(Sorry for the giant break in this series… life happened!)
People are often seriously confused about social construction.
Socially constructed things are not less real than non-socially-constructed things. Money is a social construct: if everyone woke up one morning and decided that those little pieces of green paper were completely worthless, dollars would rapidly become only useful for ass-wiping purposes. However, if you decide that because money is a social construction you should be able to take as many items from stores as you like, the government (itself a social construction!) would probably send some nice people with guns after you.
Second, postmodernists and strawman versions of postmodernists, “reality is socially constructed” does not mean that trees only exist because everyone collectively agrees that trees exist. That is stupid. If everyone was adendronist, the trees would still exist happily photosynthesizing away. However, if a culture didn’t view “trees” as a meaningful concept, but classified “evergreens” and “non-evergreens” as separate categories, then for that culture trees do not exist, even though woody plants with secondary branches and a trunk do.
To understand how social construction works, imagine a man with some degree of attraction to men and women. In ancient Greece, he would have conceived of himself as an erastes, a lover of young boys who took the active, dominant and penetrating role. In Elizabethan England, he would have conceived of himself as a sodomite, a person who chose to commit the sin of male/male sex. Today, depending on his social group, he might think of himself as bisexual, pansexual, struggling with same-sex attraction, gay (by the “one drop” rule of homosexuality), homoflexible or simply queer.
Each of these different labels causes different behavior. A man who identifies as gay will probably not have sex with women, while a man who identifies as bisexual probably will. A man who identifies as pansexual or queer is more likely to be okay with dating people of a wide variety of gender presentations, performances or identities than a man who doesn’t. A man who sees himself as struggling with same-sex attraction might be celibate or seek out an ex-gay ministry. The erastes would have viewed teenage boys as the ultimate in desirability and would have almost certainly married a woman regardless of his actual preferences.
The attraction is the same; the behavior, mediated through social ideas, is not the same.
And now it’s time to mention, for the first time in this giantass series for a gender egalitarian blog, gender.
It is pretty clear that there are some aspects of gender that are biological, and some aspects of gender that are socially constructed. The “pink is for girls” thing, for instance, is socially constructed; however, men being taller than women is biological. However, a lot of other issues are far thornier.
Women and men have different brain structures. The hormonal arrangement of men and women is different; anecdotally, some trans people have reported personality changes once taking hormones. It seems implausible in the extreme that these would have absolutely no effect on men or women whatsoever.
On the other hand, we do know that some things about gender are cultural. For instance, some traits are different cross-culturally: in American culture, we have the Myth of Men Not Being Hot, while the Wodaabe have beauty contests for their men.
Besides, it would be simply bizarre to think the massive amount of gendered shit people go through for their entire lives has no effect on their personality. Gender role socialization begins at birth— parents will literally rate their children as littler, softer and finer-featured if they are female than if they are male, even when the children show no difference on objective scales.
As they grow older, children often become more insistent about their gender around preschool age (although whether that’s natural or a product of gender socialization who knows– and even many cis children may go through a period of insisting they are another gender and/or Batman) and may adopt more stereotypically gendered traits. Children of one gender may not realize that the toys or games of another gender is even an option. In addition, standard operant conditioning takes place: if you get parental and peer approval for playing football and bullied and shunned for playing with dolls, you will probably end up disliking dolls.
And that’s not even getting into complicated stuff like stereotype threat.
So by the time someone is ten years old, they’ve had years and years of gender shit in their heads.
At this point, I’m a gender differences agnostic, because I feel that is the most intellectually honest position. I figure that it’s probably not all biological, and it’s probably not all social, but which any particular trait is I will find out when the neuroscience comes in. Nevertheless, I still believe in reducing gender socialization as much as possible for one reason.
Regardless of the origin of the differences– men and women are far more alike than they are different.
Consider upper-body strength. It’s a bit hard to figure out how men could have been socialized into having more upper body strength, so that’s clearly primarily biological. However, there are female Olympic athletes and male couch potatoes, and we can clearly agree that a woman who can lift three times her body weight is a “real” woman, the same way that a man who only lifts the tortilla chip bag is still a “real” man. And if we decided that couch potato dude should have to carry the table when we move because men are stronger than women…
Well.
A lot of gender differences in our society are couch-carrying differences. Men might be more aggressive than women, but that doesn’t mean we should pressure men who are not aggressive into being more so. Women might have lower sex drives than men, but that doesn’t make slut shaming okay. These bell curves overlap one hell of a lot, and I disapprove of anything that makes life more miserable for a bunch of people for no reason.
Also, I’m kinda pissed because I never got action figures as a kid, and I would have totally loved Hulk fists with Real! Punching! ACTION!!!!
@Schala: Read my second paragraph. I outright said I was staying the hell away from the morality/ethics side of the topic, and merely disagreeing with the idea that using hormone blockers to delay puberty was somehow not medical intervention, while allowing the body’s hormonal processes to continue uninfluenced by medicine somehow was medical intervention. It is and is not, respectively. By definition. I said absolutely nothing about the morality or ethics of such a choice. Your cancer example is certainly a good one in which the explicit lack of medical intervention leads to a fatal result. Any case in which… Read more »
Not altering it when you know it’s the good thing to do for that person, and something that person wants, to boot. Is also medical intervention.
Like letting you die of a small ungeneralized cancer without trying anything, despite your requests that something be tried. It’s also very infuriating.
@Schala: Hormone blockers are the LACK of medical intervention. Unfortunately, words mean things: in·ter·ven·tion /ˌintərˈvenSHən/ Noun: The action or process of intervening. intervening present participle of in·ter·vene (Verb) Verb: Come between so as to prevent or alter a result or course of events. (of an event or circumstance) Occur as a delay or obstacle to something being done. Acting to prevent or alter the course of the body’s natural processes in some fashion is by definition intervening. Administration of medicine is obviously a medical process. Accordingly, administering hormone blockers to delay the body from entering puberty when it intends to… Read more »
When I was a boy I was mistaken for a girl many many times. “Cara linda” is ingrained into my head. When I was a young person, and I’d answer the phone and the person would call me a girl, or miss, or something because of my voice. (My wife was calling one of her friends and her 14 year old son answered the phone and my wife thought it was their 7 year old daughter. It happens). When I was a young man I grew my hair long…and yup, I was thought to be female many times…at the store,… Read more »
No, but that sounds awful! But that’s why I think having two parents around just betters the odds of one being the sane one 🙂
@Jay Generally: I used to have Bride Pony, Baby Whirly Twirl, and one of those off-brand pink unicorns before I graduated high school and mom made me get rid of all my old toys. I’m toying with the idea of getting a new Twilight Sparkle now that it’s holiday buying season. For old times’ sake, and because purple nerdy unicorns are AWESOME. @dungone: Did your mom splint your left hand? That’s what my dad tried when my brother started using “the wrong hand.” Took six weeks before my mom was able to get across that it’s actually OK to be… Read more »
@ SpudTater
I vaguely recall an experiment that was done in France (I think) where they had participants wear glasses that caused their vision to flip upside down. These people had to keep these on for a certain amount of time (probably a week) to see how well their brains adjusted to the reversed input.
as I recall, it worked. They even showed one of the people successfully riding a bike down the street.
@Dungone I wasn’t trying to be like “I had long hair as a kid, people thought I was a girl, what the heck is your problem?” Sorry if it seemed like that. Fact is, I wasn’t actually responding to anything you’d written, I just was skimming the comments saw “long hair on boys” in one of Schala’s comments and thought I’d throw my experience in. @Daisy to be honest, I don’t know how my parents would’ve reacted to somebody calling me a girl. I don’t recall it ever happening in front of them. I like to think my mom wouldn’t’ve… Read more »
but very similar behavior is unlikely to come from very different brain structures. [BlackHumor] No, I completely disagree. One of the things I learnt in computer science is that computation is generic; given enough resources, one computer can simulate any other computer (including, for example, a brain), and this can be mathematically proven. Plus, processing problems are generally commutable; it doesn’t take different hardware to do maths than to do languages. To show that this principle truly applies in a real-world neurological context, I would cite the many examples of people who have had brain damage, and whose brains have… Read more »
@moderators, could you delete that last comment? It somehow posted to the wrong thread. I have no idea how.
Clearly, we must agree to disagree when it comes down to this point. You have a very unusual understanding of what constitutes a medical intervention, but I can see why you are passionate about it. I think that short of bringing a medical ethicist in to weigh in on how doctors should look at it, I suggest we just shelve this discussion. Good points, though, and I think we agree more than we disagree on the problems that kids face, just have some subtle differences in what the solutions should be.
Working in hippie health food stores, I made the gender-mistake countless times. I’ve met lots of little boys with waist-length hair or long dreadlocks, and you reflexively say, “she”–and what gets me is how their parents will snap, HE! Like I was supposed to be able to tell. Did they not realize their kid looked like a girl? Nothing wrong with that, but they would get defensive, and not seem to understand the situation was entirely of their own making. What’s fun is that it works both ways. As much as parents are “OMG, what will people think if they… Read more »
Paul: I had long hair in second grade. I did it because my brothers, who were in High School, had long hair. I got made fun of sometimes, but I don’t remember ever being bothered being mistaken for a girl (and looking at the pictures, I look an awful lot like my niece did when she was that age) In fact, oftentimes if it was a stranger commenting i remember not even bothering to correct them. I didn’t know them, so who cares if they walked away thinking I was a girl? Working in hippie health food stores, I made… Read more »
I really believe that a child should be sure of their gender identity if it is to warrant a medical intervention of any sort. Hormone blockers are the LACK of medical intervention. Providing hormones is intervention, letting puberty take its course is intervention (because yes, puberty is irreversible) – making puberty frozen is NOT taking any medical intervention. Notice those dots? Those are the counts for the individual samples. Do you also notice how the lower 50% of the counts for the men (straight and gay) and the upper 50% for the women (cis and trans) overlap almost completely? I… Read more »
Oh, and: Someone who has not at least started puberty yet should not medically transition, because little children often want to be something (such as the other sex) without any actual weight behind it. It’s the same way that kids want to be dinosaurs or princesses or whatever; a young boy (gender chosen arbitrarily) does not really comprehend the difference between “I’d like to be able to wear dresses” and “I want to be a woman full stop”. I know plenty of genderqueer people DID, actually, know they wanted to be the other sex as a kid, and I sympathize… Read more »
@Schala: Here’s the study that post cited. I want to draw your attention to this graph. Notice those dots? Those are the counts for the individual samples. Do you also notice how the lower 50% of the counts for the men (straight and gay) and the upper 50% for the women (cis and trans) overlap almost completely? There’s a considerable average difference, but saying that “high counts mean man and low counts mean women” is bullshit. It’s like height; if I told you someone I knew was 6 feet tall you might reasonably GUESS that it’s a man, but hopefully… Read more »
@Schala, I consider my childhood be a permanent and very formative aspect of my life here on this planet. I can’t go back and undo it, change it around, figure out how I might have done things differently and try again. I would give up my 20’s or my 30’s or my 40’s to some lost cause much more readily than I would give up my teenage years. I spent the majority of my 20’s as a Marine in Iraq and I don’t find that nearly as important to where I am now as the stuff that happened when I… Read more »
I’m too angry to really reply.
Let’s just say that implants are permanent, delaying hormones is not permanent, unless you fucking remove the gonads.
@Schala, let me put it this way. I’m against delaying puberty for an 11 year old for the same exact reasons that I’m against performing breast implants for an 11 year old, which is for the same exact reason that I’m against performing a circumcision on an infant. When the kid turns 18, he can do whatever he or she wants. I will only say that in the case of trans, I would find it acceptable to use the therapy if the child is sure that they need to make a change from the natural course of things. I have… Read more »
Except, again, there are plenty of cis men with “female” BSTc counts, and plenty of cis women with “male” BSTc counts. Where is this from? Citation needed, not from that blog. From studies. And INAH 1 or 3 is not BSTc. We need neuron numbers, and count. Also, given nobody was EVER diagnosed post-mortem using this method of counting brain neurons or measuring size, I fail to see how this is relevant. The diagnosis is often self-made, and then confirmed later by hormones (if hormones feel bad, they are stopped). You could say that every person that knew they were… Read more »
@ Schala “penis = masculine, likes trucks, duh” That one got me. XD I lol’d. It’s a rather simplistic version of the story I felt I was being told and failing to perform. @ The L My mother collected unicorns, and she started buying My Little Pony unicorns because they were cute but less expensize than glass, ceramic or pewter options she couldn’t afford. Her friends saw the collection, thought she was collecting the ponies, and kept buying her non-unicorn ponies. Since she knew I was an action figure junkie, she’d give me the non-unicorn ponies. I wanna say only… Read more »
Since the kid decides, yes. I’m saying that. Screw people who think this is nuts.
The parents brings the kid there, at best (very often it’s not at 11, if you get my drift – parents are generally not that supportive), they don’t get to decide.
So, unless you’re on the fence (genderqueer, agender, etc), yes, it’s solely responsible. Except, again, there are plenty of cis men with “female” BSTc counts, and plenty of cis women with “male” BSTc counts. @BlackHumor: I disagree with the notion that different brain structures would necessarily cause great differences in behaviour. The brain is, after all, a computer, and different computers can run the same software. (Disclaimer: AI graduate here…) Technically true, but I would say it’s really the other way around. Great differences in behavior might come from very similar brain structures, but very similar behavior is unlikely to… Read more »
It’s an hormone agonist. It delays puberty, it doesn’t prevent or kill it. It’s like extending childhood if you prefer. No hurt no foul when you’re adult – especially if it prevented the wrong kind of puberty long enough to figure it out. No, what it is is a social experiment performed on a child. An 11 year old child is not prepared to know what his or her life will be like when he is 16 and the sort of social dynamic that he would have to fit into. I don’t actually know if it’s acceptable for a parent… Read more »
By the way YOU brought up the “but hormone blockers!!!”, I was responding to that, saying it was extremely improbable, even for your mother.