However, it doesn’t mean that they weren’t happy in some/lots of ways before they came out/transitioned, or necessarily that they’re perfectly happy and all is right in the world with them now.
Generally speaking, yes, transitioning does make people happier. Some people are exceptions, and it doesn’t. Some people it doesn’t make them happy enough that they don’t commit suicide at higher rates than the general population average (as much as twice the rate from what I remember?)
More movement, understanding, work, needs to be done. Jerks like the people getting all up in the Scientific American’s face for this article certainly don’t help.
Pinker is certainly right about one thing: It is wretched moral reasoning. If we found incontrovertible evidence that <grotesque exaggeration for comic effect follows, not actually opinion> 80% of women have a gene expression that causes them to hate engineering despite the gloating of the usual suspects that would not impact how we ought to treat female engineers one iota, nor would it diminish the moral primacy of the equality in dignity and worth between women and men.
In fact, there is nothing you could discover that would impact the above. It’s based on recognition of shared humanity, on empathy, not on the presence or absence of any difference.
If your stance on equality of the sexes could be changed by the revelations that women’s average spatial reasoning ability is one quarter sigma to the left or right there’s something fucked up about your moral compass.
"In 1998, just before she passed away, she was given the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Computer Game Developers Association. In 2007, she was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences.
And perhaps most touching, when completing the blockbuster The Sims, designer Will Wright dedicated the game to Bunten."
As my understanding of the issues grows, I’m noticing more and more when people ask for gender/sex when there is absolutely no reason I can see to actually ask it, and they just try to get it as an adjunct to a name. Perhaps because it’s a useless holdover from when people addressed letters with Mr. or Mrs? Anyway, unless I see a real reason for it to be asked, I skip it generally now on forms, and if someone tells me I have to enter something, I go for “prefer not to say” or choose my gender and then bitch about it in a STERNLY WORDED EMAIL, which I’m sure they appreciate greatly.
Anyway, more often than not now, forms are being designed to omit the question entirely, because then they don’t have to deal with people like me being annoying.
I’m not aware of changing views around the biology of sex, we’re certainly learning more about the finer details, but the basic model hasn’t really changed at all as far as I’m aware.
eh, no. a) I’m not changing the definition, I’m defending it. b) I’m not denying any counterexample, because I accept that it exists, I’m just pointing out that it doesn’t fit the definition in a.
Did the British decide to solve their defense budget shortfall by selling off HMRN to the US?
EDIT should have added a smiley or something to indicate non seriousness. To those that flagged as OT, y’all got lots of other flagging to do in this thread as well since most of the discussion is not in fact about SciAm’s articles.
You might be right about this. I don’t know how spectrum is defined in the social/medical/psychological sense vs the physical science sense. This is the internet, after all, and getting bogged down in semantics is what people do.
But, fundamentally and more importantly, I think we both agree that social and legal equality should not be reliant on biology.
It isn’t strictly binary no, but it isn’t strictly a spectrum either (i.e. it isn’t a continuous or quantised scale), it’s far closer to the former than the latter.
Not all genetically linked traits that are differentially advantageous to the sexes are going to happen to linked to the presence or absence of a Y chromosome. If we will posit that there was a string of genes that was linked to “wanting to have sex with men more than women,” that would be evolutionary more advantageous for women than for men. There may be many such genes with various effects and the expression of them may be related to why “gender” is often more complicated than Y chromsome or not.
Edited to add: Especially when you add societal conventions of “gender” which may define some of these traits as more appropriate for men or women.
The article doesn’t mention any changes though, it lists things that simply reaffirm the consensus (the articles it lists don’t even all deal with biological sex research either), and falsely paints them as being more significant than they are. The only new information in the field (that I’m aware of) is on the finer detail about how things work on a biochemical level, it doesn’t change the basic makeup of biological sex differences in the wild, they still are what we thought they were. There are still lots of unanswered questions, I’m not saying we have all the answers, but we haven’t discovered anything earth shattering that backs up the more radical views from non-scientific political/sociological theories.
I posted the actual English definitions of “spectrum”, from both Merriam-Webster and the Oxford Dictionary for you, which fully satisfy the context where “spectrum” was used, FFS. Your nitpick has been nitpicked fully into nonexistence at this point; care to post something, besides your own insistence…?
they make a biological case for women’s equality, when the real case is a social and ethical one.
That’s good as far as it goes but that’s not very far. Race is far more of a social construct but we do ourselves no favours if we ignore those constructs rather than confronting them.
Women are those outside typical gender norms are discriminated against because of how society genders them so it’s no good to just point to biology. Trying to locate a biological predisposition to homosexuality hasn’t changed the minds of those who needed convincing.
My first thought was that in principle you could (if you wanted) ask for a numerical answer, with maybe 0 being 100% female and 1 being 100% male.
Then I realized I was thinking too much like a physicist, and that’s not actually what “spectrum” means here.
But hey, maybe there’s a reasonably-comprehensive model where human gender can be represented as a normalized vector of some finite number of variables? Maybe an octonion?
Nope, still not seeing a good solution except to not bother asking.
