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xssve -> RE: Girl Scout troops disband over admittance of transgender child (12/27/2011 12:53:57 PM)
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I posted this in "what determines gender, but it really belongs here:
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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