rationalskepticism.org

TMB wrote:

I'm going to start from the position that this concept is not real: it doesn't describe any actual psychological reality (in most people, at least), that can't be adequately described by other factors.

OK

As far as I can tell, the factors that contribute to a person's sense of identity in relation to sex, are:

1. Their biological sex

Agreed

2. Their sexuality

What is this? Do you mean their sexual orientation, homo/heterosexual?

Yes.

3. Their interests

?

People often speak of gravitation towards certain types of interests as being part of "gender": Playing with dolls and dressing up for girls - later making house, shopping etc. for women. Physical activity, fighting, taking things apart and building things for boys and men...

I know of course that this is bollox, but it's part of the socially constructed narrative about gender and no more bollox than the rest of that narrative, as far as I can make out.

4. Their interaction with social expectations about how these factors go together.

OK, but surely this just means that peoples ideas about things are affected by cultural norms? Ie. if a girl is raised in a society where leg shaving is considered feminine, she is highly likely to feel the same way and yet consider it a personal choice?

It's interesting this. I think one source of my difficulty describing what I mean in this thread is that I'm a person who always makes a clear distinction between internal, "real" personal feelings and those imposed upon one by society. But when I think about it I know you're right - all of our feelings are affected by how we've been brought up and interacted with society, however much we think otherwise.

The concept of "gender" only seems to arise where there is a severe conflict between any of the first three of these factors, and the fourth one. A biological male who happens to be homosexual will have to fight against homophobes who insist on the expectation that men "should" want to have sex with women. A young girl who happens to like playing rough games will be called a "tomboy" and, later, probably be suspected of being gay, simply because her interests don't coincide with what society says they "ought" to be. In extreme cases, a young child can form a transgender identity and insist that they are the opposite of everything people tell them they "should" be.

Agreed.

But the problem with all this is that factor 4 is entirely cultural and arbitratry. There is no innate connection between biological sex and certain interests, or contradiction between it and other interests. Since these social expectations are not "real" - they are not rooted in anything to do with physical or innate psychological reality - the idea of "gender" that emerges from them cannot be real either. It is simply a way of describing the interaction between the real elements of a person's body and psychology, and social expectation.

I do not understand your point. Society is a complex interplay between individual and group wants, there is some cooperation, plenty of duplicity and conflict as this seeks some form of balance. Our culture is strongly subject to our biology, and what you see in culture reflects that. Are you suggesting that culture and biology can somehow be separated and that if it were possible that our biological nature could/should be left to follow its way and for culture to leave it alone?

The first part - that they can be separated at least in terms of analysing how they operate and what consequences flow from them. Certainly I don't think culture can ever operate in a way that is separate from biology, but there are plenty of things about biology - growth; ageing; disease; appetite; physical fitness etc - that can be analysed as fundamentally biological processes, even though they are affected by our experiences within our culture. (For example, death is a fundamentally biological process and everyone, without exception, will die. But people in poor societies tend to die earlier, on everage, than people in rich ones.)

This is different from something like, say, sexual modesty, which is a purely cultural process. A baby is not born with any concept that they should cover certain parts of their body, they have to learn it (whereas they ARE born with a body that is already programmed in such a way that it will eventually die, no matter what kind of culture they grow up in).

Or to extend your own point: our culture is strongly subject to our biology, but there are some aspects of our biology that are only superficially affected by culture, and will always fundamentally be biology.

But this is not about my assertion of that, it's about the implication in much current discourse about gender that a person's "gender identity" is largely "biologically innate" like this.

Now I can accept that some of the components of gender identity (as I listed above and you seem to broadly accept) are so biologically innate. Obviously having a penis or a vagina is. There is a growing consensus that hetero or homosexuality is. I don't know, but I'm happy to accept the possibility that certain personality traits are.

My point is that these things only become "gender identity" by virtue of interacting with the last, vital ingredient: society's grouping of those components and characteristics into two overall categories and naming them "male" and "female". Telling us that a person has a "male gender" is not therefore telling us anything about their own innate or biological qualities that we can't know from a description of those qualities in isolation. And it's not even telling us anything about those qualities, since each of those qualities in isolation can exist in either gender (eg, a person can fancy women, and even have a penis, and still have a female "gender").

So what IS it telling us?

Some people seem to feel that it describes something about how they "feel about themselves". This seems to be particularly the case for transgender people.

For me, I can't internally isolate anything that I feel about myself that corresponds to this idea. I mean, I have a penis and fancy women, but we are told that this is not necessarily an indication of a particular gender. I have certain interests and characteristics, some of which I'm told are typically male and some typically female. Beyond that, I'm just me.

So I don't understand what it can be, other than a purely cultural social construct. However I'm beginning to understand that this is highly subjective, and some people like vombatiformes DO feel something that can only be described as "gender".

It would be interesting if the conclusion is that it DOES exist as a real psychologically experienced thing, but only for some people. Like a phobia or something.