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[Jude]

"Gender" is relevant to people (assuming it means people's conceptions of their own sexuality and identity and etc) but all the arguing about how to define it and blah blah is certainly intellectual wank fodder.

Also, to relate it to government forms, isn't having an option for "other" extremely clumsy since it will lead to ALL others being lumped together and treated alike? And is that a problem, since we already have that with "male" and "female?"

[G-Flex]

It would be clumsy, but certainly less clumsy than what exists now.

Also, if such things are "clumsy" to begin with, then maybe we shouldn't have systems in place which assume that everyone adheres to them in the first place.

[Forumsdwarf]

a system based on your chromosomes wherein you have 'xx' 'xy' and 'other' as options

Exactly.  "Other", in this case, isn't a miscellaneous category or an oversight on my part.  It actually has a meaning, "genetically damaged", as anyone who lacks exactly two chromosomes, sex-linked (Klinefelter's) or not (Down's), is genetically damaged and suffers from a disability.  The disabled have their own set of legal issues so that base is covered.
But ... the real issue is whether an "XX" with male anatomy should be in the ladies' room or an "XY" with female anatomy the men's.
I'm perfectly alright with being a strict "chromosomist" in athletic competitions and saying, "XY must compete with XY," just because there isn't any more fair way to do it.  Is it fair to pit XX against XY in contests of physical strength just because the XY self-identifies as female or had an operation or two?
But, as many of you pointed out, the prison example, the restroom example, the vast landscape of sex-differentiated social norms, these aren't served by genetic tests.
The knot would appear to remain knotted.
I do love simple solutions, but only if they work.  Maybe next time.

men desire more sexual partners while women would rather have one devoted mate

Not just any old mate; there's a "dark side" to behavioral evolution in women, too: the tendency to hypergamy taken to the extreme of duplicity, of bearing the child of an alpha / high-status male while duping or maneuvering a less-desirable male into paying for it.
There's enough evolutionary history behind it that women are biologically adapted to becoming pregnant by a chosen partner; they can subconsciously tip the scales between husband and lover who should father their children.
But call me an optimist, I believe most men and women are honest and loving.  Most.

[G-Flex]

Genetic definitions don't even work for biological sex, at least not for everyone.

It's perfectly possible to have abnormal development even with a perfectly-normal karyotype/genotype, for instance. One way to become intersexed (in some fashion or another) is to simply not respond well to certain hormones.

And even if genetic definitions were sufficient, there are all kinds of cases where a person either has an abnormal number of certain chromosomes, or abnormal genetic information stored on them.

I'm perfectly alright with being a strict "chromosomist" in athletic competitions and saying, "XY must compete with XY," just because there isn't any more fair way to do it.  Is it fair to pit XX against XY in contests of physical strength just because the XY self-identifies as female or had an operation or two?

The problem is that you can use the same logic with other criteria. That's why weight classes exist in, say, boxing: Because they determined that it's not fair for a 125-pound man to fight a 275-pound man.

In other words, "men can't compete against women" is only fair in an extremely broad statistical sense; if everyone were totally average for their sex, it would be true, but you wouldn't need to even consider sex in order to make things fair, you'd just have to consider the things that you're assuming sex affects in the first place. In other words, it would be just as fair - or more - to categorize by things like height, weight, muscle mass/density, and that sort of thing, where possible. After all, if it's not fair for men to compete against women, you have to ask which criteria vary between the sexes that make that true, and even if those criteria do vary in such a way, they also significantly vary between people of the same sex.

[Footkerchief]

This fact leads to evolution of different behaviors and desires in males and females. It's not just due to social conditioning that men are often willing to have sex with a woman they just met while women are far more conservative. It's not just due to social conditioning that deadbeat dads are far more common than deadbeat moms. or that men desire more sexual partners while women would rather have one devoted mate. And on and on and on.

Not just any old mate; there's a "dark side" to behavioral evolution in women, too: the tendency to hypergamy taken to the extreme of duplicity, of bearing the child of an alpha / high-status male while duping or maneuvering a less-desirable male into paying for it.
There's enough evolutionary history behind it that women are biologically adapted to becoming pregnant by a chosen partner; they can subconsciously tip the scales between husband and lover who should father their children.

Is there scientific evidence for these kinds of claims?  Because these sound like classic evo psych just-so stories.

[Forumsdwarf]

Enough we learned about it in biology.  With strangely titillating video footage.

[MrWiggles]

This fact leads to evolution of different behaviors and desires in males and females. It's not just due to social conditioning that men are often willing to have sex with a woman they just met while women are far more conservative. It's not just due to social conditioning that deadbeat dads are far more common than deadbeat moms. or that men desire more sexual partners while women would rather have one devoted mate. And on and on and on.

Not just any old mate; there's a "dark side" to behavioral evolution in women, too: the tendency to hypergamy taken to the extreme of duplicity, of bearing the child of an alpha / high-status male while duping or maneuvering a less-desirable male into paying for it.
There's enough evolutionary history behind it that women are biologically adapted to becoming pregnant by a chosen partner; they can subconsciously tip the scales between husband and lover who should father their children.

Is there scientific evidence for these kinds of claims?  Because these sound like classic evo psych just-so stories.

Thats a bit unfair, Evolutionary psychology isn't just bold face speculation. They do have archeological evidence and analogs of neolithic human culture that still exist. They also make good of game theory.

Its a weak and soft science field, but its not 'just so', explanations.

[G-Flex]

Again, even if statistical correlations do exist, that doesn't mean judging people by their physical sex makes a hell of a lot of sense outside of extremely narrow contexts. After all, like I said, you can statistically correlate people's behavioral patterns, physiology, psychological makeup, etc. with all kinds of things in a fairly profound way, but there is always going to be significant enough variation between individuals that it makes more sense to treat people as individuals instead of assigning them any sort of roles based on arbitrary statistical criteria.

In other words, prescribed roles like "men should be the ones to handle things like science and engineering because they're statistically better at it" (even if this is true on a level related solely to biological sex, which I doubt) don't really make a lot of sense unless you have to pick people at random for those roles. It's more productive to simply say "whoever's apt to be good at science and engineering should be the ones to handle them", as there would still be men who suck at it and women who are amazing at it.

[Grakelin]

blah blah is certainly intellectual wank fodder.

No matter how much you embellish your language, you're still just complaining that the issue is too intellectual for you to deal with. In this case, it is usually better not to start debating at all.

[G-Flex]

Yes. The issue of gender is something that affects everyone whether they realize it or not. I mean, how can it not? People are taught to behave very differently from a very young age depending on whether they're seen as male or female, and a lot of this is completely arbitrary or doesn't take into account what the person's natural inclinations are.

[Jude]

This fact leads to evolution of different behaviors and desires in males and females. It's not just due to social conditioning that men are often willing to have sex with a woman they just met while women are far more conservative. It's not just due to social conditioning that deadbeat dads are far more common than deadbeat moms. or that men desire more sexual partners while women would rather have one devoted mate. And on and on and on.

Not just any old mate; there's a "dark side" to behavioral evolution in women, too: the tendency to hypergamy taken to the extreme of duplicity, of bearing the child of an alpha / high-status male while duping or maneuvering a less-desirable male into paying for it.
There's enough evolutionary history behind it that women are biologically adapted to becoming pregnant by a chosen partner; they can subconsciously tip the scales between husband and lover who should father their children.

Is there scientific evidence for these kinds of claims?  Because these sound like classic evo psych just-so stories.

There's plenty of evidence some of which I mentioned. The fact that we see it all over the animal kingdom is one piece. The fact that it accurately predicts how men and women DO generally behave is another. The fact that it meshes perfectly with what we know of genetics and biology is another, whereas contrary claims do not.

EP isn't "soft science" if it's done right, and by done right I mean by the same methods as the rest of science. yeah its practitioners (even the best) tend to be given to speculation, but if you don't mix up the speculation with the actual scientific work then you're A-OK.

Again, even if statistical correlations do exist, that doesn't mean judging people by their physical sex makes a hell of a lot of sense outside of extremely narrow contexts. After all, like I said, you can statistically correlate people's behavioral patterns, physiology, psychological makeup, etc. with all kinds of things in a fairly profound way, but there is always going to be significant enough variation between individuals that it makes more sense to treat people as individuals instead of assigning them any sort of roles based on arbitrary statistical criteria.

In other words, prescribed roles like "men should be the ones to handle things like science and engineering because they're statistically better at it" (even if this is true on a level related solely to biological sex, which I doubt) don't really make a lot of sense unless you have to pick people at random for those roles. It's more productive to simply say "whoever's apt to be good at science and engineering should be the ones to handle them", as there would still be men who suck at it and women who are amazing at it.

All of these things are true, but don't change the fact that gender roles are by and large not arbitrary. If they were arbitrary (meaning, basically random, not caused by any consistencies in the way men and women think, behave and interact with each other and the world), we'd expect to see much or most of the planet with a radical reversal of the gender roles we see in our own society, among other things.

Your argument that they aren't arbitrary seems to run that they CAN'T be based in nature, because then we'd be obligated to maintain them, since (the implication) whatever is natural is good. Whatever is natural is NOT necessarily good; the fact that men and women are hardwired to think and behave quite differently does not mean that it's morally correct to deny one of them opportunities or treat one worse than the other.

Nobody's saying "men should be the ones to handle science and math;" I'm saying that if men have more interest in science and math, or if more men are good at science and math than women (maybe true, maybe not - I don't really care) then there's no reason why we should view it as unjust that more men are scientists than women. What's important is to make sure that any women who DO want to be scientists have the opportunity, not to enforce equal numbers of each sex in all fields.

Anyway, another assumption you're making is that gender roles are primarily taught and not innate. One major piece of evidence against this assumption is the existence of a number of human universals related to gender roles and sexual behavior; if gender roles were all learned, we should not see any such consistencies. Instead I'd argue that they arise from the interaction of people's natural (innate if you will) inclinations and behavior with their society and with other drives the people have, such as behaving similarly to others around them. If one dominated the other, then we'd see either all societies being the same, or else far far more difference among societies than we actually see, respectively.

And some aspects of how genders are supposed to behave may be somewhat arbitrary, but all basically boil down to the very non-arbitrary fact that women bear children and need to be fertilized by men, and both sexes have biology and psychology evolved to deal with this fact.

[ChairmanPoo]

To OP: The label is likely inter-gender because that's how ambiguous genders (of which hermaphrodites are only a part) are classified in medicine as a whole

[G-Flex]

There's plenty of evidence some of which I mentioned. The fact that we see it all over the animal kingdom is one piece.

Sexual dimorphism elsewhere in the animal kingdom is not directly evidence of what sexual dimorphism is like in humans.

The fact that it accurately predicts how men and women DO generally behave is another.

What accurately predicts what, and how do you properly exclude socialization/environment from the factors here?

Your argument that they aren't arbitrary seems to run that they CAN'T be based in nature, because then we'd be obligated to maintain them, since (the implication) whatever is natural is good. Whatever is natural is NOT necessarily good; the fact that men and women are hardwired to think and behave quite differently does not mean that it's morally correct to deny one of them opportunities or treat one worse than the other.

I don't know how you read any of that into what I said, but okay. I made it very clear that, even if statistical correlations do exist between personal characteristics and sex, in a directly causal manner even, there is still no impetus to assign people social roles based on sex.

Anyway, another assumption you're making is that gender roles are primarily taught and not innate. One major piece of evidence against this assumption is the existence of a number of human universals related to gender roles and sexual behavior; if gender roles were all learned, we should not see any such consistencies.

This falls apart a bit if you consider that things are happening to society which have never happened before. It's possible for social "universals" to all of a sudden become less universal due to variables changing which haven't changed before. Post-industrial societies the sort of which we live in now simply haven't happened before.

In other words, even if something is universal across all cultures, it can still be due to social factors in that all those cultures still have many cultural influences in common.

And some aspects of how genders are supposed to behave may be somewhat arbitrary, but all basically boil down to the very non-arbitrary fact that women bear children and need to be fertilized by men, and both sexes have biology and psychology evolved to deal with this fact.

Yes, and my point is that these simple facts don't really affect our lives as much as they perhaps once did, and only do in limited contexts. Childbirth is less of a toll on women than it was in basically any other point in history, by far (few women die during childbirth these days, whereas it was fairly common throughout pretty much all of history), jobs are more sedentary on average, etc.

And again, there's enough statistical variation within the sexes that roles being assigned based on sex simply doesn't make any sense. If you want girls who are good at science to get into science, and guys who are good at stereotypically-girly stuff to get into stereotypically-girly stuff, then you have to socialize them in an egalitarian manner. It's incredibly easy to thrust roles upon children without even realizing it; different things are expected of boys vs. girls, and individual variation is not taken into account as often as it should be.

[Kitpup]

For this whole discussion on gender roles being innate as well as learned, I point you to the various islands and tribal peoples wherein there are peoples who have completely reversed gender roles.
^{Originally seen on a docu, but here's at least a reference (towards the bottom) to what I'm speaking about http://www.drmillslmu.com/sexdiffs/spr01/panel1.htm}

[Jude]

There's plenty of evidence some of which I mentioned. The fact that we see it all over the animal kingdom is one piece.

Sexual dimorphism elsewhere in the animal kingdom is not directly evidence of what sexual dimorphism is like in humans.

This is a true statement. And yet it does not refute my point at all. Do you get why?

Hint: it's in the adverb you used

The fact that it accurately predicts how men and women DO generally behave is another.

What accurately predicts what, and how do you properly exclude socialization/environment from the factors here?

The hypothesis that men and women evolved to have different behaviors predicts that men will be more interested in many sexual partners whereas women should value fidelity from fewer partners, that men will be more interested in looks than women while women will be more interested in commitment and skill and social status than men, that men will be more offended if their woman bangs another man than if she becomes emotionally, but not sexually, involved with one, but vice versa for women, that men will generally be more interested in pursuing power and social status directly as a means to improve their attractiveness whereas women will focus on physical attractiveness....and on and on and on.

All of these predictions are borne out by what we see in the real world; many of them appear in all human societies. See the book "Human Universals" by Donald Brown for many many more.

You can't entirely rule out the influence of socialization, but when a sex difference consistently appears in EVERY SINGLE HUMAN SOCIETY, you have excellent reason to believe that that difference is due to the way humans are hardwired rather than to socialization. Here's how it works. The view that humans are socialized in a certain behavior would predict that given the massive diversity of humanity, that behavior should not appear in all of them. If it DOES appear in all of them, there would have to have been an extraordinary collection of coincides leading to that, too much to be accepted when there is a far more obvious and parsimonious explanation at hand - namely, that humans evolved that behavior for some reason or other.

I don't know how you read any of that into what I said, but okay.

It seems to be the implicit logic. I certainly can't see any other logic for it.

I made it very clear that, even if statistical correlations do exist between personal characteristics and sex, in a directly causal manner even, there is still no impetus to assign people social roles based on sex.

And I agreed

This falls apart a bit if you consider that things are happening to society which have never happened before. It's possible for social "universals" to all of a sudden become less universal due to variables changing which haven't changed before. Post-industrial societies the sort of which we live in now simply haven't happened before.

Of course. And yet those societies STILL share many, many characteristics with the most far-flung, remote hunter-gatherer tribes. If something stops being universal, then it is removed from the list of universals. But the fact that so many exist is extremely telling. Attempts to minimize it are just holdouts of the view (dogmatic and empirically unjustified) that human nature is taught and little or none of it is innate.

In other words, even if something is universal across all cultures, it can still be due to social factors in that all those cultures still have many cultural influences in common.

But like I said above, this is science and we have to consider parsimony. The one view (that universals probably derive from innate characteristics) is quite straightforward, while the other view (universals probably derive from the same social influences affecting all societies) demands an incredible amount of coincidence and parallel development of ideas and culture in vastly divergent cultures over tens of thousands of years.

Now this is not to say that many of the same pressures and impetuses (impeti? i dunno) dont' exist in many cultures. But if human nature was entirely learned, that wouldn't be true. Because human nature is in many ways the same no matter where you are, this gives rise to those pressures which lead to the development of social norms. Either way, when you trace it back far enough, you end up in evolution and biology.

Yes, and my point is that these simple facts don't really affect our lives as much as they perhaps once did, and only do in limited contexts. Childbirth is less of a toll on women than it was in basically any other point in history, by far (few women die during childbirth these days, whereas it was fairly common throughout pretty much all of history), jobs are more sedentary on average, etc.

That's true, of course, but it doesn't wipe our evolutionary history out of existence. We are meat computers built by evolution and we cant' change that fact. We can change how we behave to one another but we can't change what we are. Again, it seems like you're assuming I'm saying that because humans evolved to do certain things, therefore we SHOULD keep doing those things, or because humans historically had certain gender roles, we SHOULD maintain those gender roles. I said nothing of the kind.