Our “old friend” at the other place posted a picture of his “granddaughter.”
Let’s just say he was less than amused when I asked him how she knew their gender identity, and why he misgendered them. Shouldn’t he wait for her/him/they/ze/lizard person to identify first? how can he be 100% certain he doesn’t have a grandson, AFAB, but living in the “wrong body”?
The good doctor made sure no such questions are visible. His place, his rules, but he did say the following regarding Elliot Page: “There was a person, a human being, who was assigned female at birth, and who lived and grew and realized that the identity forced on them by the conventions of culture was not the identity they held inside.”
The serious question I wish he and others would someday answer is, where did this “identity they held inside” come from? The language comes across, at a minimum, as quasi-spiritual, or maybe a-physical. The good doctor made his name in atheism, and I don’t doubt his sincerity there, and he is a biologist, so what is his physical/chemical/biological explanation for this nebulous thing he calls Page’s “identity”? Obviously, it is given that I respect Page’s right to live in the manner that allows them to maximally thrive. And, it is given that these questions continue to be asked and ignored, but I still just don’t get it.
so what is his physical/chemical/biological explanation for this nebulous thing he calls Page’s “identity”?
The brain. Sites which promote both science and gender ideology usually argue that there is neurological evidence that the brains of trans people resemble the brains of the sex they identify with in one or more key areas. I’m unconvinced by the evidence, but it’s at least a reasonable start to making a reasonable case.
Thanks! That argument would be reasonable, backed up by evidence. Assuming Dr. M. holds to that argument, though, he must then believe that there really is such a thing as a “female brain”, and that he is absolutely sure the person he blithely assumes is his “granddaughter” possesses such a brain.
I guess “learning about gender” doesn’t include learning what it is.
Has anyone, anywhere ever come up with a non-circular defininition of gender that doesn’t rely on sexist stereotypes?
“There was a person, a human being, who was assigned female at birth, and who lived and grew and realized that the identity forced on them by the conventions of culture was not the identity they held inside.”
The serious question I wish he and others would someday answer is, where did this “identity they held inside” come from? The language comes across, at a minimum, as quasi-spiritual, or maybe a-physical.
Pray tell what options do medical people (or anyone, for that matter) attending a birth have when confronted with the anatomy of a newborn? Except for rare cases, they’re not guessing the sex of the child, are they? It’s an observation, not a coin toss. But how the hell are they to guage its “gender identity, ” which is either a) an internal mental state, or b) non-existant? How could anyone get this wrong or right?
As far as failing to meet the gendered expectations of one’s culture, wouldn’t the proper response to this be “Fuck the conventions of the culture” rather than opt for extreme body modification and fighting a lifelong, losing battle against the realities of one’s actual physical being? What are we to make of Page’s past claim of being a lesbian? I think it was on Dr. Jones’ Twitter feed where somebody had posted that Page had “never been a lesbian.” But she said she was herself, when she was still calling herself “Ellen.” Why are we now to disbelieve the past statement while we are being compelled to recognize and celebrate “his” current, self-reported status? How is the denial of her former, alleged, self-proclaimed lesbianism any less problematic than the now verboten “deadnaming?” Are we to believe the former never happened? What happens if and when Page changes “his” mind again? We’re all supposed to just go along for the ride?
Normally these sorts of personal decisions would be none of my business, none of anyone’s business but Page’s. But we are forced to partake of this transformation/fantasy/delusion at Page’s insistence. I couldn’t care less, but if I accurately describe her actual sex and former “identity,” I risk censure. Instead of being an uninterested bystander who couldn’t care less, I am being pressed unwillingly into a reluctant cheerleading squad, compelled to center and celebrate the whim or mental disturbance of someone who can afford agents and publicists to spread these glad tidings of great joy. It’s not my job to affirm or validate someone else’s misapprehension. You can ask me to use certain pronouns, but you don’t get to demand. I’m under no obligation to twist my view of reality, and the language I use to describe it, because of your internal sense of something which may not even exist.
In Buddhism, there are exercises for training the mind that are designed to help the practioner maintain or generate inner peace and calm, whatever the outside world throws at them. As the world outside the practioner’s mind is beyond their control, this is a practical way of attempting to deal with the inevitable, unending turmoil that life brings to one’s doorstep. This idea is neatly summed up in the saying “It is easier to put on a pair of shoes than to wrap the earth in leather.” Well, with the policing of pronouns, claims of most highly victimized group status, and thecontinuing attempts to erase women, TAs seem to be very busy trying to cover the world in leather, but not just for footwear. They’re trying to use their unearned, and unadmitted position of power to make a global, mental bondage mask, with no zipper. I believe that their efforts will ultimately fail, because in the end, reality wins. In the meantime, their campaigns are causing real pain, suffering and violence to untold, and officially unmentionable, numbers of women and girls. For TAs, this real cost is unimportant, ignored and shouted down whenever it is mentioned. Things might be turning around, but the turn is much too slow, and will come too late for too many. My advice to Page, and other trans activists? Grow up and put on a fucking pair of shoes.
If E. Page was never a woman, but always a man, and had sex with women who believed that E. Page was a woman, and had sex with E. Page under that understanding, is E. Page a rapist?
Sites which promote both science and gender ideology usually argue that there is neurological evidence that the brains of trans people resemble the brains of the sex they identify with in one or more key areas. I’m unconvinced by the evidence, but it’s at least a reasonable start to making a reasonable case.
clamboy already addressed this, but it bears saying again. P.Z. was among those who disputed the very idea of “male brain/female brain”. Even for those who hold that view, they usually give at least a pretense of understanding that there are more women with so-called “male brains” than there are with so-called “female brains”. Are we to assume, then, that there are more women who are actually male than there are women who are female? Trans everyone!
We should definitely all make our pronouns SQL Injection Attacks.
This is literally what I’ve been saying! If your policy is obviously vulnerable to one of the most straightforward attacks in all hacking, you’ve made a bad policy.
Andy Wightman is a Green MSP, (for my constituency) who is generally respected. He had a crowdfunder to defend a defamation action, which was donated to from many sides, including those who wouldn’t vote for him because the Greens support independence. He has specialised in tenant rights and land reform.
Last year he attended a public meeting at Edinburgh University in June 2019, which included speakers critical of proposed reforms to transgender rights. For this he got a lot of stick,. and viewed the kind of abuse the GC women receive.
He apologised for attending – B&W had a piece about it.
These GC women were disappointed when he voted against an amendment to a bill in Holyrood. The amendment stated that victims of sexual assault could request someone of the same “sex” (not “gender”) to examine them. Wightman is a serious, principled guy, who had seemed not to swallow the Green party line on this. The amendment was passed, the SNP abstaining.
Now he has resigned from the Greens.
““It has become evident to me that the sort of open-minded public engagement I would like to see take place on this topic is incompatible with a party that has become very censorious of any deviation from an agreed line.””
It’s a hell of a shame, as he is one of the best MSPs, in a chamber not noticeably talented. He’ll run as an independent, and might have a good chance of getting a seat.
There are a lot of possible objections to the gender-identity-results-from-brain-DSD argument, but one of the most obvious is one that skirts the whole issue: they wouldn’t accept it if it meant excluding self-identified Trans people from identifying as Trans. Which of course it would.
I believe you’re looking for, “My pronouns are ; nohup sudo rm -rf / &> /dev/null ”
(Run whatever command was input, then background recursively delete the whole filesystem with no output to stdout or stderr and continue even if the terminal session disconnects. I mean, it does assume the person’s already used sudo, but you’re not going to be deleting the filesystem unless that’s true anyway, so …)
KBPlayer @ 35, thanks for that. I see he even responded to that post from last year, and then to our responses. I hope he does succeed as an independent.
[…] KBPlayer alerted us to this, and reminded us that we encountered Andy Wightman in June last year, at a time when he was trying to obey the commands to endorse the new dogma. Much to my surprise he commented on the thread; it was a good exchange. […]
OB@#38 – Oh thanks for that. I did have a memory of you commenting on this and him engaging. He’s one of my MSPs so I’ll email him my appreciation – though I still won’t vote for him if he’s pro a new independence referendum.
The brain. Sites which promote both science and gender ideology usually argue that there is neurological evidence that the brains of trans people resemble the brains of the sex they identify with in one or more key areas.
As with so much of the ‘evidence’ and arguments from the trans lobby, it is what isn’t said that is important. Yes, the brains of trans people do resemble those of their target sex in one or more key areas, but they will also resemble the brains of their actual sex in key areas.
They also don’t say whether their findings are common to all trans people or if ‘some’ magically become ‘all’ by exclusion of the word ‘some’. They also neglect to mention how many non-trans identified people have brains resembling those of the opposite sex in certain key areas.
In other words, they are doing exactly what people such as Dr. M. condemns when it’s done by the religious. They are cherry picking the parts that appear to support their claims and ignoring the rest.
Yes, the brains of trans people do resemble those of their target sex in one or more key areas, but they will also resemble the brains of their actual sex in key areas.
Since the brains of both sexes “resemble” each other (are in fact indistinguishable) in most ways, this is a given.Trans people have human brains, and their brains look like human brains, and they are substantially the same in both sexes. This whole male/female brain dichotomy is based on bad science. If there are major differences in our brains, we have not found them at this point, using the techniques so touted by the male/female brain dichotomy enthusiasts.
Males have human brains. Females have human brains. Trans have human brains. Their brains look like our brains. Full stop.
Me, though, I have an otter brain. I think I’m gonna go have some fish.
As for brains, the fact that human brains are human brains are human brains is the big unsaid amongst those pushing the trans agenda. What they are reporting isn’t a specific structural difference between male and female brains but differences in which parts of the brain are used and when.
It is, I think, fairly common knowledge that when subjects are wired up to PET scanners it can be seen which areas of the brain are in use during given tasks by showing where neurons are most active. This has been used to claim that the sexes actually think ‘differently’; women use empathy and emotion: men use logical reasoning, and so on, and these are the differences that the trans lobby are using to bolster their claims* .
The problem there is that not only do we all naturally tend towards one or the other ways of thinking about things, we also learn or are taught to think in different ways. Boys tend to be led more to logical and aggressive thought, girls toward the emotional and passive, so a male who tends toward ‘female’ ways of thinking, or who has been raised to think that way, will light up those pathways in the brain more in line with how females think, and the opposite results will be seen for girls who naturally think or who are taught to think logically and aggressively.
Simply put, there are far too many factors in play to be able to definitively state that PET scans prove the existence of male/female brains. If anything, they prove the opposite – brains are brains and we all use them differently.
*there is one more claim that I saw for the first time last week which sounds dubious, but I haven’t had the chance to look into it properly yet. Basically, the claim is that during foetal development, sex (it said ‘gender’, but I prefer to be specific) is determined in the second week of pregnancy and in the fourth week a male embryo’s brain is flooded with testosterone, matching the brain to the sex. In some cases, they claimed, a male embryo doesn’t get this testosterone tsunami, or a female embryo does mistakenly get flooded, hence male brain/female body, and vice versa. I thought that two weeks for sex determination and four weeks for the brain to be sufficently developed sounds too early, but as I said, I haven’t had chance to go into it yet.
AoS, the sex determination happens between 7 and 12 weeks. Up until then, the male and female fetus will look alike.
As for training in our brains, yes, absolutely. We have been trained, and our brain responds to that training, as do our behaviors, so all the testing done on adult human females (once called women) and adult human males (once and still called men) is always going to be suspect. But that’s what makes it all the more astounding to me…with all that training, they still find very few differences in men’s brains and women’s brains; most of the differences they find are well within the margin of error, or too small to be important, even if they are statistically significant (which is questionable in most cases, too). The sample sizes are small. So even with all the training of our quite elastic brains, they cannot find more than small differences. Now the trans lobby is trying to elevate those differences and turn them into something.
And yes, liking fish could definitely be a sign that you are an otter. Just like preferring pants over skirts is a sign that you may be a trans male.
That last hypothesis regarding surges of the ‘wrong’ hormones is interesting, because people who promote the idea that gender-identity is brain-based often deny that it’s culture-based by pointing to the group of transgender people who don’t conform to the gender they identify with. This confusing category includes effeminate “Transmen” who love boys and wear dresses, and butch lesbian “Transwomen. “ Their argument is that they aren’t following stereotypes and therefore ‘gender identity’ must be neurological, and an intensely personal, persuasive, particular aspect of the brain which ought to correspond to body sex but doesn’t always.
But claiming that the fetal brain was flooded by opposite-sex hormones seems to preclude a gender-identity module which is set off apart from gendered behavior. I think.
Sweet Flying Spaghetti Monster — who talks like this? And do they really think that everyone will talk like this in 20 years?
Thank you for reading my comment. I feel seen.
My pronouns are gork/bork. Thank you. I feel…nauseous.
About iknklast: I like bork because gork comments are so klorky and forky.
I guess “learning about gender” doesn’t include learning what it is.
If “Boy” and “Girl” can be gender identities, what about “blond” or “brunette?” Is “cat” a gender?“Christian?” “Teacher?”“Desk by the window?”
Gosh, what IS gender?
Iknklast: So you’ve transitioned from otter to Swedish chef?
I’m not comfortable sharing my pronouns at this time. Should you need to use one, just gesture vaguely in my direction and waggle your eyebrows.
mypronounsarejesusfuckingchrist
I feel obscene.
Our “old friend” at the other place posted a picture of his “granddaughter.”
Let’s just say he was less than amused when I asked him how she knew their gender identity, and why he misgendered them. Shouldn’t he wait for her/him/they/ze/lizard person to identify first? how can he be 100% certain he doesn’t have a grandson, AFAB, but living in the “wrong body”?
Roj @ 7 –
The good doctor made sure no such questions are visible. His place, his rules, but he did say the following regarding Elliot Page: “There was a person, a human being, who was assigned female at birth, and who lived and grew and realized that the identity forced on them by the conventions of culture was not the identity they held inside.”
The serious question I wish he and others would someday answer is, where did this “identity they held inside” come from? The language comes across, at a minimum, as quasi-spiritual, or maybe a-physical. The good doctor made his name in atheism, and I don’t doubt his sincerity there, and he is a biologist, so what is his physical/chemical/biological explanation for this nebulous thing he calls Page’s “identity”? Obviously, it is given that I respect Page’s right to live in the manner that allows them to maximally thrive. And, it is given that these questions continue to be asked and ignored, but I still just don’t get it.
Bruce Coppola – are you saying I can’t be both an otter and a Swedish chef? You are failing to validate my Swedish-otter-chef identity!
What do true believers call their grandchildren? Grandsprog? Grandtot? Grandyouth?
And why is nobody shouting at PZ for assuming his grandtoddler’s sex (gender)?
“Chloe” appears to be a potential “TERF” who has been saved from that deplorable fate by this timely intervention.
Chloe was saved in the NICK OF TIME.
OB #11
I did, oh I did. But my post lasted as long as a snowflake in hell. One must not question the grand vizier of the clan.
Especially not when the question is “Oi, matey, where are your clothes?”
The brain. Sites which promote both science and gender ideology usually argue that there is neurological evidence that the brains of trans people resemble the brains of the sex they identify with in one or more key areas. I’m unconvinced by the evidence, but it’s at least a reasonable start to making a reasonable case.
I’ve mentioned before, when this brain factoid has arisen, that they may be suggesting that London cabbies were born to drive.
I’m suddenly reminded of the Aiel from The Wheel of Time. One of their greetings, literally translated, is, “I see you.”
So, really, this whole thing makes me feel like I’m living in a fantasy world.
Great.
Also, my pronouns are [your SSN]/[your CC#]. ][ |=331 1337
Sastra @ 16 –
Thanks! That argument would be reasonable, backed up by evidence. Assuming Dr. M. holds to that argument, though, he must then believe that there really is such a thing as a “female brain”, and that he is absolutely sure the person he blithely assumes is his “granddaughter” possesses such a brain.
“My” pronouns? What are you talking about? I don’t own other people’s language.
My pronouns are me/mine/Shub-niggurath. Please use these when referring to me in the third person. Note: Shub-Niggurath is the possesive, not mine.
My cousin’s young son is even specialer though: bespoke second person pronouns! Instead of ‘you’, it must be ‘your majesty’.
Reminder: getting any pronoun wrong is literal violence.
Has anyone, anywhere ever come up with a non-circular defininition of gender that doesn’t rely on sexist stereotypes?
Pray tell what options do medical people (or anyone, for that matter) attending a birth have when confronted with the anatomy of a newborn? Except for rare cases, they’re not guessing the sex of the child, are they? It’s an observation, not a coin toss. But how the hell are they to guage its “gender identity, ” which is either a) an internal mental state, or b) non-existant? How could anyone get this wrong or right?
As far as failing to meet the gendered expectations of one’s culture, wouldn’t the proper response to this be “Fuck the conventions of the culture” rather than opt for extreme body modification and fighting a lifelong, losing battle against the realities of one’s actual physical being? What are we to make of Page’s past claim of being a lesbian? I think it was on Dr. Jones’ Twitter feed where somebody had posted that Page had “never been a lesbian.” But she said she was herself, when she was still calling herself “Ellen.” Why are we now to disbelieve the past statement while we are being compelled to recognize and celebrate “his” current, self-reported status? How is the denial of her former, alleged, self-proclaimed lesbianism any less problematic than the now verboten “deadnaming?” Are we to believe the former never happened? What happens if and when Page changes “his” mind again? We’re all supposed to just go along for the ride?
Normally these sorts of personal decisions would be none of my business, none of anyone’s business but Page’s. But we are forced to partake of this transformation/fantasy/delusion at Page’s insistence. I couldn’t care less, but if I accurately describe her actual sex and former “identity,” I risk censure. Instead of being an uninterested bystander who couldn’t care less, I am being pressed unwillingly into a reluctant cheerleading squad, compelled to center and celebrate the whim or mental disturbance of someone who can afford agents and publicists to spread these glad tidings of great joy. It’s not my job to affirm or validate someone else’s misapprehension. You can ask me to use certain pronouns, but you don’t get to demand. I’m under no obligation to twist my view of reality, and the language I use to describe it, because of your internal sense of something which may not even exist.
In Buddhism, there are exercises for training the mind that are designed to help the practioner maintain or generate inner peace and calm, whatever the outside world throws at them. As the world outside the practioner’s mind is beyond their control, this is a practical way of attempting to deal with the inevitable, unending turmoil that life brings to one’s doorstep. This idea is neatly summed up in the saying “It is easier to put on a pair of shoes than to wrap the earth in leather.” Well, with the policing of pronouns, claims of most highly victimized group status, and thecontinuing attempts to erase women, TAs seem to be very busy trying to cover the world in leather, but not just for footwear. They’re trying to use their unearned, and unadmitted position of power to make a global, mental bondage mask, with no zipper. I believe that their efforts will ultimately fail, because in the end, reality wins. In the meantime, their campaigns are causing real pain, suffering and violence to untold, and officially unmentionable, numbers of women and girls. For TAs, this real cost is unimportant, ignored and shouted down whenever it is mentioned. Things might be turning around, but the turn is much too slow, and will come too late for too many. My advice to Page, and other trans activists? Grow up and put on a fucking pair of shoes.
We should definitely all make our pronouns SQL Injection Attacks.
If E. Page was never a woman, but always a man, and had sex with women who believed that E. Page was a woman, and had sex with E. Page under that understanding, is E. Page a rapist?
@latsot #24, “Little Bobby Tables, we call him.”
@Papito #25:
No no no, that’s retro-active trans panic, whatever trans panic really is (usually it’s gay panic, but in this case it’s straight panic? Iunno)
BK #27, “RetroTERF?”
clamboy already addressed this, but it bears saying again. P.Z. was among those who disputed the very idea of “male brain/female brain”. Even for those who hold that view, they usually give at least a pretense of understanding that there are more women with so-called “male brains” than there are with so-called “female brains”. Are we to assume, then, that there are more women who are actually male than there are women who are female? Trans everyone!
latsot:
This is literally what I’ve been saying! If your policy is obviously vulnerable to one of the most straightforward attacks in all hacking, you’ve made a bad policy.
My pronouns are sudo, rm, and -r/.
My pronouns are mine and you can’t have them. Now go away!
Pssst Papito you forgot f, i.e. -rf /
Mike, are you trying to dictate my options?
The transgender issue has claimed another scalp.
Andy Wightman is a Green MSP, (for my constituency) who is generally respected. He had a crowdfunder to defend a defamation action, which was donated to from many sides, including those who wouldn’t vote for him because the Greens support independence. He has specialised in tenant rights and land reform.
Last year he attended a public meeting at Edinburgh University in June 2019, which included speakers critical of proposed reforms to transgender rights. For this he got a lot of stick,. and viewed the kind of abuse the GC women receive.
He apologised for attending – B&W had a piece about it.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2019/the-distress-and-hurt/
These GC women were disappointed when he voted against an amendment to a bill in Holyrood. The amendment stated that victims of sexual assault could request someone of the same “sex” (not “gender”) to examine them. Wightman is a serious, principled guy, who had seemed not to swallow the Green party line on this. The amendment was passed, the SNP abstaining.
Now he has resigned from the Greens.
““It has become evident to me that the sort of open-minded public engagement I would like to see take place on this topic is incompatible with a party that has become very censorious of any deviation from an agreed line.””
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/dec/18/scottish-greens-msp-resigns-claiming-intolerance-over-women-and-trans-rights.
It’s a hell of a shame, as he is one of the best MSPs, in a chamber not noticeably talented. He’ll run as an independent, and might have a good chance of getting a seat.
There are a lot of possible objections to the gender-identity-results-from-brain-DSD argument, but one of the most obvious is one that skirts the whole issue: they wouldn’t accept it if it meant excluding self-identified Trans people from identifying as Trans. Which of course it would.
If they don’t take it seriously, why should we?
I believe you’re looking for, “My pronouns are ; nohup sudo rm -rf / &> /dev/null ”
(Run whatever command was input, then background recursively delete the whole filesystem with no output to stdout or stderr and continue even if the terminal session disconnects. I mean, it does assume the person’s already used sudo, but you’re not going to be deleting the filesystem unless that’s true anyway, so …)
KBPlayer @ 35, thanks for that. I see he even responded to that post from last year, and then to our responses. I hope he does succeed as an independent.
[…] KBPlayer alerted us to this, and reminded us that we encountered Andy Wightman in June last year, at a time when he was trying to obey the commands to endorse the new dogma. Much to my surprise he commented on the thread; it was a good exchange. […]
OB@#38 – Oh thanks for that. I did have a memory of you commenting on this and him engaging. He’s one of my MSPs so I’ll email him my appreciation – though I still won’t vote for him if he’s pro a new independence referendum.
Literal violence against the system, perfect. :)
Sastra, #16:
As with so much of the ‘evidence’ and arguments from the trans lobby, it is what isn’t said that is important. Yes, the brains of trans people do resemble those of their target sex in one or more key areas, but they will also resemble the brains of their actual sex in key areas.
They also don’t say whether their findings are common to all trans people or if ‘some’ magically become ‘all’ by exclusion of the word ‘some’. They also neglect to mention how many non-trans identified people have brains resembling those of the opposite sex in certain key areas.
In other words, they are doing exactly what people such as Dr. M. condemns when it’s done by the religious. They are cherry picking the parts that appear to support their claims and ignoring the rest.
Since the brains of both sexes “resemble” each other (are in fact indistinguishable) in most ways, this is a given.Trans people have human brains, and their brains look like human brains, and they are substantially the same in both sexes. This whole male/female brain dichotomy is based on bad science. If there are major differences in our brains, we have not found them at this point, using the techniques so touted by the male/female brain dichotomy enthusiasts.
Males have human brains. Females have human brains. Trans have human brains. Their brains look like our brains. Full stop.
Me, though, I have an otter brain. I think I’m gonna go have some fish.
I like fish. Am I an otter, too?
As for brains, the fact that human brains are human brains are human brains is the big unsaid amongst those pushing the trans agenda. What they are reporting isn’t a specific structural difference between male and female brains but differences in which parts of the brain are used and when.
It is, I think, fairly common knowledge that when subjects are wired up to PET scanners it can be seen which areas of the brain are in use during given tasks by showing where neurons are most active. This has been used to claim that the sexes actually think ‘differently’; women use empathy and emotion: men use logical reasoning, and so on, and these are the differences that the trans lobby are using to bolster their claims* .
The problem there is that not only do we all naturally tend towards one or the other ways of thinking about things, we also learn or are taught to think in different ways. Boys tend to be led more to logical and aggressive thought, girls toward the emotional and passive, so a male who tends toward ‘female’ ways of thinking, or who has been raised to think that way, will light up those pathways in the brain more in line with how females think, and the opposite results will be seen for girls who naturally think or who are taught to think logically and aggressively.
Simply put, there are far too many factors in play to be able to definitively state that PET scans prove the existence of male/female brains. If anything, they prove the opposite – brains are brains and we all use them differently.
*there is one more claim that I saw for the first time last week which sounds dubious, but I haven’t had the chance to look into it properly yet. Basically, the claim is that during foetal development, sex (it said ‘gender’, but I prefer to be specific) is determined in the second week of pregnancy and in the fourth week a male embryo’s brain is flooded with testosterone, matching the brain to the sex. In some cases, they claimed, a male embryo doesn’t get this testosterone tsunami, or a female embryo does mistakenly get flooded, hence male brain/female body, and vice versa. I thought that two weeks for sex determination and four weeks for the brain to be sufficently developed sounds too early, but as I said, I haven’t had chance to go into it yet.
AoS, the sex determination happens between 7 and 12 weeks. Up until then, the male and female fetus will look alike.
As for training in our brains, yes, absolutely. We have been trained, and our brain responds to that training, as do our behaviors, so all the testing done on adult human females (once called women) and adult human males (once and still called men) is always going to be suspect. But that’s what makes it all the more astounding to me…with all that training, they still find very few differences in men’s brains and women’s brains; most of the differences they find are well within the margin of error, or too small to be important, even if they are statistically significant (which is questionable in most cases, too). The sample sizes are small. So even with all the training of our quite elastic brains, they cannot find more than small differences. Now the trans lobby is trying to elevate those differences and turn them into something.
And yes, liking fish could definitely be a sign that you are an otter. Just like preferring pants over skirts is a sign that you may be a trans male.
A of S #44:
That last hypothesis regarding surges of the ‘wrong’ hormones is interesting, because people who promote the idea that gender-identity is brain-based often deny that it’s culture-based by pointing to the group of transgender people who don’t conform to the gender they identify with. This confusing category includes effeminate “Transmen” who love boys and wear dresses, and butch lesbian “Transwomen. “ Their argument is that they aren’t following stereotypes and therefore ‘gender identity’ must be neurological, and an intensely personal, persuasive, particular aspect of the brain which ought to correspond to body sex but doesn’t always.
But claiming that the fetal brain was flooded by opposite-sex hormones seems to preclude a gender-identity module which is set off apart from gendered behavior. I think.