Reading back through various threads here, I noticed a lot of flawed ideas about gender, but most of those threads are quite old and many of the participants are no longer active here, so I thought I'd just drop this in as I think it has a lot of value in unpicking poorly conceived holdover ideas we may have about gendering.

I saw exactly this same item a couple of weeks ago on YouTube. Don't know whether this is sheer coincidence, or whether this chap is suddenly popular and is therefore being recommended a lot. Whatever: I found it a fascinating watch; and like many things, at the end I felt, well, actually, this is exactly what one should have expected. (See my signature down below.)

The observed phenomenon is that a small but consistent minority of humans are transgender, in the sense that they insist - passionately - that their gender is not that which their biological sex would suggest. Their brains experience themselves as the opposite sex to their physical bodies.

Surely, this phenomenon must have an objective cause - a neurophysiological cause. What's the alternative explanation? That all of these people are suffering from the same delusion? What would cause such a delusion, consistently over the entire time during which this phenomenon has been observed, and affecting consistently a small but significant percentage of humans? Surely it's far more reasonable to expect that, just as some people are left-handed, some people ginger-haired, some people tone-deaf or colour-blind, and so on, and just as all of these phenomena have a physiological explanation, in the same way some people are transgender and that has a physiological explanation too.

So that presentation made a great deal of sense to me.

This sound like an interesting listen.
Sapolsky has been well-known for a long time. Years ago, I listened to a bunch of his Stanford lectures about human behavior. (I also watched and listened to him talking about his field work with baboons.)
He was even on the Joe Rogan podcast years ago, before Rogan became a total shill sellout for the right.
Here's a link to the Sapolsky lectures I mentioned. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9 ... 949691B199

Evolving wrote:I saw exactly this same item a couple of weeks ago on YouTube. Don't know whether this is sheer coincidence, or whether this chap is suddenly popular and is therefore being recommended a lot. Whatever: I found it a fascinating watch; and like many things, at the end I felt, well, actually, this is exactly what one should have expected. (See my signature down below.)

He has always had quite a large lay following, I think because he's such a typical hippie style professor, but I think in recent years he's spent more time on public communication through t'net.

Evolving wrote:The observed phenomenon is that a small but consistent minority of humans are transgender, in the sense that they insist - passionately - that their gender is not that which their biological sex would suggest. Their brains experience themselves as the opposite sex to their physical bodies.

Surely, this phenomenon must have an objective cause - a neurophysiological cause. What's the alternative explanation? That all of these people are suffering from the same delusion? What would cause such a delusion, consistently over the entire time during which this phenomenon has been observed, and affecting consistently a small but significant percentage of humans? Surely it's far more reasonable to expect that, just as some people are left-handed, some people ginger-haired, some people tone-deaf or colour-blind, and so on, and just as all of these phenomena have a physiological explanation, in the same way some people are transgender and that has a physiological explanation too.

So that presentation made a great deal of sense to me.

Not just humans, but many animals too, and we wouldn't suppose they're doing it for a laugh, or for a political reason, or for any of the contrived explain-aways concocted by... traditionalists. There's something physical there, whether genetic or developmental, and even if we consider it a 'disorder' in terms of being not what the biological processes were meant to do, people are still genuinely experiencing this as part of who they are - something intrinsic and inalienable to them: an experience most of us can never conceive of, and thus we need to, at the very least, recognize it as being part of the spectrum of what humanity is and accommodate it socially, culturally, legally etc as such.

And sorry, I of course appreciate that you have a much more refined and comprehensive sense of this than me, I don't mean to give granny lessons on egg-slurping!

The_Piper wrote:This sound like an interesting listen.
Sapolsky has been well-known for a long time. Years ago, I listened to a bunch of his Stanford lectures about human behavior. (I also watched and listened to him talking about his field work with baboons.)

I come back and watch this series every couple of years, it's just so good even what... 15 years later?

Proprioception.

That's what my mind wants to talk about when it comes to 'what does it feel like to be X'?

I can't cogently formulate my ideas on it despite having spent a long time pondering it.

However, we know we can sense the extent of our bodies. We know we feel ourselves - our sense of self - to be somewhere inside our cranial cavity. There's some representation of our self that we hold there non-cognitively, but that we can also think about and kind of 'test' - for example by touching the tip of your nose. It's something fundamental to motility in all mobile organisms, but perhaps even precedes that in evolutionary terms; an awareness of what we are as opposed to what we are not.

When we go to the doctors, aside from when we have overt symptoms or, say, a leg that fell off - it's our sense of self and reporting of it that doctors' question first to begin to determine a diagnosis. If someone feels hot despite the temperature being mild, we don't say they're 'wrong' - how can they be wrong if they say they feel hot? Who else can tell them they are or aren't feeling hot? A doctor will certainly take note of that as a means of discovering a physical cause. While we can say that anecdotes are not data in the sense of reporting external events; anecdotal reporting is pretty much the only data we can attain of internal events, of sensory feelings.

That's under the hood somewhere of why I've always believed (well, at least as long as I recall) that if a person who possesses male chromosomes and anatomy says that they don't feel male that this is an inalienable truth to them regardless of whether I can ever hope to share or empathize with it. And if some such people are 'confused' and flit back and forth about their feelings, well that seems perfectly reasonable too given they've grown up in a society that only sees clean binaries. All of it is confusing, and probably should be. Perhaps we all should be a little more confused and open to our own confusion, rather than being unquestioningly certain about a rigid sense of self.

Spearthrower wrote:Proprioception.

That's what my mind wants to talk about when it comes to 'what does it feel like to be X'?

I can't cogently formulate my ideas on it despite having spent a long time pondering it.

However, we know we can sense the extent of our bodies. We know we feel ourselves - our sense of self - to be somewhere inside our cranial cavity. There's some representation of our self that we hold there non-cognitively, but that we can also think about and kind of 'test' - for example by touching the tip of your nose. It's something fundamental to motility in all mobile organisms, but perhaps even precedes that in evolutionary terms; an awareness of what we are as opposed to what we are not.

When we go to the doctors, aside from when we have overt symptoms or, say, a leg that fell off - it's our sense of self and reporting of it that doctors' question first to begin to determine a diagnosis. If someone feels hot despite the temperature being mild, we don't say they're 'wrong' - how can they be wrong if they say they feel hot? Who else can tell them they are or aren't feeling hot? A doctor will certainly take note of that as a means of discovering a physical cause. While we can say that anecdotes are not data in the sense of reporting external events; anecdotal reporting is pretty much the only data we can attain of internal events, of sensory feelings.

That's under the hood somewhere of why I've always believed (well, at least as long as I recall) that if a person who possesses male chromosomes and anatomy says that they don't feel male that this is an inalienable truth to them regardless of whether I can ever hope to share or empathize with it. And if some such people are 'confused' and flit back and forth about their feelings, well that seems perfectly reasonable too given they've grown up in a society that only sees clean binaries. All of it is confusing, and probably should be. Perhaps we all should be a little more confused and open to our own confusion, rather than being unquestioningly certain about a rigid sense of self.

Whether one feels hot or cold are both points of self-reference in that no external reference is required to make that decision.
On the other hand, one must examine external behaviour and definitions etc. to decide whether one feels like a male or female.

I don't know much about gender issues/studies, but this realisation makes me seriously doubt whether one 'feeling male/female' is an innate quality.

jamest wrote:
Whether one feels hot or cold are both points of self-reference in that no external reference is required to make that decision.
On the other hand, one must examine external behaviour and definitions etc. to decide whether one feels like a male or female.

How so?

Do you mean one must exist as a subject in a society in order to determine how one feels relative to societal expectations?

Spearthrower wrote:

The_Piper wrote:This sound like an interesting listen.
Sapolsky has been well-known for a long time. Years ago, I listened to a bunch of his Stanford lectures about human behavior. (I also watched and listened to him talking about his field work with baboons.)

I come back and watch this series every couple of years, it's just so good even what... 15 years later?

Yeah the videos are 12 years old. I've rewatched a few, but I'm going to go through the series again. So many valuable insights that I'm bound to have forgotten some over the years.

The_Piper wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:

The_Piper wrote:This sound like an interesting listen.
Sapolsky has been well-known for a long time. Years ago, I listened to a bunch of his Stanford lectures about human behavior. (I also watched and listened to him talking about his field work with baboons.)

I come back and watch this series every couple of years, it's just so good even what... 15 years later?

Yeah the videos are 12 years old. I've rewatched a few, but I'm going to go through the series again. So many valuable insights that I'm bound to have forgotten some over the years.

He's got a new book out next month, I believe, which is surely going to stir up some discussion.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/book ... -sapolsky/

Determined: Life Without Free Will


ETA: there are quite a few courses available online - I'll update a thread I made some time ago to add these!

Spearthrower wrote:

jamest wrote:
Whether one feels hot or cold are both points of self-reference in that no external reference is required to make that decision.
On the other hand, one must examine external behaviour and definitions etc. to decide whether one feels like a male or female.

How so?

Do you mean one must exist as a subject in a society in order to determine how one feels relative to societal expectations?

Male and female seem to me to be concepts determined/defined by observation and thought - social constructs. I mean, without observational reference and interaction with my society and its language, I wouldn't even be aware of these different states of being. Even if I did not conform and said that I feel like a woman, then that decision has still been made after observation of and interaction with 'things' external to my own being. I would have decided that I feel like a woman because it would seem, after reflection, that I think and behave like most females I observe appear to think and behave.

To say that feeling like a man or woman is an innate quality is to say that one can have these feelings without any reference whatsoever to the external world. I don't actually think that this is possible, because there is no feeling of X without an understanding of Y, such that an understanding of Y would have to be an innate quality also.

If you want to go down that road then it's time to join my cult.

Of course, feeling hot or cold is dramatically simpler than feeling something relative to a social arena, but how can an exothermic organism understand feeling cold without experiencing an external calibration? Our thermoregulatory systems keep us at 'body temperature' unless we are in an environment that causes us to increase or decrease in heat. Had you been born and raised in Dallol in northern Ethiopia, for example, you'd never have experienced a sensation of cold previously so would not be clear about such a sensation if it happened. There is a layer of socio-cultural reference too, but of course, it's nowhere near as complicated as an explicitly social reference.

If you want to go down that road then it's time to join my cult.

Do me a favour and keep this kind of vapid nonsense out of this thread, please.

Spearthrower wrote:Of course, feeling hot or cold is dramatically simpler than feeling something relative to a social arena, but how can an exothermic organism understand feeling cold without experiencing an external calibration? Our thermoregulatory systems keep us at 'body temperature' unless we are in an environment that causes us to increase or decrease in heat. Had you been born and raised in Dallol in northern Ethiopia, for example, you'd never have experienced a sensation of cold previously so would not be clear about such a sensation if it happened. There is a layer of socio-cultural reference too, but of course, it's nowhere near as complicated as an explicitly social reference.

You can feel hot or cold without knowing or understanding what's happening to you externally. Even in places such as the one that you mention, there are varying degrees of heat or 'hotness' such that the concept could be understood in isolation of coldness, which might later yield definitions ranging from warm to extremely hot.

I don't think that you can feel male or female without having any external knowledge to the extent that acquiring external understanding and definitions must come prior to any such feeling.

The only way that 'feeling like X as opposed to Y' can be an innate quality, is if understanding Y is also an innate quality. And though you didn't like my cult joke, the point being made is a serious one: if a baby knows from the onset what it feels like to be [say] female, then it must also know from the onset what it is to be male. And I don't see how that can be reconciled with the predominant worldview here.

jamest wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:Of course, feeling hot or cold is dramatically simpler than feeling something relative to a social arena, but how can an exothermic organism understand feeling cold without experiencing an external calibration? Our thermoregulatory systems keep us at 'body temperature' unless we are in an environment that causes us to increase or decrease in heat. Had you been born and raised in Dallol in northern Ethiopia, for example, you'd never have experienced a sensation of cold previously so would not be clear about such a sensation if it happened. There is a layer of socio-cultural reference too, but of course, it's nowhere near as complicated as an explicitly social reference.

You can feel hot or cold without knowing or understanding what's happening to you externally. Even in places such as the one that you mention, there are varying degrees of heat or 'hotness' such that the concept could be understood in isolation of coldness, which might later yield definitions ranging from warm to extremely hot.

Varying degrees of warmth doesn't equate to experiencing cold - even my partner never experienced cold until she moved to Bangkok in her 20's. Of course, she knew the concept of it because of society, because the word was in her language. But knowing word X and experiencing X are not the same thing.

She's still never experienced sufficient cold to induce shivers. It's a purely conceptual notion reported to her by society. That's a strange thing to think about.

jamest wrote:I don't think that you can feel male or female without having any external knowledge to the extent that acquiring external understanding and definitions must come prior to any such feeling.

It's not that I disagree, but I think it's not really much of a point as this is essentially true of everything - human cognition is a product of human sociality as much as it is of genes. As already said, I think that gender is a vastly more complex feeling than a more basal one like coldness - my analogy wasn't intended to suggest the two are functionally equivalent, but to provide a model of how feelings can't be dismissed as 'wrong'.

Feeling male or female is related to the environment you're in because society categorizes in a binary of either/or and typifies both by a suite of expectations, duties, characteristics etc which are cultural rather than biological. But throughout history, people have been recognized as neither/nor all across the world, in different cultures and at different times. Modern neuroscience is showing that there is a biological basis for this, it's not just societal and about societal typology, but an internal divergence too. For example, as per the talk above, there are plenty of chromosomal arrangements that are not categorizable by binary assortments. If such people report feeling different to societal expectations and there is a physical basis showing that some elements of their physiology do not conform to that binary, then I think it suggestive that, regardless of exactly how society categorizes male/female, their apparent sex is not determinable by outward observable characteristics like the possession of penis or vagina, facial hair or tits. Society got it wrong by over-simplifying leaving a sense of dysphoria in those not fitting into the physiological or societal characteristics.

jamest wrote:The only way that 'feeling like X as opposed to Y' can be an innate quality, is if understanding Y is also an innate quality. And though you didn't like my cult joke, the point being made is a serious one: if a baby knows from the onset what it feels like to be [say] female, then it must also know from the onset what it is to be male. And I don't see how that can be reconciled with the predominant worldview here.

Why would a baby feel like either sex? That seems completely irrelevant to me.

Have you actually watched the video above at all?

Spearthrower wrote:
Varying degrees of warmth doesn't equate to experiencing cold

True, but it still facilitates the conceptualisation of hotness/heat even devoid of the knowledge of coldness. Hence, the feeling of being hot precedes the definition/measure (external discourse). That is, to experience heat is an innate quality/ability.

Conversely, it seems to me that you cannot experience being male/female until after you have understood what it is to be male/female, which would mean that the feeling is not innate.

- even my partner never experienced cold until she moved to Bangkok in her 20's. Of course, she knew the concept of it because of society, because the word was in her language. But knowing word X and experiencing X are not the same thing.

She's still never experienced sufficient cold to induce shivers. It's a purely conceptual notion reported to her by society. That's a strange thing to think about.

Very strange indeed. Embarrassingly, I didn't even know such places exist.

jamest wrote:I don't think that you can feel male or female without having any external knowledge to the extent that acquiring external understanding and definitions must come prior to any such feeling.

It's not that I disagree, but I think it's not really much of a point as this is essentially true of everything - human cognition is a product of human sociality as much as it is of genes.

A newborn can experience/feel many things whilst having zero knowledge of its external world. Therefore, we can say that these abilities/feelings are innate and not contingent upon any social construct. However, imo it is almost impossible to argue that feeling male/female is one of those innate qualities for the reasons I have expressed.

As already said, I think that gender is a vastly more complex feeling than a more basal one like coldness - my analogy wasn't intended to suggest the two are functionally equivalent, but to provide a model of how feelings can't be dismissed as 'wrong'.

I wasn't sure what your motives were, but for me your words sparked a train of thought which made me realise that we cannot be born with an innate feeling of being male/female, which I consider to be important wrt the thread's apparent subject matter.

jamest wrote:The only way that 'feeling like X as opposed to Y' can be an innate quality, is if understanding Y is also an innate quality. And though you didn't like my cult joke, the point being made is a serious one: if a baby knows from the onset what it feels like to be [say] female, then it must also know from the onset what it is to be male. And I don't see how that can be reconciled with the predominant worldview here.

Why would a baby feel like either sex? That seems completely irrelevant to me.

My discussion with you here was based upon what you said in post 6 about what it is like to not feel male after comparing such feelings to being hot and elsewhere (post 4) where you used the word "intrinsic" which essentially means innate.

I confess that I have not watched the video, but I'm not here commenting upon the content of that video.

I've probably made my point by now, so I won't bug you any more.

Conversely, it seems to me that you cannot experience being male/female until after you have understood what it is to be male/female, which would mean that the feeling is not innate.

Again, this seems entirely pointless to me.

What feelings are innate in the sense that they occur in the absence of an external environment?

I confess that I have not watched the video, but I'm not here commenting upon the content of that video.

Watch it jamest. This thread is about that video, and that video is about the most up to date biological understanding of gender, specifically of the brain. Unless you happen to have been studying the neurosciences recently, there is so much you don't know but would need to in order to make an informed analysis.

My discussion with you here was based upon what you said in post 6 about what it is like to not feel male after comparing such feelings to being hot and elsewhere (post 4) where you used the word "intrinsic" which essentially means innate.

And I told you twice already, that my analogy of feeling hot and cold was to do with a limitation of knowledge about what a subject is feeling, such that doctors will use anecdotal reporting to lead their diagnosis of a physical treatment. I've since told you several times that your comparison isn't really useful. Plus, intrinsic and innate do not necessarily mean the same thing (intrinsic was used to mean 'extremely important characteristic' not 'built in from birth'), and my usage was regarding feeling, and how feelings are intrinsic and inalienable. You can't just take one word I said somewhere and attach it to something else I was talking about.

jamest wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:Proprioception.

That's what my mind wants to talk about when it comes to 'what does it feel like to be X'?

I can't cogently formulate my ideas on it despite having spent a long time pondering it.

However, we know we can sense the extent of our bodies. We know we feel ourselves - our sense of self - to be somewhere inside our cranial cavity. There's some representation of our self that we hold there non-cognitively, but that we can also think about and kind of 'test' - for example by touching the tip of your nose. It's something fundamental to motility in all mobile organisms, but perhaps even precedes that in evolutionary terms; an awareness of what we are as opposed to what we are not.

When we go to the doctors, aside from when we have overt symptoms or, say, a leg that fell off - it's our sense of self and reporting of it that doctors' question first to begin to determine a diagnosis. If someone feels hot despite the temperature being mild, we don't say they're 'wrong' - how can they be wrong if they say they feel hot? Who else can tell them they are or aren't feeling hot? A doctor will certainly take note of that as a means of discovering a physical cause. While we can say that anecdotes are not data in the sense of reporting external events; anecdotal reporting is pretty much the only data we can attain of internal events, of sensory feelings.

That's under the hood somewhere of why I've always believed (well, at least as long as I recall) that if a person who possesses male chromosomes and anatomy says that they don't feel male that this is an inalienable truth to them regardless of whether I can ever hope to share or empathize with it. And if some such people are 'confused' and flit back and forth about their feelings, well that seems perfectly reasonable too given they've grown up in a society that only sees clean binaries. All of it is confusing, and probably should be. Perhaps we all should be a little more confused and open to our own confusion, rather than being unquestioningly certain about a rigid sense of self.

Whether one feels hot or cold are both points of self-reference in that no external reference is required to make that decision.
On the other hand, one must examine external behaviour and definitions etc. to decide whether one feels like a male or female.

... or something inbetween or beyond the boundaries of m/f.

I don't know much about gender issues/studies, but this realisation makes me seriously doubt whether one 'feeling male/female' is an innate quality.

For 'innate' do you mean 'physiological'?

Identity is complex and multifaceted. It's the kind of question which is asked constantly yet never receives a definitive answer.

Like everyone, you have many identities that shift around, come-and-go depending on different contexts and factors that feed into your sense of who and what you are at any given time.

There's similar variabilities in how we identify others and/or identify with others, and how we are identified by others.

Identity is a subjective realm whatever angle we come at it from, and yet the vehicle of our incorrigible, personal subjectivity is necessarily our physiology - our neurology, our neurochemical processes, our responses and reactions to stimuli, our emotions, our perception etc, all of which are mitigated by our bodies in things we call experiences and then communicated to ourselves and to others in the form of ideas.

So our variable, fluid, subjective ideas about who and what we are are rooted in the objective, physical realm of our anatomy, and as a species our anatomy overwhelmingly falls into one of two discrete body-types: male and female.

Is anything there controversial?

The difficulties around the gender debate, as presented by self-described 'gender critical' objectors to trans*, are founded in an assumption that the objective fact of our personal body-type (basically, our genitals) not only does, but indeed should, always govern our subjective experiences and ideas about who and what we are.

Moreover, gender criticals maintain that the terms male and female, along with a lot of reinforcing gendered language (Mum, Dad, him, her etc), don't just represent one of the two permissible objective identities but in fact do, and should, determine or direct our identity, both for ourselves and, importantly, for how others identify us and relate to us.

On the whole, gender criticals are not gender-fluid or gender non-conforming. As with the vast majority of our fellow humans, the exclusive physiological categories of male/female unequivocally represent and reflect a fundamental or foundational element of óur identity: our sense and understanding of who and what we are as man and women/girls and boys.

Male/Female body-types therefore become an important component of how gender criticals identify themselves and how they would like others to identify them and to relate to them. In this regard they are predominantly, though not exclusively, cisgendered, and their identities as men/women are represented and reflected in social norms which endorse the notion that the binaries of male/female are mutually exclusive and non-traversable.

However, what marks out the gender critical from other 'normal' men and women is their ideological refusal to acknowledge the subjective elements of a person's identity, and instead to focus completely and exclusively on the objective physiological categories. In essence, gender criticals reduce a person's identity down to their genitals.

Gender criticals take the apparent normalcy of their personal identity, as defined by their genitals, and use it to justify (and perhaps impose) a normative standard which demands that everyone identify themselves by their genitals, or, if a person has had their genitals removed or transformed surgically, by the genitals they had at birth.

When gender criticals talk about "biological sex" this is what they mean - they mean "genitals at birth", and are figuratively and quite literally talking a load of cock.

Now imagine a person whose ideas and sense of who and what they are does not conform to the strict, physiological conditionality through which gender criticals claim they derive their own identity, and by which they demand everyone else should. There is literally no place for trans* and gender non-conforming identies (people) in the gender critical framework.

Gender criticals fail not only to acknowledge the subjective elements of everyone's identity, but they explicitly disallow it. What a person thinks and feels about themselves is irrelevant: a person's genitals at birth are the only accountable factor by which to legitimise any person's identity; you are either a man or a woman, and nothing does or can exist between or beyond those strict, impermeable boundaries.

This strikes me as a rather distorted, not to mention a grossly impoverished view of humanity; of what people are and can be.

The gender critical's views are also deeply, tragically ironic, because in denying the legitimacy of subjective experience and ideas in informing us about our personal selves they invalidate the inner lives of everyone, including themselves.

However, in practice they do not apply the same strict physiological, subjective-denying conditionality to themselves as they apply to others, because it is their thoughts and feeling about themselves and others that are brought to inform a debate in which the thoughts and feelings of trans* are discounted and objective genitourinary 'facts' prioritised. By such works they also render themselves bigots.

THWOTH wrote:
For 'innate' do you mean 'physiological'?

Identity is complex and multifaceted...

To be clear, I have no problem with people identifying themselves however they like as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else. I only joined the discussion because I am of the opinion that however one feels about one's identity, the claim that it is intrinsic to their being (innate) is highly problematical from my rational perspective.

However, I do acknowledge that we are born with specific innate qualities (including perhaps a base personality which will determine how we will think about and emotionalize our lives wrt the external world) and that some of these qualities may indeed contribute to how one eventually feels about its identity. However, I do think that a specific outcome to that process is not inevitable and probably highly contingent upon the society and interactions that one will experience. Indeed, the quality of one's experiences may perhaps be sufficient enough to change one's 'base personality'. I'm thinking about abused kids or war, for instance. In such instances, how one identifies oneself may lead to an entirely different outcome.

The bottom-line, imo, is that any identity gleaned and then 'felt' relative to things within experience cannot be labelled as intrinsic or innate. Though I do accept that the issue is indeed complex and multifaceted.