gender

Tbf, the comments are all pretty butthurt

OMG people commenting on some internet article are awful and dumb? You don't say!

Jazz is going to really hate his parents come puberty

the parents say that they are trying to limit the influence of social "messages" on their kids, that the two boys are free to choose whatever clothing/hair they want, and that they both happen to choose pink clothing and long hair (surprise!). i have no reason to doubt that, but given the intensity of parental disdain for "conventional" gender roles, you have to wonder how many warm fuzzies the boys get for dressing girly. i mean, i appreciate the basic nobility of the parents' quest, but have questions about the execution.

people are exhausting.

If you have to home school you're kids, you've already gone too far in your intellectual conceits

I think you mean "unschool" Michael. Get it straight. ;p

i mean, i appreciate the basic nobility of the parents' quest, but have questions about the execution

Well, yeah. Exactly. There's no way this could actually be accomplished but that's sort of irrelevant here I guess. I'm sure that Storm and Rio or whatever it was get plenty of praise for embracing their girly sides. Every quote in that article makes them sound like the most tedious people on the planet.

if home schooled kids can't grasp basical grammatical structures, do you blame the parentheses?

kids are weirdly obsessed with gender and gender rules--im sure most of that derives from still learning how to "perform" their particular gender. I can't help but think the parents in this story are doing their kids a diservice, getting along and coping with the BS of society is an important skill in its own right, so raising kids as if they live in a gender utopia is maybe not such great parenting.

maybe I'm just cynical, but I tend to assume that mainstream online news articles that deal with "unconventional" elements of sex, gender, and sexual orientation (this, the pregnant man, the boy who wore a dress for his Halloween costume, transgendered kids, etc.) are bigot bait packaged to get as many irate comments (= hits = ad revenue) as possible without explicitly shaming the subjects in the text of the article. while I appreciate this kid's parents efforts to challenge gender norms, I doubt sharing their story with the world will make the world a more tolerant place when news networks are using them in much the same way as they used the balloon boy family. admittedly, Yahoo isn't Fox News and the article (and even many of the comments) probably isn't totally ill-intentioned.

lolziest part is somehow trusting their other two kids to keep the secret

kids are weirdly obsessed with gender and gender rules--im sure most of that derives from still learning how to "perform" their particular gender. I can't help but think the parents in this story are doing their kids a diservice, getting along and coping with the BS of society is an important skill in its own right, so raising kids as if they live in a gender utopia is maybe not such great parenting.

sometimes, though, it's good parenting to allow your kids to express themselves in abnormal ways (w/r/t gender, sexual orientation, race, or whatever) even to the point where they risk getting ostracized and picked upon by other kids (or even adults). no matter how old you are, the price of being confident and having a strong sense of self is confrontation, and it's more worthwhile to learn how to face or defuse confrontation than it is to avoid it altogether at the expense of your individuality. mind you, I'm not saying parents should put their kids in controversial places merely for the sake of generating controversy, which is often the way it works when the media gets involved in people's personal lives.

thing is: how did this become "news" in the first place? like, did they call the paper and say "you know we'd just like to put this out there" or what?

yeah i get you, and i think i agree. surely that can be done in a way that says "be whoever or whatever you want" but also "this is how society may react, and how closed minded people are, and perhaps here's how to try and get along with them."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/fashion/new-challenge-for-parents-childrens-gender-roles.html?_r=1&ref=fashion

This post continues from here, emil.y's Feminist Theiry & "Women's Issues" Discussion Thread. I'm jumping threads because I felt like my interest in discussing the biological basis of what we perceive as "gender" was not really appropriate for that thread. Anyone who's interested in that topic(hey, surfing!) or who would simply like to discuss gender in a differently framed space (ENBB, VegemiteGrrl, aimless, anyone) is welcome to join me here.

More to come...

Oh, right. Frame it as "discuss gender without those pesky feminists distracting us with their facts" = really not classy way to do this.

*sigh*

WCC, come on, surely you can see that Con is taking his subject of interest here also not to derail the previous thread.

xposts

Um I totally intend to be all up in this thread with feminist facts FWIW and I don't think Contenderizer is against that?

I read this as the other thread has gravitated (that's probably the wrong word but y'know) towards talking about social constructs and privilige and I felt the same, like I would be having a separate conversation at the same table if I talked about biological sex and constructing a working model of the relationship between the body, the brain and the mind's sex / gender uh.. stuff... so moving this conversation seems OK to me?

Oh, right. Frame it as "discuss gender without those pesky feminists distracting us with their facts" = really not classy way to do this.

it's framed as a open discussion of gender, WCC, that's all. and i'm only attempting to move a certain portion of the discussion because i felt as though i was intruding into the other thread by constantly bringing up the stuff i wanted to talk about. i didn't want to be a irritant or a boor. beyond that, a few other people had mentioned feeling nervous abt bringing up their viewpoints in that thread, so i hoped that this might provide a more comfortable space for them.

but hey, we're off to the races...

That "differently framed space" crack was pretty dumb, you have to admit. I think the initial post was judgier than it had to be under the circumstances. But I'm interested to see what's discussed here, because this kind of reading material is stuff I'm prob never going to tackle on my own!

It's not the reviving of the thread, or the addressing of the topic, it's the "hey! List of ppl who clashed w WCC & Laurel on the other thread, we got a new clubhouse here!" that irks.

So... WCC lent me this book called "Delusions of Gender", I can't copy-paste every paragraph because boring, illegal and tl;dr, but I want to talk about it LOTS. It is very interesting and stuffed with proper citations. I'm only a chapter in but would highly recommend.

WCC, perhaps this is in deference to your 'owning' the other thread and ppl not feeling comfortable about contradicting or disagreeing w/you there or even commenting questioningly. I certainly don't; it's been made clear that ppl of my accidental stripe are suspect.

i think one of the more interesting books i've read on gender and biological determinism is "Demonic Males"-- it cries out for a feminist critique, however.

http://www.amazon.com/Demonic-Males-Origins-Human-Violence/dp/0395877431/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1329339100&sr=8-1

Also

http://www.google.com/search?q=chevalier+d%27eon&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:en-US&ie=utf8&oe=utf8

I don't "own" the other thread. I didn't even start it.

And that "Demonic Males" although I read it, was picked apart pretty thoroughly by other primate scientists so I don't think much "feminist" critique is needed.

so, the first thing i wanna do is to restate my take on gender and biology from that previous thread, as i'd like to know what others think:

gender's odd. it's clearly a cultural construct, both in a hazy, general sense that exists outside any specific individual and in the various ways we all individually (re)construct & perceive it. but that's not all it is. unlike "race", there's a substantial biological component to gender, at least to the extent that sex and gender are related. of course, we can only understand what "biological gender" might mean at several levels of remove, as filtered through a thicket of complex inherited constructions from which we can't even sensibly hope to extricate our perspectives.

speaking personally and not necessarily scientifically, it seems to me that biological gender probably does in certain respects "drive" human behavior and that these drivings do sometimes correspond at least partially with the dubious cultural constructs we've inherited. men, for example, seem in general to be more openly and aggressively violent than women, to the extent that male violence is a serious problem the world over. the fact that male violence has been a problem in every society and historic epoch i know of suggests to me that it probably has at least some basis in human biology.

with that in mind, it doesn't seem unreasonable to suppose that the relationship between testosterone and male competition might have something to do with this, as competition often expresses itself in aggression, and aggression in turn in violence. this is not to say that men are intractably violent, of course, or that women can't be violent themselves...

Oh and if you're going to trot out the tired old "feminists be making men all suspect bcuz they'd like them to acknowledge privilege" wow you are really taking the retro thing a bit far there.

Just from the PW review of that book, ryan, I will certainly not be reading it.

In their analysis, patriotism breeds aggression, yet, from an evolutionary standpoint, they reject the presumed inevitability of male violence and male dominance over women.

How enlightened and helpful of them. I'm so glad they took that first step toward actually doing something about a culture of rape and violence--they rejected its inevitability!

ah. well i read it a long time ago and it popped into my head on the "gender/biology" question. im not intending to defend it. not helpful bringing it up here, i guess.

That "differently framed space" crack was pretty dumb, you have to admit. I think the initial post was judgier than it had to be under the circumstances. But I'm interested to see what's discussed here, because this kind of reading material is stuff I'm prob never going to tackle on my own!

― one little aioli (Laurel), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 12:39 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark

It's not the reviving of the thread, or the addressing of the topic, it's the "hey! List of ppl who clashed w WCC & Laurel on the other thread, we got a new clubhouse here!" that irks.

― White Chocolate Cheesecake, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 12:40 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark

okay, that's fair. guilty as charged. i was feeling a bit shut out in that last thread (and perhaps prickly in response) and i got the feeling that at least a few others were on the same page. could have been a bit more politic about it itt, though.

anyway, i don't in any way mean to frame this thread as "not feminist". my hope was that it would feel like a free and open space to all, including WCC & laurel & anyone else.

in the terms of this thread id argue simply that nothing is really anything until it's interpreted as such, and i think that even includes how we respond to our own hormonal states.

in that there is no real direct through-line from hormonal and/or biological states to behavior.

contdzr: In your whole 2nd paragraph, I feel like you could remove "male" from "male violence" and you'd be closer to the truth?

In partic, this statement: "the fact that male violence has been a problem in every society and historic epoch i know of suggests to me that it probably has at least some basis in human biology." That's not science! That's your assumption from a general knowledge of history! I don't know if you're right or wrong, but gbx made some pretty fact-filled posts to the oth thread about how from a medical standpoint he wasn't going along with any kind of hormone-driven assumptions about violence or anything else.

gender is weird in that there's the sex<->gender link at one level, the internal psychological self-image, the perception of others, and then the entire idea of "traditional gender roles" or even gender roles at all, in that you probably should be able to decide what aspects and roles you apply to your life(style)

and about eighty other angles, really

And that "Demonic Males" although I read it, was picked apart pretty thoroughly by other primate scientists so I don't think much "feminist" critique is needed.

― White Chocolate Cheesecake, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 12:56 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

curious abt this. i read a good deal about it at the time, and it seemed to be fairly well-received, at least in mainstream circles at the time of publication. and criticism isn't necessarily negation, right? always meant to read it, tbh.

Laurel, can we at least assume that being born male in a society with customs that perpetuate male violence mean there's a relation, even if it's not directly a result of the organism, but rather the perceived gender role of the organism?

Oh and if you're going to trot out the tired old "feminists be making men all suspect bcuz they'd like them to acknowledge privilege" wow you are really taking the retro thing a bit far there.

are you replying to a post that hasn't even been made?

In their analysis, patriotism breeds aggression, yet, from an evolutionary standpoint, they reject the presumed inevitability of male violence and male dominance over women.

Huh? Patriotism is a relatively recent construct.

What if patriarchy was a very successful but increasingly less so human adaptation? Like, among all the other weird things in human evolution (and we above all species have had the most 'success' with cultural and social adaptation; we even eat in perhaps a highly unnatural way) like smaller jaws, etc..., we went through a period of endemic low-level violence that favored brutish males and now were still living through the genetic echo of that, even when it may or may not make much sense since anybody can sit in a control room and 'pilot' drones?

That "shut out" that you felt on that thread? That's pretty much how I feel on ~the rest of the Internet~ where I get advertising choices based on my google searches that mark me as "male" and try to sell me Rogaine. That's how I feel when my Sys Admin says "you're not a girl, you're a geek" as if that's supposed to be a compliment.

If you, as a man, are made to feel little ~shut out~ by a feminist space, you should actually take a little moment on how you have the rest of the world to feel comfortable in, which is not a choice for gender non-conforming women like me.

Opinions on "biological gender" presented without science to back them up make me so angry that I want to show you all exactly how little testosterone has to do with violence. But I dont get to write it off my violence as "testosterone" when I get angry, I just get written off as "crazy woman" and penalized in ways that a man getting angry will never face.

tbf the solution there is to stop society from accepting violence from any party, not to accept it from women, too

Laurel, can we at least assume that being born male in a society with customs that perpetuate male violence mean there's a relation, even if it's not directly a result of the organism, but rather the perceived gender role of the organism?

I don't know! But that's not what contend was asking, he is specifically talking about the likelihood of a link between masculine violence/aggression and testosterone...or something? If I'm parsing correctly.

@MW Replace 'genetic echo' with 'cultural echo' and I think you might have more of a point.

but gbx made some pretty fact-filled posts to the oth thread about how from a medical standpoint he wasn't going along with any kind of hormone-driven assumptions about violence or anything else.

Even if you ignore the fact that adolescent males are far more likely to kill, die or engage in anti-social bhaviors you haven't even looked at the (slightly, by comparison) bi-morphism of humans, meaning even if your aggressor is a woman, you have a statistical chance that, if you're a man, you outweigh her or are taller.

in the terms of this thread id argue simply that nothing is really anything until it's interpreted as such, and i think that even includes how we respond to our own hormonal states.

...in that there is no real direct through-line from hormonal and/or biological states to behavior.

― ryan, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 1:04 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

sure, but we don't need a direct through-line of the "hormone Y causes behavior X" sort in order to reasonably suppose that human chemistry might have some kind of influence on human behavior, especially when considered in a general sense.

I'm not interested in explaining books to ppl who haven't read them. If you're so interested in gender, go read them yourself. I gotta get off this thread because this level of anger makes me feel violent and women are socialized to direct that violence / anger on themselves.

...

@MW Replace 'genetic echo' with 'cultural echo' and I think you might have more of a point.

I am super curious about the effect of culture on human evolution. In aworld filled w/racism and the kind of sexism that leaves little girls out to die, the relationship is not tenuous in some cases, it's very direct. Thus I think genetic and cultural are intertwined.

Our first "NOT AAALLLL CIS PEOPLE!!!!" comment. Yay!

Zing

Omg, my co- worker who did not even bother coming to the meeting about re-doing the questions is fighting me on this and directing me to census categories. I suspect religious grounds are behind that. Nnnnnggggg. 20 emails and counting.

Crut - that would be great but would cause us probs with auto-categorizing the data.

Everyone agreed yesterday to change the question, bar the co-worker who skipped the meeting. We just needed to sort out wording. Today no-one except me is responding to her emails saying we mustn't add any other options. Her reasons: (bear in mind we are asking parents as well as children about their gender):

Again, I think g3ender should be m@le/fem@le. If there is a consensus to have third option, which I d0n't think there is, then the third opti0n should just be blank. I don't think w3 are in a position to get into terminology that is p0tentially confus1ng (children aren't usually transg3nd3r and p@rents don't necessarily choose a different g3nder for young childr3n). It becomes too pol1tical as well.

I responded to that by saying I disagree but would go along with the results of a vote, so please let's have show of hands. No-one responded, and the person trying to get the new questionnaire together has now asked our supervisor to decide. I think I know which way it'll go, unfortunately. I could still be wrong.

How is gender manifest? Should gender be understood as entirely cultural? For example, I think of gait and voice as associated with gender. While both are associated with the body, I think of the former as an understanding and the latter as a given.

gender pronouns for consideration as a possible set: you (en), one (en), on (fr)
Are there other language equivalents that are as impersonal as possible?

In languages with neuter gender, can you use neuter pronouns after your name and what does it mean when you do this?

Sweden introduced a gender-neutral pronoun last decade

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hen_(pronoun)

xp: i don't really know what you mean, neuter as a grammatical gender and gendered pronouns (as prominent in english) are not really related

this might be of interest (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_pronoun#Gender)

many languages do not distinguish female and male in the third person pronoun.
Some languages have or had a non-gender-specific third person pronoun:

Malay (including Indonesian and Malaysian standards), Malagasy of Madagascar, Philippine languages, Māori, Rapa Nui, Hawaiian, and other Austronesian languages
Chinese, Burmese, and other Sino-Tibetan languages
Vietnamese and other Mon–Khmer languages
Igbo, Yoruba, and other Volta-Niger languages
Swahili, and other Bantu languages
Haitian Creole
Turkish and other Turkic languages
Luo and other Nilo-Saharan languages
Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, and other Uralic languages
Hindi-Urdu
Georgian
Japanese
Armenian
Korean
Mapudungun
Basque
Persian

Some of these languages started to distinguish gender in the third person pronoun due to influence from European languages. Mandarin, for example, introduced, in the early 20th century a different character for she (她), which is pronounced identically as he (他) and thus is still indistinguishable in speech (tā). Korean geunyeo (그녀) is found in writing to translate "she" from European languages. In the spoken language it still sounds awkward and rather unnatural, as it literally translates to "that female".

I know from personal experience that Chinese or Turkish speakers that have come to English (or, for instance, Dutch) later in life sometimes tend to exclusively use 'he' for the third person, regardless of the particular person's gender (or in some cases throw in a random 'she' sometimes, again regardless of the actual gender).

Thanks for the link and sorry for the possible confusion. I think what I mean, and sorry for working this out here, is this: if gender in language is used to convey the gender of a person, in a language with a neuter gender, what does it mean when you put neuter gender pronouns with slashes in between in parentheses behind a name?

Are there always male and female versions of nouns for gendered species in languages with gender and if there is not would it be wrong to use the masculine or feminine to refer to an instance that is not masculine or feminine respectively?

(where gender identity is an issue and needs to be conveyed in language, I think it would be best to mark (recognize, signal, announce) in the first and second person.)

(or first is where when has authority and second is where it is a priority to mark for communication and third is where what does not need to claim any knowledge)

(third is where one does not need to claim any knowledge but perhaps being able to refer presumes knowledge in which case all persons bear responsibility)