[sunahsuh]

I take massive issue with this.

We start the training with regard to gender so early that it's hard to tell what's "nature" and what's "nurture". I'm watching the choices my sister makes during her pregnancy with fascination. Gender is the earliest thing we bombard them with -- painting rooms pink, buying gendered clothes, choosing certain toys.. we don't even thinking about it because it's so normal until, for instance, you make a conscious effort to try and raise your child in a gender neutral environment.

[three14]

I have 4 kids, three girls and a boy, and they play with other kids their ages, so I have a fair amount of experience with little kids. There are corner cases where you can't tell what's nature and what's nurture, but you haven't really watched little kids if you haven't noticed that little boys (i.e. 2 year olds) bounce off walls much more than little girls, and there's no realistic nurture mechanism for that difference, at least among my friends and neighbors kids. More or less none of us have televisions, and it's too young to be training them at sports (or at least I haven't witnessed any of the parents doing so).

Legos, on the other hand, seem to be nurture: my daughters play with legos more days than not, and we don't have any pastel bricks.

[fennecfoxen]

So here's a news story about twin boys, one of whom decided he'd rather be a girl. Pretty much essentially the same "nurture". Still want to blame society when the girl decides she wants to wear pretty dresses? I think that's a hard sell.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2011/12/11/led-child-who-si...

[wanorris]

Given that they're identical twins, I think it's also pretty clear that this case undercuts the argument that it's all just genetics as well.

Oh, and "decided he'd rather be a girl" is generally considered offensive to trans people. She believes that she's always been a girl, and did not "decide" anything of the kind. Her physical characteristics were simply misleading regarding her true gender.

[pbhjpbhj]

>"is generally considered offensive to trans people"

Isn't that just being delusional. If I decide that I should have been born as superman, does that mean you now all have to refer to me as the Man of Steel and ignore the fact that I wasn't born with the organs (X-ray eyes, etc.) that would make it possible for me to be said person.

Except in cases of genetic sex indeterminacy a person is born either male or female regardless of what they think they should have been or currently want to be.

You're welcome to adopt your own self-vision but imposing unreality on others is beyond reasonable expectations of society.

[dalke]

The heart of the matter is, what is gender? It's clearly not the case that gender is identical to being biologically male or female, eg, based on which sex organs are present, or on the chromosome. You need only read the Wikipedia pages on "intersex" and "third gender" to see some of the diversity in the world. Sex indeterminacy is only one of many possibilities.

Go back to the original Turing Test. In "The Imitation Game", the questioner must determine which of two people is male and female based only on written notes. (Presumably typewritten or some other means which doesn't even reveal handwriting.) If the only way to tell that a person who looks like a female is actually a male is through a close physical examination, then will you at least agree that they are doing a good job of acting as a female?

Of course there are many people who do that, including actors and cross-dressers, who see it as a different persona which they can put on or take off. For those who work hard at it, it's a sign of respect to be called "she" because it's a recognition of the effort needed to get the body language, and voice patterns, and dress style down.

But some people feel that being born male was a mistake, a birth defect. A cleft palate is a birth defect which is easily fixed nowadays. Nose jobs and breast implants and LASIK are usually voluntary procedures to change a genetic characteristic. Gender reassignment isn't as simple, but much easier pre-puberty. One worry is that the person, decades later, may decide that the choice made as a child was wrong, or at least deluded. That's why there's a lot of counseling involved.

If someone considers themself a female, takes on female gender roles, and to every extent possible acts like a female, then can you see why there's some offense that some side effects of some stupid little chromosome still make others call them a "he" instead of "she"?

That person may still be deluded. The question for you is, how do you tell the difference between a delusion and (what you consider to be the impossible case of) actually being born as the wrong sex? What are the negatives and benefits of encouraging vs. denying that delusion? Bear in mind that clearly a number of transgender people are happier having made that change.

As to your Superman example, "Superman" is a specific person from a fictional world. But suppose you thought you were Kryptonian, and you underwent hypothetical genetic tinkering and technological augmentation to get x-ray vision, super-strength, and so on. Then yes, I would call you a Kryptonian, or a human transformed into a Kryptonian if I wanted to be more precise. Just like my Dad, born Canadian, is now a US citizen. But if you just decide one day that everyone should call you "Superman", without making any effort at it, then don't be surprised if people don't agree with you. What would that effort look like? I saw a Superman impersonator on the Strip in Vegas, and would have no problems calling that person the Man of Steel.

[einhverfr]

Gender is entirely a social construct very loosely tied to biology but not at all determined by it.

I personally think the same thing is probably true of sexual orientation (which really is sexual attraction to gender not necessarily the same sex).

I would add that many anthropologists don't think people are born with a gender.

[bermanoid]

Gender is entirely a social construct very loosely tied to biology but not at all determined by it.

This doesn't sound plausible.

[tl;dr: If evolution didn't build in a powerful urge to make our gender behavior match our reproductive sex, then it made a huge error and missed a very easy and effective optimization.]

It may be the case that gender could be very loosely tied to biology in a philosophical or theoretical sense, but in the world that we're in right now, there are very strong adaptive reasons that gender expression and reproductive sex tend to stay close (statistically, of course) in any sexually dimorphic species, which I'd call a very strong "tie to biology".

Evolution 101-wise, gender can only be allowed to diverge from reproductive sex to a limited enough extent that it's more or less irrelevant to reproductive success. Evolution will make sure of that on a long enough time scale (at least up until the modern era, where we can to some extent decouple reproduction from sex).

If the two diverged commonly enough that animals were often foregoing sex with reproductively compatible partners in favor of incompatible ones that nevertheless matched the gender role they were interested in, then an adaptation that better facilitated reproductive matchings would easily emerge and dominate the population.

Note that such a compensating adaptation might even emerge as some form of social behavior, even if the impetus to that behavior was genetically driven; IMO, this doesn't make it any less tied to biology.

As an example, one suggestion [1] to solve the "gay problem" in evolution (why has full homosexuality, where a person is not at all attracted to members of the opposite sex, not been eradicated from the gene pool, since it should be so devastating to reproduction rates?) is that getting rid of the "gay gene" (or genes, or whatever) is actually a very difficult task for evolution to carry out (I'm anthropomorphizing evolution here for ease of speaking, not because I don't realize why that's wrong) for some reason. Difficult enough so that accepting the ~10% homosexuality rate was a better option, though obviously not ideal. So instead of getting rid of homosexuality, evolution tried to mitigate the "damage" that such behavior causes by enhancing an inclination for people to disapprove of it, which meant that even when people/animals were fully homosexual, they still tended to mate with members of the other sex due to social pressure. Thus the seemingly fitness-devastating 10% homosexuality rate was bumped down to a more ignorable number via social effects, and the presence of the gene was a net win. This is not to say that there's a "homophobia gene"; if this theory is correct, I'd guess that evolution more likely leveraged existing social behaviors (like wanting to fit in, or hating people that act differently) and turned them up to a slightly higher level.

In the case of gender identity, I suspect that there is a heavy dosage of social conformity involved in training people to signal their reproductive sex through gendered behavior. But I think it's biologically driven, or at least that it would be extremely surprising if it wasn't, since it's such low-hanging fruit. I'm sure that these biological imperatives are somewhat flexible, and that if pink was considered a boy color then boys would flock to the pink section of Toys R Us, rather than these things being hard-coded into the genome (though certain behaviors are definitely going to be hard-coded, since sex signaling had to take place before higher-level thought centers could be leveraged). But the inclination to figure out what these socially derived sex-signaling behaviors are is not a social construct - that's an evolutionary imperative, so while we may be able to change the particular expressions of gender that we see in the world, it's probably going to be rather difficult to prevent people from seeking them out and conforming to them.

This is why I'm always uncomfortable with nature vs. nurture questions - the environment that evolution optimizes any particular genome to succeed in includes the entire existing social structure, which was also influenced by previous rounds of evolution. So picking apart what is a "social construct" and what is "biological" is really a fool's errand, when it comes down to it - there's a delicate interplay between the two, and they always play off of each other.

[1] I should mention, there are other theories as well, the simplest being that even with the "gay gene", a person is only sometimes fully homosexual (twin studies have shown that homosexuality is definitely not 100% determined by DNA, though it's not 0%, either), so they do rather limited damage, and if tied to useful adaptations, there would be no particular evolutionary imperative to get rid of such a gene; the point, though, is that such arguments only hold up to a point, and if a large percentage of the population was gay, there would be much more selection pressure against that behavior, tamping down the ratio rather quickly to a lower level.

[wanorris]

As people who have been in certain kinds of accidents or been treated for certain kinds of medical conditions can tell you, having a certain set of body parts is not a requirement for being a member of either gender.

The overwhelming majority of people are born with a certain set of chromosomes, a set of parts between their legs, and an idea in their head that all agree with one another on what gender they are. It's a large enough majority that it's easy to think that these are the same thing, because for most people, they are.

But for trans people, these things disagree, and the gender that they think of themselves as in their heads wins. Since they are being treated by the world at large as something they don't consider themselves to be, they take steps to correct how the world views them by transitioning. Given money, access to treatment, and other constraints, this may include surgery, hormones, etc. But even in the absence of these things, they can still be trans people who know what their true gender is.

[einhverfr]

I don't know what "true gender" means scientifically. Physical characteristics are objective. I would expect something we can say is intrinsic, like true gender would also be, but I can't find a way of determinign it objectively or even intersubjectively, can you?

In fact, anthropologically I am not even sure anyone is born with a gender.

[sunahsuh]

They're identical twins. So, same "nature" too. So what does this story tell us?

[d0mine]

As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl (P.S.) http://www.amazon.com/As-Nature-Made-Him-Raised/dp/006112056...

Some things you can't change

[maximusprime]

I expected people would take issue with it. Unfortunately some people really really want it to be the case that girls and boys are only different because of their environment.

Given the way evolution works, doesn't that seem ridiculously unlikely?

Given the way we evolved to have clearly defined roles, and how we have obvious physical differences to enable that, doesn't it seem pretty obvious that we evolved our brain power differently also? eg men lots of brain power for spacial awareness for hunting etc.... women caring nuturing, far more brain power for language, communication etc

The other funny thing is that it's usually the same set of people who firmly believe that you are born homosexual, and that you can't be made homosexual by your upbringing. They believe sexual orientation to be biological. But at the same time claim that being 'girl' or 'boy' is something that you've been taught by culture??

[sunahsuh]

Your grandparent post took the argument farther than just saying that evolution has given men and women certain tendencies or proclivities (as an aggregate, allowing for the massive range of individual differences that are possible). You flat-out claim that men and women have brains that are hard-wired a certain way. If there's anything evolution has given us as humans, it's brains that are amazingly adaptable and plastic. Research has shown that things like basic perception differ across cultures (see, for instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCller-Lyer_illusion). You make an apparently logical assumption based on what you understand of evolution and biology (and how the human brain works) but I proffer that there's a fair amount of evidence that those assumptions might be wrong. (For instance, we have this recent study questioning the widely-held belief that men are by nature better at spatial reasoning: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/women-math-science...)

> But at the same time claim that being 'girl' or 'boy' is something that you've been taught by culture??

You misunderstand the argument. The argument is that what it means to be a boy or a girl has been taught by culture. That being said, I do personally believe there's more room for inquiry into the nurture side of the equation and that the "entirely biological" argument is something that's currently politically expedient to counter the people claiming that it's entirely a personal choice. On a personal note though, my earliest memory of having a crush on another girl was in 2nd grade and my uber-religious parents certainly weren't nurturing such notions in me (nor was anything else in my environment explicitly).

[bermanoid]

You make an apparently logical assumption based on what you understand of evolution and biology (and how the human brain works) but I proffer that there's a fair amount of evidence that those assumptions might be wrong. (For instance, we have this recent study questioning the widely-held belief that men are by nature better at spatial reasoning: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/women-math-science...)

The problem is, there's a "fair amount of evidence" on both sides, and it's universally shoddy research.

On the "innate difference" side, the most that can usually be done is to show that a discrepancy exists, and that it exists broadly in a statistical sense, argue that it exists broadly enough to posit that the effect is at least partially biological.

On the "no innate difference" side, the most that can usually be done is to pick out a couple of instances where the claimed effect doesn't exist, argue that if it doesn't exist everywhere then it's not real, and claim that this exception proves that it can't possibly be biological at all.

The "innate difference" folks then reject the debunkings as relying on cherry-picked data (in some cases this is fair, in some cases probably not, and unfortunately the level of statistical rigor in most papers on both sides is horrendous, so it's hard to say for sure), the "no innate difference" people disagree, and nothing is ever resolved.

The problem, of course, is that there's absolutely no realistic way to do a study that removes the effect of people growing up in a world that has the current set of gender roles, so both sides are right, in a sense: none of the "innate difference" papers actually prove that the differences are primarily biological, and none of the debunkings prove that they're not.

So everybody falls back on their priors. And our priors on these matters are pretty naive, more based on emotion and the minimal set of observations that we each personally have than anything else. Women that are good at math, feminists, and those that generally side with nurture assume that the burden of proof is on the "nature" folks to prove that there is an innate difference (because it's "obvious" that men and women are equal intellectually), and the nature types assume the burden of proof goes the other way (because they look at the observed statistical discrepancies and assume that they should be taken at face value until debunked). So we all end up arguing over what set of assumptions is more reasonable, throwing meaningless references to studies at each other as if the studies actually prove anything, which they usually don't.

It's quite the mess. I would ask, at least, that everyone on either side of this try to think of at least a few experiments that would actually change your mind on these matters. They're actually kind of tough to come up with, because it's so difficult to separate culture from the equation...

[einhverfr]

On top of that, you have an epistemological problem. How can you separate culture and biology in something like this without repeating the same experiment in a wide range of people in different types of cultures?

[lubutu]

Is it not possible that it's a bit of both? Given this scenario, which is clearly very likely, enforcing gender stereotypes could dissuade a child from walking a certain road down which their nature would have led them.

Boys and girls are naturally different, yes, but as demonstrated by the many women in science, that doesn't mean that all females want to grow up to become hairdressers or models.

Stereotypes do affect a child's development. Please don't limit their potential.

[maximusprime]

Yes it's obviously both. It's genetics, and sometimes bad stereotyping parents/upbringing.

[einhverfr]

One interesting experiment is to try HARD to create a realistic person of the other gender in an environment like Second Life. It's remarkably difficult but once you do, it's quite an interesting experience to see how socially conditioned so many things are.