I’m in agreement with you. I didn’t think any lines were crossed. There seemed to be a bit of a twitchy vibe circulating yesterday evening regarding bans, but perhaps someone just spiked the halloween punch.
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Can anyone classify them then? Granted, this will be from a subjective viewpoint, with room for debate, people identifying as one with elements from the other spectrum and so on. I suppose the case of David Reimer (a Canadian man born biologically male but raised female following medical advice and intervention after his penis was accidentally destroyed during a botched circumcision in infancy) and his twin brother Brian provides some clue that it’s not just cultural, although that was some seriously biased and screwed up research methodology and it might be difficult to separate the trauma of gender dysphoria from living through such a fucked up childhood:
Reimer said that Dr. Money forced the twins to rehearse sexual acts involving “thrusting movements”, with David playing the bottom role. Reimer said that, as a child, he had to get “down on all fours” with his brother, Brian Reimer, “up behind his butt” with “his crotch against” his “buttocks”. Reimer said that Dr. Money forced David, in another sexual position, to have his “legs spread” with Brian on top. Reimer said that Dr. Money also forced the children to take their “clothes off” and engage in “genital inspections”. On at “least one occasion”, Reimer said that Dr. Money took a photograph of the two children doing these activities. Dr. Money’s rationale for these various treatments was his belief that “childhood ‘sexual rehearsal play’” was important for a “healthy adult gender identity”.
Yeah… both twins killed themselves, so it’s hardly an example of an otherwise healthy upbringing. Still, the parents lied about things being OK and for years David was used as evidence that gender was a cultural construct.
Another example is the Guevedoces of the Dominican Republic, who are raised as girls because they only develop external male organs after about 12 years. In this case the kids are often brought up under more normal circumstances, but this report points to some of them who were never happy living as girls and gravitated towards the boys and their activities. On the other hand, others had an operation and lived out the rest of their lives as women. Most were heterosexual men as adults, despite being raised as girls.
Another example from Afghanistan is Bacha Posh:
Bacha posh (Persian: بچه پوش, literally “dressed up as a boy”) is a cultural practice in parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan in which some families without sons will pick a daughter to live and behave as a boy. This enables the child to behave more freely: attending school, escorting her sisters in public, and working. Bacha posh also allows the family to avoid the social stigma associated of not having any male children. The issue of Bacha Posh has been highlighted in Jenny Nordberg’s book The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan as well as in Iranian movie director Majid Majidi’s 2001 film Baran.
While many of the girls/women develop boyish habits and have trouble reintegrating into female society later while feeling that they are missing some of their identity, a lot of this is due to the greater freedom that boys have in that society, so it’s understandable that they might not be too keen about taking on a woman’s role whatever their identity says.
I don’t know, but it seems like there are a number of processes going on - (1) our body chemistry affecting us in particular ways (i.e. things like your hormone balance can affect you regardless of your gender identity or biological sex), (2) some sex-specific aspects (however society is structured, pregnancy will still be a bigger issue for women), (3) cultural pressures, (4) individual variation and (5) some kind of inherent gender identity that may or may not exist. Transsexuals sometimes identify as a specific gender without having the first three aspects. Many people resist or reject cultural pressure and the roles assigned to their gender without changing their identity. Changing your body chemistry doesn’t seem to have an effect on your identity, and it doesn’t look like cultural pressure has that much of an effect either.
My impression is that this discussion is often dominated by people’s ideas about gender and that there’s not a lot that people actually know or are able to define. Self-identification seems like a very fuzzy way of doing things - identity and personality are very contingent on external factors and self-diagnosis is very inaccurate both in mental and physical issues. That doesn’t mean that people are wrong and gender is a different issue where people could well have a more accurate picture of themselves, but it just seems so subjective that I sometimes wonder if people actually just don’t believe that there’s anything in box (5) at all. Could “no you’re not” ever be a correct response to someone who states an honestly held belief that they are a man/woman, in the way that it could be to someone who claimed to be black/autistic/a cancer sufferer? (Leaving aside the fact that it would be incredibly rude). Is there any substance to manhood or womanhood, even if that substance is undefinable, yet intuitable?
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Jeeeesus, man. That’s an awful story.
My position on all this is that estrogen and testosterone have powerful, measurable biological effects. And people marinate in this stuff from a very early age. Like so:
Levels of testosterone (T) and sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG) were measured in blood samples from pregnant women and related to gender role behavior in 342 male and 337 female offspring at the age of 3.5 years. Gender role behavior was assessed using the Pre-School Activities Inventory, a standardized measure on which a parent indicates the child’s involvement with sex-typical toys, games, and activities. Levels of T, but not SHBG, related linearly to gender role behavior in preschool girls. Neither hormone related to gender role behavior in boys. Other factors, including the presence of older brothers or sisters in the home, parental adherence to traditional sex roles, the presence of a male partner in the home, and maternal education, did not relate to gender role behavior in this sample and did not account for the relation observed between T and behavior. Although other, unmeasured factors may explain the relation, the results suggest that normal variability in T levels prenatally may contribute to the development of individual differences in the gender role behavior of preschool girls.
But beyond that, people can and should be whatever they want to be, sexually, as long as they aren’t hurting other people. Of course, due to concern driving trollies, people could be “hurting” the “institutions of marriage” or “our cherished cultural traditions” or other bullshit constructs. I mean physical, demonstrable, scientifically measurable harm to other real people, not abstract nonsense.
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I think you mean “Hokey Pokey” - as in ice cream of course.
Has there ever been a lovelier set of British innuendo?
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This. The struggle is real. I had this kind of thing happen to me just yesterday, and it was totally not appropriate or convenient or interesting. It was… fucking tedious. I’ve seen the NPR example you mentioned cited many times in this context in other discussions, and I think I know why: It just resonates with us. There’s a real sense of desperation to be believed when it comes to this. (Woman are currently reading this and cocking an eyebrow, “Oh, so now you get a taste of how it feels.”) I’ve tried to explain this to women before, and it never comes across well. I do know that I was raised in a very religious household and that my exposure to certain cultural norms was limited by that. At around, thirteen, I still managed to hit puberty. I accept that much of what we do around sex and gender is cultural, but fuck: Hormones are real. While I don’t think anyone disputes that, it’s very difficult to explain something so visceral, so it comes across as trying to justify something, when the reality is you just want people to understand.
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It’s hard for me to understand how anyone wouldn’t understand, it’s not at all uncommon!
My perspective on it is a bit different though. What I hate more than anything is to be conflicted, for me, harmony requires resolve. This would mean either taking steps to control your hormones (not easy at all, but more or less possible), or to give in to temptation instantly. It can feel more principled to protest how one feels and feel badly about it. But with many people I have spoken to, there is greater time and inconvenience spent opposing sexual impulses than would be the case giving in to them. Pragmatically, this could be the difference of hours of obsessing about somebody versus a fraction of the time joining with them.
A paradox of how mental conditioning works is that whatever one decides must be resisted will dominate their thoughts. It can be seen in conservatives and closet-cases as “the unthinkable”, but my experience is that this affects nearly everybody. Like I joke with my kid: “Whatever you do, don’t think about the elephant!” Giving in so that temptation releases you not only takes time (and probably embarrassment), but might conflict with yours or others social conditioning. I see this with many men who feel that they are expected to be monogamous. They feel that this is an impossible promise, yet make it anyway! But it seems to me that love, respect, devotion, and other worthwhile feelings for people do not have the direct relationship with sexuality that many cultures assume to be the case. Just like I wouldn’t demand that a friendship means that my friend is everyone to me - having other friends does not cause me to like one any more or less, if we are honest.
Just like one might have friends who they only work out with, eat with, or dance with - making friends with whom one has sexual relations need not cheapen anyone concerned. This is more a factor I think of living in a culture with negative attitudes about sex. Being open about sex can be much less burdensome.
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That’s fair enough, but it doesn’t really answer my question. People should be able to express themselves as they wish, but this doesn’t explain whether there’s something common underlying what they wish. Testosterone is important, but it’s also interesting that it works on male and female children in different ways. One of the problems is that genders are often defined in very value-based ways that aren’t helpful. Men are naturally strong, responsible, smart, scientific leaders, while women are weak, pliable, talkative, domestic followers. On the other hand, men are ignorant, violent, sex-crazed cavemen, while women are the emotionally intelligent ones holding the world together.
I think it’s always good to bear in mind that we aren’t that different, and that while there are general things you can say about each, you’re comparing greatly overlapping qualities. There are also many qualities that men and women share and that are celebrated in both, but in overly gendered ways. Strength of character, intelligence, courage, selflessness etc. are all valued in both genders, but often in a more outward sense for men and a more domestic context for women. Both genders can be emotional, vulnerable and subject to low self esteem, intrusive thoughts and lack of perspective, but when this is stigmatised for women and denied for men (or used in both cases in order to beat the other gender over the head), it isn’t helpful. There are also general trends that may have some validity, but don’t need to influence our actions all that much. I’m not as observant or caring as my wife, and she is better at looking after the kids while doing other housework and organising appointments. However, I do most of that because that’s what our family needs right now. I’m not as naturally gifted in that area as she is (and this isn’t just because of gender), but I’m perfectly competent at it - and that’s enough.
As for transsexualism and gender identity, I’ll probably never understand it - but I do believe it’s real, whatever’s going on. It just seems to be another one of those things that makes me wonder how any of our gender identities are formed, and whether I’m too cis to have any idea of what being trans might feel like, or too genderqueer for solid gender identities to make any sense. I honestly have no idea, even though I am comfortable in my own body.
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Points for your excellent taste in music!
We aren’t talking about isolated outliers, we are talking about two normal distributions with slightly different means and standard deviations that overlap hugely. I know some men have the experience of being constantly bombarded with sex from some part of their brain they can’t control. Other men do not.
I’m not here to deny it is a thing. Men are taller than women, we all know that. But if you pick a random man and random woman from the American population the chance the man is taller is only 90%. That is a very big difference, but studies of people’s perception of probability tell us that most people interpret a 90% chance as a 100% chance (except in strange cases where they interpret it as a 0% chance). The statements “men are taller than women” or “men have more active sex drives than women” are, as read by the majority of the population, false. As someone who has taken statistics and understand that these statements are coming out of studies of the population using reasonable methodologies, they may be true.
Like I said, I push back on gender differences not because there aren’t gender differences, but because the meanings of the words used vary a lot from person to person and translate badly from people who know what they are talking about to people who don’t.
When the truth is buried deep, beneath a thousand years of sleep, time demands a turnaround, and once again, the truth is found.
I think that taking brain medication (and maybe recreational drugs, but those experiences are easier to write off after the fact) gives an insight into this process that a lot of people seem to lack. A lot of people seem to run with thoughts, emotions and behaviours lined up neatly. Those pills might make the aliens beam voices into your head telling you to jump in front of the subway, but that’s why you lean against the wall when the train is pulling into the station and put yourself off balance so that you can’t make a split second decision to do it (and then you stop fucking taking those pills right now).
I know I said it above, but I can’t recommend Whipping Girl enough. Serano does such a good job talking about masculinity and femininity as real human experiences and at unpacking our attitudes towards those things.
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It is kinssa funny, I was having this exact argument–well, not really an argument cause he was factually wrong :D–last night. 90% isn’t automatically gonna win, bit it does tell me over the long term where I should place my bets.
On my list. Thank you!
Edit
Since I do y have time right now to read Whipping Girl, I checked out the perfectly accurate Wikipedia for a quick synopsis.
Cissexual assumption is a phrase coined by Julia Serano for her claim that cissexual people assume that all people experience gender identity in the same way.
Yes, yes, yes. And I hope I was eloquent enough that I was only ever talking about how I see myself, and not anyone else (except for Ron Swanson).
Thanks for the comments. For my part, what I was saying was that while I’m sure there are many men who don’t have the same issues with sex drive and many women who have similar ones, the effects of testosterone are not like body height. It’s not like 60% of men have issues with high testosterone and 55% of women do (or even 90/10) - it’s a particularly male issue, and it’s interesting that more than one feminist feels that he can’t help being a pervert with the addition of a lot of testosterone, and has big changes in perspective on things like porn, sexual desire, objectification and other areas. Sex drive is another thing which has many root causes, and statistics would be more appropriately used there. I suspect that it’s nothing like 90% of hetero couples where the man has a bigger sex drive.
I don’t think everyone shares my experience, but I do know quite a few who do. I don’t think it makes men all that different from women - people with depression also get intrusive negative thoughts that they feel shame about, and in both cases you can build up a set of tools to deal with it. On the other hand, many guys don’t see objectifying women as a negative thing, so there are definite differences in its effect.
I’ll have to check out Whipping Girl, it sounds very interesting.
BINGO.
I’m not saying much in this convo, but I am reading, and its insightful in a way that Crumb interview was not. So thank you for that. I am finding it very interesting. 
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I’m just not sure I entirely buy that. The caricature of the heterosexual man from a sitcom (to borrow a phrase from a friend: “rutting beasts rendered incapable of rational thought by the presence of boobs”) is the real experience of some men. It may be that it’s the experience of vanishingly few women, but that’s doesn’t show it is a sharp divide rather than a spectrum.
Doctors prescribe SSRIs for depression because Serotonin is the not-depressed-chemical for your brain. But for some people those drugs make the more depressed. If two people take the same SSRI one may sleep more and the other less. One may gain weight and the other lose weight. The risk of suicide can increase when you take SSRIs.
I think the brain is just plain too complex to be able to predict emotions, thought and behaviours from one chemical input (well, aside from fatal ones). Here’s a list of “less common” side effects to a testosterone slow release patch I found online:
Bad, unusual, or unpleasant (after) taste; bleeding gums; blemishes on the skin; breast pain; change in taste; cough; crying; depersonalization; diarrhea; discouragement; dizziness; dry mouth; dysphoria; enlarged breasts; euphoria; fear or nervousness; feeling sad or empty; gum pain or blisters; hoarseness; indigestion; irritability; itching skin; loss of appetite; loss of interest or pleasure; lower back or side pain; mouth ulcers; nausea; noisy breathing; painful or difficult urination; paranoia; passing of gas; pounding in the ears; quick to react or overreact emotionally; rapidly changing moods; redness and swelling of the gums; slow or fast heartbeat; stinging of the lips; stomach cramps, pain, fullness, or discomfort; swelling of the gums; swelling of the nose; tiredness; toothache; trouble concentrating; trouble sleeping; unusual tiredness or weakness; vomiting
I’ve mentioned it recently in gun control discussions, but it turns out that if you take two people with the “same” mental illness (in the way that American psychiatrists diagnose illnesses), the American is more likely to hear voices tell them to hurt or kill other people, while the person from India is more likely to hear voices telling them to clean their house. I know that sex is a bit more primal, but everything still passes through personal experience to be made into thoughts. For an obvious case a male who has never seen a naked woman isn’t going to be capable of having sexual fantasies about a woman’s body as-it-is, but that’s very superficial. People’s ability to imagine options is limited by their experience, both in the sense of just not knowing things and in the sense of creating taboos (and of course plenty of people fetishize taboo subjects and turn them from disgust to arousal).
I think that Louis CK bit probably gave a lot of men a way to talk about something that they hadn’t really been able to broach before. I’ve heard lots of people refer back to it. Like finally they can talk about something they’ve been told they really ought to keep to themselves. There could be extremely strong cultural differences between sexes in the perceived importance of keeping those kinds of thoughts to yourself, too.
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I really don’t want to act like my experience was universal - I had particular influences from culture, religion, my own experiences, family upbringing and so on, and even my brothers didn’t have exactly the same experience as me. ADHD probably had more than a little effect in my case. However, I think it’s very common for young men to feel strong sexual feelings around that time, even if they didn’t expect or welcome them. Full knowledge of the female body is not necessary. I guess in some ways doesn’t matter if a few women also experience this kind of thing - I don’t think I’ve ever met one and I’ve met plenty of guys who had similar experiences. If it’s more common, I stand corrected.
I think the whole rutting beast thing is where personal responsibility comes in. I had a number of female friends at the time, who didn’t feel awkward around me. A number of women commented that I didn’t look at them like some other men did - I would leave the area if possible if I felt like that, and I would work against objectification by thinking of reasons that I respected or appreciated that person. I didn’t speak in a sexual way, particularly around women. I’m telling you what I was dealing with internally; I may have felt like a rutting beast, but I still had quite a bit of control over my actions and worked hard to make sure nobody else was affected by them.
People like Louis CK resonate with me because there’s this big disjoint between the way you present yourself and hope people see you and the way you see yourself. When your brain makes you think of sex again and you just want to have normal interactions with people, it can be very frustrating. I think the religious issue is an important magnifier too - it’s probably no coincidence that @ldobe, @actionabe and I all come from pretty religious backgrounds.
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I have always voiced doubts about “objectification”, as it is popularly understood. What it seems people mean is denying some their agency. Yet my experience has been that hardly anyone, apart from a few sickos, actually prefers having sex with those who don’t want to participate. So it seems like the flip side of the coin of rationalizing rape as “natural”.
A deeper problem here I think is people often assuming that sexual relationships can or should be somehow one-sided. This often takes the form of implying a transactionality which I find distasteful. For example, that if one person is interested in having sex with another, that they are somehow assumed to be taking rather than giving. That sexuality is somehow naturally more selfish than generous. I think this isn’t healthy. Also, people are often quick to posit special double-standards of agency with regards to sexual relationships which don’t function consistently with other areas of life. For instance, if somebody only likes spending time with one in a reading club, that is a “respectful boundary”, but if they only like spending time with one for sexual activity that this suggests opportunism of some kind.
Engaging people in sex can actually be a way to help them to affirm their agency. To give them pleasure rather then take it. But you never know until you ask.
Did you mean for that to be at me?
I was inspired to comment based upon your reply to jsroberts above. But I think it is relevant to the conversation generally. I edited my post to make this a bit more clear.
When somebody replies to me I sometimes resume reading a topic from that point and then working back up the thread to where I left off reading last time.
Mostly, I just don’t care. If a person who looks like a dude walks up to me and says “Hi, I’m Susan, and I’m a woman. Pleased to meet you.” then by god, as far as I’m concerned, that is a woman named Susan.
I get where not being able to “pass” as a certain gender may cause major complications since people assume stuff. But if someone tells me that’s what they are, then who am I to question that. I go about my damn business and I like to assume others do too.
Maybe, but as the recent BB article featuring the Indian facebook youtube parody bollywood song by women about the stream of (male) creeps that bug them in the “other” message box shows, it’s a huge gender difference. Raise your hand if you are a dude and women sexually objectify you online to the point that you gotta write a comedy song about that experience? That clearly cuts across major cultural barriers.
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Testosterone is any interesting hormone. In me, the excess I had stopped me from ovulating. Awkward at the time as I was actively trying to get pregnant.
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An interesting Guardian article on the topic. Conclusion: testosterone and hormones themselves are not as responsible for poor behaviour as we think. In fact, as testosterone shows a positive relationship with social status and violence shows a negative one, the link is quite weak. Factors like the people you associate with have a larger influence, while the developing brain (decreased nerve connections in the pre-frontal cortex leading to a reduction in goal-setting, priority-setting, planning, organisation and impulse-inhibition) can explain quite a bit.
For example, it is not just testosterone that drives risk taking, but the inability of the immature brain to assess risk properly that gets them into trouble.
This has particular implications for sexual behaviour. Female adolescents have, thanks to their hormones, the body shape of a woman. In male adolescents, testosterone is driving them to think of sex every six seconds (as little as that?). Meanwhile, their reasoning is temporarily disabled while their brain sets up the “under reconstruction” sign. It’s a recipe for disaster.
The remodelling of the cortex helps explain another feature of teenagers: their astonishing level of self-centredeness. For a while, as their brain is undergoing changes, they find it hard to recognise other’s emotions. If you show teenagers pictures of faces, they will be some 20% less accurate in gauging the emotions depicted, not recovering this ability until they are 18 or so. This may be one of the reasons why they seem unable to read the signs, when treading on thin ice with their behaviour, with no appreciation of the impact of what they are doing on those around them. Teenagers exist in a universe of one.
It’s annoying that the article writer brought up the unfounded “thinking of sex every six seconds” trope, but the general idea seems to be more or less accurate (if it were true, how long would you spend thinking about sex each time? Does the clock just start when you stop thinking about sex or can you spend your six seconds also thinking about sex, and how would you test it under normal conditions?). She also points out that while testosterone isn’t directly responsible for aggression, aggression, stress and testosterone work in a positive feedback loop.
I think an important point is that as the company you keep does have an influence, socialising people rather than institutionalising them sounds like a good way to mitigate or respond to negative effects. The US incarceration rate is about 9 times as high as the German one, and my family feels much safer over here. If people with little hope are more likely to attempt risky behaviour that is damaging to themselves and others, giving people the feeling that they are an important part of society and that they have a lot to gain from it (and by that I don’t mean things like power, money and status over others, but rather belonging, worth, acceptance and so on) would seem to be more productive. It is important to recognise that these are real effects that are influenced by society, and that this is not just men being terrible people.
While it’s possible that I misread it, one of the things I disagreed most about the Buzzfeed article was that the writer felt the need to identify as a woman in order to be a feminist and be “on the girls’ team”. Identifying with people with whom we don’t share the same identity is an important part of building a society worth living in. I may be a man, but I’m not on the boys’ team and identifying with women was an important part of learning to be a man for me. (I’m not on the girls’ team either, BTW).
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