[atq2119]

> For instance, biological sex is binary/bimodal for all intents and purposes. It is discrete, and very much not a spectrum.

This is such an interesting example for why free speech protections are important, but good faith discussion culture is even more important.

The first sentence is correct, the second isn't, when taken literally. The overall thrust of the statement still has merit, but it pays to be careful about one's phrasing.

To be clear, biology is messy and there are exceptions, which is why biological sex is not literally discrete in the sense that, say, binary logic is discrete. But it's also fairly reasonable to say that this is one of those cases where the exceptions confirm the time: There is a spectrum, it's just incredibly focused around two points.

The two extreme groups around this discussion both completely distort this nuanced observation. On the one side, you've got people that pretend that because the bimodality isn't perfect, it doesn't matter at all (and saying that it matters is hate!). On the other side, you've got people who pretend that there is no nuance to the bimodality (and many of them do actually hate people who don't fit perfectly into the binary).

It's pretty frustrating (to put it mildly), and free speech or lack of it has nothing to do with why it's frustrating.

[yodsanklai]

> The two extreme groups around this discussion both completely distort this nuanced observation.

AFAIU one group think gender should be a social construct, rather than a biological one. I don't this whole debate has even been about the 0.1%(?) who are not XX or XY.

[dragonwriter]

> AFAIU one group think gender should be a social construct, rather than a biological one.

No, one group, pretty much without exception, recognizes that gender always has been a social construct, and that it has historically been socially constructed differently in different culture. The other side may or may not recognize that; that’s not actually the point of disagreement. The point of disagreement is that the first side things that the proper social construction of ascribed gender is to align it with the subject’s gender identity. The other side, whether they frame it in terms of “gender isn’t real, only biological sex is”, “gender should reflect biological sex”, or in any of a variety of other terms, believes that the correct social construction of ascribed gender is that it should be based on some aspect or combination of aspects of biological sex (often based on a stereotype that elides the fact that choosing different aspects of biological sex for this purpose would result in different assignments.)

[Members of the first group may, in fact, view gender identity as a biological sex trait, in which case their disagreement with the second group can be viewed as a disagreement over which aspect of biological sex should be the basis.]

> I don’t this whole debate has even been about the 0.1%(?) who are not XX or XY.

Not being XX or XY isn’t the only biological divergence from simplistic stereotypes of biological sex that occurs.

[sam_goody]

I can tell which group you identify with by the bias in your comment. ;)

I have been on the fence about this whole subject, and I have read quite extensively. At least, get the facts straight.

Large groups of people classify people by their gender at birth, and 1) would disagree that this distinction is social in nature (eg. all religions identify the gender thus, and the source [at least from the POV of the adherents] is not social. 2) Would also disagree that it has historically been socially constructed differently in different culture. You won't find any example where such a norm became dominant, and you won't find any society which lasted more than 50 years after such ideas became even speakable in public.

More than that, many will disagree whether "identifying" with something (such as being a girl) is any more "real" than liking ice cream; They definitely do not consider it to be a legitimate source of defining an identity. (As legit as saying a girl is someone who identifies with Pecan ice cream - its not "which aspect of biological sex should be the basis", but "does this aspect even exist?")

[implements]

> Large groups of people classify people by their gender at birth, …

Strictly speaking, they did - but then for a time in the West (70s to about ten years ago) they just observed sex at birth and indoctrinated against the social imposition of normative gender expectations … but then all of a sudden people were born ‘gendered’ again, albeit with the novel twist that innate gender was no longer necessarily tied to their biological sex.

It’s a bit of a puzzle, as it appears that forty years of individual liberalisation (“See the person, not the stereotype”) something which transformed the lives of half the population is being reversed in order to please a small group of trans gender / gender non-conforming people for whom identifying as a one or other specific stereotype is apparently at the core of their identity.

[dragonwriter]

> Strictly speaking, they did - but then for a time in the West (70s to about ten years ago) they just observed sex at birth and indoctrinated against the social imposition of normative gender expectations …

Nope, that didn’t happen. Socially ascribed gender, with important social consequences (most importantly, ones coercively imposed by, or with support of, the power of government), did not go away.

If it had, though, the grounds for the dispute would be somewhat different, but the overall character would be the same, since the side opposing ascribing gender in accord with identity is also fairly universally in favor of coercive discrimination and/or segregation on the basis of (their preferred form of) ascribed gender, which is a fairly central point of their argument.

[atq2119]

You're right, socially ascribed gender didn't go away across society, but there was a string conscious effort by many - still is, by the way - to make it go away or at least make it significantly less impactful.

Importantly, the normative consensus among progressives was as GP describes. The trans activism movement is a move backwards in that regard, since it tries to shift the normative consensus back towards gender being important and that gender should be impactful. It's no wonder they clash with some feminists.

[dragonwriter]

> Large groups of people classify people by their gender at birth, and 1) would disagree that this distinction is social in nature

The disagreement is not over the factual physical observation. “Was born with (or without) a penis” is not a social distinction, but is also not the source of the disagreement.

The social weight given to it, OTOH, is. “Gets addressed in a particular way, is allowed in certain shared spaces and banned from others, etc.,” are, factually and indisputably, social distinctions, and are the focus of the disagreement.

> 2) Would also disagree that it has historically been socially constructed differently in different culture

This is just factually wrong; systems with more than two gender roles, and/or where one or more of the most closely corresponding to the supposedly universal binary defended by the side that claims one exists can be ascribed on bases other than the physical traits that faction demands should control ascription of gender have, in fact, existed (before now.)

> You won't find any example where such a norm became dominant, and you won't find any society which lasted more than 50 years after such ideas became even speakable in public.

This is, simply false; there are, for instance, very many examples in the indigenous cultures of the Americas.

[implements]

> The other side, […] believes that the correct social construction of ascribed gender is that it should be based on some aspect or combination of aspects of biological sex (often based on a stereotype that elides the fact that choosing different aspects of biological sex for this purpose would result in different assignments.)

Gender distinguishes men from women, male-like thoughts, acts, emotions, capabilities and appearances from female ones. Other than for the direct purposes of reproduction, why would we want or need to classify individuals into the social groups of men and women?

You see, there’s a third group that flatly denies the desirably of socially constructing something called ‘gender’ at all.

[concordDance]

> Other than for the direct purposes of reproduction, why would we want or need to classify individuals into the social groups of men and women?

Because men and women behave and think differently on average and treating them the same is going to cause a lot of problems in life. I mean sure, there's overlap and some men will behave in a feminine way only on one particular axis and vice versa, but ignoring the information gender gives is a very bad idea.

[implements]

Couldn’t disagree more - I think those differences are primarily the result of socialisation, and dare I say it, socialisation historically designed to make females subordinate to male interests ie to be sexually desirable, good mothers, good housewives and good carers.

If you consider a definition of feminine (prettiness, gracefulness, gentleness, empathy, humility, and sensitivity) it’s not someone who acts to make their mark on the world as a man might - it’s someone who at best achieves that by supporting a masculine partner. What a terrible vision of the world that is, and what an incredible waste of individual human talent.

[concordDance]

Why is being famous in history important? Why isn't raising strong, morale children important? Ensuring good relationships in the community? Defusing tensions? These are traditionally feminine things.

[Mezzie]

I think you're both kind of wrong. So much time is spent on worrying about the 'thinking' part of 'are women and men different?' (Or AFAB and AMAB if we want to use the language usually used in spaces dedicated to gender discussions). To me, the purpose of differentiating women and men is just down to efficiency, improving design of society and the items in it, and giving outliers (such as myself) language for why we feel so weird and don't fit in.

For example, men being so much physically stronger and larger than women does impact a fair amount of basic things in life. Car design is a pain in the ass (it's super fun that if I adjust the steering wheel in my car I can't see the speedometer), office chairs and tools are only made for men's bodies (my hands are small and I'm short), etc. Erasing sex just means things get designed for the average and large swaths of the other sex are ignored. (I'm not male, but I'd imagine large men have similar issues with things like sewing machines, bottles, diaper changing stations, etc. being designed for females only).

I also have a hard time fitting in in female-dominated spaces because so much of it is based around mollification/preventing conflict. Which makes sense because if you're female, starting shit with the other half of the population doesn't end well for you. Het and bi women generally live lives where they spend their time being aware that they will not win physical confrontations. (Aside: I'd guess this is why DV is more of an issue in lesbian relationships: The risk of being an abusive prick isn't being offset by the fact that your victim could pin you to the floor and punch you until you pass out). Being aware of this means I can place my own assertiveness/aggression in context and be like 'ah I feel out of place here because I am a statistical anomaly for my sex, not because anybody is wrong'.

> If you consider a definition of feminine (prettiness, gracefulness, gentleness, empathy, humility, and sensitivity) it’s not someone who acts to make their mark on the world as a man might - it’s someone who at best achieves that by supporting a masculine partner. What a terrible vision of the world that is, and what an incredible waste of individual human talent.

This I find really interesting, as I spent a lot of my life fighting any parts of myself that were traditionally feminine. I'm a more masculine than usual cis woman; bordering on butch but not quite there. And in my 30s I'm unlearning a lot of messiness around that and starting to accept the part of myself that likes teaching and nurturing + has a very strong passion for making sure the next generation is armed for the world we're sending them into. After all, surely wanting to pursue an academic career creating digital skills and history curricula for K-12 (mostly K-8) education is a 'waste of my individual human talent' when I could be writing new algorithms, isn't it?

I submit that the only people who get to determine whether something is an incredible waste of human talent are the people possessing the talent.

[dumpsterdiver]

If gender is separate from biological sex then what meaning does it have for someone to say they identify as a man or a woman? What is a man? What is a woman? Are they a grouping of mannerisms? If we engineered ourselves to have no sex and then we all selected our genders, how would we quantify what those genders represent without any biological context?

[dragonwriter]

> If gender is separate from biological sex

Its important to separate three things:

“Gender” in the broad sense is one of several possible social constructions of divisions of people into groups and associated distinct expectations and roles; it is a feature of the social context. While there is considerable variation in between social milieus, it is always grounded, to a greater or lesser degree, in current or historical stereotypes associated with some subset of anatomical sex traits; in fact, that’s part of what we use to identify which of the many socially constructed divides in a society is gender.

“Ascribed gender” is how other people treat a person with regard to gender.

“Gender identity” is how a person sees themselves and prefers to be treated with regard to gender.

None of these things are disconnected, in either practice or the theory of the major factions, from biological sex (the last is arguably itself either a biological sex trait, a set of biological sex traits, or an interaction of biological sex traits with the social context; for it to be anything else either requires dualism, or an arbitrarily restrictive definition of “sex”), except that maybe the side opposing recognizing gender identity as the basis for ascribed gender thinks gender identity is divorced from biological sex.

[gumshift]

It depends on who is doing the identifying. When a woman identifies as a woman, or a man identifies as a man, they are making a statement about their sex, on whether they are female or male.

When a man identifies as a woman, he is expressing his desire to be a woman, based on his ideal of what a woman is. Similarly, when a woman identifies as a man, she is expressing her desire to be a man, based on her ideal of what a man is. Neither have any direct experience of actually being the opposite sex, of course, so this ideal is based around gendered stereotypes and superficial cosmetic traits, particularly those related to sexual attraction.

[tzs]

It's not just about XX or XY. It is about many other biological features that are correlated with XX and XY, but not 100% correlated.

Besides the big one (penis vs vagina) there are things like the rest of the reproductive system, breast size and functionality, brain structures, muscle function, bone structure, facial features, and others.

These develop at different times during fetal development, and don't have to all come out "male" or "female".

In programming terms it is like XX/XY is a master setting for a complex distributed system, and then there are a bunch of flags that control implementation of that master setting in various subsystems of the distributed system which are "supposed" to all be set if the master setting is XX and all clear if it is XY, but sometimes you end up with some set and some clear.

[implements]

> AFAIU one group think gender should be a social construct, rather than a biological one.

No, gender critical people very much don’t want gender to be a biological construct - they find the idea of innate biological masculinity or femininity appallingly regressive. They prefer to think of men and women as primarily unique individuals, ones who are incidentally sexed purely for reproductive purposes ie not for social ones.

[MrScruff]

If gender is a social construct (an idea which I'm sympathetic to), shouldn't it just go away entirely? I'm happy to move towards a society where we abandon stereotypes of masculine and feminine behaviour, I just don't understand how that's compatible with saying 'I wish to identify as a different gender because my behaviours match the stereotype of that gender.'. Doesn't that just reinforce those stereotypes?

[notSupplied]

I agree. I wish to go away from traditionalist views “Alice should stop playing with trucks and play with dolls because she is a girl” to “Alice can with trucks if she wants”. But I was shocked to find that instead, some people now believe “Alice is really a boy if she likes playing with trucks”

[concordDance]

Then why the fuss about transgender people? It's all about treating them as a different gender, no-one seems to care about adults getting bottom surgery on their own dime.

[tixialu]

Mostly because some places - prisons, for example - need to be segregated by sex, and the transactivists want to abolish that.

And because they're also pushing a large-scale redefinition of the terms "woman" and "man", and trying to make it law, which most people don't agree with.

[atq2119]

> AFAIU one group think gender should be a social construct, rather than a biological one

Gender is a social construct by definition.

This all starts with the purely descriptive observation that when you analyze the informal man/woman distinction that exists de facto in society, there is a component that is inherently biological (visible traits, hormonal differences, etc.) and a component that is arbitrary social convention (clothing, color schemes, etc.). Having different terms for those components helps, and so the first one is called sex and the second is called gender.

This is all purely descriptive and I don't think anybody reasonable has major disagreements about it on either side of this topic.

The question is whether and what kind of normative conclusions one can or should draw from the observation.

For example, very conservative folks would make the normative statement that gender expressions must align with sex (women can't wear pants, men can't wear dresses, that sort of thing). There are two major strikes against this position as far as I'm concerned: first, it's clearly very illiberal; second, even ignoring the illiberalism, it doesn't leave room for the few people who, through no fault of their own, don't fall neatly into the sex binary. Those folks are left in a Kafkaesque situation of having no real way of complying with such a rule.

Some trans activists also make questionable normative statements, such as "transwomen are women". That's a normative statement because it implies that the word "woman" should be used to refer to a person's gender instead of a person's sex. It's no wonder they clash with some feminists who point out that, while there may be significant overlap, the life experiences of transwomen are generally not the same as those of women (in the sex sense), and there are situations where the distinction matters.