Re: Is there such a thing as an innate sense of gender?
Posted: April 5th, 2024, 12:31 am
Consul wrote: ↑April 4th, 2024, 11:49 pmDo you think male and female brains are the same and, like John Money, consider gender identity to be social construct? Funny how, as Lagaya noted, infants of each sex already preferences because they know anything about gender.Sy Borg wrote: ↑April 4th, 2024, 6:36 pmMental 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!
Sy Borg wrote: ↑April 4th, 2024, 6:36 pmBrains 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?
Your extra terms only muddy the waters. It's very obvious, just based n plain old reality, that gender identity is real and it varies. It's not the fault of transpeople that our understanding of it is weak.
Consul wrote: ↑April 4th, 2024, 11:49 pmI don't care about your - or anyone else's - political fetishes and buzzwords. They have no bearing on what I say. I prefer to have my own mind rather than chase every fashionable cause.Sy Borg wrote: ↑April 4th, 2024, 6:36 pmThe 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."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.
I don't see why they should be invalidated by people who know precious little about them - but that's their situation.
The fact is that you are arguing that gender identity is not real, and thus you have been working to invalidate and undermine transsexuals. No one on this thread has said that transmen and regular men, or transwomen and regular women, are the same.
In fact, I said that they should be classified as third and fourth sexes so they have a place, but you were against that too. Why? Due to your intractable views about biological sex, even denying that the multiple types of hermaphroditism in the animal kingdom were merely just variations of being male and female. That "logic" is as obviously flawed as the claim that non primary colours are not real.
It is insane to force post-operative transpeople to be purely treated as their birth gender - which means making post-operative ostensible women use men's bathrooms and men's prisons. That's basically a death sentence. I think the old balance was right in granting transpeople all rights of the opposite biological sex aside from sport and domestic violence services. Pushing to extend those rights to sport, DV services - especially for transgenderists who haven't had reconstructive surgery - has proved to be a bridge too far. Hence the public reaction.
The upshot of all this will probably be similar to BLM - and increase of prejudice, racism and misinformation that ignores the last half century of learning. Activists seem to routinely make things worse for their causes by generating resentment via divisiveness.