would eventually chage his sex to female. Gregory Hemingway becaome GLORIA.
I find it puzzling what it is that you find so difficult to accept?

Irrespective of whether it's innate or not, I have no difficulty at all with accepting transsexuality as a mental phenomenon!

[Consul]

Mental gender is part self-perception, part inclinations and, I expect, part aptitude. I'm not interested in this plethora of distracting labels you are applying to the situation. In your effort to invalidate what you appear to see as postmodern delusion, you over-complicate things, adding extra criteria that's simply not necessary.

Given the annoying ambiguity of central terms such as "identity", "gender", and "gender identity", I've been introducing those alternative terms for the purpose of clarification!

Brains are obviously gendered, whether you like the term or not.

What exactly does this mean? That the brains of females are neurophysiologically different from those of males?

The evidence provided by history (and simply observing people and animals, as per the above post) makes this obvious. Mentally, there is overlap between men and women, much more so than physically. The most masculine female will be enormously more stereotypically mentally masculine than the most feminine male. Some people's brains are oriented so far in the direction of the opposite physical gender that they decide it's more comfortable to live in that gender, and not be subject to expectations they can't deliver.
I don't see why they should be invalidated by people who know precious little about them - but that's their situation.

"To invalidate" – that's one of those fashionable Wokespeak terms I don't like. I don't "invalidate" the subjective experience of gender dysphoria or "gender incongruence", and I'm anything but a conservative defender of sex stereotypes. I have no problem at all with "gender-nonconforming" appearance or behaviour. I just don't buy the falsities and lies spread by gender theorists & activists—such as that transsexual men are women/transsexual women are men.