Feffy is *not* deluded. Feffy knows that the reproductive organs and genitalia he was born with are those of a woman. He also experiences incredible distress at seeing breasts and a vulva where his mind tells him a masculine chest and penis should be . Feffy's reality testing in tact. He knows what body he was born with. People who are d…
Feffy is *not* deluded. Feffy knows that the reproductive organs and genitalia he was born with are those of a woman. He also experiences incredible distress at seeing breasts and a vulva where his mind tells him a masculine chest and penis should be . Feffy's reality testing in tact. He knows what body he was born with. People who are delusional (,prior to treatment) believe the hallucinations are real. Why not accept him as a man if in meeting him at a cocktail party, you would he assume he was a man? The difference between a butch lesbian and a trans man is the trans man feels genuine distress at his primary and secondary sexual charasteristics. The butch lesbian however has no desire for a penii sax and never has. And their must be some inherent sense of gender, or you wouldn't have girls saying I'm a boy and vice- versa..As far as harm to women,, I do think those questions are nuanced and on a case by case basis. I am very tired, so I will reply with those thoughts later.
There's the danger of stumbling over words here. Words like "deluded" (and any words related to mental health really) carry such strong negative connotations that we're reluctant to use them even when they apply. So let's go a little further.
Imagine a man who is fully aware that the body he was born with is that of a human being. But experiences incredible distress at seeing hand and feet where his mind tells him paws and fur should be. He looks behind him and notes that the tail he knows deep down should be there is missing.
I'm conscious that this might sound like I'm being facetious, but I promise I'm not. In fact, there is a man who experiences feelings similar to this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalking_Cat). Is he not deluded because he knows he's human, and simply thinks there's been some kind of "mistake"? Or is the delusion the belief that he is a cat in the first place?
Yes, I believe that Feffy is deluded. In the same way I think our cat-man is. In the same way that I think Cecelia is.
I'm not dismissing the very obvious distress Feffy feels. And I'm not arguing at all that he should be denied surgery to ease that distress. I'm not saying I wouldn't address and treat him as a man at a cocktail party (I'm referring to him as a man here even though I know he will never read this). But I'm asking until what point we should endorse the idea that those feelings are *real*. That Feffy is literally a man because of that distress. There are wide ranging societal level implications here, that simply can't be addressed on a "case-by-case" basis.
Furthermore, what are the implications of endorsing the idea that having a female body is ever a "developmental" issue. I mean, this idea is so misogynistic as to be almost unbelievable.
I don't think there's an inherent sense of gender at all. I've never spoken to a single person, male or female, cis or trans, whose been able to even remotely describe what it feels like to be a man or a woman. And certainly not in a way that other men or women would agree with. Can you? When a child says they're a boy or a girl, what is really happening here? Some children say this at the age of 4/5. What do we even think a child's understanding of being a girl or a boy *is* at that age? Dresses and dolls and the colour pink? Trucks and fighting and the colour blue?
If a child says they're a boy or a girl, they don't know what they're talking about. Just as when they say any number of things, they don't know what they're talking about. If a little boy wants to wear a dress or put on makeup, that's fine. There is absolutely no harm in that. But if you tell a child that they literally *are* the opposite sex because of this feeling, you, as an adult, begin to create that reality in their heads.
We need to think much more carefully than we are about whether this is actually a kind thing to do.
Well would you consider the cat man's case differently if he had a partial cat brain attached to his human brain? I"m not mocking you or being facetious. I'm linking an article from the Cleveland Clinic that describes differences between men and women"s brains and that transgender brains performed more like the gender they perceived themselves to be. https://health.clevelandclinic.org/research-on-the-transgender-brain-what-you-should-know/
Wow! That's fascinating, thank you. I've heard people talking about "male" and "female" brains before but I must admit I didn't take it very seriously. It all sounds deeply sexist to me.
I found the research this article was based on (https://www.endocrine-abstracts.org/ea/0056/ea0056s30.3.htm) at one of the links, and though it's a very interesting look at the potential developmental causes of gender dysphoria, it doesn't say what the Cleveland Clinic article suggests that it does.
The research notes that the brains of some of the transgender subjects reacted chemically in ways that were more similar to the gender they identified as. This is fascinating, but it's not the point. Any more than explaining the developmental or chemical reasons that Cecelia's brain works the way it does would make her hallucinations more real.
I'm not questioning the reality of gender dysphoria. Not at all. I'm not saying that people with gender dysphoria shouldn't get surgery or shouldn't be affirmed socially. I'm saying that gender dysphoria doesn't make a female a male. Nor does having a brain that responds in stereotypically male ways to chemical stimuli (the researchers didn't even extrapolate this to behavioural traits because it would make no sense).
Some men are soft and emotional. Some women are strong and pragmatic. Some men are nurturing and effeminate. Some women are insensitive and butch. There is no such thing as "female" or "male" behaviour once you move past restrictive, often misogynistic stereotypes.
It's about the subset of trans-identified folks who are "early-onset GD androphilic (homosexual) MtFs and early-onset GD gynephilic (homosexual) FtMs. The early onset of GD and sexual orientation are key points in the following analysis".
What they found was that there was evidence that this particular subset of trans folks differ in brain scan measurements from both non-trans males and non-trans females. That is, they could distinguish 4 phenotypes, not just two, from the scans: cis male, cis female, MtF, FtM. And they suggest analogizing this subset as perhaps a form of intersex brain.
There are some interesting implications. One would be that there is no more scientific reason to (based on brain scans) group these MtF folks in with cis females under one label ("women") any more than to group them under the label "men", as their brains differ from both (and from FtM as well). This does not scientifically support the slogan "trans women are women", but it would support treating them humanely, as we try to treat intersex people.
In other words, a good deal of the socio-political problems come from trying to collapse a set of 4 brain phenotypes into two categories, which they do not fit well. Treat them more honestly as 4 categories.
I do want to note that the above does not apply to all trans folks. There are those who discover their trans nature later in life, often fitting the Autogynophile (AGP) profile, which differs in various ways from the group whose brains were studied above. There are the social contagion cases of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. There is the huge fad of identifying as various flavors of non-binary or asexual. Some activists include under the "trans umbrella" those with "cis" gender identities but who get sexual arousal from transvestism. Those would require separate analysis, but I speculate that they are less likely to show up as distinguishable from their birth sex in brain scans.
Imagine in a world 20 years from now, we've come to our senses and we use brain studies to medically and relatively objectively identify MtF and FtM individuals via brain scans, and give them whatever treatments (plural) have been found objectively most successful. They are treated humanely as our fellow citizens whose minority brain type is not their fault and who deserve no stigma, just like intersex people or those born with other abnormalities. They could be treated in ways that are compatible with traditional liberal values of compassion and support, but also compatible with science and medicine, without ideological blinders getting in the way. In different domains they may be treated:
(1) as new categories FtM and MtF trans, provably distinct from cis folks
(2) by their body sex
(3) by their "gender identification"
For every circumstance, we would see which of these three ways work best. For example, for sports, option #2 might work best, while for eg: women writers contests #3 might (or might not) make the most sense, or separate contests just for trans folks (#1) might be good.
And that pragmatic lumping could change with experience, because it would not be based on pretending they are identical in all ways to their biological sex, nor their gender identity sex. Instead we'd be saying "for THIS specific purpose, let's try grouping them with others in a given way for pragmatic reasons" and see if any adjustments are needed later.
Nobody would be "erased", in fact they would be validated by brain scans and supported for their unique categories.
Thank you! I’m loving all the neuroscience I’m being treated to! I find this stuff absolutely fascinating 😁 But I’m still very leery of the idea of male and female “brain phenotypes.”
We don’t separate males and females because of brain phenotypes, and we no longer claim that women are incapable of certain types of work because of their fragile, feminine sensibilities. We separate them because of physical differences and societal norms of privacy.
Differences in brain chemistry, in the aggregate, don’t tell us anything useful about individual behaviour. And even if they did, I don’t think we’d need that to justify treating trans people humanely (I know you’re not suggestion we *would* need that).
The clearest evidence that trans brains are different from cis brains is that trans people suffer from gender dysphoria. I don’t think any further diagnosis is required. Nor would a brain scan remove the risk of transition regret. There’s the possibility of regret with any significant body modification. And because brain scans aren’t likely to be 100% perfect, some genuinely dysphoric people would probably slip through the cracks.
I just think we need to a) differentiate very clearly between conversion therapy and appropriate counselling for people about to make a decision that will lead to lifelong medicalisation, b) de-stigmatised gender “non-conformity,” and c) recognise that gender identity doesn’t trump biological sex in some instances.
Dividing people into male and female across the number of categories that we do is a clearly imperfect method. In many cases, the reasoning is obvious, but in others, it's not even done because there are meaningful differences between men and women, but to encourage more women and girls to participate in certain fields.
Men had such a head start with regards to almost everything, that boosting female participation requires a little effort. I'm all for creating trans spaces too. But sadly, trans people don't seem to want them. I understand some of the reasons for this, but they're basically all about reality butting up against their desire for affirmation. And we'll find ourselves in even more complicated waters if pre-pubertal transition becomes more common.
Gah! It's so frustrating! We're trying to unravel all of these incredibly complex, nuanced, interlocking issues, and it's taboo to talk honestly about pretty much every aspect of them.😅
And by the way, I for many decades held the feminist perspective that most gender roles were entirely socially constructed, other than those based on things like childbirth or upper body strength. Or more specifically, that there were no inherent mental or psychological differences between male and female minds or brains (tho some differences in bodies).
Studies of early infant preferences, preferences among other primates, cross cultural correlations, and occupations in countries with fewer gender barriers have convinced me that such a "blank slate" attitude is no longer scientifically supportable. If juvenile monkeys studied in their native habitat show marked gender preferences for rag dolls vs bright colored toy trucks with moving parts, it's hard to chalk that up to patriarchal conditioning. I reluctantly concede that there is good evidence of some non-trivial sex based underlying differences in proclivities and interests.
Of course, culture adds a whole bunch of other arbitrary associations on top of that; wearing lipstick or carrying purses is unlikely to have any biological roots. And individuals can be slightly or strongly atypical of group trends. So I continue to believe that, for example, both males and females should be welcomed into any occupation for which they are qualified and interested. In no way does my new recognition of some underlying propensities suggest that we erect sex-based barriers to individuals who want to pursue interests typical or atypical of their sex.
But it does cause me to question whether observing any deviation from 49%/51% ratios *automatically* implies discrimination or barriers. Sometimes it might, sometimes it may reflect free choices, and statistically differing proclivities.
So accepting that there are partially different male and female (and possible MtF and FtM) brain phenotypes does not imply any return to rigid stereotyping and restrictions. No need to shy away from recognizing the results of the analysis I linked because we are afraid of the implications of accepting the results.
" I for many decades held the feminist perspective that most gender roles were entirely socially constructed."
I think we more or less agree here. I don't think of gender roles as *entirely* socially constructed. As you say, we see differences in male and female behaviour across pretty much all animal species. But again, we’re talking in aggregates. Individuals are different.
Pick any masculine trait you like, and there’s a female out there who exhibits it to a greater degree than you. In fact, there’s an individual female who exhibits *all* of the traditionally masculine traits to a greater degree than you (and me too obviously, I’m not questioning your manhood😁). Strength, aggression, height, agreeableness (or a lack thereof), you name it.
So while it’s true that gendered behaviour is, in part, biological, and that observing these differences isn't necessarily discriminatory, the important point (which you make as well) is that individuals should still be left free to choose their own destiny. Because there is enormous variation in how individuals behave that defies the bell curves.
I'm leery of the idea of male and female brains, not because I don’t understand that males and females are different, but because population level differences are terrible predictors of individual tendencies. And I think a focus at the population level naturally tempts us to overlook this.
Your male brain works differently to my male brain. And each of our brains probably work very similarly to some women's brains. So the sweet spot for me is just to treat everybody as if they're the same unless there are clear physical reasons not to.
Steve, I think you may be suggesting that Gender Dysphoria is the gold standard for trans status, and I think we should question that.
First, consider that before the WPATH gender-affirmative care standard and puberty blockers. research on children with Gender Dysphoria showed that about 80% had that dysphoria resolve during puberty. (Most became gay or lesbian). That is, only about 1/5 of GD cases were actually trans. Being trans is not the only cause of GD.
And consider that almost all of the cases of ROGD (Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, typically propagated by social contagion amongst teenagers - mainly girls - without previous GD) come to believe that they suddenly have GD - and who can say they do not? Does that 4000% increase in diagnosed GD reflect a 4000% increase in actual trans, or in "I believe I have GD and nobody can prove differently"?
Or consider the male prisoners who suddenly discover that they have GD in order to be transferred to a women's prison? Who's to say they didn't suddenly get GD (and perhaps spontaneously heal from it upon release)? GD is entirely subjective after all.
What I'm saying is that while I believe that there really is a subjective psychological condition of Gender Dysphoria, it's EXTREMELY imprecisely bounded (remember that sudden 4000% increase? Does that suggest that only 2.5% of the reported GD in that group is actually based on trans status?), and this can happen because there is zero objective evidence of it and many social or pragmatic reasons to delude oneself or others about it.
So GD is not the same as being trans, any more than having a fever is the same as having influenza. (And fevers can be objectively measured!)
If brain scans can fairly reliably determine 4 phenotypes (with FAR less than a 40 false positives to each true positive), that would likely be vastly more precise than relying on asserted subjective GD as the gold standard benchmark.
And yes, you are right that we agree that we don't need this to treat people humanely. Everybody should be treated humanely, trans or cis, GD or no GD.
This is more about society trying to (1) better understand the underlying nature of the problem (eg: 4 distinct phenotypes rather than only two with some people having perfect reversals, like a 100% female brain in a male body) as a guide to needed balances and tradeoffs, and (2) having some relatively objective validation. In other words, it could provide some tools for rationally making the tricky decisions needed to wisely make those humane policies.
You might have noticed the degree of irrationality involved today, and thus the need for any rational and humane assistance in threading a path. Not ironclad doctrine, just meaningful additional guidance from science, rather than relying exclusively on ideologically reshaped subjective reports.
"I think you may be suggesting that Gender Dysphoria is the gold standard for trans status, and I think we should question that"
Yeah, maybe I wasn't perfectly clear here. I do think gender dysphoria (GD) is the gold standard, but a) I think a lot of people calling themselves trans today don't actually have GD, b) GD status can change, and c) I'm talking about an official, not self diagnosis.
I'm not arguing that somebody with GD should automatically be given hormones and surgery. Especially when they're children. I think surgery and hormone treatments should be a last resort when all other efforts to help the person deal with their distress have failed.
Again, the significant and irreversible nature of gender affirming surgery means that some percentage of people will always have regrets. The aim is simply to make that number as small as reasonably possible.
Yes, most dysphoric children will outgrow their feelings and become (usually homosexual) children. I hate the fact that this has become one of the many taboos in trans discourse. That's why I think it's important to normalise gender "non-conformity".
I think, for a lot of these kids, if they were able to explore their relationship to their gender without learning to think they were in the "wrong body," they'd experience much less distress and would be much more comfortable waiting for adulthood to see if they were in that 80%.
ROGD should absolutely be assumed to be temporary (again, in most cases this would fail a clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria), and medical interventions should at least wait until the child is an adult. Given that most cases of ROGD manifest well into puberty, I don't think this would be a big issue in most cases with proper care and counselling.
I think adults really underestimate how impressionable children are, and how much of their sense of identity they absorb from their parents and friends. We really need to give them the chance to develop into adults before making these life-changing choices. That the ~80% desistance rate isn't enough to convince people of this shows how lost we are.
But, since gender affirmative treatment has become required in much of the US, and counseling professionals can lose their licenses if they are perceived to have questioned whether a given client is actually trans or might have other conditions, and puberty blockers are fairly widely used, today it's close to illegal and certainly infeasible to reproduce any assessment of how often GD would desist on its own. So those advocating for this cause may be hoping that the pre-WPATH data on resolved GD will age out and be forgotten.
Some of the selling points of puberty blockers are: (1) it just delays puberty, but kids can always change their mind later, and (2) they do no irreversible harm in the meanwhile. However, nearly 100% of those taking puberty blockers continue on that path (while we have reason to believe that only perhaps 20% would absent chemical intervention). Apparently going through normal puberty (including developing sexual attractions) is part of what helps resolve the GD for many of the homosexual kids. Sigh.
"and counseling professionals can lose their licenses if they are perceived to have questioned whether a given client is actually trans or might have other conditions,"
Yep, this is the first layer of insanity that needs to be rolled back. I think the de-trans community are gong to be invaluable here, because they're the ones pushing for it the hardest and are the living proof that blindly affirming children isn't the answer.
Not only do (I think it actually *is*) 100% of children on puberty blockers go on to transition, but the claim that they're reversible or do no harm is a lie. Not only that, but as I think I mentioned earlier, putting prepubescent children on puberty blockers can actually make their gender reassignment *more* difficult.
Passion GBR covered the brain science about the same way I would have so I'll just add that Steven Pinker is the one who convinced me that there are in fact brain differences. There just aren't any IQ differences. Women's brains are designed *overall* to be better at communication and articulating emotion, and men are *in general* better at math and engineering functions, so we may always have some lopsided professions but that doesn't matter, what does is our value judgements about them. Right now, any time cognitive/neuroscientists talk about these brain differences they strike me as going overboard to emphasize this doesn't mean women should be kept out of certain professions (apparently no one worries there are hardly any male hairdressers who aren't gay :) ) or that women are somehow less intellectual than men. The right has traditionally used biological differences to oppress others (like you and me) and that's what the left justly fears - so why not challenge the value judgements rather than the reality?
I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Starship Troopers from the '90s (I may have mentioned this before, can't remember) but it presented a military in which men and women were completely equal and even showered together without the men trying to molest everyone. One of my co-workers said that was utterly unrealistic as in battle, male soldiers would absolutely be concerned with defending female soldiers and that it would be near-impossible to shower with them and not be aroused. I said that's the way it is today but I can foresee something like that happening in the future, once we shed enough of our prejudices and got used to women (and everyone else) as equals. And especially when the traditionalist, misogynist military gets over the idea that women exist to fulfill their sexual needs.
This is why I dislike identity politics as a solution to society's ills. I'd rather we work toward a society in which everyone does what they do best and no one cares if there aren't enough black people/white people/male/female/trans people/gays/Southeast Asians/whatever in a particular profession. I don't care if men are better at me than math - no one told me math is hard, that girls can't do math - certainly my parents never did, but I still sucked at it. (The way I was taught didn't help either - that's on crappy Southern schools in the '60s and early '70s).
I think evolving toward acknowledging differences without judgement is where we need to be. I'm good with lack of gender parity in STEM if every woman who wants to be there is, and is getting the same treatment as everyone else.
I certainly agree with your major points. In particular, our society needs to get over the idea that "our side" needs to suppress or distort true facts, because we are afraid that the other side will misuse such facts. That direction lies tyranny. Like the way that governments allowed *without accountability* to freely censor things for national security, will gravitate into abusing that power to censor embarrassments or challenges to the ruling party. We need to challenge the misinterpretations or false implications, not suppress any "inconvenient truths".
(This also fit's with Steve's questions of "is pretending that trans women are the same as biological women really the only way to support treating trans folks humanely?")
Small dissents.
Today, I would question whether human being (without editing their genomes) are ever likely to en masse avoid arousal from exposure to nakedness. Note how widespread coverage of the loins is cross culturally around the world. I think that may indicate an innate propensity which can only partially and inconsistently be overridden by culture. (For selective groups, it can certainly happen. I'm quite familiar with naturism etc. But what works for a selective subset like that may not work for the broad unselected society; and the military - composed largely of young folks - is going to be closer to the broader society than to naturists. Or perhaps worse.).
I would agree that it would be possible to culturally get past the "male soldiers losing focus due to protecting female soldiers" thing. After all, many cultures without chivalry concepts are willing to sacrifice women more easily than men, so that's obviously easily affected by culture. There are other reasons that women may relatively rarely make good combat soldiers; the major physical differences can be very relevant. How many woman can carry an average or above average weight wounded man over their shoulders? A few, not most. Reports are that standards are often watered down to allow women to pass. That works, in peacetime. (Of course, guiding a drone or repairing a helicopter or flying a plane is quite another matter).
There are some far more practical reasons to gird one's loins no matter where you live: Flies and other annoying critters that find the scent of one's butthole positively heavenly, LOL! We don't have bushy tails to chase them away like horses. In addition, women have a second orifice bugs might find terribly attractive.
We may think it's about keeping men's basest instincts (LOL) in check and I can't swear it isn't, but if I lived in the jungle with a bunch of women I'd still wear a skirt. If I had memory of modern life I'd wear a bra too, because I've always found braless uncomfortable.
When men see nudity all day long it stops being sexualized. Boy oh boy was my long hair sexualized when I was in Turkey; I was followed around by men all day long trying to get into my pants, as was my blonde friend with whom I was traveling. Chinese men sexualized women's feet at one point and Victorian men famously sexualized ankles and legs. And in those jungle/savannah societies, the men clearly don't go around in a state of arousal all day long at the sight of all those naked boobs.
About once in a century the world produces a mathematics genius who blazes new trails. The Frenchman Galois was one of them; Euler, Gauss, Cantor, Gödel, a few others. John Horton Conway, inventor of the famous Game of Life, may be one.
1) They are always men (Hypatia, a 5th century Greek woman. may have been one; there have been no other qualifying women in modern times).
2) They all do their best work before the age of twenty.
These are not just brilliant mathematicians, they are off the scale. They're far too rare to draw any statistically valid conclusions from.
Hypatia's father was a mathematician who supported her in her endeavours; many Greek fathers wouldn't have. Hedy Lamarr likely might have been a far greater engineer and inventor had she not been born a few decades later; she was self-taught. Imagine what she might have become had she been formally trained. When she tried to sell her 'spread spectrum technology' invention to the Navy after WWII, she was told she'd be more valuable selling 'kisses and war bonds'. Know you place, little girl!
There were women who wanted to go up into space in the 20th century; they were, as aviators, as accomplished as any man, but NASA and the military always found excuses to not send them even though they came close a few times. Somewhere deep inside the myriad excuses they offered was the one they couldn't admit to themselves, except occasionally to each other: Male astronauts were the new heroes, but if even a *girl* can go up into space, it can't be that hard.
I believe STEM can be more sex-integrated than it is if we remove the barriers for women, including just being more overall supportive of girls who show a knack for STEM skills and talents. I'm not sure it will ever achieve a 50/50 parity. I don't care as long as every woman (or POC)'s talents are being used, along with every white/male's, to the best of their ability.
I wouldn't argue with any of this, but the rarity of female math geniuses is very unlikely just another instance of keeping women down.
Who would argue against fairness in admissions? In STEM work? There has been more progress since 1980 in this kind of equality than in the millennia previous. May it continue to full equality.
I need to add something though and I don't seek to be offensive ... I recently removed myself from a blog community where three members would shoehorn unfairness to women into the most unrelated topics, daily bitter rants that got very old. They could not accept that any man was with them. In this chapter of this forum we're discussing gender issues. I don't deny a word of what you wrote but please don't make a habit of it. Thanks in advance.
My degree is in mathematics and I've been reading the history of mathematics since before my voice changed. I don't think you can make the case that the gender inequality of these trailblazing mathematicians can be lain at the feet of misogyny.
Poetess Emily Dickenson was unpublished in her lifetime; when her writings were discovered she was elevated to the highest esteem in poetry, and that was long before feminism. There have been stellar female mathematicians and physicists (Emmy Noether springs to mind) but the Galois/Gödel class seems reserved to young men.
As for representation in STEM I think it's more complicated than that. I'm a software developer and technical writer (my boss is an American woman though the company is in London) and concede that I have worked with very few women. There are a lot more of them in HR and the business side of the industry than writing code.
As you have said, the super geniuses are too rare to learn more statistically.
But it appears that in many related species, and across a surprising number of dimensions, males tend to have a higher standard deviation then females, so that there tend to be more at the high end and more at the low end even if the mean or mode or medians are basically the same. This can be true of, say, height or speed, and likely intelligence or many specialized aptitudes.
It's possible that this has some evolutionary advantage for a species, where there is a tension and tradeoff between "conforming to what works best today" and "preserving alleles which might help adapt to future changes". Maybe the relatively more expendable males have a slightly different setpoint.
This can mean an unequal distribution of sexes at the top or bottom end, even with equal opportunities and without external discrimination or cultural factors.
And obviously, this does NOT justify any sort of discrimination!! It says nothing about any individual, who may be typical or atypical.
It is however yet another reason to not automatically assume that discrimination can be assumed to be the only explanation for observation of unequal representation in situations requiring relatively rarified skills or interests.
I wasn't arguing that men are solely responsible for keeping women down, or that there'd be more female math geniuses if there were more fathers like Hypatia's. My father, who helped me with my math homework, NEVER taught me I couldn't do math, or that girls couldn't do it well. In fact I *told* him that and he refused to believe it. He was right, of course, and he dragged me through like ten years of math classes until I was no longer required to take them. I was NO budding Hypatia.
I suspect you're right, that there's more going on to the lack of female math geniuses than male holding back, and we're in less position to argue 'misogyny' now because I keep seeing the integration of women and POC in places they weren't in the last ten years. Like corporate websites and leadership pages and in higher-level positions.
I suspect we may spend awhile playing catchup due to historical male obstructionism, but I think we're making progress already. I'm seeing more female CTOs and VPs of IT; ten years ago, women on corporate websites were almost always VPs of Marketing, Communications, and HR. Is it affirmative action or merit? Who knows? Like it was in Hedy Lamarr's time.
We may *never*, in the best of future times, acheive parity with men in certain spaces, but that's okay, as long as the next baby Hypatia is allowed to pursue her talents and skills without being flayed alive by ignorant Christians :)
And in the meantime, there's nothing wrong with going back to the long-way-around way of getting to medical transition...living like the opposite gender for a year or two, lots of counseling, make sure this is what the person really wants. The trans movement is rushing medical transition on everyone for reasons I'm still trying to figure out. The medical community *used* to recognize surgical transition as a giant mother of a move not to be undertaken by either doctors or patients lightly; now the trans movement uses the threat of suicide, and encourages children to threaten this, to get what they want.
Given how prevalent suicide had already become *before* trans became a fad (and I do believe a lot of it is), I'm not at all convinced all 'trans' people are truly trans, or that their suicidality stems from genuine dysphoria.
But we humans are masters at distracting ourselves from whatever is *really* the underlying problem(s).
The conclusion of the CC is a red flag that it's not being as academically rigrorous as it might be. It concludes that anxiety & depression might actually be signs of gender dysphoria. Except those are the two most common mental illnesses out there, and GD only got to be 'a thing' just a few years ago, really - about 10-12.
There's a growing recognition in some circles that some so-called GD might actually be distractions from underlying, pre-existing psychological problems. That the rise of 'Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria' in young people (supported by a highly-peer-reviewed research paper by Lisa Littman, controversial only for trans-ideologues) may actually be peer group- and social media-influenced. That suicidality might not be due to GD but to these underlying problems. Given that suicide rates have risen *dramatically* in the last *twenty years*, before the rise of the trans movement, while suicidality in transfolk may be genuine, it may not necessarily be related to GD.
Feffy sounds like he *might* be one who is 'genuinely' trans (not socially induced) since he feels he was this way since he was four or five, but we can't even take *that* at face value anymore, because he could have been induced to believe that by trans ideologues marketing a 'solution' for him. Here's the problem critical theory set have created for themselves--they've blurred language and meaning so much, we can't trust anyone anymore, not even academics, whose own standards have slipped in service to political ideologues, and certainly not the self-diagnoses of psychologically disturbed individuals.
Millennials and Gen Z have been shown by many studies to be one of the most anxious, stressed, and depressed generations ever, even more than Boomers living through enforced draft and the Vietnam War, not to mention all the other turmoil of the '60s and early '70s, and GD is being marketed to them as a fix for all their problems. One wonders if the high suicide rate among transfolk is partly because transitioning didn't fix all their problems.
And given, how un-self-aware this ironically highly narcissistic movement is, I'm not terribly inclined to believe anymore anyone who claims they 'always' felt this way unless others around them could confirm this.
I think the 'genuine' trans are the ones who really did feel this way from a very early age, and I'm reading a quite convincing personal history of it right now, The Transsexual Scientist, by Dana Bevan, a psychologist and transwoman who described growing up in the Forties feeling this way. So, the part of the CC article that sounds worth exploring is the fact that gender and sex may be on a spectrum (not that hard a concept to consider), and I'm with you that we should just be who we are and love who we do. But the queer theory, which embraces some trans issues, has muddied the labels and language so much they don't make sense, and they make gender and sex way more complicated, frankly, than it is.
Whether GD is real or induced also isn't the final point, but given how ugly the movement has become, it's time for some real pushback and forcing discussions these people don't want to have, because they're afraid of what it means to their self-image.
Here's an article I shared on Facebook this weekend about The New Homophobia in the LGBTQ movement.
First of all, the stereotypes of male and female psychology don't survive actual scientific testing, double-blind and peer-reviewed; women are just as aggressive, men are just as social and so on. Most of the stereotypes are indeed responses to societal expectation.
Except one.
Men in competitive situations will outperform themselves in noncompetitive ones. Women perform identically with or without competition.
And this is why "trans women" in women's sports is just wrong; even without the corporeal advantages of heavier male bones and muscles, that competitive male brain confers an unfair advantage.
There are differences in brain wiring and sometimes they support the stereotypes but it doesn't matter; we're not our biology, it's not our destiny. The brain differences are there. Steven Pinker gets into this rather a lot. Here's an article by a different researcher on the diffs:
Standard deviation and distance from the mean are and indication of the strength and significance of data when assigning meaning. Just a mindset I developed in the job I retired from where I had to provide an executive summary to project managers ($$$) about the significance of my data.
When you compare someone with gender dysphoria who gets hormones and affirmation surgery to schizophrenics who want to make their delusions real, it sounds like a critique of current treatment for gender dysphoria rather than support. It seems to imply that the medical establishment harms them by confirming their delusion, instead of training them to reject it . But if they are to reject it, we are back to the awful conversion therapies that were also used on gay people. If you are fine with society affirming them, then what exactly are you objecting too? What do you want trans people to acknowledge or do differently?
"When you compare someone with gender dysphoria who gets hormones and affirmation surgery to schizophrenics who want to make their delusions real, it sounds like a critique of current treatment for gender dysphoria"
Again, you're saying this because you're assigning different moral weight and validity to different types of psychological distress. Schizophrenia = crazy. Gender dysphoria = valid. No. Both schizophrenics and people with gender dysphoria simply want their distress to stop.
What if I compared gender dysphoria to body integrity disorder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_dysphoria) instead? Where people identify as disabled and feel powerfully compelled to amputate healthy limbs or paralyse themselves so they become the wheelchair users the deeply feel themselves to be? Can we then have a conversation about whether these people should be unquestioningly affirmed?
I'm not saying that treating people with gender dysphoria harms them. I'm saying that the current affirmation only model is potentially harmful (as evidenced by the increasing numbers of people, mainly young girls, coming forward to say how they were let down by their gender health care providers).
I'm saying that comparing counselling for young people who are about to make life-long, life-altering changes to their bodies, to gay conversion therapy, both trivialises the horrors of conversion therapy and fails our duty of care to minors.
I don't want trans people to do anything. Well, except get the care they need and live happy lives. But I want the medical community to act responsibly.
I want us to continue being able to talk honestly about biological reality (in the case of sport for example) so that the needs of both women and trans people can be addressed.
And I want us to fully recognise the influence we have over the thinking of young children. And to stop telling them that a preference for stereotypically male/female things means there's something wrong with them that needs to be fixed through lifelong medicalisation.
It's widely known that ~80% of trans identifying children will stop identifying as trans after puberty. And this saves them from a lifetime of hormone therapy and surgery that, as we can see in Feffy's case, absolutely does not guarantee good mental health. I don't think we should make these facts taboo.
I want trans people to *think* about what they're doing, ask themselves what they *really* want, question whether being trans will address and solve underlying problems they may have, and stop listening to what everyone else is telling them they should think, do or feel.
There's an awful lot of peer pressure in this movement that transfolk need to take responsibility for.
The post-surgical regret rate for reassignment surgery is about 1%, one of the lowest. I would bet that's because of the rigor of the diagnosis.
If everyone going through a "nonbinary" phase was granted reassignment surgery there would be a hell of a lot of regret once the latest fad turned to, oh, having antlers grafted in, or vertical pupils.
"The post-surgical regret rate for reassignment surgery is about 1%, one of the lowest. I would bet that's because of the rigor of the diagnosis."
I really wonder if this is still the case. I believe this figure is based on a time when there were still actual safeguards in place. Individuals who wanted to transition received counselling and spent time living as the opposite sex before they had hormones and surgery. These simple, logical steps obviously weeded out the people who might have regretted transition.
This is all the sane people are arguing for.
I recently saw a podcast with Buck Angel and Blair White saying the same thing. It's not that I don't think trans people exist or that they'll all regret surgery (I know you're not accusing me of this), it's that the real condition of gender dysphoria has been turned into a fad with little to no concern for the children caught up in it.
Your last sentence is far and away the most important issue for me. Any gender reassignment treatment should be absolutely illegal until adulthood and psychiatric evaluation.
The adherents of this fad will not be moved by science. To even suggest a medical dimension to GD sends them into apoplectic rage.
Is it like treating mental illness like other dysphorias, or like conversion therapy, or neither? That should be a question.
I think we need to avoid jumping to an emotionally driven quick conclusion. I'm tired of the arguments which proceed like "this has to me a whiff of (something bad that once happened) so we should shut down all critical thinking and run away". Instead study it and see if it really IS like that bad thing or not. Otherwise we'd also reject psychological treatment of body dysmorphia because it's sorta maybe similar to gay conversion therapy (but only if one looks at it very superficially or with an ideological bias).
Just for the record, if we allow people to get gender reassignment surgery or cosmetic surgeries to make them look like a cat, I think we should allow adults to voluntarily seek certified professional therapy to modify their sexual orientation. The abuse was in coercively forcing people (especially children) to undergo often wildly unscientific processes to supposedly change their orientation. This is another of those cases of expanding from "avoid a specific abuse" to "avoid anything which can be construed to have any similarity to it" - politically driven overshoot, not well considered abatement of abusive situations.
Other examples are citing the Tuskegee syphilis experiment to justify Black people avoiding Covid vaccination, based on a tremendously tenuous asserted connection., or avoiding modern professional genetic counseling because some eugenicists a century ago went dark places with forcible sterilization.
We need to engage the cortex too, not just the amygdala.
Let's go back to the days when transitioning was a long, slow process beginning with living as the opposite sex for a year or two and then getting hormones and surgery and all that. Especially for kids, this will give them some breathing space to make up their minds and perhaps outgrow the GD, which 80% of them will do if not interfered with too young. The fact that the trans movement is so hell-bent on railroading anyone who exhibits interest in transitioning points to the need to have their own personal feelings validated rather than any concern for whether they're harming others.
Try asking a four year old boy "are you a little girl?" His vehemence will shock you. Sorry but I am not buying that, at that age, it's all "social construct."
Not sure this is delusion at work. Dysphoria is real; depending on your sources, one in 15-65,000 births pass the medical criteria. However when we have hundreds of times as many claiming dysphoria (or insulting intelligence by claiming intermediate gender) then it's hard to accept that there are some genuine ones.
But there are, and they are not being helped by this raging fad.
And it's a painful existence. A genuine dysphoric lives in a state of continuous shock, a sense of wrongness. I dated one guy every time he came to Seattle, years, and I never would have known if he hadn't told me that this meeting would be our last because he was going into surgery soon. He didn't look, act, or sound at all feminine but if he qualified for reassignment then he had passed a high bar.
Feffy is *not* deluded. Feffy knows that the reproductive organs and genitalia he was born with are those of a woman. He also experiences incredible distress at seeing breasts and a vulva where his mind tells him a masculine chest and penis should be . Feffy's reality testing in tact. He knows what body he was born with. People who are delusional (,prior to treatment) believe the hallucinations are real. Why not accept him as a man if in meeting him at a cocktail party, you would he assume he was a man? The difference between a butch lesbian and a trans man is the trans man feels genuine distress at his primary and secondary sexual charasteristics. The butch lesbian however has no desire for a penii sax and never has. And their must be some inherent sense of gender, or you wouldn't have girls saying I'm a boy and vice- versa..As far as harm to women,, I do think those questions are nuanced and on a case by case basis. I am very tired, so I will reply with those thoughts later.
There's the danger of stumbling over words here. Words like "deluded" (and any words related to mental health really) carry such strong negative connotations that we're reluctant to use them even when they apply. So let's go a little further.
Imagine a man who is fully aware that the body he was born with is that of a human being. But experiences incredible distress at seeing hand and feet where his mind tells him paws and fur should be. He looks behind him and notes that the tail he knows deep down should be there is missing.
I'm conscious that this might sound like I'm being facetious, but I promise I'm not. In fact, there is a man who experiences feelings similar to this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalking_Cat). Is he not deluded because he knows he's human, and simply thinks there's been some kind of "mistake"? Or is the delusion the belief that he is a cat in the first place?
Yes, I believe that Feffy is deluded. In the same way I think our cat-man is. In the same way that I think Cecelia is.
I'm not dismissing the very obvious distress Feffy feels. And I'm not arguing at all that he should be denied surgery to ease that distress. I'm not saying I wouldn't address and treat him as a man at a cocktail party (I'm referring to him as a man here even though I know he will never read this). But I'm asking until what point we should endorse the idea that those feelings are *real*. That Feffy is literally a man because of that distress. There are wide ranging societal level implications here, that simply can't be addressed on a "case-by-case" basis.
Furthermore, what are the implications of endorsing the idea that having a female body is ever a "developmental" issue. I mean, this idea is so misogynistic as to be almost unbelievable.
I don't think there's an inherent sense of gender at all. I've never spoken to a single person, male or female, cis or trans, whose been able to even remotely describe what it feels like to be a man or a woman. And certainly not in a way that other men or women would agree with. Can you? When a child says they're a boy or a girl, what is really happening here? Some children say this at the age of 4/5. What do we even think a child's understanding of being a girl or a boy *is* at that age? Dresses and dolls and the colour pink? Trucks and fighting and the colour blue?
If a child says they're a boy or a girl, they don't know what they're talking about. Just as when they say any number of things, they don't know what they're talking about. If a little boy wants to wear a dress or put on makeup, that's fine. There is absolutely no harm in that. But if you tell a child that they literally *are* the opposite sex because of this feeling, you, as an adult, begin to create that reality in their heads.
We need to think much more carefully than we are about whether this is actually a kind thing to do.
Well would you consider the cat man's case differently if he had a partial cat brain attached to his human brain? I"m not mocking you or being facetious. I'm linking an article from the Cleveland Clinic that describes differences between men and women"s brains and that transgender brains performed more like the gender they perceived themselves to be. https://health.clevelandclinic.org/research-on-the-transgender-brain-what-you-should-know/
Wow! That's fascinating, thank you. I've heard people talking about "male" and "female" brains before but I must admit I didn't take it very seriously. It all sounds deeply sexist to me.
I found the research this article was based on (https://www.endocrine-abstracts.org/ea/0056/ea0056s30.3.htm) at one of the links, and though it's a very interesting look at the potential developmental causes of gender dysphoria, it doesn't say what the Cleveland Clinic article suggests that it does.
The research notes that the brains of some of the transgender subjects reacted chemically in ways that were more similar to the gender they identified as. This is fascinating, but it's not the point. Any more than explaining the developmental or chemical reasons that Cecelia's brain works the way it does would make her hallucinations more real.
I'm not questioning the reality of gender dysphoria. Not at all. I'm not saying that people with gender dysphoria shouldn't get surgery or shouldn't be affirmed socially. I'm saying that gender dysphoria doesn't make a female a male. Nor does having a brain that responds in stereotypically male ways to chemical stimuli (the researchers didn't even extrapolate this to behavioural traits because it would make no sense).
Some men are soft and emotional. Some women are strong and pragmatic. Some men are nurturing and effeminate. Some women are insensitive and butch. There is no such thing as "female" or "male" behaviour once you move past restrictive, often misogynistic stereotypes.
Here's an interesting survey of brain difference studies you my find interesting, Steve.
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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4987404/
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It's about the subset of trans-identified folks who are "early-onset GD androphilic (homosexual) MtFs and early-onset GD gynephilic (homosexual) FtMs. The early onset of GD and sexual orientation are key points in the following analysis".
What they found was that there was evidence that this particular subset of trans folks differ in brain scan measurements from both non-trans males and non-trans females. That is, they could distinguish 4 phenotypes, not just two, from the scans: cis male, cis female, MtF, FtM. And they suggest analogizing this subset as perhaps a form of intersex brain.
There are some interesting implications. One would be that there is no more scientific reason to (based on brain scans) group these MtF folks in with cis females under one label ("women") any more than to group them under the label "men", as their brains differ from both (and from FtM as well). This does not scientifically support the slogan "trans women are women", but it would support treating them humanely, as we try to treat intersex people.
In other words, a good deal of the socio-political problems come from trying to collapse a set of 4 brain phenotypes into two categories, which they do not fit well. Treat them more honestly as 4 categories.
I do want to note that the above does not apply to all trans folks. There are those who discover their trans nature later in life, often fitting the Autogynophile (AGP) profile, which differs in various ways from the group whose brains were studied above. There are the social contagion cases of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. There is the huge fad of identifying as various flavors of non-binary or asexual. Some activists include under the "trans umbrella" those with "cis" gender identities but who get sexual arousal from transvestism. Those would require separate analysis, but I speculate that they are less likely to show up as distinguishable from their birth sex in brain scans.
Imagine in a world 20 years from now, we've come to our senses and we use brain studies to medically and relatively objectively identify MtF and FtM individuals via brain scans, and give them whatever treatments (plural) have been found objectively most successful. They are treated humanely as our fellow citizens whose minority brain type is not their fault and who deserve no stigma, just like intersex people or those born with other abnormalities. They could be treated in ways that are compatible with traditional liberal values of compassion and support, but also compatible with science and medicine, without ideological blinders getting in the way. In different domains they may be treated:
(1) as new categories FtM and MtF trans, provably distinct from cis folks
(2) by their body sex
(3) by their "gender identification"
For every circumstance, we would see which of these three ways work best. For example, for sports, option #2 might work best, while for eg: women writers contests #3 might (or might not) make the most sense, or separate contests just for trans folks (#1) might be good.
And that pragmatic lumping could change with experience, because it would not be based on pretending they are identical in all ways to their biological sex, nor their gender identity sex. Instead we'd be saying "for THIS specific purpose, let's try grouping them with others in a given way for pragmatic reasons" and see if any adjustments are needed later.
Nobody would be "erased", in fact they would be validated by brain scans and supported for their unique categories.
Thank you! I’m loving all the neuroscience I’m being treated to! I find this stuff absolutely fascinating 😁 But I’m still very leery of the idea of male and female “brain phenotypes.”
We don’t separate males and females because of brain phenotypes, and we no longer claim that women are incapable of certain types of work because of their fragile, feminine sensibilities. We separate them because of physical differences and societal norms of privacy.
Differences in brain chemistry, in the aggregate, don’t tell us anything useful about individual behaviour. And even if they did, I don’t think we’d need that to justify treating trans people humanely (I know you’re not suggestion we *would* need that).
The clearest evidence that trans brains are different from cis brains is that trans people suffer from gender dysphoria. I don’t think any further diagnosis is required. Nor would a brain scan remove the risk of transition regret. There’s the possibility of regret with any significant body modification. And because brain scans aren’t likely to be 100% perfect, some genuinely dysphoric people would probably slip through the cracks.
I just think we need to a) differentiate very clearly between conversion therapy and appropriate counselling for people about to make a decision that will lead to lifelong medicalisation, b) de-stigmatised gender “non-conformity,” and c) recognise that gender identity doesn’t trump biological sex in some instances.
Dividing people into male and female across the number of categories that we do is a clearly imperfect method. In many cases, the reasoning is obvious, but in others, it's not even done because there are meaningful differences between men and women, but to encourage more women and girls to participate in certain fields.
Men had such a head start with regards to almost everything, that boosting female participation requires a little effort. I'm all for creating trans spaces too. But sadly, trans people don't seem to want them. I understand some of the reasons for this, but they're basically all about reality butting up against their desire for affirmation. And we'll find ourselves in even more complicated waters if pre-pubertal transition becomes more common.
Gah! It's so frustrating! We're trying to unravel all of these incredibly complex, nuanced, interlocking issues, and it's taboo to talk honestly about pretty much every aspect of them.😅
And by the way, I for many decades held the feminist perspective that most gender roles were entirely socially constructed, other than those based on things like childbirth or upper body strength. Or more specifically, that there were no inherent mental or psychological differences between male and female minds or brains (tho some differences in bodies).
Studies of early infant preferences, preferences among other primates, cross cultural correlations, and occupations in countries with fewer gender barriers have convinced me that such a "blank slate" attitude is no longer scientifically supportable. If juvenile monkeys studied in their native habitat show marked gender preferences for rag dolls vs bright colored toy trucks with moving parts, it's hard to chalk that up to patriarchal conditioning. I reluctantly concede that there is good evidence of some non-trivial sex based underlying differences in proclivities and interests.
Of course, culture adds a whole bunch of other arbitrary associations on top of that; wearing lipstick or carrying purses is unlikely to have any biological roots. And individuals can be slightly or strongly atypical of group trends. So I continue to believe that, for example, both males and females should be welcomed into any occupation for which they are qualified and interested. In no way does my new recognition of some underlying propensities suggest that we erect sex-based barriers to individuals who want to pursue interests typical or atypical of their sex.
But it does cause me to question whether observing any deviation from 49%/51% ratios *automatically* implies discrimination or barriers. Sometimes it might, sometimes it may reflect free choices, and statistically differing proclivities.
So accepting that there are partially different male and female (and possible MtF and FtM) brain phenotypes does not imply any return to rigid stereotyping and restrictions. No need to shy away from recognizing the results of the analysis I linked because we are afraid of the implications of accepting the results.
" I for many decades held the feminist perspective that most gender roles were entirely socially constructed."
I think we more or less agree here. I don't think of gender roles as *entirely* socially constructed. As you say, we see differences in male and female behaviour across pretty much all animal species. But again, we’re talking in aggregates. Individuals are different.
Pick any masculine trait you like, and there’s a female out there who exhibits it to a greater degree than you. In fact, there’s an individual female who exhibits *all* of the traditionally masculine traits to a greater degree than you (and me too obviously, I’m not questioning your manhood😁). Strength, aggression, height, agreeableness (or a lack thereof), you name it.
So while it’s true that gendered behaviour is, in part, biological, and that observing these differences isn't necessarily discriminatory, the important point (which you make as well) is that individuals should still be left free to choose their own destiny. Because there is enormous variation in how individuals behave that defies the bell curves.
I'm leery of the idea of male and female brains, not because I don’t understand that males and females are different, but because population level differences are terrible predictors of individual tendencies. And I think a focus at the population level naturally tempts us to overlook this.
Your male brain works differently to my male brain. And each of our brains probably work very similarly to some women's brains. So the sweet spot for me is just to treat everybody as if they're the same unless there are clear physical reasons not to.
Steve, I think you may be suggesting that Gender Dysphoria is the gold standard for trans status, and I think we should question that.
First, consider that before the WPATH gender-affirmative care standard and puberty blockers. research on children with Gender Dysphoria showed that about 80% had that dysphoria resolve during puberty. (Most became gay or lesbian). That is, only about 1/5 of GD cases were actually trans. Being trans is not the only cause of GD.
And consider that almost all of the cases of ROGD (Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, typically propagated by social contagion amongst teenagers - mainly girls - without previous GD) come to believe that they suddenly have GD - and who can say they do not? Does that 4000% increase in diagnosed GD reflect a 4000% increase in actual trans, or in "I believe I have GD and nobody can prove differently"?
Or consider the male prisoners who suddenly discover that they have GD in order to be transferred to a women's prison? Who's to say they didn't suddenly get GD (and perhaps spontaneously heal from it upon release)? GD is entirely subjective after all.
What I'm saying is that while I believe that there really is a subjective psychological condition of Gender Dysphoria, it's EXTREMELY imprecisely bounded (remember that sudden 4000% increase? Does that suggest that only 2.5% of the reported GD in that group is actually based on trans status?), and this can happen because there is zero objective evidence of it and many social or pragmatic reasons to delude oneself or others about it.
So GD is not the same as being trans, any more than having a fever is the same as having influenza. (And fevers can be objectively measured!)
If brain scans can fairly reliably determine 4 phenotypes (with FAR less than a 40 false positives to each true positive), that would likely be vastly more precise than relying on asserted subjective GD as the gold standard benchmark.
And yes, you are right that we agree that we don't need this to treat people humanely. Everybody should be treated humanely, trans or cis, GD or no GD.
This is more about society trying to (1) better understand the underlying nature of the problem (eg: 4 distinct phenotypes rather than only two with some people having perfect reversals, like a 100% female brain in a male body) as a guide to needed balances and tradeoffs, and (2) having some relatively objective validation. In other words, it could provide some tools for rationally making the tricky decisions needed to wisely make those humane policies.
You might have noticed the degree of irrationality involved today, and thus the need for any rational and humane assistance in threading a path. Not ironclad doctrine, just meaningful additional guidance from science, rather than relying exclusively on ideologically reshaped subjective reports.
"I think you may be suggesting that Gender Dysphoria is the gold standard for trans status, and I think we should question that"
Yeah, maybe I wasn't perfectly clear here. I do think gender dysphoria (GD) is the gold standard, but a) I think a lot of people calling themselves trans today don't actually have GD, b) GD status can change, and c) I'm talking about an official, not self diagnosis.
I'm not arguing that somebody with GD should automatically be given hormones and surgery. Especially when they're children. I think surgery and hormone treatments should be a last resort when all other efforts to help the person deal with their distress have failed.
Again, the significant and irreversible nature of gender affirming surgery means that some percentage of people will always have regrets. The aim is simply to make that number as small as reasonably possible.
Yes, most dysphoric children will outgrow their feelings and become (usually homosexual) children. I hate the fact that this has become one of the many taboos in trans discourse. That's why I think it's important to normalise gender "non-conformity".
I think, for a lot of these kids, if they were able to explore their relationship to their gender without learning to think they were in the "wrong body," they'd experience much less distress and would be much more comfortable waiting for adulthood to see if they were in that 80%.
ROGD should absolutely be assumed to be temporary (again, in most cases this would fail a clinical diagnosis of gender dysphoria), and medical interventions should at least wait until the child is an adult. Given that most cases of ROGD manifest well into puberty, I don't think this would be a big issue in most cases with proper care and counselling.
I think adults really underestimate how impressionable children are, and how much of their sense of identity they absorb from their parents and friends. We really need to give them the chance to develop into adults before making these life-changing choices. That the ~80% desistance rate isn't enough to convince people of this shows how lost we are.
Yep.
But, since gender affirmative treatment has become required in much of the US, and counseling professionals can lose their licenses if they are perceived to have questioned whether a given client is actually trans or might have other conditions, and puberty blockers are fairly widely used, today it's close to illegal and certainly infeasible to reproduce any assessment of how often GD would desist on its own. So those advocating for this cause may be hoping that the pre-WPATH data on resolved GD will age out and be forgotten.
Some of the selling points of puberty blockers are: (1) it just delays puberty, but kids can always change their mind later, and (2) they do no irreversible harm in the meanwhile. However, nearly 100% of those taking puberty blockers continue on that path (while we have reason to believe that only perhaps 20% would absent chemical intervention). Apparently going through normal puberty (including developing sexual attractions) is part of what helps resolve the GD for many of the homosexual kids. Sigh.
"and counseling professionals can lose their licenses if they are perceived to have questioned whether a given client is actually trans or might have other conditions,"
Yep, this is the first layer of insanity that needs to be rolled back. I think the de-trans community are gong to be invaluable here, because they're the ones pushing for it the hardest and are the living proof that blindly affirming children isn't the answer.
Not only do (I think it actually *is*) 100% of children on puberty blockers go on to transition, but the claim that they're reversible or do no harm is a lie. Not only that, but as I think I mentioned earlier, putting prepubescent children on puberty blockers can actually make their gender reassignment *more* difficult.
Passion GBR covered the brain science about the same way I would have so I'll just add that Steven Pinker is the one who convinced me that there are in fact brain differences. There just aren't any IQ differences. Women's brains are designed *overall* to be better at communication and articulating emotion, and men are *in general* better at math and engineering functions, so we may always have some lopsided professions but that doesn't matter, what does is our value judgements about them. Right now, any time cognitive/neuroscientists talk about these brain differences they strike me as going overboard to emphasize this doesn't mean women should be kept out of certain professions (apparently no one worries there are hardly any male hairdressers who aren't gay :) ) or that women are somehow less intellectual than men. The right has traditionally used biological differences to oppress others (like you and me) and that's what the left justly fears - so why not challenge the value judgements rather than the reality?
I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Starship Troopers from the '90s (I may have mentioned this before, can't remember) but it presented a military in which men and women were completely equal and even showered together without the men trying to molest everyone. One of my co-workers said that was utterly unrealistic as in battle, male soldiers would absolutely be concerned with defending female soldiers and that it would be near-impossible to shower with them and not be aroused. I said that's the way it is today but I can foresee something like that happening in the future, once we shed enough of our prejudices and got used to women (and everyone else) as equals. And especially when the traditionalist, misogynist military gets over the idea that women exist to fulfill their sexual needs.
This is why I dislike identity politics as a solution to society's ills. I'd rather we work toward a society in which everyone does what they do best and no one cares if there aren't enough black people/white people/male/female/trans people/gays/Southeast Asians/whatever in a particular profession. I don't care if men are better at me than math - no one told me math is hard, that girls can't do math - certainly my parents never did, but I still sucked at it. (The way I was taught didn't help either - that's on crappy Southern schools in the '60s and early '70s).
I think evolving toward acknowledging differences without judgement is where we need to be. I'm good with lack of gender parity in STEM if every woman who wants to be there is, and is getting the same treatment as everyone else.
I certainly agree with your major points. In particular, our society needs to get over the idea that "our side" needs to suppress or distort true facts, because we are afraid that the other side will misuse such facts. That direction lies tyranny. Like the way that governments allowed *without accountability* to freely censor things for national security, will gravitate into abusing that power to censor embarrassments or challenges to the ruling party. We need to challenge the misinterpretations or false implications, not suppress any "inconvenient truths".
(This also fit's with Steve's questions of "is pretending that trans women are the same as biological women really the only way to support treating trans folks humanely?")
Small dissents.
Today, I would question whether human being (without editing their genomes) are ever likely to en masse avoid arousal from exposure to nakedness. Note how widespread coverage of the loins is cross culturally around the world. I think that may indicate an innate propensity which can only partially and inconsistently be overridden by culture. (For selective groups, it can certainly happen. I'm quite familiar with naturism etc. But what works for a selective subset like that may not work for the broad unselected society; and the military - composed largely of young folks - is going to be closer to the broader society than to naturists. Or perhaps worse.).
I would agree that it would be possible to culturally get past the "male soldiers losing focus due to protecting female soldiers" thing. After all, many cultures without chivalry concepts are willing to sacrifice women more easily than men, so that's obviously easily affected by culture. There are other reasons that women may relatively rarely make good combat soldiers; the major physical differences can be very relevant. How many woman can carry an average or above average weight wounded man over their shoulders? A few, not most. Reports are that standards are often watered down to allow women to pass. That works, in peacetime. (Of course, guiding a drone or repairing a helicopter or flying a plane is quite another matter).
There are some far more practical reasons to gird one's loins no matter where you live: Flies and other annoying critters that find the scent of one's butthole positively heavenly, LOL! We don't have bushy tails to chase them away like horses. In addition, women have a second orifice bugs might find terribly attractive.
We may think it's about keeping men's basest instincts (LOL) in check and I can't swear it isn't, but if I lived in the jungle with a bunch of women I'd still wear a skirt. If I had memory of modern life I'd wear a bra too, because I've always found braless uncomfortable.
When men see nudity all day long it stops being sexualized. Boy oh boy was my long hair sexualized when I was in Turkey; I was followed around by men all day long trying to get into my pants, as was my blonde friend with whom I was traveling. Chinese men sexualized women's feet at one point and Victorian men famously sexualized ankles and legs. And in those jungle/savannah societies, the men clearly don't go around in a state of arousal all day long at the sight of all those naked boobs.
Male arousal by breasts is a fairly recent phenomenon.
Covering the genitalia probably has more to do with their vulnerability than the potential for arousal leading to rape.
About once in a century the world produces a mathematics genius who blazes new trails. The Frenchman Galois was one of them; Euler, Gauss, Cantor, Gödel, a few others. John Horton Conway, inventor of the famous Game of Life, may be one.
1) They are always men (Hypatia, a 5th century Greek woman. may have been one; there have been no other qualifying women in modern times).
2) They all do their best work before the age of twenty.
These are not just brilliant mathematicians, they are off the scale. They're far too rare to draw any statistically valid conclusions from.
Hypatia's father was a mathematician who supported her in her endeavours; many Greek fathers wouldn't have. Hedy Lamarr likely might have been a far greater engineer and inventor had she not been born a few decades later; she was self-taught. Imagine what she might have become had she been formally trained. When she tried to sell her 'spread spectrum technology' invention to the Navy after WWII, she was told she'd be more valuable selling 'kisses and war bonds'. Know you place, little girl!
There were women who wanted to go up into space in the 20th century; they were, as aviators, as accomplished as any man, but NASA and the military always found excuses to not send them even though they came close a few times. Somewhere deep inside the myriad excuses they offered was the one they couldn't admit to themselves, except occasionally to each other: Male astronauts were the new heroes, but if even a *girl* can go up into space, it can't be that hard.
I believe STEM can be more sex-integrated than it is if we remove the barriers for women, including just being more overall supportive of girls who show a knack for STEM skills and talents. I'm not sure it will ever achieve a 50/50 parity. I don't care as long as every woman (or POC)'s talents are being used, along with every white/male's, to the best of their ability.
I wouldn't argue with any of this, but the rarity of female math geniuses is very unlikely just another instance of keeping women down.
Who would argue against fairness in admissions? In STEM work? There has been more progress since 1980 in this kind of equality than in the millennia previous. May it continue to full equality.
I need to add something though and I don't seek to be offensive ... I recently removed myself from a blog community where three members would shoehorn unfairness to women into the most unrelated topics, daily bitter rants that got very old. They could not accept that any man was with them. In this chapter of this forum we're discussing gender issues. I don't deny a word of what you wrote but please don't make a habit of it. Thanks in advance.
My degree is in mathematics and I've been reading the history of mathematics since before my voice changed. I don't think you can make the case that the gender inequality of these trailblazing mathematicians can be lain at the feet of misogyny.
Poetess Emily Dickenson was unpublished in her lifetime; when her writings were discovered she was elevated to the highest esteem in poetry, and that was long before feminism. There have been stellar female mathematicians and physicists (Emmy Noether springs to mind) but the Galois/Gödel class seems reserved to young men.
As for representation in STEM I think it's more complicated than that. I'm a software developer and technical writer (my boss is an American woman though the company is in London) and concede that I have worked with very few women. There are a lot more of them in HR and the business side of the industry than writing code.
As you have said, the super geniuses are too rare to learn more statistically.
But it appears that in many related species, and across a surprising number of dimensions, males tend to have a higher standard deviation then females, so that there tend to be more at the high end and more at the low end even if the mean or mode or medians are basically the same. This can be true of, say, height or speed, and likely intelligence or many specialized aptitudes.
It's possible that this has some evolutionary advantage for a species, where there is a tension and tradeoff between "conforming to what works best today" and "preserving alleles which might help adapt to future changes". Maybe the relatively more expendable males have a slightly different setpoint.
This can mean an unequal distribution of sexes at the top or bottom end, even with equal opportunities and without external discrimination or cultural factors.
And obviously, this does NOT justify any sort of discrimination!! It says nothing about any individual, who may be typical or atypical.
It is however yet another reason to not automatically assume that discrimination can be assumed to be the only explanation for observation of unequal representation in situations requiring relatively rarified skills or interests.
I wasn't arguing that men are solely responsible for keeping women down, or that there'd be more female math geniuses if there were more fathers like Hypatia's. My father, who helped me with my math homework, NEVER taught me I couldn't do math, or that girls couldn't do it well. In fact I *told* him that and he refused to believe it. He was right, of course, and he dragged me through like ten years of math classes until I was no longer required to take them. I was NO budding Hypatia.
I suspect you're right, that there's more going on to the lack of female math geniuses than male holding back, and we're in less position to argue 'misogyny' now because I keep seeing the integration of women and POC in places they weren't in the last ten years. Like corporate websites and leadership pages and in higher-level positions.
I suspect we may spend awhile playing catchup due to historical male obstructionism, but I think we're making progress already. I'm seeing more female CTOs and VPs of IT; ten years ago, women on corporate websites were almost always VPs of Marketing, Communications, and HR. Is it affirmative action or merit? Who knows? Like it was in Hedy Lamarr's time.
We may *never*, in the best of future times, acheive parity with men in certain spaces, but that's okay, as long as the next baby Hypatia is allowed to pursue her talents and skills without being flayed alive by ignorant Christians :)
And in the meantime, there's nothing wrong with going back to the long-way-around way of getting to medical transition...living like the opposite gender for a year or two, lots of counseling, make sure this is what the person really wants. The trans movement is rushing medical transition on everyone for reasons I'm still trying to figure out. The medical community *used* to recognize surgical transition as a giant mother of a move not to be undertaken by either doctors or patients lightly; now the trans movement uses the threat of suicide, and encourages children to threaten this, to get what they want.
Given how prevalent suicide had already become *before* trans became a fad (and I do believe a lot of it is), I'm not at all convinced all 'trans' people are truly trans, or that their suicidality stems from genuine dysphoria.
But we humans are masters at distracting ourselves from whatever is *really* the underlying problem(s).
"The trans movement is rushing medical transition on everyone"
... while at the same time flying into rage at any suggestion that GD has a medical dimension
The conclusion of the CC is a red flag that it's not being as academically rigrorous as it might be. It concludes that anxiety & depression might actually be signs of gender dysphoria. Except those are the two most common mental illnesses out there, and GD only got to be 'a thing' just a few years ago, really - about 10-12.
There's a growing recognition in some circles that some so-called GD might actually be distractions from underlying, pre-existing psychological problems. That the rise of 'Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria' in young people (supported by a highly-peer-reviewed research paper by Lisa Littman, controversial only for trans-ideologues) may actually be peer group- and social media-influenced. That suicidality might not be due to GD but to these underlying problems. Given that suicide rates have risen *dramatically* in the last *twenty years*, before the rise of the trans movement, while suicidality in transfolk may be genuine, it may not necessarily be related to GD.
Feffy sounds like he *might* be one who is 'genuinely' trans (not socially induced) since he feels he was this way since he was four or five, but we can't even take *that* at face value anymore, because he could have been induced to believe that by trans ideologues marketing a 'solution' for him. Here's the problem critical theory set have created for themselves--they've blurred language and meaning so much, we can't trust anyone anymore, not even academics, whose own standards have slipped in service to political ideologues, and certainly not the self-diagnoses of psychologically disturbed individuals.
Millennials and Gen Z have been shown by many studies to be one of the most anxious, stressed, and depressed generations ever, even more than Boomers living through enforced draft and the Vietnam War, not to mention all the other turmoil of the '60s and early '70s, and GD is being marketed to them as a fix for all their problems. One wonders if the high suicide rate among transfolk is partly because transitioning didn't fix all their problems.
And given, how un-self-aware this ironically highly narcissistic movement is, I'm not terribly inclined to believe anymore anyone who claims they 'always' felt this way unless others around them could confirm this.
I think the 'genuine' trans are the ones who really did feel this way from a very early age, and I'm reading a quite convincing personal history of it right now, The Transsexual Scientist, by Dana Bevan, a psychologist and transwoman who described growing up in the Forties feeling this way. So, the part of the CC article that sounds worth exploring is the fact that gender and sex may be on a spectrum (not that hard a concept to consider), and I'm with you that we should just be who we are and love who we do. But the queer theory, which embraces some trans issues, has muddied the labels and language so much they don't make sense, and they make gender and sex way more complicated, frankly, than it is.
Whether GD is real or induced also isn't the final point, but given how ugly the movement has become, it's time for some real pushback and forcing discussions these people don't want to have, because they're afraid of what it means to their self-image.
Here's an article I shared on Facebook this weekend about The New Homophobia in the LGBTQ movement.
https://www.newsweek.com/new-homophobia-opinion-1698969?fbclid=IwAR28pgTqWatkFDn-SQ3GwuUSbPqzeCNtBRdQGHW0yBodQZ_g69GhH9fTBZE
Your last paragraph: not quite.
First of all, the stereotypes of male and female psychology don't survive actual scientific testing, double-blind and peer-reviewed; women are just as aggressive, men are just as social and so on. Most of the stereotypes are indeed responses to societal expectation.
Except one.
Men in competitive situations will outperform themselves in noncompetitive ones. Women perform identically with or without competition.
And this is why "trans women" in women's sports is just wrong; even without the corporeal advantages of heavier male bones and muscles, that competitive male brain confers an unfair advantage.
There are differences in brain wiring and sometimes they support the stereotypes but it doesn't matter; we're not our biology, it's not our destiny. The brain differences are there. Steven Pinker gets into this rather a lot. Here's an article by a different researcher on the diffs:
https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-different.html
Fascinating!
A thing I wish these studies had sigma and zeta values included so we could see if the data is significant, or noise more easily.
What do you mean, like evaluating to see how worthy they are of citation? Not sure what sigma & Zeta values are.
Standard deviation and distance from the mean are and indication of the strength and significance of data when assigning meaning. Just a mindset I developed in the job I retired from where I had to provide an executive summary to project managers ($$$) about the significance of my data.
That is an interesting thing that I was unaware of.
When you compare someone with gender dysphoria who gets hormones and affirmation surgery to schizophrenics who want to make their delusions real, it sounds like a critique of current treatment for gender dysphoria rather than support. It seems to imply that the medical establishment harms them by confirming their delusion, instead of training them to reject it . But if they are to reject it, we are back to the awful conversion therapies that were also used on gay people. If you are fine with society affirming them, then what exactly are you objecting too? What do you want trans people to acknowledge or do differently?
"When you compare someone with gender dysphoria who gets hormones and affirmation surgery to schizophrenics who want to make their delusions real, it sounds like a critique of current treatment for gender dysphoria"
Again, you're saying this because you're assigning different moral weight and validity to different types of psychological distress. Schizophrenia = crazy. Gender dysphoria = valid. No. Both schizophrenics and people with gender dysphoria simply want their distress to stop.
What if I compared gender dysphoria to body integrity disorder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_dysphoria) instead? Where people identify as disabled and feel powerfully compelled to amputate healthy limbs or paralyse themselves so they become the wheelchair users the deeply feel themselves to be? Can we then have a conversation about whether these people should be unquestioningly affirmed?
I'm not saying that treating people with gender dysphoria harms them. I'm saying that the current affirmation only model is potentially harmful (as evidenced by the increasing numbers of people, mainly young girls, coming forward to say how they were let down by their gender health care providers).
I'm saying that comparing counselling for young people who are about to make life-long, life-altering changes to their bodies, to gay conversion therapy, both trivialises the horrors of conversion therapy and fails our duty of care to minors.
I don't want trans people to do anything. Well, except get the care they need and live happy lives. But I want the medical community to act responsibly.
I want us to continue being able to talk honestly about biological reality (in the case of sport for example) so that the needs of both women and trans people can be addressed.
And I want us to fully recognise the influence we have over the thinking of young children. And to stop telling them that a preference for stereotypically male/female things means there's something wrong with them that needs to be fixed through lifelong medicalisation.
It's widely known that ~80% of trans identifying children will stop identifying as trans after puberty. And this saves them from a lifetime of hormone therapy and surgery that, as we can see in Feffy's case, absolutely does not guarantee good mental health. I don't think we should make these facts taboo.
I want trans people to *think* about what they're doing, ask themselves what they *really* want, question whether being trans will address and solve underlying problems they may have, and stop listening to what everyone else is telling them they should think, do or feel.
There's an awful lot of peer pressure in this movement that transfolk need to take responsibility for.
The post-surgical regret rate for reassignment surgery is about 1%, one of the lowest. I would bet that's because of the rigor of the diagnosis.
If everyone going through a "nonbinary" phase was granted reassignment surgery there would be a hell of a lot of regret once the latest fad turned to, oh, having antlers grafted in, or vertical pupils.
"The post-surgical regret rate for reassignment surgery is about 1%, one of the lowest. I would bet that's because of the rigor of the diagnosis."
I really wonder if this is still the case. I believe this figure is based on a time when there were still actual safeguards in place. Individuals who wanted to transition received counselling and spent time living as the opposite sex before they had hormones and surgery. These simple, logical steps obviously weeded out the people who might have regretted transition.
This is all the sane people are arguing for.
I recently saw a podcast with Buck Angel and Blair White saying the same thing. It's not that I don't think trans people exist or that they'll all regret surgery (I know you're not accusing me of this), it's that the real condition of gender dysphoria has been turned into a fad with little to no concern for the children caught up in it.
Your last sentence is far and away the most important issue for me. Any gender reassignment treatment should be absolutely illegal until adulthood and psychiatric evaluation.
The adherents of this fad will not be moved by science. To even suggest a medical dimension to GD sends them into apoplectic rage.
Is it like treating mental illness like other dysphorias, or like conversion therapy, or neither? That should be a question.
I think we need to avoid jumping to an emotionally driven quick conclusion. I'm tired of the arguments which proceed like "this has to me a whiff of (something bad that once happened) so we should shut down all critical thinking and run away". Instead study it and see if it really IS like that bad thing or not. Otherwise we'd also reject psychological treatment of body dysmorphia because it's sorta maybe similar to gay conversion therapy (but only if one looks at it very superficially or with an ideological bias).
Just for the record, if we allow people to get gender reassignment surgery or cosmetic surgeries to make them look like a cat, I think we should allow adults to voluntarily seek certified professional therapy to modify their sexual orientation. The abuse was in coercively forcing people (especially children) to undergo often wildly unscientific processes to supposedly change their orientation. This is another of those cases of expanding from "avoid a specific abuse" to "avoid anything which can be construed to have any similarity to it" - politically driven overshoot, not well considered abatement of abusive situations.
Other examples are citing the Tuskegee syphilis experiment to justify Black people avoiding Covid vaccination, based on a tremendously tenuous asserted connection., or avoiding modern professional genetic counseling because some eugenicists a century ago went dark places with forcible sterilization.
We need to engage the cortex too, not just the amygdala.
Let's go back to the days when transitioning was a long, slow process beginning with living as the opposite sex for a year or two and then getting hormones and surgery and all that. Especially for kids, this will give them some breathing space to make up their minds and perhaps outgrow the GD, which 80% of them will do if not interfered with too young. The fact that the trans movement is so hell-bent on railroading anyone who exhibits interest in transitioning points to the need to have their own personal feelings validated rather than any concern for whether they're harming others.
Try asking a four year old boy "are you a little girl?" His vehemence will shock you. Sorry but I am not buying that, at that age, it's all "social construct."
Not sure this is delusion at work. Dysphoria is real; depending on your sources, one in 15-65,000 births pass the medical criteria. However when we have hundreds of times as many claiming dysphoria (or insulting intelligence by claiming intermediate gender) then it's hard to accept that there are some genuine ones.
But there are, and they are not being helped by this raging fad.
And it's a painful existence. A genuine dysphoric lives in a state of continuous shock, a sense of wrongness. I dated one guy every time he came to Seattle, years, and I never would have known if he hadn't told me that this meeting would be our last because he was going into surgery soon. He didn't look, act, or sound at all feminine but if he qualified for reassignment then he had passed a high bar.
And he didn't give a damn about pronouns.