[DoreenMichele]

The people arguing that gender is a social construct are arguing about a completely different field from human biology per se. Even his remarks about biology per se look ill informed to me. On top of that, he seems to make zero effort to make any distinction between sex and gender.

Him insisting he's right is sort of like someone dismissing Freud's theories based on "I have a PhD in physics, damn it!"

Good for you. And irrelevant.

[thu2111]

The whole idea that gender and sex aren't synonyms looks very bizarre to someone who hasn't paid attention to this whole corner of academia. If someone said "Make a drop down that lets people specify their sex" I'd interpret that request in exactly the same way as if someone used the word gender: a radio button for male or female.

There seem to be people here arguing that if the request said "sex" the radio button is fine, but if it said "gender" then ... then what? A slider? What would it even say? Please select the place on the spectrum you feel you are, where one side is male and one side is female? I've never seen such a form.

[DoreenMichele]

That's a reasonable point. I was introduced to the idea that "gender is a social construct" well before I was introduced to the idea of transsexuals, so I had some opportunity to think about that as a separate issue from the idea of "Some people want sex change operations."

I was one of the top ranked students of my graduating high school class and I tend to speak my mind and do other things that tend to be socially acceptable for men, but not women. Women like me tend to get a lot of flak from the world for failing to "know their place" and they get a lot of flak in a way that questions their gender identity and that causes them to wonder about gender roles and their own identity and so forth.

So when I was younger, I wondered things like If having an opinion and speaking my mind is "masculine," does that say something about my sexuality?

So I found the whole concept of being a transsexual pretty confusing when I first ran into it. I wondered did that apply to me in some way and where do you draw certain lines.

I ran into someone online who talked about having "beard envy" and that was an Aha! moment for me. I have never felt that way and that was an incident that helped me feel clear in my mind about the ways in which "gender is a social construct" negatively impacts my life as a woman and really has nothing to do with things like sexuality or sex.

So I feel clear that, yup, "I'm a woman" and that's sometimes problematic and uncomfortable because of how the rest of the world would like to dictate to me what that means about how I should dress and how I should behave and so forth. And that fact is even more problematic for some people than it is for me because they are intersex or they feel their body is the wrong sex (etc).

So I fully get that it's a weird idea the first time you run into it and it can take some time to understand the distinction people are trying to make.

If you want to say "I have a PhD in biology, so I feel entitled to insist my (offensive) opinions about sex are right!" then I think you have some obligation to try to understand the distinction people are trying to make. He doesn't appear to be doing that.

If you are just a software engineer trying to figure out how to code up radio buttons on a website and not someone actively promoting your ideas about biological sex, eh, you may have no real need, personally, to spend a whole lot of time trying to parse these things. At that point, it makes sense to basically go "Well, not really something I'm interested in and since I don't have an informed opinion, I will largely leave it to other people to argue about this."

If you don't know much about math, you probably aren't going to tell people with PhDs in math that they are wrong because you don't understand what they are talking about. That same general standard should apply in this case as well. It's okay to not know everything about every subject, assuming you don't try to cram your uninformed opinions down everyone else's throats.

I will add that human categories are just that: human made concepts. Animals like the platypus didn't consult with human categories before they evolved into mammals that lay eggs, which humans have an issue with because it flies in the face of our nice, neat categories.

Nature is full of examples of things that fail to be readily categorized by humans in a way that is convenient for us. Our desire to categories things often runs into friction with actual reality.

At that point, you have to admit that the mental is defective rather than trying to insist reality is behaving badly and should stop doing that already.

[thu2111]

Thanks for the interesting comment.

It feels like what you're describing here is what I'd use the words masculinity and femininity for. You do indeed use that term in the third paragraph. If someone said "Please define a form where someone can specify their masculinity or femininity" then I'd consider the request rather odd, but I'd also immediately imagine a slider. As indeed, I'm sure everyone has met people who whilst possessing the anatomy of a particular gender behaved more like the opposite, in terms of behavioural stereotypes.

As there are already words to describe this spectrum and the existence of it is uncontroversial, I struggle to understand why there's an academic attempt to redefine the word gender. It feels abusive, like the behaviour described in 1984 or Animal Farm, where people play games with language in order to create artificial crimes they can accuse their opponents of. If all these people mean by "gender is a social construct" is "there are masculine women and feminine men" then why don't they just say that?

Over the years I've come to learn that people who are paid for their production of ideas are often tempted to obfuscate their language in various ways, or at the very least, aren't bothered by their field redefining standard words in ways that have unintuitive meanings. This behaviour isn't organised or deliberately malicious, it just arises from the incentives they have to carve out an intellectual space in which they make the rules and other people find it hard to enter. It's difficult not to conclude this is happening with the redefinition of the word "gender".

If you don't know much about math, you probably aren't going to tell people with PhDs in math that they are wrong because you don't understand what they are talking about

Actually I have told people with PhDs in maths things to that effect ;)

Cryptography is essentially (semi)applied maths. Mathematicians and theoretical cryptographers do have an unfortunate tendency to redefine standard mathematical terms and operators to mean something different in different contexts, or sometimes even things that are misleading. For example they like to say, "we have proven this scheme correct in the generic group model", which means a proof has been provided that assumes attackers can only solve a very small set of allowed equations and thus doesn't prove much of anything. Yet to anyone outside the field it sounds very impressive, like if there is no flaw in the proof then the proposition is completely true. They also like to redefine the meaning of + and * in some contexts, like when working with elliptic curves, such that equations that look like normal math actually mean something totally different. They could use different symbols or even words, but, they don't.

There's often no need for this. Jargon is unavoidable in any technical field but often phrasing things in plain English loses no precision and can only illuminate. Gender/critical theory seems to be filled with bizarre redefinitions of terms to mean the opposite of what they normally mean, like the way they pretend racism means something else such that their obviously racist statements, by their definition, aren't, and statements that aren't racist by their definition are.

I've found over time that I prefer reading papers from corporate research teams, as they tend to engage less in this sort of obfuscation.

[DoreenMichele]

There are lots of terms in the world that get used differently by different people, sometimes to mean the exact opposite of what other people mean. One example is "decriminalization" (of prostitution). I have taken to stating up front which way I mean that because it's so consistently misconstrued if I don't.

I don't think masculinity and feminity really works to express the desired idea here. In the past, I have been told that I read as very feminine. A lot of that is behavioral and is rooted in things like body language.

More than a decade ago, I cut my hair very short for health reasons. I continued to be interpreted as clearly female.

Then I spent some homeless. I began wearing men's t-shirts and sweatpants for practical reasons, including the fact that a man's t-shirt gives better coverage when I am braless.

Initially, I continued to be read as female. But after a year on the street, people sometimes called me "sir " especially if they were seeing me from the back (and I think the lack of a bra helped convince people I was male -- you can see the outline of bra straps through clothing).

I don't feel less feminine. I can't tell you what I'm doing differently. Whatever it is, it isn't conscious and intentional.

As far as I can tell, I still have the default character traits that are 'typically' feminine that probably helped get me read as extremely feminine in my youth. But something about my demeanor changed in ways I cannot pinpoint.

And, yet, the social construct of gender continues to get in my way in many important ways and interfere with me making my life work. I still do not feel I have escaped that prison and the poverty it helps impose on my life.

Life constrains people by what other people expect of them and de facto insist on as a role they must play. I think this is a separate issue from masculinity or feminity. I think it is reasonable for people to try to invent language to talk about such ideas.

I did qualify my remark about math with "probably."

I'm okay with having this discussion with you. Many people knowledgeable about this topic wouldn't be.

You will notice other people here talk about "this is a standard trans excluding tactic" and I've said no such thing. People who are negatively impacted by certain practices tend to conclude that they are being intentionally and consciously mistreated and excluded.

I generally don't make that assumption. I tend to believe that much friction of this sort is genuinely due to some people honestly not understanding what the issue is and why it matters to some people.

I don't make that assumption even for things that do directly negatively impact me. And that's not the norm.