They’ve actually found that trans individuals have brain structures that match their identity rather than their sex at birth.
So while the way genders are supposed to act is a social construct, gender is very much biological as well.
The truth is at this stage we don’t fully understand it.
I’d love to learn more about that, do you have a source I can go to read more?
Thank you, that’s some great reading. Very… dense haha I’m far from a biologist or scientist of any kind so I’m doing quite a bit of googling but some great info in there
That doesn’t back up your claim at all, the evidence is still incredibly weak and the sample sizes are all very small
Sample sizes can only get so big when studying less than a percentage of the population
Considering the only evidence the other camp has is “the Bible” and “their feels,” Ima take it. 🤷
It does back up my claim we’ve found evidence of it in trans people. I also explicitly said we don’t understand it yet.
Before people start thinking there is an innately male or female brain, please remember that environmental conditions including social ones influence the way the brain is structured due to neuroplasticity.
And think about how boys are encouraged to eat and girls are encouraged to watch their weight, and how child body growth relies on building up periodic fat reserves in order to happen, and you need to eat a lot of protein when building muscle mass, and what the physical implications for that are and how it contributes to our social definition of sex. And how that contributes to cis women being more vulnerable to physical violence.
I know this is a joke, but these kinds of topics are showing up in children’s media these days. Which i think is great. Simple representation matters.
I’m not lgbt but when you witness first hand what people talk about when they say transgender you undertand everything.
My cousing was born in 1990, nobody talked about it and being gay was stil a big no no, specially being the son of one of 5 brothers. I have 18 cousings and only me and 1 other are women, the rest are all men. All of us were raised together in the same way, so much so that I’m very much not girly and only tried makeup for the first time at 18.
All that to say that my cousing was NOT influenciate in any way but he was born pretty much a girl, a LOT more girly than me. He woud sing all the little mairmaids songs, dance like he was Belle, LOVED dolls and being “mommy” etc. Mind you he was 2, 3, 5 yo. His parents put him in 10 different psychiatrists. Nothing worked (obviously). he tried hiding or even toning down but there was no way, the boy was born a princess.
Every time I hear about gender x bio sex I remeber him He never had a “choice”, that’s what he was born as.
I wish he had had the chance to be himself when he was young (he never changed his gender but he finally “came out” to his dad about 5 years ago)
This was very much my experience with the trans girl I grew up with 35 years ago. From the instant she was able to express preferences (I’m talking like age 18 months to 2 years), it was all princesses and dolls and makeup and trying on mom’s high heels. We all just assumed she was a gay boy because we had never heard of a transgender person before.
We encouraged her to just keep that behavior at home because she was bullied mercilessly for appearing to be an effeminate boy. But nothing would stop her; she was completely irrepressible.
When in high school, she told us she was really a girl, it was like the most face-palmingly obvious thing. Of COURSE that’s what we’d been seeing her entire life. It just made sense. That’s just who she is.
I don’t think witnessing it is really enough to understand it for everyone.
For example, I don’t fit in with traditional gender norms. Yet at the same time I don’t feel like I was born into the wrong sex/gender. And if I was born as the opposite sex, I think I’d be pretty indifferent about it. I don’t really care either way for myself, personally.
I have both transgender and nonbinary friends and I simply don’t relate to their struggles. While I don’t feel like I fit in, I don’t feel like I’m the “wrong” gender/sex either.
I respect transgender and nonbinary individuals. And I think they absolutely deserve to live their life the way that makes them the most comfortable being themselves. But unfortunately, even witnessing this stuff fist hand doesn’t mean I’ll ever personally be able to understand gender dysphoria.
I’m supportive, but I’ll never truly understand. But I don’t think you have to fully be able to understand to be an ally.
Same
Me neither. Apparently, some schools teach this, but most only learn this in college.
Which is why the culture war so often involves College educated van non-College educated.
I’m on the College side of the culture war, but we must kind of acknowledge the truth that we had extra education that the other side did not.
Some of them might resent us for it, some of us might be snobby about it.
But at root, that’s where the culture disparity stems from.
You’re being too kind. Many of them are anti-education. That’s why they’re spending huge amount of time burning books about gay people and banning abortion, and far less time trying to reduce school shootings or paedophilia in mainstream churches.
To paraphrase the old adage: you can’t educate someone out of a position that they didn’t educate themselves into.
The number of times people that have denied the literal dictionary definition of gender when I place it in front of them… with linked sources… from multiple dictionaries… often ones those people chose themselves…
Education about the definition of these words is important, but it does nothing to combat the mainstream conservative position that “the dictionary is wrong and woke because… idk - the Jews want them transes to rape babies or something.” The only way to combat that entrenched, willful ignorance is with a big rock.
You’re being too kind.
While I know where you’re coming from, there’s no path to ever making things better without kindness, empathy, and an open mind. Yes, their actions are draconian and misguided, steeped in superstition and myth, but if we simply give up entirely, we don’t have any hope of making the progress that we all seem to agree needs to be made.
I don’t have a silver bullet to solve the problem, I’m simply suggesting that those among us who are truly progressive should steadfastly seek to enroll others in our cause, rather than simply writing them off as a lost cause. Some people certainly are, others simply haven’t had issues explained to them in a way that fits into their world view. Good luck to us all on the path that lay ahead.
An incredibly simplistic take on complex gender identity issues, at this time of the day, localized entirely on Memes@lemmy.ml?
at least we are talking about it. And tbf memes are the News of the young. It’s easyer to communicate things to young people with memes lol. I use them all the time with my neaphew to talk about his depression and it works wonders
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No
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Albany identity is not Albany expression
It’s only repeated in just about every corner of the Internet and popular culture!
Good, mfers need to learn
But it goes as far as the brain can understand it. For bigot brains, it just slides off
Fraa Jad was wrong; topology is not always destiny.
Biological sex is also a spectrum
More like a combinatorics table, with 99% of individuals having one of the two largest combinations.
Please can you explain this in genetic terms?
As I understood it, sex is determined by the presence, or absence, of a Y chromosome, at the 23rd pair.
While exceptions exist, they’re incredibly rare genetic observations and I have never heard or read it referred to as a “spectrum”.
Yeah it’s the first time I’ve heard of it referred to as a spectrum. Although the term is insensitive it’s more like two sides with a few outliers.
You have your XX females and your XY males making up 99.9% of the population and then some individuals who are XXY, XYY, or XXX. You can even have some who are XXXY, XXYY, or XXXX.
In terms of how that affects biological sexual development and associated gender identity i can’t say offhand and it would likely be a rabbit hole that one can spend hours looking into.
https://youtu.be/kT0HJkr1jj4?si=_gOsunaQoUZ0bg0W
TL;DW: your understanding is a simplification. It an assumption that allows educators to move past complex nuances when teaching about broader topics as part of a general education. Chromosomes and gene expression are a chaotic mess in reality.
It’s not really about the genotype. Every context that uses sex to divide people into groups has its own definition of sex. Sometimes with a spectrum sometimes not.
Example car crash testing: When testing safety features of cars, you’re not gonna care about whether the person has a vagina or not, but features like height, neck strength and other stuff will matter.
Since women are on average smaller and less muscular than men, small people with weak necks will be categorized as female. Tall people with strong necks will be categorized as male.Example Condoms:
Two categories: has penis (male, can use) and has no penis (not male, cannot use [for inteded purpose]). So if you are XY genotype, but without a penis (idk cut off?), you’re not a male in that context.As you see both examples correlate with the gonosomes, but are not defined by it.
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did you fully read my comment?
sex depends on context
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Some figures claim that 1.7 percent of the population is some form of intersex, which is more common than having red hair I believe.
I’m at the “'not getting any” end of the spectrum
Biological sex is also a social construct lmao, this is a very conservative framing of gender
Read Judith Butler
Biological sex is also a social construct lmao
What? No.
This is the kind of shit that makes trans activism completely ridiculous.
Only for they gave inadequate context. Biological sex and genome expression is much more complicated than m/f but that discussion is not really in the scope of the thread.
I would suggest reading “Bodies that matter, on the discursive limits of Sex” from Judith Butler.
Pointing out how intersex people don’t fit into the constructed binary is easy to dismiss, sex essentialists just call those people defective men and women.
(Which gets into how if you can’t have kids or you can but you don’t look a certain way you’re “defective”, which is a value judgement and doesn’t have some universal or biological basis)
I would disagree on them calling them defective. This is unnecessarily confrontational.
I would rather say the neglige their existence while using the simplest useful model. They should consider if a better model might be more appropriate.
I would disagree on them calling them defective. This is unnecessarily confrontational.
That is only one or the reasons it is wrong to call them defective. They arent defective.
Reading comprehension. I did not say so.
Actually the idea comes from feminism from literally the 1980s-1990s, from well respected feminist theorists. But thank you for illustrating how tied together the rights and oppression of cis women and trans people are.
Read “Bodies that matter, on the discursive limits of Sex” from Judith Butler.
Also understand the definition of a social construct. Social construct doesn’t mean fake, it means falling into a classification scheme that is socially manufactured. Something that is 12 inches long isn’t “fake” in its 12 inch longness because measuremenr systems are socially constructed, it just means that it can become 10 inches long or 14 inches long if the length of an inch is redefined. And you would be wrong if you told someone that no, it is incorrect to call it 30.48 centimeters long. People can apply different classification schemes/social constructs to the same physical object and still be correct. They could also call it ten blagards long and be internally consistent within their classification scheme, but that wouldn’t have utility within a social context because the meaning of blagard hasn’t been socially constructed.
An inch isn’t some innate objective truth, it is a common standard.
The sex binary is a commonly applied standard, but it is arbitrary and harmful (see how women are treated rooted in myths around sex, the prolific mutilation of intersex infants, and the “trans panic defense”). If inches being the length they were started resulting in engineering failures that killed people we would change how we measure things.
Well, it does and we don’t, but you get the point.
An inch isn’t some innate objective truth, it is a common standard.
Do you mean that just like we have defined inch the length that is exactly 25.4mm (where mm is the length light travels in 1/299792458 seconds in a vacuum, seconds being whatever the fuck they are), we have also defined animals with XX chromosome females, and if they’re human, women, while recognizing that there are rare exceptions?
Do you mean that just like we have defined inch the length that is exactly 25.4mm (where mm is the length light travels in 1/299792458 seconds in a vacuum, seconds being whatever the fuck they are), we have also defined animals with XX chromosome females, and if they’re human, women, while recognizing that there are rare exceptions?
Two things:
A) you’re not thinking procedurally. Doctors do not generally check chromosomes when they determining sex generally. So it would be more accurate to say “in infants, doctors define sex by looking at genitals, in adults, by looking at a variety of characteristics. We use chromosomes in medical circumstances to look for potential conditions that may explain symptoms, and sometimes we can use that as a category in determining sex” The definition you are using is really most applicable in people who are doing research, not clinical work, or interacting with human beings in a social context.
B) cool, so we’ve established that is what you think sex is. Other communities define sex differently. You can’t claim inches are some universal innate biological truth and those heathens over there using centimeters are wrong and need to accept the wisdom of inches. And while inches might be more useful to you, centimeters may be more useful to them.
I would really suggest that you read “Bodies that matter, on the discursive limits of Sex” from Judith Butler. She literally has a PhD in philosophy and has devoted her life to analysis of the way we as a society conceptualize sex.
Did the doctor check your chromosomes when you came out of the womb?
Lol imagine being a nerd, but it is for 6th grade biology. At least be a nerd about college biology.
Well, they can …
Doctor’s in the UK offer screening for Down’s syndrome, Edwards’ syndrome and Patau’s syndrome at 10-14 weeks.
That isnt the primary mode by which the assignment of sex happens in our society. Stop being an idealist around what sex is, and actually grapple with how sex classification practically happens within our society.
When doctors mutilate intersex babies they don’t wait for a chromosome test.
