Female Reproductive Mutilation
Glosswitch wrote a horror-struck post yesterday about teenage girls and breast-binding.
I’m not supposed to call them young women. They’re non-binary individuals or trans men and that, we are supposed to think, is what makes the binding okay. Whatever the risks – “compressed or broken ribs, punctured or collapsed lungs, back pain, compression of the spine, damaged breast tissue, damaged blood vessels, blood clots, inflamed ribs, and even heart attacks” – binding is justified because of the psychological benefits. There’s no other way, you see.
I look at arguments such as these and I literally want to scream.
You know, women used to bind their whole torsos. Remember that? Lacing? Corsets? Corsets crushed internal organs, and prevented women from breathing properly. It was impossible to draw a deep breath while wearing a corset. I posted about it a few months ago, via Elizabeth McGovern saying how awful it was wearing them on Downton Abbey:
‘There is no way,’ she says, speaking heavily and with the conviction that can be born only of bitter experience, ‘that I can convey to you what a profound experience it is not to be wearing a corset. In the series, we’ve been through the years leading up to the First World War, the years during it, and now we’re in the years after it, and I have actually physically inhabited the clothes of each era in that I have not only tried them on but spent the major part of my days wearing them.
‘Corsets are so uncomfortable that they drive me mad, and it is incredible how much it changes your world view to be out of them. You can move around so much more freely, and the passage of air is not constricted – you have more oxygen making its way to your brain so you have much more ambition, much more desire to achieve things and connect with the outside world…’
So isn’t it…something, that we’re back to mutilating women, and that that’s being portrayed as progressive.
Back to Glossy:
We need to call the rise of binding, puberty blocking, mastectomy, testosterone prescriptions and hysterectomy for girls and young women what it is: Female Reproductive Mutilation. Just as with FGM, it is a practice in which females are complicit not because they are foolish, nor because they are morally weak, but because they are trying to survive in a culture which does not respect the full humanity of a female body that grows freely, intact and unharmed. The feelings of a girl who wishes to take a knife and slice off her own breasts are absolutely valid. She is not faking it. We should be listening to her, respecting her suffering. But this complicity? This acceptance of the hatred that has been growing in her year on year?
I think more highly of women and girls than that. I will not accept the racist Western bullshit that decrees that when others remove the clitorises of girls, they are barbaric, but when we bind their breasts and cause their uteruses to atrophy, we are merely respecting their true identities. We are not. We are turning away from their pain, concluding that if they are willing to take it on themselves, who are we to stop them? It’s a horrendous abnegation of responsibility.
I know what it is like to want to disappear. I know what it is like to reject femaleness. I also know that you can reach a point of wanting to grow, of finding a way through it, even though the discomfort never fully leaves you. We are denying girls the chance to make that choice later in life and we are endorsing their suffering now. It is unforgivable.
Foot-binding. Corsets. High heels. FGM. Breast-binding. It’s all the same shit.
I think breast binding is qualitatively different from corseting (etc.) in at least two ways. Other forms of restriction and mutilation were (and are) imposed on women regardless of their personal tastes, whereas breast binding is a much more spontaneous phenomenon, largely performed directly against (or at least orthogonally to) social and familial pressure (which is one reason it’s often done badly); secondly, the more customary impositions were designed to enhance and entrench femininity, whereas breast binding is performed for precisely the opposite reason.
Nobody said they were identical. But they’re not as radically different as some fans like to think, either.
Thanks for explaining about things that are designed to enhance and entrench femininity though. I had no idea.
Binding doesn’t seem particularly useful to me. I am chesty.
I’ve tried binding when costuming in male roles. It doesn’t actually do that much.
I’ve tried going braless and wearing bulky clothes. It works great.
If I wasn’t so chesty, binding might make a bigger difference, and yet there would be even less need of it.
I would conclude that it does not do much to change how others perceive you, but it does serve as a ritual of body-antagonism.
This is not rocket science. Corsets worked by manipulating female bodies so they better fit the patriarchal mold. Breast binders do the same thing with only one additional nuance. They manipulate female bodies AND minds to better fit the patriarchal mold.
You’re not willing to wear a virtual corset by starving, posing, dressing, and displaying your body for the pleasure of men? Well then, you must not even be an actual woman. Get over there and bind or pay someone to slice off your breasts and call yourself a man, because you’re that much of a failure at being a woman.
Your very last line says they’re “all the same shit”. I thought it might be interesting to think about a big way that they’re *not* the same (being opposite manifestations of the performativity of gender roles), and perhaps explore what those differences mean. And I thought you might be interested in having that kind of a discussion, too.
I’ve been reading your blog nearly every day for more than five years, and I’ve learned more about feminism and atheism from you than from just about anyone else. I deeply respect and admire you, and I am not here to teach you anything you don’t already know; on the contrary, if I make a comment, it’s either me thinking out loud (however poorly that might come across), me pointing something out *for other readers* that I think you might’ve omitted *due to inattention or disinterest*, or me trying to start a discussion from which I might learn something else. I understand being mistrustful, especially seeing as I don’t comment often and can sound rather didactic and assholish when I do (since I sound rather didactic and assholish whenever I write, even when I try not to), but I am not one of the malicious actors who hounded you off Freethought Blogs, Ophelia. I had hoped I’d earned the benefit of the doubt, but it appears I haven’t. That isn’t your fault, but I thought I’d let you know the respect and admiration I continue to hold for you.
I’m sorry, Seth. I apologize. I’m sure you have earned the benefit of the doubt, but I’m really bad at who’s said what kind of thing unless they say it often. Really bad at it.
I want people to comment here for all those excellent reasons – that’s exactly the kind of reason I want people to comment here. It’s imbecilic and mean of me to bite their heads off when they do. I can be such an asshole.
I wasn’t thinking you were one of the malicious actors though.
Anyway…I agree that they’re different as well as similar. That’s been one of the surprises of feminism, I think, the way old forms of oppression can sneak back in “enlightened” or “empowered” etc costumes. Like Glossy, I find it horribly sad.
You didn’t address me, Seth, but I’ll reply to you anyway since my comment was mostly in response to yours. Knowing that your comment was intended as constructive, I apologize for the sarcastic “this isn’t rocket science” statement.
That said, I hope you’ll understand that, without more context, it came across as minimizing the horror that is breast binding and elective mastectomies.
Thank you for the apology. Though, to be fair, I *have* enjoyed watching you bite some other people’s heads off when they seemed to deserve it, so I can’t complain *too* much. ;) For what it’s worth, I’m sorry for failing to make my intentions clear in the posts that I’ve made this evening. More broadly, I really am sorry for the sustained abuse you’ve had to withstand from people who claim to know better, and I regret that I could not have done more to show my solidarity and support through the worst of it.
Jennifer@8: Yes, I can easily see how my first post can be read that way, and I apologise for that. I’ll try to make my intentions clearer in the future.
Ophelia@7: I think it’s pretty clear that the same fundamental social impulses have informed both kinds of behaviour, but what can be made of the motivations of people who bind versus people who used to corset? Corseting was an act of conformity, deviations from which were punished by widespread social censure; once that social pressure evaporated, so too did almost every woman’s need to wear a corset. By contrast, outside of very small self-selected communities, binding is met with indifference at best and censure at worst. Even if binding is an attempt to live up to masculine gendered expectations, the social dynamics of punishment and reward are inverted…and yet the behaviour persists, in the face of a net-negative social reaction, when all it took to eliminate mandatory corseting was the development of a net-neutral social attitude toward it.
Is there even a way to explore these questions without immediately getting ensnared in a morass of identity, wherein one finds oneself mouthing the same words as religious fundamentalists about “women pretending to be men” and “men pretending to be women”? I’m acquainted with a person that identifies as a man and recently went through top surgery after years of binding; if I told him that he was really a woman who’d mutilated herself because of internalised misogyny, that would hurt him quite a lot, and I don’t think I could convince myself that it were even true in the first place.
Seth – thinking out loud is good. How about this? Is it possible that breast binding isn’t the opposite of conformity, but exactly the same thing? It is done for the same reasons, to conform to society’s expectations. Okay, so you don’t act or think like women are “supposed’ to act or think, so you begin to identify as male. But you look female, because your body conforms to a biological expectation. To conform to the gender expectations, you transition to male because you don’t conform to the standard view of female. To conform to gender expectations, you need to look male, so you bind. It’s really not the opposite of conformity, it’s the exact same conformity. The same old story, the same old rules, the same old gender essentialism that tells us A is male and B is female because…A is bold, adventurous, likes math, works on cars, and wears blue jeans and sweat shirts; B is sweet, sensitive, caring, compassionate, cries at sad movies and weddings, and likes to wear lipstick and eye shadow.
It feels like rebellion, but it’s total conformity.
Ophelia @ 7:
Having not been much involved with issues of social justice most of my life, I’m shocked and appalled at how these old oppressions are able to sneak back in. Thanks to you and writers like you, I at least know about it now.
Seth @ 9:
You are a stand-up guy. I’m glad that you’re commenting here.
Inklast @ 11: There’s a lot of merit in that argument, but it still raises the question of whether a trans man is *just* and *always* a woman who doesn’t have a sufficiently ‘feminine’ personality, and whether the mismatch of their personality with the ideals of femininity (coupled, perhaps, with a seeming match to the ideals of masculinity) is sufficient to explain the inner alienation which leads them to transition in the first place. I don’t know the answer to that.
I do know that up until very recently, I suspected that trans men and trans women were reifying gender roles instead of combating them. That might be the case, to some extent, but after some discussions with trans people, I learned that many of them have *had* to perform hyper-versions of their gender in order to get beyond medical gatekeeping; a trans woman with whom I’m familiar said that when she told her therapist about her love of ice hockey (as a player and a spectator) as well as other traditionally ‘masculine’ pursuits, her therapist cancelled her hormone prescription until she could prove that she was “trying hard enough”. That is an anecdote, admittedly, but it gives some evidence that not all trans women are hyperfeminine by nature, and that some of them are coerced into performing hyperfemininity in order to convince their doctors to continue their treatment. By extension, that would suggest that at least some trans men are similarly coerced with respect to hypermasculinity.
MrFancyPants @ 12: Thanks. You’re not too bad, yourself. ;)
Ophelia, you can be acerbic and grumpy but I comment on your blog while I never say a word at The Orbit because I do not feel comfortable there.
Seth @ 9 – thank you!
Myrhinne @ 14 – yeah – The Orbit is like the worst of the Pharyngula horde, squared.
Seth @ 13 – I know – I’ve heard anecdotes of that kind too (and I don’t doubt their veracity). But I’m left with the competing anecdotes that the women I know tell, about not really getting what it means to “feel like” a woman apart from having the history of being seen as female. That’s the anecdote I tell too.
I’m remembering a sort of haze of rationalization around corsets and stays. I kept seeing allusions to a deep-rooted notion that corsetting was BIOLOGICALLY necessary. Much the way that brassieres are treated as obligatory in so many places.
The female body is assumed not to function properly without exoskeletons.
Do even the burqa-niqab-jilbab fans go so far? Do they ever insist that women must be shielded from light for some ‘special’ pseud-medical reason?
Well now that you mention it there was very heavy-duty pressure on [white] women to wear bonnets and similar so that they wouldn’t turn brown. The roots and implications of that are too obvious to belabor.
John the Drunkard, to me personally, a bra improves my physical and mental well-being. It saves me pain while being physically active.
Regarding binding – some binders are better than others. The preferred ones are stretchy in the back to allow better breathing. Still not recommended for physical exercise or while playing wind-instruments (during which times layered sports bras are often used instead). Nor is it recommended to bind for more than about 8 hours a day.
Samantha Vimes, my son tried the bulky clothing method at first, but he strongly prefers binding. If all goes well, he will soon have surgery and won’t have to worry about it any longer.
iknklast – my son was opposed to gender roles and expectations pre-transitioning and continues to oppose them afterwards. He conforms to the degree that he needs to in order to live in society as it exists. But having a masculinized body absolutely delights him. Never saw anyone so happy about body hair.
But in what sense is it recommended at all? Certainly not in a medical sense. Some binding is worse than other binding, naturally, but surely no binding is recommended.
It could be recommended for relief of top-dysphoria. Mental health is health too. Though the trans boys and men that I know find binding on their own. I suppose if binders were covered by health insurance doctors would be recommending them in some cases.
It could be recommended by whom? And I wasn’t asking whether it could be recommended – obviously it could – but in what sense it is at all. The fact that trans boys and men find it on their own is the opposite of saying it’s recommended.
Glosswitch found anorexia on her own, too, and that’s her point – it wasn’t a good thing to find. Self-mutilation isn’t something to rejoice at, or, usually, to recommend.
Ultimately this is not a question about whether individual people should be “allowed” to use breast binders or otherwise modify their bodies. Nor is it about whether individual women at this particular moment have positive things to say about their experiences with it. It’s about whether the wider society should be encouraging it under the guise of a falsehood.
A woman who is in the depths of an eating disorder will tell you that it is necessary for her mental health to do these things that keep her skinny, even though they’ll mess up her entire digestive system for the rest of her life. And she would be right! When you’d rather die than gain an ounce, starving yourself does keep you from going mad with self-disgust, and allow you to get through another day.
Doesn’t mean anorexia/bulimia should be prescribed after an hour “therapy” session, for fuck’s sake.
It’s a bit much to call binding mutilation, but if you can’t exercise well in them, then hobbling would be the appropriate term. Like hobble skirts, and hobbled, horses, and hobbling around in high heels. It would fall into that not-so-charming category of clothing that has been thought to improve one’s appearance, for a given desire of improvement, which at the same time temporarily limits functionality. Breathing is a very important function, and if you can’t breathe well enough to run in your clothing, it’s a dangerous type of clothing.
It’s funny how hobbling attire seems to be designed for female bodies.
If a trans boy were to show up at the office of a doctor or therapist and say he can’t stand having breasts, can’t stand how the appearance of breasts causes people to think he was a girl I can see the doctor or therapist recommending that he look into ways to disguise the breasts, including binding. My son’s doctor gave a talk recently at a support group. The issue of binding came up and he definitely approved of binding given the binder was fitted properly, had a stretchy back, and was not worn for too long each day. But in the long haul he recommends surgery.
If people can get bodies they are more happy with that is a good thing. Whether the issue is a prominent birthmark, an asymmetrical face, breasts that get in the way of desired activity, or breasts that are visible at all. Which modification is mutilation? Are we required to be stuck with whichever body we got through the genetic lottery when the means exist to modify our bodies to our tastes?
We can criticize pressure to look a certain narrow and limited way, but at the same time acknowledge that for some people some kind of body modification is actually helpful.
Again I must say, it’s not about whether people should be allowed to do something, it’s about whether we as a society are doing the right thing by the people who want to modify their bodies to fit into some particular mold. Should people be allowed? Generally, probably yes. Should they be encouraged to? Well, I have a fucking asymmetrical face, crooked-ass teeth, and unusually hairy body for a woman. It’s painful to think that some enabler is standing on the sidelines gently encouraging me to spend thousands more than I already did in my 20s and 30s trying to “fix” those things.
Spot on, Jennifer. I think for female-bodied persons, the whole “change your body to conform to what society says you ought to be” is too familiar a thing for us not to question to what degree this is more of the same.
I don’t like my body. I’m too skinny generally and a disability has led to wastage of most of the muscles in my lower legs and I have to wear clumsy orthotic footwear. BUT – I know I’m stuck with it so I carry on and have done so for nearly 70 years. I have no idea however what it is like to feel oneself to be in the wrong body but I wonder sometimes about the impact of societal views of ‘appropriate’ appearance. Even here, those who kick against it, like Grayson Perry are men. I don’t believe a female artist, who from time to time adopted a male persona, simply because they wanted to, would be treated as he is, appearing on mainstream TV as both ‘male’ and ‘female’.
It makes in the end no difference if men wear skirts and women trousers. It has no relationship to what they are biologically or psychologically. If we can break away from that gendered dress code, some at least of the pressures that leads women transitioning to male to feel they have to bind their breasts to appear ‘male’ might be reduced.
This is a bit confused because a) I’m thinking out loud and b) I’m trying to do so from a perspective that I don’t really have any experience of. I think it is important to try though.
Comparing binding for transgender men to various forms of FGM is a lot like comparing assisted suicide for chronically ill patients to forced euthanasia of chronically ill patients. There may be superficial similarities in modality, but it doesn’t take a lot of contemplation to see that such similarities are indeed superficial. Certainly, there is no expectation that somebody who wholeheartedly supported their ailing grandfather’s decision to end his battle with cancer (and may even have celebrated that this option was available), would feel the same support for doctors terminating their ailing grandmother’s life against her will. No less absurd is the implication that people who support transgender mens’ decision to bind belong on the same platform as people who would advocate for female foot-binding as a cultural norm.
Binding is one of a limited set of options available to transgender boys/men in pursuit of one simple goal: to be thought of as a boy (or man) by those around them. Admittedly, the question of *WHY* they want this (“is it nature or nurture”?) seems to be hotly contested[1]. But, IMO, this *WHY* is irrelevant to the question at hand. At least, it in no way addresses two key observations that back my claim that transgender breast-binding is categorically NOT the “same shit” as FGM.
1) Transgender boys & men (people born with female anatomy who claim to ‘feel like’ they are male) exhibit astronomically high rates of anxiety & depression. As a group, they have suicide rates in some cultures that soar to 10 – 20 times higher than that of the base population (for comparison, the suicidal rates among male US veterans is 50% higher than base population rates, and that of female US vets about 5 times higher than base population rates).
2) Measures of emotional distress and psychological ailments are greatly reduced for transgender boys who are perceived as, and treated by, those around them as boys/men. A recent study found that transitioning (adopting a name, pronouns, and various cultural cues associated with men) at a young age actually eliminated the increase of mental health issues and emotional distress in transgender children altogether. In that study, transgender boys who were able to introduce and present themselves to others such that they were perceived and treated as boys, showed the same rates of happiness and mental well-being as boys born with male anatomy[2].
In the face of these observations, it seems to be the epitome of misdirection/false-equivocation to encapsulate transgender binding (as a tactic used by transgender boys to more reliably be perceived as male by those around them) with such practices as foot binding, corsets, and high heels.
[1] Personally, I’m convinced biology plays a much bigger role than culture. Yes, I absolutely think culture plays a huge role in how all people, transgender or not, experience gender. I have no illusions that every society on the planet has some deeply fucked up misconceptions about what a person’s gender says about that person or how they should be treated. Or that, almost without fail, these misconceptions overwhelmingly favor and privilege males over females. Nevertheless, even in all it’s fucked-up-ed-ness, and all the complex and toxic effects thereof, there is simply no evident correlation between any particular form of these misconceptions and the direction with which – or ages at which – people claim to be transgender. Nor is there any “dosage correlation” between the per-capita frequency of transgender individuals with intensity or pervasiveness of cultural/familial gender misconceptions. Transgender people seemingly emerge from the most progressive, pro-feminist families as frequently as they do from the most bigoted, women-hating families. Without correlation between any aspect of transgender reporting (age of onset, direction, frequency, etc) with any aspect of gender-based cultural norms, causation simply must be must be ruled out. This is precisely why, once studies failed to find any correlation between childhood vaccines and autism rates, the notion that vaccines cause autism was DONE. It was dead even though the actual causal mechanism(s) had not yet been established; and will remain dead even if no cause of autism is ever found.. Independent of this, twin studies also contribute solid evidence for a biological component. So, no, I don’t know what biology is behind the proclamation of a assigned-female-at-birth 4-year-old insisting that they are actually a boy. But I’m fairly confident that a biological component is there. In fact, I would not be surprised if, in the near future, some developmental neurologist discovered a means to assess a group of infants/toddlers born with female anatomy, and differentiate between those likely to one day proclaim “I’m really a boy” from those who will not.
[2] http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2016/02/24/peds.2015-3223 Note – the same observations hold for transgender girls; I singled out transgender boys in addressing the subject matter of breast-binding.
Is the issue really so clear-cut? I don’t find it at all “painful” to think of parents “enabling” their child to get plastic surgery after a serious burn, but I do find it painful to think of an agent encouraging an aging actress to get a face lift. Similarly, there’s a huge difference between a doctor supporting a patient with breast cancer in having a breast implant surgery after a mastectomy, and a husband encouraging his wife to get breast implants because he finds her chest to be too flat to be sexy.
Or you could put that another way. You could say that binding is one of a limited set of options available to girls/women in pursuit of one simple goal: to be thought of as not female by those around them.
Then you could think about why girls and women might find it so painful to be thought of as female by those around them.
The word I come up with when I read posts like Kevin’s and Anat’s is: “triage”. Triage surgery–particularly battlefield triage, or that used in the wake of a major disaster–is often very imperfect; it might even qualify as malpractice if performed in otherwise ideal settings.
Which seems to be the problem. We don’t have an ideal setting for dealing with this particular issue. We have a successful [1] system of treatment for addressing bulimia and anorexia. We don’t have anything of that sort for addressing body dysphoria–except transitioning, which does seem to work. Until something that might actually work better than the transition process is actually introduced, that’s where we’re at.
I keep fighting for feminist causes, and I believe that if we ever do achieve a post-feminist society (one where gender roles are non-existent), then the cases of needing to transition will drop (I cannot say if they will disappear entirely, merely that the gray area would likely be cleared). But figuring out the best way to accommodate those caught in our current societal standards to actually survive and be happy with themselves is a matter of triage, not ideology.
[1] Successful, here, simply means ‘better results than ignoring the problem’. Transitioning is the most successful approach to body dysphoria that I can find; other approaches that attempt to reaffirm birth sex identity result in worsening the patient’s condition.
But maybe, as so often, those aren’t the only choices. Maybe, as so often, we’re not forced to choose between two absurd alternatives.
And maybe, just maybe, saying it’s not really ideal for women to mutilate themselves because women are despised should not be dismissed as “ideology.”
The only difference between the burned child and the mastectomy patient and the other examples (Kevin @29) is that these two hypothetical people have been described as requesting the cosmetic surgery rather than being pressured into it. All that says to me is that they’ve internalized the message that asymmetry and scars make you less valuable as a person. Both are efforts to conform to superficial beauty standards. I rationalize the things I do to conform to societal beauty standards all the time, so I’m not coming at this from a purity standpoint. I’m trying to understand what principled reason there could possibly be for encouraging people to see their bodies in such a way.
As far as I’m aware, never in recorded history has society made a serious effort to deal with disorders like anorexia, bulimia, or gender identity disorders outside of patriarchy. This is not triage. We didn’t end up in today’s gender-embracing, gender-obsessed, beauty- and youth-worshiping world suddenly or by accident.
I believe my post demonstrates that I have thought about this. I have no problem with the hypothesis itself. Women *are* treated like shit in this world. So yes, at first blush, it’s entirely plausible to suppose that “transgender boys” are really just young girls who, seeing how women are treated, resolve to themselves (perhaps subconsciously) “Meh, not for me, I think I’ll take the boy route.”
But at that level, it’s just an ad hoc (albeit plausible) hypothesis for the existence of transgender boys. I reject it not because I question the premise (that our society is hugely anti-woman and this affects everyone in monumental ways), but because the hypothesis falls apart with further scrutiny.
For one, it has a whopping gap in terms of parsimony: even if true, a completely separate hypothesis would be needed to explain
1) why transgender girls exist (in comparable numbers, to boot) and
2) why transgender girls express their sense of being not-a-boy in uncannily similar manners (age-wise, behavior-wise, etc) as transgender boys express their sense of being not-a-girl.
If anti-women hatred is the primary drive behind girls proclaiming themselves to not be girls, there should be a signal/response connection in frequency with which girls make this proclamation. We should see the highest frequency of transgender boys within rigidly patriarchal religious communities and from families who raise their kids to a steady drumbeat of misogyny. We should see the lowest frequency among progressive families that do their damnedest to teach and model feminist principles of gender equality. Such is not the case.
If anti-women hatred is the primary driver, there should be a signal/response connection in intensity with which transgender boys proclaim their boyhood. That is, the shittier a female-bodied child perceives the treatment of women to be, the more strongly and intensely that child should express their transgender inclination. Such is not the case.
If the model, “Everybody says I am X. People who are X are treated like shit. Therefore I believe that I am not X” were sufficient to drive transgender boys’ behaviors, we should see transgender-like responses to all manners of categories. We should see hundreds of thousands of minority children who react to racism by insisting that they are really white (and maintaining that stance throughout childhood into adulthood). Such is not the case.
If the environmental hypothesis were true, we’d expect fraternal and identical twin girls to express transgender preferences at near-equal frequency. But surveys of transgender individuals with twin siblings show a high level of concordance of between identical twins that is utterly absent between fraternal twins.
I’m sorry, I’m getting fatigued with my own repetitiveness. I’ll just stop and ask: do you even care whether or not misogyny is the primary driver of transgender boys engaging in such behaviors as hormone therapy and breast-binding? Or do you just know that it is, end-of-story?
Kevin #34,
A woman-hating culture doesn’t give a shit who your parents are.
Link?
Sorry for lack of citation:
Transsexuality Among Twins: Identity Concordance, Transition, Rearing, and Orientation
International Journal of Transgenderism
Volume 14, Issue 1, 2013
Full paper available at this link:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15532739.2013.750222
Not sure I follow. My efforts to preach and model, to the best of my ability, the principles of gender equality and feminism to my kids…. are you calling it a waste of breath and effort? Whether I treat my wife as an equal partner or routinely refer to her as a worthless [insert expletive], you say it’d make no difference on my kids’ perception of gender roles?
Kevin – I have asked you this before, I’m pretty sure. Would you please stop doing that accusatory thing? Nobody here, including me, is talking about you. This post is not about you, and people talking about this issue is not about you. Stop doing that manipulative “Are you calling me ___” crap. It’s a self-righteous and bullying move and I dislike it.
Sorry, please feel free to remove that. I can reframe the point impersonably and more respectfully. I have been working to avoid using that kind of rhetoric in your comment section, particularly with respect to this topic.
Thank you, I appreciate it.
@ 28 Kevin Kirkpatrick
My understanding is that the consensus among researchers is moving in that direction.
@Silentbob,
Interesting article. My theory:
In our ancestors, and in modern primates along with other social, intelligent, sexually-reproductive animals, there is an innate ability to differentiate adult males from adult females. Some combination of scent, appearance, and sound associated with adult females triggers a “female-stimulus” area of the brain, and some combination associated with adult males triggers a “male-stimulus” area of the brain.
From an evolutionary vantage point, this would be very useful for reproductive success. When a female animal reaches sexual maturity, the area of her brain triggered by “male-stimulus” would (in tandem with many other factors) activate the sexual arousal areas her brain; and in males, the “female-stimulus” would activate the sexual arousal area of the brain.
My theory is that, in intelligent social species, where behavior is much more strongly driven by observation and modeling, this mechanism was “co-opted” and put to use during the developmental stages. It stands to reason that, based on physiological differences between males and females, there’d be optimal, yet subtly different, sets of behaviors for males and females to engage in for the animals to have success as a group. These sets of behaviors would be very dynamic, changing with environment and the animals’ overall physiologies. They would also be relatively complex. As a young animal is developing, the very fact that it was born and is being nourished and protected means that the sets of behaviors of the adult males and adult females around it worked, and likely will continue to work.
It’s at this point that I think the “co-option” of the sexual “male-stimulus” and “female-stimulus” would have kicked in. Quite simply, just as “male-stimulus” triggers female sexual arousal in adulthood, so too might “female-stimulus” trigger the learning/modeling part of the brain during development… sort of a “I should really pay attention right now” response that fires when female juveniles are observing female adult behavior. Conversely, male juveniles would pay more attention to (and be inclined to mimic) the behaviors of adult males.
The idea holds up to some observations: Male chimpanzees are, on average, stronger and bigger than female chimpanzees. Troops of chimps seem to “know” to take advantage of this by delegating the role of patrolling (in a sophisticated, organized manner) and defending their territory primarily to males, and the role of nurturing/feeding the young chimps to the females (solely capable of providing milk to very young chimps). And, as chimps develop, the male juvenile & adolescent chimps are observed to keenly watch and mimic the adult males’ patrolling behavior; while female juvenile & adolescent chimps seem more keen on mimicking adult female behavior.
If this theory matches reality, and some vestigial artifact of it remains a part of human development, there would be three interesting take-aways that spring to mind immediately:
1) It have an optimistic/pro-feminist undertone. It could mean boys are not innately more violent; they just observe adult males exhibiting violent behavior in the world around them and are inclined to model that. Girls are not innately more nurturing; they may just observe adult females of their culture exhibiting nurturing behavior and feel inclined to model that. The exact same may apply to “pursuit of STEM fields”: boys see all the successful male scientists and feel a sense of “I should be like them” that girls do not feel. Or consider acquiescence to sexist treatment: girls who frequently see adult women behaving subserviently to adult men, and absorb that as behavior to emulate, may grow to become women less inclined to see anything wrong with sexist subservience.
The list goes on; but my reason for calling the theory “optimistic” is that it implies that the cycle of sexist gender roles can be changed quite abruptly (although not easily). In theory, just a single generation of adults deliberately exhibiting non-sexist behavior may be enough to stamp that behavior out of humanity for all future generations to come.
2) It could serve as a single parsimonious explanation that accounts for both homosexual and transgender individuals. A mismatch in development, where the “female-stimulus” becomes linked to arousal in a girl; or the “male-stimulus” linked to arousal in boys, could be a large part of what drives a small fraction of girls to develop into lesbian women as adults and boys to develop into gay men. Failures of these links to develop may explain why some people feel “asexual” – attracted to neither men nor women; and links developing from both male- and female- stimulus to arousal centers of the brain may be why other people describe themselves as bi-sexual.
More topical is the potential of this hypothesis to explain “gender identity” as “what area of one’s brain is linked to ‘model/mimic this behavior’?” For transgender boys, despite having an anatomically female body, if their “model/mimic” center of their brain is linked to the “male-stimulus” rather than “female-stimulus”, their entire childhood development would be saturated with a sense of being forced to mimic/model the wrong set of adults. In the English language, it may be that “I am a boy” is not so much a statement about what body parts a child has, or what everyone tells the child they are, but is actually the closest a child’s vocabulary can get to a sense of “I’m inclined to mimic men, and part of that is being called a boy as a child and going by a boy’s name”. Conversely, transgender girls would be inclined to mimic behaviors they see adult women engaging in, despite their male anatomy at birth. An analog to the sexuality aspect (“no links” => asexual and “both links” => bisexual) may also explain the reason some people are born feeling no connection or shared identity with eiither men or women; and others may experience a (seemingly contradictory) sense of being both.
3) Any time a hypothesis seems to “answer everything”, while that may mean it’s correct, it may also just mean it’s empty/unfalsifiable. To this end, I was pleasently surprised. One prediction that I would make is that, if this mechanism exists, then girls should be (in a subtle, statistical sense), slightly more inclined to learn from female teachers. After all, if the “female-stimulus” part of their brain is wired up to trigger a “this is important, pay attention” response, then that may make it easier for them to absorb information from a female rather than male teacher. And – I say with totally honesty – this is a question I’d never before now investigated… but I googled “do girls learn better from female teachers” and the first result back was this article:
http://national.deseretnews.com/article/5369/girls-learn-better-from-female-teachers-but-what-about-boys.html
I have no doubt the theory has holes; but would like to caveat it by saying that human development (particularly sexuality and gender identity) is WAY more complex than what a simple mechanism could entail. In particularly, I do not propose that this hypothetical mechanism would be the ONLY influence on sexuality and gender identity, which are certainly multi-faceted in both what drives them and how they manifest. I only suggest it as the basis for the claim that their could be a biological component of gender identity; with a plausible idea of what such a mechanism might look like and why it may exist in the first place.