Posted: Jan 03, 2011 11:58 pm
Festeringbob wrote:the role of genes in the formulation of the mind is not properly elucidated yet, therefor at this time there is no definitive answer to your question of psychological gender being "real" or "innate" as opposed to "learnt" and "imposed", however the wonderful thing about nature is it's ineffable ability to fuck up, and as such we see all sorts of failures in biological systems which help us understand what is wrong with the damaged component (failure in the genes that are responsible for the production of melanin result in albinism for example)
particularly prudent to this case is the existence of gender identity disorder, which appears to be a failure in some mechanism that allows the mind to assume the correct psychological role, whilst no one as yet knows why this happens, it begs the question, how can this happen if gender is learnt?
How can there be a "correct psychological role" outside of society's judgment about what is "correct"?
"Correct" is not a description of innate reality, it's a value judgment about reality. The vast majority of sheep are white. But when we see a sheep that is black, we don't call it an "incorrect sheep". A farmer may judge it as being incorrect for his purposes, but that is an entirely different matter. In terms of innate reality, there are simply correspondences between things that happen often (like the other aspects of "sheepdom" and whiteness) and ones that happen less often.
Similarly, if a person is born with a penis, a total dislike of all sports and a deep desire to nurture young children (even supposing that we can know such things are "inborn"), what makes the correspondence between those physical and psychological factors "incorrect"? How can that be anything other than society's judgment that such things ought to correspond differently? And what is society's justification for that judgment?
Isn't there aa wierd kind of "is/ought" problem here? A leap from the observation that certain sets of characteristics cluster together the majority of the time, to a judgment that they ought to cluster together the rest of the time as well?