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[Reelya]

Pre-natal hormones is the leading candidate, i think for explaining most of the variation. Post-natal hormones too but pre-natal ones are the most interesting area of study. It gives a model which explains the correlations, but also the exceptions, due to hormone differences in individuals.

Pure nature (genes) and pure nurture (environment) both fail to explain all the variations in a way that isn't somewhat offensive. I think they're both flawed models and that a flawed model somewhere along the line will lead you to conclusions which are contradictory.

for the "nurture" model that says gender identity is 100% imposed by society, transgender people are actually the counter-example: these are people who grew up with the same "100% overpowering" social conditioning as the rest of us, yet they "somehow knew" they were always male or female.

It's contradictory to allow that transgender people "know" their "true gender" whilst also holding that cisgender people are really non-gendered people who have been shaped with society's "fake gender". In other words, if you allow that transgender people have a "true gender" then why can't the rest of us?

[LordBucket]

what about making people be able to switch between genders at-will?

I think this would solve a lot of problems. "Walk a mile in a man's shoes." Literally in this case. Don't like what you are? Feel the other gender has a better deal? Switch. Done. Eat the grass see just how green it is.

While we're at it, I propose complete morphological freedom. Why stop at being able to change genders when we could be anything we want at all? Fly to the park, swim as a dolphin, be beautiful, and watch with amusement as teenagers rapidly switch between monocular and binocular vision to get high. Then waltz in with a set of spider eyes and laugh.

Completely in favor.

[Reelya]

Red about Norah, a lesbian who lived for 18 months as "Ned" and hung out with blue-collar straight guys. Amazingly she discovered they weren't quite the gibbering evil sexist monsters we've been lead to believe.

http://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1239263

[Sergarr]

...teenagers rapidly switch between monocular and binocular vision to get high...

I, um, don't see how doing that would make you get high. I'd expect something more like "a giant headache".

[penguinofhonor]

We could just stop using masculine/feminine to describe things that are neither. It really has no place beyond
describing body shape, voice, fashion style and similar obvious outward features.

I acknowledge that my worldview is not consensus, but I don't think what you're saying here is either. Let's go back to the example I gave earlier. If a guy says he wishes his girlfriend were more feminine, or a girl says she wishes her boyfriend were more masculine...are either of them talking about body shape, fashion, or any of the other things you list?

I don't think they are.

Yes, they could be talking about any of those things. I regularly see people described as masculine or feminine solely on appearance, often with no knowledge of how the person acts (or is acted upon). And there are plenty of other things they can describe that haven't been listed.

When your average person uses masculinity/femininity, they're using the definition with the cultural baggage. Look how much difficulty everyone here has dropping that baggage when this is a thread explicitly for analysis of gender issues and you're actively explaining the system to them. I can't believe that your average person who has never heard of this is somehow better at using the "true" definitions.

...teenagers rapidly switch between monocular and binocular vision to get high...

I, um, don't see how doing that would make you get high. I'd expect something more like "a giant headache".

Go back to the 1800s and tell someone to stick this crystal in this crappy little glass pipe, apply fire to it, and then to inhale the foul-smelling vapor that comes off. They won't expect to get high off that either.

[Sergarr]

but switching between monocular and binocular vision requires you to simple blink with one of your eyes

if that got people high we wouldn't need drugs

[penguinofhonor]

Oh, that doesn't get you high? You must just be weird.

[DJ]

Let's go back to the example I gave earlier. If a guy says he wishes his girlfriend were more feminine, or a girl says she wishes her boyfriend were more masculine...are either of them talking about body shape, fashion, or any of the other things you list?

They're talking too vaguely to say what they actually want. What they probably want to say is they wish they were more/less sensitive, obliging, assertive, or any number of traits that aren't exclusive to either gender.

[penguinofhonor]

That's kind of what LB is saying.

[Glowcat]

for the "nurture" model that says gender identity is 100% imposed by society, transgender people are actually the counter-example: these are people who grew up with the same "100% overpowering" social conditioning as the rest of us, yet they "somehow knew" they were always male or female.

It's contradictory to allow that transgender people "know" their "true gender" whilst also holding that cisgender people are really non-gendered people who have been shaped with society's "fake gender". In other words, if you allow that transgender people have a "true gender" then why can't the rest of us?

This is a dangerous simplification, because trans people don't always fall neatly into gender categories either. Especially when it comes to preferences and aspects of personality, and not that sense of association with a broad set of people (who might be a reference point more than the person's actual gender). How one trans person experiences their dysphoria can vary greatly from another person's. There is a range of transgender "internal sense" that forgoes binary gender categories entirely and people can see themselves as neither male nor female, or even sharing from each of those categories only partially.

I do think people have an internal sense of their gender but due to social conditioning our perception unnaturally lumps together various aspects of a person under a single simplistic label that fails to account for reality's nuances. We call certain behaviors "masculine" or "feminine" without realizing that they might have nothing to do with each other, such as how lesbian relationships do not base themselves upon how heterosexual men behave. Under such a system it is very difficult for cis people to understand their own gender without the sort of exploration that being trans typically forces upon a person.

[Reelya]

Different stage of development control different things. The pre-natal hormone model can easily account for what you observe there.

Different parts of the brain, or different stage of brain development can be exposed to different hormone levels. There could also be genes which block or enhance the effect of hormones on particular brain structures or functions. So, by it's nature the hormone model does not assume any of this is an "all or nothing" deal.

For example, lesbianism correlates highly with relative finger-length between the index finger and middle finger, which is an in-uterine biological trait determined by testosterone:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/695142.stm

Then there are gay males: previous studies found that males with older brothers are more likely to be gay, but it makes no difference whether you grew up with them or not, and adopted older brothers make no difference. Only biological older brothers from the same mother change the odds, so the logical assumption is that there were changes in the body of the woman between pregnancies leading to different hormone-related environments.

Right there, you have a scientific prediction about the "older brothers" study. If the model assumes that the noted difference is from hormones, then there should be signs of hormone-related physical differences in people who meet the criteria vs a control sample. And that is exactly what the "finger length" study found in these cases:

If you look at the finger study, they found that gay males with older brothers have different finger-length ratios than the straight males and gay males without older brothers (the latter two groups having the same average finger-lengths). This suggests whatever is causing the "older brothers" effect is in fact in-uterine testosterone, which can change over the course of multiple pregnancies for an individual mother. It implies that the older-brother effect is a real, biological effect, though not the only "form" of determining sexual orientation in males, it's quite a real one.

Now, neither the "gene" theory or the "socialization" theory explain all the above observations.

[Angle]

...damnit. The second I go to sleep, 2 and a half pages of discussion? really?

...OK. *Rolls up sleeves* Here we go...

Oh go fuck off back to r/MensRights and bitch about the evil wimminz over there, and please don't bring your MRA bullshit over here.

Aaaargh. I recognize that you've probably had some negative experiences in this area, and I do agree with you on MRA's in general. That said, you are seriously overreacting here, and in any case I can't condone that kind of language. Please practice more awareness in the future, and less flaming. Thank you very much.

I mostly wanted to stamp on the "men and women are the same, and any differences are oppressive social constructs" nonsense before anyone decided to try that one.

Sexual dimorphism DOES exist, and it will until we turn ourselves into a genderless species that reproduces via cloning. Choosing to ignore it doesn't make you... un-sexist, it just makes you ignore it. Not that you should use sexual dimorphism to say women or men deserve less rights, though.

Yes, but so does Intra-Sexual Dimorphism. Saying that all men or all women are he same is almost as silly. Thus, restricting people to two roles based on gender is also rather silly. That's why I had proposed having multiple roles that people could opt into depending on their personal preferences. I'd also like to emphasize that the largest difference, muscle mass, has less and less bearing on our modern society.

While we're at it, I propose complete morphological freedom. Why stop at being able to change genders when we could be anything we want at all? Fly to the park, swim as a dolphin, be beautiful, and watch with amusement as teenagers rapidly switch between monocular and binocular vision to get high. Then waltz in with a set of spider eyes and laugh.

Completely in favor.

Yeah, I like the idea. I don't think the technology is there yet, though...

It does promise to make things interesting for us soon, though. I think it also adds emphasis to our need for a better set of gender roles.

Though first, we should probably discuss whether we need particular gender roles in our modern society. What do you say?

[DJ]

Physical strength is as relevant as ever in blue collar jobs. In military too, but mostly just in infantry (smaller build is an advantage for tank crews, though).

[Reelya]

Even for traits with the same average, there are often big differences in the statistical spread between men and women.

There are a lot of traits, both physical and mental, where men tend to be either really crap, or really good (statistically speaking), compared to women who have that trait clustered more in the middle of the spectrum. If you take a sample based on one of these traits of "middle or better" you get statistically more women than men (which would explain more female undergraduates, as a fair thing), but if you take a sample of "only the best", or "only the worst" it skews more and more towards males as you take smaller samples, explaining more men at post-graduate levels, which are more competitive.  Since men tend to have more concentration at both the top and bottom of such traits, if you say it's all due to social bias, what exactly is happening? the system is both biased for and against males at the same time?

Similarly for traits that require great strength. If you need strength X to do job Y, the more competitive it is, assuming strength translates to productivity, you're going to find way more men than women. The "top 5%" of strength is going to have a larger percentage of men than e.g. the "top 10%", and so forth. Explaining why so many jobs like construction, mining, furniture removal, are heavily male-dominated. You just can't be strong enough to do these jobs.

I'll wager that there are many jobs where the "optimal" strength is actually WAY higher than the actual maximum human strength. The odds of a task having an optimal strength exactly close to the human maximum is close to zero - it's really unlikely. Think about a job: "would Superman be better at this job than a strong human?". If, so then, strength is highly relevant to performance for that job, and you can't have enough.

[Glowcat]

Different stage of development control different things. The pre-natal hormone model can easily account for what you observe there.

No it can't... even all the attempts to prove physical differences indicate alternative sexual orientation (which by itself says nothing about gender identity) only seek to establish a correlation and their results are so shoddy that just focusing on the limits of their hypothesis is dubious enough, but going further to extend a method that doesn't even reliably indicate sexual orientation to all aspects of a person is asinine. Judging a person's orientation by finger length, hair whorl direction, sibling number, or handedness is nothing more than media clickbait at this point.

Even studies attempting a more in-depth exploration of prenatal endocrinology haven't come up with better correlation results than "Can happen... sometimes... maybe" and it certainly doesn't point to any universal influence over a person that pushes them into a single one of the binary gender categories. There is no gradient between "male" and "female". The human brain is too complex for that sort of simplification and the way hormones interact with each individual is so varied that you can't really point to anything that would indicate sexuality or gender identity, or why some people don't identify as either binary gender or why some people are completely asexual. That model is bullshit not because there isn't any element of truth to it, but rather that it doesn't even begin to explore what makes humans do and think the things we do.

Yeah, clearly the pure biological and the pure socialization theories are nonsense, but more often than not it's biological essentialism that makes claims far beyond the evidence at hand and typically to justify a pre-existing bias that dominates the proponent's society. It's also the basis almost universally used to discriminate against people, such as preventing women from serving in armed forces, or in sports disqualifying intersex candidates such as Caster Semenya for having too much testosterone as well as disqualifying transwomen (who typically have far less testosterone due to androgen blockers) due to whatever other reason they can use to justify them not "really being a woman." If people would actually try to find better categorizations for these things instead of thinking everything about performance is explained by two insipid gender categories that are largely arbitrary then there wouldn't be so many imbecilic controversies over nothing.