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I've tried coming at this topic from a few different angles over the years and I frequently find that one of the biggest hinderences to debates around gender is that there are many different and at times contradictory ways to be on both sides of the various questions regarding gender in modern society. I've decided to lay out what I think are the fundamental questions that people disagree with. In isolation I think I can reason any option for any of the below questions but certain combinations of answers seem like they can't coexist
Questions in dispute in the debates around gender:
\1. To what degree if any is gender related to sex?
A) gender and sex are the same thing B) gender and sex are tightly mapped but some people have a gender misaligned with their sex C) gender and sex are related but not tightly mapped D) gender is totally unrelated to sex\2. How many Genders are there?
A) two B) several C) Many D) A near infinite number\3. Who or what determines what a person's gender is:
A) society B) biology C) self\4. Sexual orientation(gay/straight/bisexual) is primarily related to the [Blank] of the object of attraction:
A) gender B) Sex C) Some combination of gender and sex D) none of the above\5. Are the differences between how men and women behave more socially or biologically derived:
A) Much more due to Social Pressures B) a near even mix C) Much more due to Biological differences\6. How much can an individual's gender change over time?
A) Gender can never change B) Gender is constant but someone's understanding of their gender can change C) Gender can change in response to dramatic life events D) Gender can be fluid and change frequently\7. Is the relationship between men and women or the relationship between males and females the primary focus of feminism?
A) men and women B) males and females C) both D) there is no difference\8. How is gender felt from a first person perspective?
A) an innate feeling separate from behavior and dress B) an inclination for certain behaviors and dress C) just the consequence of sexQuestions I'm excluding because while definitely relevant to policy discussions I don't believe are really fundamental to disagreements:
Are puberty blockers safe?
Do males and females differ in physical capability?
How well can any given transgendered person pass?
How much should we expect people to game gender affirming policies and what if anything should be done to prevent this
Examples playing with edge cases:
I - A Female dresses and behaves in a manner perfectly median in every metric for a woman in the society they live in. Is it legitimate for this person to identify as a man without changing any behavior?
II - A Female dresses and behaves in a manner perfectly median in every metric for a man in the society they live in. Is it legitimate for this person to identify as a woman without changing any behavior?
III - A Female, who dresses and behaves in a manner perfectly median in every metric for a woman in the society they live in, Meets A Female who dresses and behaves in a manner perfectly median in every metric for a man in the society they live in. They have sex. Was this a heterosexual coupling or a homosexual coupling? Does this answer change depending on what each partner identifies as? Does it matter if they never exchanged gender identity?
IV - A Male teenager is unsure about their gender identity, they are not classically masculine and are bullied for this. No one ever affirms their masculinity. They attempt a social transition and find those around them very supportive and constantly affirm their femininity which the teenager enjoys although doesn't particularly enjoy many of the feminine trappings. What criteria should the teenager use to gauge whether they are a girl, boy or other gender?
V - A Male who identifies as a man raised in a very standard American cultural context is abruptly transported to a different culture with exactly opposite norms for men and women but an otherwise similar culture. would you expect the person to identify as a man or woman?
VI - In A world where there are no visible secondary sex characteristics including strength differentials and a society where there is no social distinction between the sexes would this society invent gender? If so would gender primarily fall along sex lines?
Please feel free to compare and contrast how different sets of answers to these questions have different implications for these examples or new scenarios you find interesting or propose new relevant questions. I'm most interested in kind of mapping out how different 'factions' in the general debate might answer these questions.
edit: the formatting was right in the preview >_>
If you can provide me with a representative person for any of your edge cases, I'll be able to answer them. Otherwise they're as legitimate as asking, "If the laws of physics were completely different, would gravity behave as it does now?". Yeah? No? Who fuckin' knows?
I know a nonbinary person who perfectly represents edge case #1. That enough for you to answer that one?
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You object to just the concept of hypothetical questions?
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Edge cases / thought experiments help tease out subtle inaccuracies that may point to deeper problems. "What happens when you divide a piece of matter in half a hundred times" is a weird edge case, yet atoms. "If the laws of physics were different, what happens" is a very useful approach to physics!
For the specific edge cases: Plenty of people declare they are 'nonbinary' with very little change in the way they present themselves or """"perform gender"""". I know a few people who say they are trans, but still act almost entirely like men/women, but that's rare.
IV is clearly something that happens, physically. There are some cases where less-masculine teenagers are bullied constantly, and then transition, and then are 'supported'. And the question is - are these people 'really trans', and what does that mean? Is it possible for someone to transition for reasons other than 'truly being a woman, like, feeling it'?
(Personal opinion: 'people are supported for transitioning, which is why they do it' is, least for mtf, less common than 'everyone thought i was weird / my parents and friends hated it / i was very scared and didnt come out for years').
V and VI are far-out hypotheticals, ofc.
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Since ‘gender’ is not a term with a common definition, could you please explain what you mean by it?
To clarify, despite my dislike of the term, I don’t intend this as a jab. I really lost track of what people mean when they use it, so I’m unsure what you mean here.
The definition is contested, the general purpose here is to try and work around that to feel out what people mean when they talk about the concept. I've intentionally not put a finger on the scale.
So are you just asking “what is gender”? Or are you asking intentionally unclear questions?
What someone thinks gender is should inform their answers to these questions.
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It seems to me they're asking "what is gender" in a somewhat more rigorous fashion than normal. Simply ask the question and you'll get all sorts of random answers, few of them helpful, which will then in turn get discussed until people break out the specific examples to try to isolate their distinctions. This is just trying to cut to the chase.
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They are strongly correlated at a population level; individually, it varies.
Two primary genders (man-male-masculine-he/him-♂ and woman-female-feminine-she/her-♀), plus some number of derived genders (defined by reference to other genders).
I don't know.
It depends on the individual.
I don't know.
It can be fluid, but for many people, it is nearly or entirely constant.
Both. Feminism, as I understand the term, refers to all movements and ideologies opposing the placement of 'him' over 'her', regardless of whether these are defined by chromosomes, natal anatomy, current anatomy, hormonal configuration, gender identity, social roles, appearance....
It probably depends on the individual.
Isn't this kind of contrary to your answer to 1? Him and her are gendered terms, If these other traits are only implicated by gender then shouldn't 'A) men and women' have fulfilled that criteria? When you decouple sex and gender you misalign this pipeway, you can no longer access 'girl therefore female'.
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Gender doesn't exist, there is only sex.
There are none, there are two sexes.
Nothing as it's a made up concept. Biology determines sex....
I think there's a whole nexus of answers along this view not in the options.
I think every question had an option that fulfills your view on each question, I do think that is going to be the most popular checking of boxes at the moment but that doesn't necessarily make it right. What further questions do you think you'd need to define the boarders of your belief than those listed?
Maybe I wasn't clear enough, I don't believe gender and sex are the same thing, I believe sex is biological reality and gender is like Thetan count, a thing some people believe in but I believe is entirely imaginary.
There isn't a single answer on any of your questions that I would say I agree with.
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I had a similar reaction to the above poster. I suspect you expected the following answer to cover this view:
The issue I had with this is that it is ignoring reality. I would prefer gender to mean the same thing as sex but some people are clearly using the word differently. Given I'm not a prescriptivist a definition that doesn't match the word's use is not a good definition.
At the same time I think the concept these people are trying to convey is mostly incoherent, poorly defined, and the general concept is pointing at something that doesn't exist. This means the rest of the answers don't work either. It's like asking if Blargle is related to sex - the only right answer is to say the whole question makes no sense.
True, but they aren't using it coherently. People who use gender as different than sex vacillate between "quixotic mental state" and "fashion" and possibly a few other definitions, but they cannot and will not ever pin it down.
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For one: perhaps you can say that society has certain gender roles roles indexed to sex without actually believing that someone can truly be the opposite gender. So it would be an answer that falls somewhere between 1a and 1b.
This is basically what we're doing when we call someone a pussy or say that he "gossips like a girl". No one thinks he's a girl or that he actually has a pussy.
I think you're right that this awkwardly handles a view where gender(as role) is imposed on people on the basis of their sex.
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I am not going to answer any multiple choice quiz on this topic.
I will not waste time endlessly questioning what I already know, and instead focus on things that that are actually unknowns, not things that are said to be unknown by an ideologically confused group of people.
Any amount on time wasted on the question "what is gender" is time that you burned because you were gaslit into thinking that we already dont know what gender is.
I shudder at the amount of IQ hours wasted on this stupid topic.
"What is gender?" is malicious nerd spining. Its not a good faith forray into what category/classificatins are, its an ideological set of words with precise political endpoints.
Does it bother you that I didn't know which side of the debate you were on until the third linebreak?
No, it bothers me that the supposedly smart people here on the motte waste IQ-time on blatant nonsense.
I dont think the last 7000 discussions we had on "what is gender?" was actually motivated by curiosity towards answering a difficult to solve problem.
Its a desperate attempt to find a signal in the noise because a bunch of people (who operate under extremely loose epistemological standards) said there was a signal.
Im bothered by people's lack of ability to seperate out the chaff.
I think you have it wrong regarding IQ. High IQ is predictive of novelty-seeking. It has zero to do with what is practical. If something does not interest me I just ignore or collapse it.
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Understanding precisely what's going on with some stupid set of beliefs can be enlightening.
It can also be useful - if, hypothetically, said beliefs were held by the vast majority of the smartest, most influential, and most powerful people in your country / civilization (and also by most of the less smart, and less powerful people too). In that case, it's probably worth figuring out what they mean and why! Saying "lol this is dumb who cares" doesn't seem to help with that, or suggest ways to solve it.
I understand that "this is dumb who cares lol" can be used to hand wave away any discussion, and that a lot of important things might have seemed dumb in the past.
Fortunately in this case, it is very dumb evidenced by the fact that the theory is logically inconsistent in just about every level of analysis. Gender is infinitely malleable at the same time sex-change surgery is paramount? It's not like it hasn't proven itself to be NOT dumb, what pressing problem does the theory solve?
They need to come up with a better framework than "I can do whatever I want, and whatever I want is logically airtight"
Sure, but this is also true of 'all people are equal and we should love everyone', 'the Christian god exists and He is three persons co-equal in one substance', most schools of moral philosophy, and a lot of stuff people believe. My argument isn't "you should consider it because it might be right", it's "you should consider it because it's worth figuring out why people believe it" (same for all of the former). Also, it is currently winning.
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Puberty blockers? Terrible and unsafe. We should ban them.
Physical capacity? Totally different. Shouldn't even be a question imo.
Passing is related to whether people think they're one gender vs another.
Again, don't really understand this question.
Asking to have people figure out all 8 questions for different factions is a lot. I'd recommend you condense them.
I generally get the sense that you're anti-trans from these questions. I'd describe myself as someone who is fine with trans but not cool with it given our current level of technological advancement. Maybe these questions don't target me specifically.
I think the more important questions can be boiled down to 1) Should someone be able to choose their own gender/sex? 2) Does our current technology mean we should accept this in all cases? 3) Should children/non-mature adults be able to change their gender/sex?
So I see you take a pretty unstructured stance on gender. What most confuses me with people that take your view is how 8A interacts with some of your other answers like 2D and 6D. It really feels like you're trying to shove two very different concepts into the same framework. You have this kind of infinite soul of expression where each person's inner being fractures out to an exactly unique point that can never be fully expressed. And you have the societal scale general attitudes that arise as a consequence of the biological differences between males and females. These two ideas do probably interact with each other in some ways that could be interesting to explore but we can't really meaningfully talk through either of them if we have to use the same words to describe both.
I see the social scale attitudes as ultimately flexible and think they will get more and more loose as technology removes us from their biological origin. I don’t really have a problem with that.
In terms of each unique person's meaning, sure everyone is unique. I don’t know what you mean about souls fracturing out to a unique point though.
Do we just disagree on my first point here?
I find the instinct you have that gender is the appropriate word to use here confusing. If your belief is that technology and social progress is going to make traditional concepts of gender no longer have power then it seems to me like gender abolition is the more obvious path than gender essentialism and expansion. Males can be women and also gender is important and also gender is actually an expansive nearly undefinable characteristic seem like strange bedfellows. Is it not more simple to just say gender is outdated nonsense and people should be able to express themselves however they'd like? That seems to me the most obvious path of transhumanism.
If someone eventually wants and is able to take on the form of a jackal, as might tempt one of our mutual acquaintances, is it not more clean to say that he was a man, as in to say male human, and decide he'd fancy at least some time in the form of a jackal so he is currently a(likely anthropomorphic) jackal without all the weird metaphysics of claiming he was actually always the abstract gender of male jackal. What is this gender framework actually buying you besides confusion?
I think we'll have to go through a phase of gender expansion before it no longer matters. We can't just swap from modern day notions to anything goes.
Uhh, no? He's a jackal-man! I mean again I don't know if I'm following you down some of these rabbit holes. When it comes to intense trans / gender / sex language or whatever I just don't think it's worth defining every little thing.
I never said gender was important! It may be important in the here and now due to things tied to it like fertility, but I don't think it's important in itself.
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