Hey all,
So I’m looking to take an active step here to understand better some things that my straight/white/cis/middle-aged male brain has had a tough time wrapping itself around, particularly in the gender identity front.
I’m working from the understanding of physical sex as the bio-bits and the expressed identity as being separate things, so that part is easy enough.
What’s confusing to me though is like this. If we take gender as being an expression of your persona, a set of traits that define one as male, female, or some combination of both then what function does a title/pronoun serve? To assume that some things are masculine or feminine traits seems to put unneeded rigidity to things.
We’ve had men or women who enjoy things traditionally associated with the other gender for as long as there have been people I expect. If that’s the case then what purpose does the need for a gender title serve?
I’ll admit personally questioning some things like fairness in cis/trans integrated sports, but that’s outside what I’m asking here. Some things like bathroom laws are just society needing to get over itself in thinking our personal parts are all that special.
Certainly not trying to stir up any fights, just trying to get some input from people that have a different life experience than myself. Is it really as simple as a preferred title?
Edit: Just wanted to take a second to thank all the people here who took the time to write some truly extensive thoughts and explanations, even getting into some full on citation-laden studies into neurology that’ll give me plenty to digest. You all have shown a great deal of patience with me updating some thinking from the bio/social teachings of 20+ years back. 🙂
We’re not sure about the neurological mechanism behind the innate sense of gender as of yet, but we have been able to confirm that there are structural differences between masculine and feminine brains that are more consistent with people’s reported gender identity than their genitalia.
And that’s the fundamental difference between tomboys and trans men, the former are gender-nonconforming women and the latter are men’s brains in female bodies.
It’s difficult to explain what gender dysphoria feels like to someone whose gender identity is consistent with their sex. There’s a sense of “wrongness” that can suffuse through everything from one’s interactions with other people in society to one’s own thought processes under the influence of the wrong set of sex hormones.
Actually, there’s almost no differences between masculine and feminine brains at all. The book delusions of gender by Cordelia Fine goes into this in detail, but the long story short is that just about all science on the difference between men and women is actually just bias of the researchers or poor study design. Honestly it’s a super interesting read if you’re curious about how the brains of men and women are different (spoiler alert, the difference is pretty much entirely social convention and those social pressures can be overcome in very interesting ways) and just how pervasive gender is in our society (babies start to recognize social patterns of gender before even one year of age) and just how deeply it shapes all of our lives.
Actually, a recent study contradicts that:
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2024/02/men-women-brain-organization-patterns.html
The differences aren’t in terms of gross anatomy, but activity levels in the default mode, striatum, and limbic networks.
Yes I caught that study! It’s a fantastic foray into how existing brains which have already been influenced by social pressures interact in the real world. Unfortunately, however, it isn’t explanatory and there’s a lot of methodological considerations which still need to be explored. Of note, much of what I’m going to bring up below are also brought up by Cordelia Fine in the fantastic book I mentioned above as they are considerations often overlooked when designing studies to find differences between sex or gender.
It should be noted first and foremost that most brain imaging data is not a reflection of structure itself, it’s a reflection of activity in specific areas of brains. But even that is circumspect for a number of reasons, most notably that you can reliably detect brain activity in individuals which are not alive. Ignoring some of the technical issues with detection of activity itself, in the context of activation patterns, we should expect significant difference from individual to individual in how thoughts are processed, and we likely should see patterns amongst individuals which share commonalities such as social identities. We can, for example, see reliable patterns of activity amongst world class athletes as compared to those with no training. Patterns of activity in the motor cortex based on physical requirements of one individual isn’t quite comparable to a social identity, however, and for a closer analogy we could look to language or social status to see that patterns of activation are rather malleable and can denote all kinds of social roles.
Applying that to social roles, such as gender, it is not surprising in the least that we can detect gendered differences based on how society treats us and what roles it provides and gives us access to. For example, ignoring brain imaging studies for a moment, we can detect reliable differences between the sexes when we give them math tests. However, a deeper analysis on this difference reveals that this can be easily reversed and influenced merely by priming the individuals. In fact, when we go a step further and look at brain imaging and activation patterns, we also see that there are sex differences in how the math areas are activated. Unfortunately, however, I have yet to see a design which combines those two concepts together - how do brain activation patterns differ when an individual is primed with a narrative which runs counter to that which they have internalized from society?
To take this point even further, I think it’s important to note that the study you are linking includes exactly zero transgender individuals. It also doesn’t attempt to investigate nor discover differences in gender expression or conformity to social roles. The patterns that they have detected could very easily be a reflection of internalizing the values which society instills in us based on our gender roles - there is simply no way to separate the two with this existing literature. But to take that a step even further, even if we did find that there were reproducible sex-based differences which persisted even across a representative sample of gender diverse individuals, we would need to also conduct this kind of imaging at different points in these individuals lives (especially early on and through childhood where one’s concept of gender evolves) to understand just how much is biological and how much is an influence of nurture. Even then we would still only have at best an understanding of brain activation profiles which happen to meet statistical significance, a trait shared with brain activation profiles of completely dead individuals, which calls into question the statistical validity of the precision at which the imaging technology is calibrated - we would need to redo all of that research with more precisely tuned imaging to be sure it’s an accurate reflection of brain activation… and we still would not be able to make any definitive statements about structural differences because activation is a reflection of action potentials at a specific point in time (notably all action potentials, not just the ones used in the cognitive process of the task at hand, but also those involved in living and perceiving an environment and thinking about other things) and not a true understanding of the underlying architecture which supports these action potentials (two very different circuit boards can produce the same electrical current in the same spatiotemporal area).
That dysphoria is the part I really hope to understand I guess. It seems to me that would be a lot of social pressure to conform to an expectation, but to my cis-brain it would seem easier to just say who cares what the ‘norms’ are and just do what you like.
The best analogy that I can imagine is this: Imagine that you went to go get fitted for a suit. You go to a seamster, get fitted, and they make you a suit. You put the suit on and it doesn’t feel right. You tell the seamster and they insist that the suit was made to your measurements and that it is correct (they even have patterns and measurements to prove it.) You shrug, pay the fee, and leave with your new suit. Wearing it out, you confide in your friends that the suit doesn’t fit, but they all tell you that you look great. Despite your insistence that the seams on your shoulders don’t line up and that the waistline is far too off-center, your friends insist that your suit is well-fitted and you look great-- that you should be happy and grateful to have such a fine suit. Meanwhile you feel awful; dreadful. You just know that somebody is going to notice and call you out on your bad suit. You’re trying your best to accept and maybe even show off your expensive, non-refundable, sold as-is attire, but the weight of it and off-balance feeling it provides is a latent part of every move you make and every word out of your mouth. Furthermore, present circumstances have made it impossible for you to have another suit made. Even if you did, they’d just use the same measurements, come up with the same patterns, and make the same mistakes-- No, you’re the one that has to wear the suit; they don’t. You have to feel the fabric against your skin. You have to feel its seams snaking over your body. After wearing it all night, you know what’s wrong with it (or at least what will make it feel right.) Your only recourse is to find a tailor willing to help you alter it to your specifications or to alter it yourself. Let the opinions of everyone else be damned. After all, they’re happy in their suits.
Probably about as close to a direct understanding as I might get. Kind of puts me to a philosophical thought, if society didn’t have any kind of gender norms somehow, would that disquiet still exist?
So, I’m a trans woman.
Lets say I was raised on an island of men. I had no idea of the concept of women, and all of the people I’d ever seen were male.
In this world, clearly, my self perception would be different. I wouldn’t have a crystalised identity, I wouldn’t be able to tell you my gender. What I would have, is a life long discomfort that I could never identity or address. My body would have been wrong, but I couldn’t have told you why. I’d have been different to the men all around me, but I couldn’t have told you how.
It’s similar to how I processed my trans identity before I had exposure to trans people or and understanding that transition was a thing.
For some of us yes, and for others no.
It’s difficult for me to even imagine the complexities of such a world that lacks gender norms. Would there be fewer trans people? Possibly. But in such a world, there would still be trans people like me that feel a strong need for surgery.
Edit: Forgot to mention HRT, which many of us would still need.
That makes me wonder what personal expression would look like. Clothing might have been developed completely differently if certain garments were made to fit more body types.
You kind of described how I’ve been feeling about having a flesh body, instead of a robot one… I don’t even care about its gender, all of it feels “wrong”. sigh
My body is a machine that coverts nutritional input into society challenging thought patterns, and sometimes small bits of energy I guess…
I hate the experience of not being able to turn off and on again; of not keeping a backup; of not being able to upgrade pieces, or even to replace the broken ones; of not being able to quickly download or upload, both data and software; of not being able to migrate my processes to other bodies, or to create multiple copies to process stuff in parallel.
I’ve always felt trapped, and it’s getting much worse with age.
Interesting! I guess this is only a possibility because of how we designed computers and machines to work? Like I often feel frustrated that I cannot pause or rewind someone who is speaking to me. Or digitally search for where my stuff IRL is. We really are all cyborgs and part of our brains is already fused with computers.