OK. I reblogged this from @saint–laika, who, if you’ll look just a little way upthread, asserts (while reblogging you) that “gender is just societal norms/roles”. I have had a conversation on this topic with her before, in which I presented her with David Reimer’s predicament and asked for an explanation, which I never got; that is what my first paragraph refers to.
I would point out that Reimer did not have the neurological disconnect between his brain and his genital physiology that is typical of trans people. And he suffered from gender dysphoria anyway. His case, and the cases of others like him, demonstrate that gender dysphoria is not an organic consequence of the neurology of being transgender, but a psychosocial complication caused by being constantly misgendered by society.
I’m not claiming that self-perception of one’s body, absent any social pressure, doesn’t come into it as well for at least some people. But even so, there is always a clash of gender perception – that psychodynamic feedback loop of “I should be this, but I’m that” – and Reimer’s case shows that this can’t be cut from the aetiological picture, reducing it to hormonal influences on brain development or what not, without losing some of the characteristic features of the condition.
I suppose one might argue that since Reimer had had his penis amputated, his dysphoria might have stemmed from a combination of phantom-limb syndrome plus the sexual abuse he was subjected to by John Money. To my mind, however, this doesn’t fit the facts. Phantom-limb syndrome can be distressing but unlike gender dysphoria it seldom leads to suicidality. And infant amputees don’t often suffer phantom-limb syndrome in later life. And Reimer expressed his childhood dysphoria by removing trappings of femaleness – e.g. ripping off dresses – which had little to do with genital anatomy and everything to do with gender presentation.
That being the case, and given the 40% suicide rate that you cite, acceptance of gender diversity is a rather pressing moral issue. The consequence of accepting “frivolous” gender identities, however those should be defined, is far less dire. Therefore, it behooves us morally to lean on the side of accepting diverse gender identities whenever in doubt.
Whatever “we people” may do, I don’t cite non-Western cultures’ concepts of additional genders unless I am confident of their meaning, which I pretty much never am. I can add one to your list of misunderstandings: the Sāmoan word fa‘afafine, which I’ve seen cited as being completely separate from “female” and “male”. In fact the etymology of the word reveals otherwise: it’s fa‘a- (causative prefix) + fafine (woman), that is, it means “womanized”. At least some queer Pacific Islanders here in New Zealand do use it as a self-identifier, but I have also heard conservative Sāmoan people use it as a homophobic / transphobic pejorative.
As for diverse genders being “birth defects”, I would have to ask what’s “defective” about them. I don’t deny that they mean something unusual has happened during embryonic development, as I think you’ll find I said in my very last comment on this thread. Sometimes that’s due to genetic or chromosomal oddities and sometimes it isn’t.
What I query is the idea that they are “defects” in the sense of being wrong, their wrongness consisting of the fact that they cause a person to deviate from the two “essential” genders. I don’t know whether you yourself hold that idea. I’m getting the sense that you don’t. But the “good posts with sources” that you linked to certainly do.
And yes, clearly from the point of view of the selfish gene, anything which makes reproduction less likely is a defect. But – to quote another Richard Dawkins title – genes aren’t us. We can choose not to reproduce, and if our genes don’t like it, as Steven Pinker says, they can go jump in the lake.
The SRY gene cannot be considered an “essential” difference between sexes / genders. For one thing, it only occurs in mammals, whereas sex differentiation is common across the animal kingdom. For another, it only operates in a short time window in embryonic development – I think a matter of a few hours. If you somehow injected every last nucleate cell in an adult woman’s body with a copy of the gene, I don’t know what effect it would have, but it wouldn’t magically turn her into a man.
(I presume a scientifically literate person such as yourself doesn’t need to be told that, but you’re not the only one reading this. In the movies, so tediously and so irritatingly often, genes are treated, not as what they are – a series of switch-gates directing the course of growth – but as an inherent “essence” such that altering one’s DNA alters one’s body and selfhood. And that’s the sense I get generally when people reduce gender to chromosomes.)
Reality, as known to science, happens from the bottom up. Subatomic particles do what they do, and in consequence they happen to fall into common stable configurations which we call atoms and molecules. Molecules, at least on the surface of one planet in the universe, are organized into organelles, and organelles into cells, and cells into organisms, not by some innate essence of life but by the logic of self-replication with variation amidst scarce resources. The same logic also organizes these organisms into a clustered distribution, with some patterns common and others rare.
The human mind, like all information-processing engines, needs simplifying and compressing algorithms to deal with all that complexity, and one of its prime algorithms is categorization: this common cluster of humans is “women”, that common cluster of humans is “men”. Because gender is relevant to reproduction, it’s included in our brains’ software starter-pack of categories (whereas – to address another of your queries – race is not).
Of course one can grade different categorization systems by usefulness. Since the real world is clustered, a useful categorization system is one where the category boundaries run through zones of sparse distribution in reality-space. However, there are other concerns besides neatness to consider.
In database engineering terms, the human mind is object-oriented, but reality is set-based. The question is, by what criteria do we draw gender category lines, for sociocultural purposes, among humans? One answer might be “The presence or absence of a functional SRY gene.” Another might be “Genital anatomy at birth.” Another might be “The general summation of all gender-correlated features.” All of these criteria refer to biological realities, and are useful in particular medical contexts; but whatever their conceptual merits, for my money the winner, for sociocultural usage, has to be “The person’s own gender self-identification.”
How am I doing so far for science denial and bullshit accusations?
