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Inclusive Dialogues: Feminism and Transgender
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There are a bunch but it's medical stuff (amount of blood, levels of hormones, likelihood of getting osteoporosis/genetic diseases etc) and so it's unlikely to come up outside of a hospital.
As someone who is in a hospital it'd make me a lot less worried if hospital charts had "sex" and "gender" rather than just "gender", since it's my job to interpret all those levels and values. Fingers crossed that society becomes more inclusive.
His twin brother also committed suicide IIRC.
John Money's body of work is still taught in psychology, albeit as a mixed-cautionary tale, but he is hardly vilified the way he should be.
-edit-
And really, there's still a disturbing number of people in various science fields who continue to insist there is no biological basis for gender. Note: "biological basis" =/= genitals (I shouldn't even have to say this, yet I do). We don't know what the biological basis for gender is, but the idea that it's purely a learned thing is just flat out wrong. People can argue until their jaws get tired about where biology ends and social programming begins, but it starts with biology.
I presume you're familiar with the concept of sexual dimorphism. Because "boiling it down to plumbing" is half the problem with how transgender people are treated. The cock wasn't even the worst source of dysphoria for me, it only became a big issue after working through other bits. In no particular order:
-Breasts. This is especially a thing for FTMs, as having two lumps of flesh that shouldn't be there is kind of disturbing, but the lack is a problem for MTFs as well.
-Body hair distribution
-General body build. People on T develop in a somewhat different way than people on E- height profile, ease and type of muscle, fat distribution...
-Mental hormonal effects. This one exists but is sort of hard to quantify. My brain straight up does not functional well on testosterone.
-Downstairs bits: It's not just peeing. Sex is a major thing, of course, and for MTFs erections. For many MTFs, the testicles as well- random body part you aren't supposed to have, that moves and is injured in weird ways. Again, body part not functioning the way you expect causes issues.
-etc.
If you want to condense it, running on estrogen is very different from running on testosterone, and if you're set up for one having the other sucks.
What is the thing for which there is a biological basis? Say we have a gender category of "masculine".
Masculine Gender Traits
What is the step in that digression for which biology is responsible, rather than social conditioning? Is the matching of "courage" with "masculine" based in biology? Do any cultures pair "courage" with "feminine"?
This is one of the problem of defining gender as biological. Take this snippet from the wikipedia page on masculinity: "Traits traditionally cited as masculine include courage, independence, and assertiveness, though traits associated with masculinity vary depending on location and context, and are influenced by a variety of social and cultural factors."
If the traits of masculinity change depending on location, context, society, and culture, then in what sense is masculinity biological?
I like it.
Now we need to get everyone to talk this way. Not feminism, but estrogenism.
Gender having a biological basis is not the same thing as making a list of traits and labeling it "male" and another list for female.
Regardless of how problematic the squiggly little essence of "what defines a gender" may be, it's what we're left with since tabula rasa has been so tragically disproved. So it's problematic, sure fine whatever. The answer to this being problematic was, for a long time "well it's all socialization then!" because that fit neatly into the little narrative that people were constructing.
But guess what? It can't be social programming, there's a trail of ruined lives that prove it isn't. So yeah that leaves you with the "problem". I don't have an answer, but I can tell you what is not the answer.
Somewhere, something, somehow, is based in our biology. It probably isn't binary, and it almost certainly doesn't have anything to do with childhood toy or color preference, but there's something intrinsic that makes the vast majority of us feel one way or another (whether that feeling matches our junk or not).
WARNING: Layperson's understanding of sexual development as it relates to chromosomes, hormones and sexually differentiated tissue development ahead:
Over time form what I've looked at, we're definitely finding evidence that can support a biological basis, but we're talking neurological development. This has lead to theories that the origin of transgender gender identity being a result of prenatal androgen exposure, both in dosage and timing*, if memory serves. Where this comes into play primarily is that, if I understand correctly, as the body develops different parts at different times, while you may get an androgen wash "correctly" (let us assume for the purposes of this discussion that "correctly" is in relation to producing a normative sexual development) at one point, this may not necessarily be the case when, say, the brain is forming. So the brain, which we've discovered to also be sexually differentiated in it's various parts, develops along a course that is closer to what we classify as female development.** I'm not entirely sure what the mechanisms involved are that cause this detour from the normative course of development, however, or what essentially triggers the androgen wash in the case of a fetus that is XX.
*the very short gist is, outside of gonadal development into testes, your sex chromosomes don't determine sexual development but are merely sort of signals regulating androgen washes during pregnancy; XY (or more specifically just the specific SRY gene on the Y chromosome) is supposed to be the go signal for androgen washes, but this is not a perfect process. The normative result is an androgen wash that exposes the cells of the body to androgens and thus masculinizes them, but if timing is off, dosage is off or if the person in question has an androgen insensitivity, the result is that the cells will develop along what we classify as female development instead (since female is basically the default expression).
**I thiiiiiiink the white matter study I read about found that in transmen, white matter was almost, if not exactly, in the ranges relating to normative, cisgender male subjects, while transwomen had white matter that fell kind of between the two normative ranges, closer to the normative, cisgender female subjects. Someone correct me if I'm not remembering this study right though, please.
I feel like this is like... really roughly explained and is kind of boiling down two years worth of stuff I've picked up over reading various articles on the subject over the last said two years.
Here's that study, and yes, your summary is fairly correct.
That seems to jive with the what people are saying about sexual orientation. They looked for the "gay gene" it wasn't there. Years pass, science accumulates, we begin to realize there are all these things happening during development that aren't genetic, they're hormonal, and they have a profound impact on the developing fetus.
I think we'll figure it out eventually. In the meantime we absolutely need to disabuse parents of the notion that they are going to make their kids gay or trans if they give them the wrong god damned toy (and even worse, that they can "correct" a queer-seeming child by going all jackboots hyper-gender with clothing, toys etc). All these things are fixed way before parenting comes into play.
Well.
Sort of.
When they're not causing things that are extremely stressful and anxiety inducing. But I'll stop there so I don't become a downer.
I'd argue as well in addition to that, while perhaps a bit of a digression from topic, the need to ban "reparative" therapies to try and "de-gay" and "de-trans" kids, since all you're going to do is fuck things up further.
As well, advocating for the ability and acceptance of delaying puberty in the instances of kids who are displaying signs of having a transgender gender identity, given that it's a fuck ton easier to simply go off hormone blockers (and so far there hasn't been evidence pointing to harm in utilizing them to hold off puberty) than it is to compensate around the changes puberty's hormones cause.
Thanks :O
That said, all this is also the reason that when, say, the rights of transfolks pops up in the news and you get the conservative assholes and the TERFs talking about "Biology" I want to fucking scream and heavily contemplate finally putting together a goddamn press kit that just has the word "BIOLOGY" stamped on it that contains all this stuff, because our outlets don't seem to have even a loose grasp on this stuff despite these issues gaining more and more attention in the mainstream
So. Yeah.
Lazy neuroscientists.
Right?
Those dorks.
There's an ironic overlap between the people who argue against gay/trans acceptance on the grounds of "natural biology" and the people who largely deny scientific study wholesale.
No, what we need are some transgender crayfish to dissect.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Reminds me, MIT just developed some new interface prototypes that, while invasive to a degree, are supposed to be less damanging/disruptive than previous implants. Of course, it's for delivering drugs and getting stimulus back in treating things like Parkinson's, but still:
http://www.engadget.com/2015/01/26/flexible-fiber-brain-implant/
[I should probably cross post this into the implants thread :V]
EDIT: Fixed up some phrasing there to be a bit less dramtic
Is there a mouse analog?
There will never really be an animal model, since transsexualism is a pretty high-level thing. You can make intersexed mice, but like... what behaviors do you look for in a trans mouse? The question doesn't really make sense.
Or is it unique to Humans?
Posting indignantly on Tumblr
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Speciesism.
I had not thought about distinguishing sex from gender roles in non-human animals. If we take the continuum idea seriously, transgender mental states in those entities makes sense....assuming non-human animals have an "assigned" sex. That opens a whole new can of worms, which is not meant as a disparaging comment about worms.
We're not super well-equipped to consider animals in this way, and we can't really assume that it applies to humans.
The following is, again, my personal opinion and not a description of any mainstream belief:
Above, I said this:
Every single mammal (and, possibly, every animal, though I don't know enough about non-mammal behavior) has evolved some capacity to differentiate males from females. While there are a lot of variations in sexual dimorphism and sexual behavior, mammals, for the most part, don't have difficulty figuring out how to mate. Yes, I recognize that same-sex or sex-reversed sexual behaviors like mounting are pretty common, too, but it's not as though mammals are figuring this out by trial and error. There's some deep instinct, common to all mammals (and probably other animals too) that gives us effectively a priori knowledge that girls and boys exist and are different.
I think that the instinct that says "I'm a boy, and girls are different" is something that we inherited from distant evolutionary ancestors. But how can we possibly inherit an instinct like that, since the exact cues that tell boys from girls are so different from species to species? That instinct must accept a wide range of input; we look for early-life cues or more-recently-evolved markers like color or scent. In humans, we look for secondary sexual characteristics and sexual behavioral dimorphism (aka, gender roles).
If my model remotely resembles reality (and I have no way of testing it at the moment, given that, y'know, I work IT for a bank and not in a research lab) then that would imply that whatever causes transgender identities in humans may have an analog in other mammals. We just don't have any way of detecting it yet.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Now we're in my wheelhouse.
I thought you might appreciate that, you filthy rationalist.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Highly complex social issues may be summed up in a play, but that summation will loose much of the complexity and thus will not be representative of everything in those societal issues.
Which is a fancy way of saying "Don't let the Vagina Monologues be the one and only flagship for feminism."
But what would happen if you had two women or two men grow up on an isolated island together with no outside contact? I'm betting one would assume a more dominant role, and one a more submissive role, to the point that an outside observer would be inclined to define one of the two as more masculine, and one as more feminine.
To me, this is one of the central issues that needs to be addressed in the modern discourse on gender roles, because the idea that one gender is more dominant leads to issues like the 30% pay gap seen in the USA, or how women are treated worldwide.
Also, I don't agree that there will never be an animal model. I do agree that there probably won't be a mammalian model, but there are (iirc) certain species of amphibians and reptiles that can change genders (including reproductive organs) in response to environmental factors. Of course, frogs and lizards are not known for being social creatures, so there is limited data that could be inferred from this.
I wouldn't immediately assume this. It's also worth noting that animal models are dangerous to consider outside of a broader context, because if you like at hyenas, for example, females are highly dominant and also give birth through a she-dick*, so there are perhaps limited lessons to be learned there, except for the fact that biology is complicated and we shouldn't make bad naturalistic arguments.
As to the two people on an island hypothetical, I think you'd see a huge variety of outcomes based on individuals. I think the results would look more bizarre than anything.
* And yes, that is as painful and outright dangerous as it sounds.
I find the direct correlation between masculinity and dominance... Surprising a little and don't think it be where my mind would nessisarly go, and wonder a bit about how wide spread that is.
The animal world is pretty rapey and mean... I don't know how well transgendered animals would either survive or... Whatever.
Trans-sealion or... Whatever... Trans-ant. Don't know
Even drawing parallels between the social interactions of the other great apes and humanity needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Transgender frogs? OK. That would be interesting. And of no relevance to human trans persons.
I think that the correlation between masculinity and dominance is primarily a human phenomena. You can readily see the ties between masculinity and dominance in humans based on the prevalence of patriarchal cultures. Western, Middle Eastern, Far Eastern, and Indian are patriarchal to various degrees. While there may be matriarchal and gender neutral societies, they are in the minority.
As an aside, and entirely anecdotally, I am of the opinion that you can have transgender animals. One of my dogs, who was fixed before she reached adolescent, shows many male dog traits (other than the obvious, of course). She will lift one leg to pee, mark numerous spots including marking over other male dogs, and will hump as a sign of dominance.
You'd be surprised what people fucking around with fMRIs can do these days. I don't know how extensive is their use in studies related to gender behaviour and identity, though.
Considering some frogs and fish can literally change their gender, I don't think modelling on animals is particularly useful.
They can change their sex.
Whether this change makes the frog "feel like a girl/boy" afterward is beyond our ability to know.
But I would further argue that even if we could know it, it would be completely irrelevant as far as humans and our gender feelings are concerned. Frogs are mentally too different from us for a useful comparison in that regard.
(It would definitely be interesting and scientifically relevant though, not everything revolves around humans)
I apologize, but yes. This is what I meant