gender fuck or gender fucked (the politics of trans)

anyway, I'm sorry y'all.

i don't expect everybody to understand exactly WHY this is so offensive to me and WHY this makes me so angry but it is and it does

crut, i don't really want you to die :(

I know <3

it's offensive because it's like talking about IQ. the only use for putting multifaceted things like "sexuality" or "intelligence" on a scale does is enforcing hegemony.

delete "does"

Is the Kinsey scale offensive?

it's pretty reductive I guess?

i don't know if the kinsey scale is offensive but i have also not really been able to discern a use for the kinsey scale.

i think kinsey's big accomplishment was helping people realize that homosexual attraction was much more common than anybody realized.

the history of the stanford-binet test developed by terman etc is deeply offensive

"the intelligence of the average negro is vastly inferior to that of the average white man. ... The intelligence of the American Indian has also been over-rated, for mental tests indicate that it is not greatly superior to that of the average negro. Our Mexican population, which is largely of Indian extraction, makes little if any better showing."

terman measured his own IQ as 180 btw

make no mistake, the people who developed the idea of IQ did so primarily in order to create a metric for choosing which non-whites and lower-class whites would be forcibly sterilized

i think an understanding of the history of "quantitative psychology" is enough to make anybody deeply suspicious of what lorax is talking about

imo this sort of bell-curve type thinking should be verboten for any decent person, even as a lazy intellectual exercise

similarly things like "racial percentage"

But like, there are people with different internal, personal levels of bisexual attraction, right?

"bisexual attraction"

the problem is that this is actually multifaceted thing that you cannot reduce to a level or scale.

what if i'm bisexually attracted to black men and white women, vs someone who is bisexually only attracted to men with bitten fingernails and white women. which one of us is more bisexual?

the one in a band

I'm sorry, please ignore that

tbh i don't know much about sexuality so maybe i'll switch to something called "mathematical intelligence" which i know an awful lot about

so what's mathematical intelligence? are there people that are "better" at math than other people? sure, at least i think. but think about all the different ways you can be good at math ...

- being able to do quick arithmetic in your head (a learned skill)
- manipulating symbols correctly (a learned skill)
- persevering when doing math (an affective trait having to do w/ confidence)
- reasoning abstractly
- reasoning quantitatively
- constructing logical arguments
- understanding logical arguments
- reducing complex things to simple models
- using tools like calculators and spreadsheets
- finding patterns
- being able to understand spatial (2d, 3d, etc) transformations in your head

all of these are legitimate ways to do math, and none of them is necessarily linked to any of the others. and the american educational system basically only values the first three as far as standardized testing of math skills goes.

so while it may be appropriate to come up w/ ways to measure skill in each of these categories, we also have to remember that none of these categories are fixed categories, that a student's strengths and weakness in all of them are strongly related to the context of the problem and the setting (cf the million sof people who can do complex arithmetic w/ money or measures in their heads but not w/ numbers on a page labeled "math test") and also that any measurement of this is a single snapshot of a person at a single time and not necessarily indicative of their history or the potential or their future

and you really, at the end of the day, have to ask what constructive purpose is being served by measuring this stuff in order to separate people out into different gradations on a scale rather than seeing it in terms of open-ended potential

now like i said i don't know a whole lot about sexuality, but it seems highly likely to me that if we were to unpack what we mean when we talk about sexuality (or any human "attribute", race, empathy, emotion, mental health, etc) we would end up w/ a set of ideas as complex as those around mathematical intelligence

right on

late great you are OTMre: macro level problems but tbh i mean my personal reaction kind of has to do with the fact that my mom & the catholic psychologist she hired to pathologize my gayness were very fond of using STATISTICAL EVIDENCE in proving the harms & dangers of homosexuality so there is that as well

The thing about the Kinsey scale is not that it's *offensive* per se, but just that's it's kind of unhelpful and a bit clumsy beyond establishing the rough idea that sexuality was slightly more complicated than a reductive homosexual / heterosexual binary.

It has been supplanted by other statistical tools such as the Klein Orientation Grid, which takes into account the idea that sexuality may be fluid - and also takes into account that sexuality is not just about who you have sex with, but also about who you are attracted to, both physically and emotionally. That other approach I linked to earlier - gyne / andro phillia is a way of measuring attraction without bringing in preconceived ideas about the gender of the person doing the fancying - e.g. it can be difficult to quantify whether being attracted to a specific person is homo or hetero sexual if you have a non-binary gender.

But as with any scientific survey, these things are done on clumsy numerical scales for individuals (usually 1 to 6 or 1 to 7) and the only time that percentages come into it is when you are talking about populations. There is also other interesting work being done out there, not just on these population studies, but following groups of case studies over a period of several years.

There's also other ideas being studied, taking a completely different approach to orientation entirely - that some people do not experience orientation towards a specific gender at all, but experience person-oriented attraction (or such things as demisexuality.) There is just so much interesting research being explored in this area!

xpost to elmo

that too!

the social sciences have a lot to answer for IMO

and you really, at the end of the day, have to ask what constructive purpose is being served by measuring this stuff in order to separate people out into different gradations on a scale rather than seeing it in terms of open-ended potential

i agree with your reservations, but it nevertheless seems to me that aptitude (a combination of skills and talents) in a given area can be meaningfully quantified and measured, either in isolation or in concert with other aptitudes. this sort of information tells us what a person is able to do at present, without further training. it also might help in determining the type and level of education they might most benefit from going forward.

of course "overall intelligence" is almost certainly chimerical...

p.s. read Lisa Diamond she's doing fantastic work on female queer / bisexual sexuality. She basically was researching past studies and found that the data on queer females was pretty much removed from studies on sexuality because it was considered to be "noise" that didn't conform to the hypotheses generated by working from the assumption that "male" modes of sexuality were normative. So her studies revealed that the so-called statistical "noise" actually revealed a consistent but vastly different mode of orientation.

xpost

ah, you slipped from one thing to another there in the middle, contenderizer

we can measure a person's proficiency for a specific skill, or we can measure whether or not they possess a certain piece of knowledge or piece of understanding. this is called "formative assessment" and helps us do exactly what we're talking about.

but it's not the same as "aptitude". a one-dimensional measurement of "aptitude" can tell us nothing about what a person is able to do, nor does it do anything to help us w/ what they might benefit from.

for example, SAT math scores are 100% useless for determining how well a person will do in math classes in college. there is absolutely no correlation, and there never has been, even though it would be very much in the interest of the college board to demonstrate this

to demonstrate a correlation, i mean

I feel like sissymanwhore needs to weigh in on this sexuality discussion

xp to the late great: yeah sure, i agree. i was using "aptitude" simply as a synonym for measurable ability (having nothing to do with any underlying "general aptitude" or the prediction of future performance)

but i guess that's pretty far removed from what people generally mean when they speak of "aptitude testing"

Well, that's not actually what "aptitude" means, so there's that.

sorry for killing thread w pedantry

for the best tbh

xxp - sure it is. that's the basic definition: "capability; ability; innate or acquired capacity"

^ "aptitude" =

ftr

i mean shit, i can ped with the best of ants

let it go

you should look @ the wikipedia entry to see the common usage though

yeah i no

thing this all seems to illustrate more than anything else is how durable the cisgender construct's sense of its own normalcy is. mainstream culture constantly reassures us that apparent biological gender = a predictable experience of binary gender = sexual orientation, and that any variation from this scheme is, at best, a "colorful" deviation.

well, that's exactly what it is, though - a social norm

sophisticated cissery

nice

I wish I could be a woman just for a little while, but me thinking that is pretty much the ultimate expression of male privilege

I'm sure Lorax has had the same thought, at least the first part

i don't suppose there's anything wrong with that sort of curiosity, no matter where you fit in the gender @ orientation continuum

The thing about humans is that their reality can pretty much always evade any categories you might want to impose upon them, including (see Macbeth) "of woman born".

always thought it was silly that c-section = not woman born

in terms of dramatic prophetic twists, i much prefer LOTR's "no man can kill me" "i am no man" bit