RE: Where does gender come from? (Full Version)

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Aswad -> RE: Where does gender come from? (12/27/2011 8:07:00 AM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: xssve

So the kid's real problem is that he's represents a more complex archetype, unrecognized in a social construct that only recognizes binary archetypes.


I believe we said as much, yes.

Health,
al-Aswad.



vincentML -> RE: Where does gender come from? (12/27/2011 8:41:33 AM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: xssve

So the kid's real problem is that he's represents a more complex archetype, unrecognized in a social construct that only recognizes binary archetypes.


As I understand tweakabelle and Aswad this is society's problem, not the kid's problem. The difficulty i encounter is that I find no answer to the question of how Nicole came to self-identify as female in an external environment similar to her brother. The issue is self-identity, after all. It is one of feeling and gender comfort. Unfortunately, we do not know what her internal environment was early on with respect to hormone ratios.



tweakabelle -> RE: Where does gender come from? (12/27/2011 8:45:08 AM)

quote:

In a way, all you've got with alleles is generalizations


........ and grandiose opinions, myths, fantasies, delusions(?) and NO evidence.

No Evidence.

Not a single citation. Not a single reason to treat your verbiage as anything other than guesses or opinions.

Please produce evidence. Not waffle. Thank you



xssve -> RE: Where does gender come from? (12/27/2011 8:47:07 AM)

Yeah, I'm just reiterating that there are two entirely different concepts her: gender, which is genetic, and gender identity, which is a social construct - there have been effeminate men and masculine women throughout history, but for the most  part, nobody ever seems to have gotten confused about their actual gender, not was there any attempt to reassign it in order to overcome any cognitive dissonance it may have generated.

Similarly, most indigenous cultures, HG cultures, do have roles and archetypes for persons who exhibit mixed sexual morphology and/or identity "Two-Spirited" in native American culture for example, so my question is really, where does all the cognitive dissonance come from in our supposedly more modern and enlightened culture?

I think it's a mixture of religious and mesomorph values, binary gender roles perhaps offer greater utility under certain conditions as among other things, it enforces certain economic/reproductive divisions of labor via role assignment, everybody knows whats expected of them, but it helps to remember that it remains an abstract construct, nature itself is not so binary; current utility has more value than potential utility, and a hypothetically well adjusted human being just deals with the human being in front of them, not an abstract archetype, a symbol - that's a form of delusion, it's technically a form of schizophrenia, though perhaps induced rather than genetic, a symbol only represents a thing, it's mutable, and it's not the thing.

All to address the title of the OP which asks where does gender come from, not where does gender identity come from - they're completely different things.



xssve -> RE: Where does gender come from? (12/27/2011 8:54:13 AM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

quote:

In a way, all you've got with alleles is generalizations


........ and grandiose opinions, myths, fantasies, delusions(?) and NO evidence.

No Evidence.

Not a single citation. Not a single reason to treat your verbiage as anything other guesses or opinions.

Please produce evidence. Not waffle. Thank you
Speaking of generalizations, evidence of what?

I don't think I've sad anything that violates the current consensus model, pretty much any geneticist or anthropologist will tell you the same thing.



vincentML -> RE: Where does gender come from? (12/27/2011 9:05:42 AM)

I doubt this will resolve the issue but it is evidence that the times they are a changing! A little girl's toy shop rant. Some girls want princesses and some want super-heroes. It aint fair!



xssve -> RE: Where does gender come from? (12/27/2011 9:08:19 AM)

I haven't even mentioned my personal hypothesis, which have to do with the effects of hormones on the developing fetus that result in sexual differentiation, particularly w/respect to bi-hemispheric specialization in the cerebral cortex - women, as a general thing, statistically speaking that is, tend to exhibit less bi-hemispheric specialization, men tend to exhibit more, and it explains a lot of perceived social-sexual differences, women tend to mix more emotion in with the logic, or at least that's the perception, you want evidence, listen any comic on Comedy Central, they all mention it at some point or other.

It might have something to do with autism as well, I happen to think that autism is a sort of pathology of bi-hemispheric specialization, they're so bi-hemispherically specialized that the two sides of their brain don't functionally communicate - the bias will be towards emotion, as much of the decision making process is generated in the anterior cingulate cortex, which happens to be the seat of emotion.

Logic allows us to make decisions based on analysis of abstract empirical models: in the absence of that, you go with whatever chemicals are released given a particular stimulus - emotion.



vincentML -> RE: Where does gender come from? (12/27/2011 9:34:41 AM)

Here is one small study that seems significant, tweakabelle:

Abstract from the New England Journal of Medicine

From the abstract:

These subjects were born with female-appearing external genitalia and were raised as girls. They have plasma testosterone levels in the high normal range, show an excellent response to testosterone and are unique models for evaluating the effect of testosterone, as compared with a female upbringing, in determining gender identity. Eighteen of 38 affected subjects were unambiguously raised as girls, yet during or after puberty, 17 of 18 changed to a male-gender identity and 16 of 18 to a male-gender role. Thus, exposure of the brain to normal levels of testosterone in utero, neonatally and at puberty appears to contribute substantially to the formation of male-gender identity. These subjects demonstrate that in the absence of sociocultural factors that could interrupt the natural sequence of events, the effect of testosterone predominates, over-riding the effect of rearing as girls. (N Engl J Med 300:1233–1237, 197



Aswad -> RE: Where does gender come from? (12/27/2011 9:37:15 AM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: xssve

Similarly, most indigenous cultures, HG cultures, do have roles and archetypes for persons who exhibit mixed sexual morphology and/or identity "Two-Spirited" in native American culture for example, so my question is really, where does all the cognitive dissonance come from in our supposedly more modern and enlightened culture?


Jewish guilt. Judeo-Christian mores. "Christian" (i.e. Catholic-derived) gender roles and misogyny. Agricultural history, intermixed with patriarchial social structures, plus the aforementioned. It's a potent cocktail. And with so many issues having a history of being oriented on this axis (suffrage, for instance), gender has become a very important identity bit. We're not just identifying with gender in the role of our relationships. We're identifying with the movements of gender, the subcultures of gender, the histories of gender, the tensions of gender, and so forth.

When Jesus returned to India, he did wonders for women in the region. While Mohammed, peace be upon him, was still alive, one of his wives served as general in one of his armies, and he started out working for the woman he ended up with as his first wife. Clearly, the paragons of these religions were doing a bit of a women's revolution on their own. But the whole Judeo-Arab region was rife with problems as regards the social standing of women, and the people who were supposed to carry on this legacy were unable to see that even their closest associates lacked their vision, and were trapped in the mores of the past. Combined with the Greco-Roman patriarchal traditions, we arrive at a travesty that is propagated to modern times, polarizing some issues that needn't actually be so polarized.

Enter women's suffrage and so forth. Millenia of baggage muddy the waters, and things end up retaining the polarizing element, and enhancing it. We can't have humanism, we must have feminism. We can't have parents, we must have the fathers and mothers. We can't have a log or a cave, we must be men or women, with all the history and bias and axes of interpretation and polarization attendant thereto. Even family itself becomes little more than an institution to support this set of divisions. And it is thus as crucial for a child to establish a solid caste identity in the binary caste system as it is for a Somali girl to be properly infibulated, so we do a bit of genital mutilation of our own, indicating just how deep the caste system runs. It even displaces the traditional castes into more generic classes, lines of battle in society as a whole, much as caste (social gender) seems to be a lot of the time.

I'm inclined to think The Wheel of Time, for all it depicts a deeply imbalanced world, is still a lot closer to something sensible in this regard. It dispenses with a lot of the caste element, while retaining the 'natural' aspects of gender, and consequently makes do with the more traditional role flexibility instead of actual gender confusion. Some of this, it seems, is tied to the comparatively fewer taboos and attendant reduction in obsession about sex in-setting, leading to divorcing the physical gender from the personality and social role aspects. In our own world, by contrast, sex is so pervasive an obsession that the physical gender becomes crucial to the identity question, necessitating changes to the physical gender to lessen the dissonance.

In practice, you would think sex could come down to "do I like this person?" and "do I want to fuck this person?", but the deeply ingrained caste dynamics force the issue, to the point where you might say it's a pathological fetishism.

I'm not generally attracted to men, physically or romantically. I've experienced one or the other on rare occasions, but not both at the same time. And potentially romantic attraction has exclusively been with a certain set of personalities that are "prohibited" in men. Whether this is conditioned from the caste dynamic, or merely preferences unrelated to such, I can't say without having encountered someone that evokes both responses at the same time. That should reveal a dissonance, if there is one. Note that some women are excluded from romantic interest by personality, as well, and make for interesting friends instead, like a man would, given the same personality. I'm curious whether this would hold true with an intersex or transgender individual, but the ones I know have too many issues to be potential partner material, or are already taken.

Not sure where I was going with this, suddenly, but I'll post it anyway, and perhaps something will come of it.

Health,
al-Aswad.



tweakabelle -> RE: Where does gender come from? (12/27/2011 9:52:30 AM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: vincentML

quote:

Not a single citation. Not a single reason to treat your verbiage as anything other than guesses or opinions.


Abstract from the New England Journal of Medicine

From the abstract:

These subjects were born with female-appearing external genitalia and were raised as girls. They have plasma testosterone levels in the high normal range, show an excellent response to testosterone and are unique models for evaluating the effect of testosterone, as compared with a female upbringing, in determining gender identity. Eighteen of 38 affected subjects were unambiguously raised as girls, yet during or after puberty, 17 of 18 changed to a male-gender identity and 16 of 18 to a male-gender role. Thus, exposure of the brain to normal levels of testosterone in utero, neonatally and at puberty appears to contribute substantially to the formation of male-gender identity. These subjects demonstrate that in the absence of sociocultural factors that could interrupt the natural sequence of events, the effect of testosterone predominates, over-riding the effect of rearing as girls. (N Engl J Med 300:1233–1237, 197

This is an extract from Imperato-McGinley et al paper on the guevedoche children discussed earlier in the thread. I think I may have supplied the orginal link with the qualification that "It's controversial" or disputed.

The authors make the claim but nowhere demonstrate how the testosterone produces the effect that they claim it does, which you will see if you read the paper in full. To put that another way ... they linked (an alleged) cause to an effect without demonstrating how the alleged cause created the effect. There's a huge gap, as there always is with claims of biological determinism of behaviour.

This claim by Imperato-McGinley et al is discredited. The remainder of her work, as en endocrinologist on the physiological aspects of the study remains valid.

Nice try Vincent but a fail nonetheless. [:D]

So we are left with ...... No evidence.



xssve -> RE: Where does gender come from? (12/27/2011 10:13:00 AM)

Well, that's what I hoping for, somebody say something a little more nuanced.

The actual human condition is inherently more complex that binary, cartoonishly exxagerated archetypes of masculinity and femininity - at the same time, there are situations that call for explicitly masculine or feminine behaviors: childrearing, combat, etc., i.e. a marital culture will tend to favor a more binary division of sexual roles, a less militant one will tend to be more flexible, hypothetically speaking, and Christian fundamentalist culture is currently very militant about... gender roles.

No less militant than Muslim, Hindu or whatever mixture or religions the Chinese favor, in a way, religion just symbolizes a sort more general sort of public consensus, forming a linguistic feedback loop, and thus it's becomes a universal phenomena of civilization, that is somehow less tolerant and flexible when it comes to sexual roles than the myriad indigenous tribes from which it is formed.

I don't know about the wheel of time, when it comes to Western thought, the bias is distinctly neo-Aristotillian, "The Great Chain of Being", centripetal, deterministic, and teleological, "natural law" whereas nature itself tends to be a little more flexible, there is no ideology at work there, it's all about results.

So philosophically, it's about whether we choose to fit into natures pattern, or change the pattern of nature to fit our particular ideology - no other animal has this choice, but even Jesus said the law was made for man, not man for the law.

Like I said, in an ideological POV, a person responds to symbols rather than actual things, the thing represents the symbol, not the other way around, and that is somewhat limiting, i.e., the woman complainant in the OP's story likely never met this kid, and doesn't know shit all about him, it makes that particular complaint a species of Chauvinism, regardless of the stimulus that generated it.

So, in similar fashion, I am sort of forced into the position of doing the same thing, responding the archetype of Chauvin, as representative of a class of behavior that I logically and empirically only conclude is more of a threat to group fitness than the stimulus that generated it, as I am in no proximity or position to argue with the bitch.

i.e., this kid can grow up to be a well adjusted trans-whatever or a dysfunctional whatever-whatever.

Me I don't care how he dresses or who he ends up fucking, only in a roundabout way that he performs his economic function whatever it is with some degree of sensitivity. I really have no objective interests beyond that, it's not going to affect me, and thus I tend to be biased towards the functional as matter of pure self interest.

I'm pretty sure somebody somewhere will take up the slack reproduction wise, that doesn't seem to be a problem, and I don't see the "threat".




xssve -> RE: Where does gender come from? (12/27/2011 10:14:31 AM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

quote:

ORIGINAL: vincentML

quote:

Not a single citation. Not a single reason to treat your verbiage as anything other than guesses or opinions.


Abstract from the New England Journal of Medicine

From the abstract:

These subjects were born with female-appearing external genitalia and were raised as girls. They have plasma testosterone levels in the high normal range, show an excellent response to testosterone and are unique models for evaluating the effect of testosterone, as compared with a female upbringing, in determining gender identity. Eighteen of 38 affected subjects were unambiguously raised as girls, yet during or after puberty, 17 of 18 changed to a male-gender identity and 16 of 18 to a male-gender role. Thus, exposure of the brain to normal levels of testosterone in utero, neonatally and at puberty appears to contribute substantially to the formation of male-gender identity. These subjects demonstrate that in the absence of sociocultural factors that could interrupt the natural sequence of events, the effect of testosterone predominates, over-riding the effect of rearing as girls. (N Engl J Med 300:1233–1237, 197

This is an extract from Imperato-McGinley et al paper on the guevedoche children discussed earlier in the thread. I think I may have supplied the orginal link with the qualification that "It's controversial" or disputed.

The authors make the claim but nowhere demonstrate how the testosterone produces the effect that they claim it does, which you will see if you read the paper in full. To put that another way ... they linked (an alleged) cause to an effect without demonstrating how the alleged cause created the effect. There's a huge gap, as there always is with claims of biological determinism of behaviour.

This claim by Imperato-McGinley et al is discredited. The remainder of her work, as en endocrinologist on the physiological aspects of the study remains valid.

Nice try Vincent but a fail nonetheless. [:D]

So we are left with ...... No evidence.
So you tell us what it is there, we're all waitin'...



tweakabelle -> RE: Where does gender come from? (12/27/2011 10:15:40 AM)

quote:

xssve
I haven't even mentioned my personal hypothesis ....................


Thank you for sharing yet another of your opinions. Please rest assured it will get all the consideration it is due.

Alas you were asked for evidence not yet another opinion or guess. For the umpteenth time, too. And still you have failed to produce an iota of evidence. I find having this discussion with you over and over again boring. Until such time as you produce some evidence, I'm going to assume you can't produce any. No surprise there, I know you can't produce any evidence to support your guesses and opinions - AFAIK, no such evidence exists.

Is there any reason not to treat your offerings as guesses? Uninformed guesses? You don't appear to understand the distinction between sex and gender, even though it was outlined earlier in the thread. If you get such basic elementary stuff wrong, what chance is there for the rest of your verbiage?




xssve -> RE: Where does gender come from? (12/27/2011 10:30:55 AM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

quote:

xssve
I haven't even mentioned my personal hypothesis ....................


Thank you for sharing yet another of your opinions. Please rest assured it will get all the consideration it is due.

Alas you were asked for evidence not yet another opinion or guess. For the umpteenth time. And still you have failed to produce an iota of evidence. I find having this discussion with you over and over again boring. Until such time as you produce some evidence, I'm going to assume you can't produce any. No surprise there, I know you can't produce any evidence to support your guesses and opinions - AFAIK, no such evidence exists.

Is there any reason not to treat your offerings as guesses? Uninformed guesses? You don't appear to understand the distinction between sex and gender, even though it was outlined earlier in the thread. If you get such basic elementary stuff wrong, what chance is there for the rest of your verbiage?


I don't remember you asking me anything, this is your crusade, this is all pretty solid theory with more than enough evidence to elevate to the status of theory, it's up to you to repudiate it, that's how this works: you have a different hypothesis, lay it on us, what else is there besides protein expression on one side, social construct on the other?



xssve -> RE: Where does gender come from? (12/27/2011 10:45:41 AM)

quote:

In the orthodox two-sex model, gender is seen as overlaid upon the 'natural biological bedrock' of physical sex. I do agree that the evidence in the OP presents a certain challenge to "what makes a man or a woman", to the orthodox two-sex model(s). That's precisely why I chose to highlight it. It seemed to me to be a good starting point from which to open the discussion about all these issues. I'm fascinated by these issues and the profound questions they pose. So I'm glad that your perspective is represented here and look forward to you developing your views if you choose to do so.

While the individual genetics and biology in the OP are as you say, completely unambiguous, this is most certainly not the case on a broader scale. There are at least 16 thus-far identified intersex states eg XYY chromosomes, multiple chromosomal mosaics - XX/XY, XX/XYY and so on - even a 'syndrome' where there is no 46th chromosome (XO or Turner's Syndrome'). There is the evidence in the link offered above where the infants' biology and genetics is anything but unambiguous. Just to mention one or two examples ....... Hopefully this thread can explore evidence like this, the OP and related matters and discuss its implications for all of us as both gendered individuals and embodied sexual subjects.
I'm not even sure what your'e arguing about, you accept this as evidence apparently but don't accept anything but genetic determinism - i.e., genes as a pattern fixed at birth, but the variety of chromosomes here argue that recombination is a dynamic, not a static process: you need to specify what exactly it is you're having a problem with.

At least two peer reviewed papers have been linked to by Vincent and myself, but you say they aren't acceptable evidence? Acceptable to who? Do you decide these things or what?

We're all just putting pieces of a puzzle together, you can't arbitrarily decide which pieces belong and which don't you're gonna have to specify and argue each one individually, so pick one and get started as your generalities are being given all the weight they deserve, which so far is none.



xssve -> RE: Where does gender come from? (12/27/2011 10:53:05 AM)

Ten years ago when I used the phrase "stationary phase mutation" I'd get no end of people calling bullshit, if that's what it is, but it's now a solid theory.



xssve -> RE: Where does gender come from? (12/27/2011 11:00:46 AM)

And I call it neo-Lamarkian because I believe the particular mutation that causes a physical male to act like a female, or vice-versa, probably happened a long time ago, some stressor results in swapping out one allele for another, probably out of junk DNA, a sort of spontaneous recombination, and as I say, RNA appears to play a more significant role than was previously thought.

We already know psychopathy, which is associated with distinct physiological changes in brain structure can be induced through stress, social or nutritional, in an otherwise healthy or average specimen, so why not other things?

It just means there are a whole new range of potential variables to consider, it is more complicated than me Tarzan you Jane, and if I'm not mistaken thats exactly what you were suggesting.



vincentML -> RE: Where does gender come from? (12/27/2011 11:07:52 AM)

quote:

This is an extract from Imperato-McGinley et al paper on the guevedoche children discussed earlier in the thread. I think I may have supplied the orginal link with the qualification that "It's controversial" or disputed.


Oops! Sorry. I wondered from where that arrived in my Favorites List [sm=ofcourse.gif]

However, my central confusion persists. How did Nicole come to recognize her gender identity? It wasn't a choice, was it?

Maybe we should leave this topic for awhile. It makes my head spin [:)]



xssve -> RE: Where does gender come from? (12/27/2011 11:22:06 AM)

We could just as easily be talking about anorexia nervosa - we all, male or female, have the urge to eat, there's very little in the way of social pressure in terms of what women should eat as opposed to what men should eat, it's a universal thing, while limited caloric intake does increase metabolic efficiency which could be a very useful adaptation under conditions of an uncertain food supply, i.e, it might be an adaptation that has nothing to do with how fat your ass looks in that dress, but it can be triggered by some social stressor - i.e., is it psychological or genetic?

Could be both.



xssve -> RE: Where does gender come from? (12/27/2011 12:40:03 PM)

I did get this thread confused with the girl scout thread, similar issue, with the distinction of what causes it vs. how to deal with it.

The junk DNA hypothesis has been demonstrated in plants, and in humans, at one stage of fetal development the fetus develops gills, meaning that DNA is in there somewhere - it just appears in the working DNA at one point, then swapped out again, probably because the fetus is already being supplied with oxygen via the umbilical cord - but the implication is there's a lot of stuff in the genome besides working DNA, the dormant DNA possibly has all kinds of things in it.

The social stress on gender identity and roles is such that it constitutes an environmental stressor, social stress has physiological consequences, it can suppress some traits, promote others, including intelligence and aggression, post gestation.

To me, it's really just a question of how much and why, and how to act.

I suppose what I'm doing is rejecting the whole notion of Cartesian dualism, i.e., framing it as nature vs. nurture, because nature is nurture, and nurture is nature, they're far more intertwined than formal logic traditionally credits, social environment has physiological effects.

Talk about making your head spin, but androgyny seems to be be a common theme in fin de siècle era's - the Twenties for example, not the exact end of the century, but the end of particular set of economic realities, a shift from a rural agrarian economy into an urban industrial one that is still going on, with a whole new shift from industrial to post industrial - i.e., the ecosystem, both social and physical is changing, farming is terraforming, so is urbanization and industrialization and we are adapting to it - gender role has less utility when manual labor and/or physical strength is not such a critical factor, but it has traditionally been a critical factor for so long that it's not likely to just disappear. i.e., physical strength, as symbolic of masculinity is relegated to a fetish of sorts, the social junk DNA, but a fairly powerful one, and not entirely obsolete - but there are and will be strength worshipers - symbolized by the Bull - from the Bull of Heaven to the Golden calf to the Bowling Green Bull, binary sexual roles are a significant aspect of that, as breeding itself, including selective breeding is central to pastoral economics, as is herd behavior. It's largely a set of pastoral values, and will always be preserved as a social stressor - it's part of us and it might come in handy again.

Metaphorically speaking, we are one big organism, with a multiplicity of interrelated functions, and right now were undergoing a shift, we're reformulating our associations and roles - we recently turned the corner, and over 50% of the global population is now urban, and in evolutionary terms it's mostly about what traits are most useful under the current set of environmental stressors, what works now as opposed to what worked yesterday, it's a dynamic universe.

And in many ways, the BDSM community is sort of in the thick of finding ways to continue to relate to each other in spite of a myriad of distinct and different values and strategies, and I think the idea of sexual mutability probably offers a great deal of utility, without forcing everybody to do the same thing, whether you're firmly in one camp or the other.

i.e., I'm with Aswad, there are things to love about men, even an element of sensuality and eroticism, but I like pussy, and I'd rather fight than switch - I'm just not going to tell you what to do with your junk, right?

Statistically, the incidence of intersexed individuals socially or physically remains pretty small, so again, the "threat" of accepting it, which implies it might become so common as to threaten the overall process of reproduction is mostly hysterical and imaginary, might even be a good thing, a more benign sort of Malthusian correction than mass starvation or pandemic.

i.e., we could probably stand to turn the birthrate down a notch, without getting too fascist about it, till we sort out the resource situation, population density is a stressor too.



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