This piece is okay and directionally correct, but the word 'gender' does have a legitimate use: a lifestyle choice loosely connected to masculinity and femininity. It's a little misleading to say it doesn't exist, although the gender ideological account is, as he pointed out, nonsense.
Thank you for reading, William! I've always seen argument you espouse as a category error. If a man happens to be more female typical in some mental traits, we say this is to do with his, "gender," but if he happens to be more female typical in some brute morphological traits (say, he's shorter than the average woman), we just call it an individual difference that bucks the on-average trend of his sex. It's even more strange when you consider how well correlated sex and, "gender," are, even in terms of lifestyle choices. Almost everyone who endorses the view you espouse would themselves have to admit that their own sex and gender are largely not at odds with each other. (I've recently seen a clip where Charlie Kirk had made this argument, that, "gender," has taken the place of, "personality," as well). To me, it's like confusing musical, "genre," with individual, "bands." It just leads to confusion.
That's not what I'm arguing. The erroneous explanations for 'gender' are legion. The question is, what legitimate use could it have? An effeminate male is not, under my account, of the female 'gender'. Note that many transwomen are quite masculine. The only thing it could mean is that you intentionally adopt the lifestyle of a, for instance, woman. That means the clothing, mannerisms, etc. 'Gender' is invented: 'transmasc', 'nonbinary', etc. They are like being a goth or a hippie. That's all it really amounts to.
"gender" is, in many reputable lexicons, NOT the same as "sex". Two entirely different kettles of fish.
As I mentioned above, here's a rather brilliant and quite insightful analogy on the difference from the late great US Justice Anton Scalia:
AS: "The word ‘gender’ has acquired the new and useful connotation of cultural or attitudinal characteristics … distinctive to the sexes. That is to say, gender is to sex as feminine is to female and masculine is to male."
Your "effeminate male" is a feminine male, but still not a female, not a possessor of ovaries. Which are, to a first approximation, the necessary and sufficient condition to qualify as a female -- no ovaries, not a female.
You being a student of philosophy, you may wish to take a gander at my elaboration on the fairly durable philosophical distinction between accidental and essential properties:
QUTOE; HUHB: But the basic principle is easy enough to understand with a simple analogy: the “essential” property of the category “teenager” is “being 13 to 19”. It is absolutely essential to be 13 to 19 to qualify as a member of the teenager category. One can’t reasonably “identify as a teenager” unless one is actually between the ages of 13 and 19 inclusive.
But there is a myriad of “accidental” properties associated with the category “teenager”. As SEP might put it, those are properties that a teenager “happens to have but that it could lack”. For example, many teenagers happen to be tall, short, male, female, white, black, brown or green with pink purple dots — all accidental properties, but they’re not “definitive”, they’re not necessary or essential to qualify as a teenager. Of course some of those accidental properties are more typical of teenagers — raging hormones, poor driving skills, bad skin, dysphoria, etc., etc. But virtually none of them are really unique to teenagers. UNQUOTE
In the case of sex and gender, the essential properties of the sexes are either ovaries (females) or testicles (males) while the accidental properties of the sexes are those traits typical of but not unique to females (feminine gender) or those traits typical of but not unique to males (masculine gender).
Unfortunately there are people "identifying" as teenagers. As a society, we have severed the tie between reality and feelings and it has terrible consequences. When we allow men to be treated as women, what argument can we have for refusing to let adults be treated as children?
I can already see the day when a grown man claims to be a child and excuses his sexual crimes against actual children, in this very manner. We are not prepared for this battle as we have already ceded too much ground.
👍 Hard to imagine a more barking-mad "idea" than "self-identification". The crux of the clusterfuck in the UK over their "Gender Recognition Act", and the consequential UK Supreme Court ruling -- in their For Women Scotland case -- that, no, transwomen are most certainly not women (AKA, adult human females).
CBC News: British Supreme Court unanimously rules legal definition of a 'woman' excludes trans women's identities
And thanks for that BizPac link. Though rather peeved to see that that story is also in a Canadian context, that the perp in question was a Canadian "professor of behavioral science". Maybe not surprising given that Canada's erstwhile fearless leader, Justin Trudeau, once insisted -- on International Women's Day, no less -- that "trans women are women":
He and the whole goddamn Liberal Party should be ridden out of town on a goddamn rail, if not tarred and feathered first, for that ideological article of faith, for that antiscientific claptrap.
But you might also have some interest in this post from the "punny" TransAtlantic, and my comment thereon, on that self-identification BS:
" 'Nullius in Verba' - Identity Ideology vs. the Scientific Disposition; The Dangers of Self-ID";
Kinda think you and far too many others are spinning your wheels, are simply "muddying the waters to make them seem deep".
"gender" seems just a matter of definition, and there are many existing uses where the implicit definition boils down into sexually dimorphic personality and behavioural traits:
And many people quite reasonably argue that those traits more typical of -- but not unique to -- males are masculine -- are in the masculine gender -- and those traits more typical of -- but not unique to -- females are in the feminine gender. "gender" is then both a binary -- masculine and feminine -- while each gender is in turn a spectrum, a range of those typical traits.
As an analogy, you might consider the reddish and bluish halves of the visible spectrum -- a binary -- but each half is a spectrum in itself.
But, for example, that a male has some traits more typical of females does not, in any way, make them a female since the necessary and sufficient condition to qualify as a female is, to a first approximation, to have ovaries. Such males are then simply "gender non-conforming", not a case of some people "born in the wrong body".
For a rather neat example of that "gender non-conformance" and a case of sexual dimorphism in the animal kingdom, consider this article by evolutionary psychologist Paula Wright on "Ruff Sex and Sneaky Fuɔkers":
The male basically has two "genders" -- morphs or forms more typical of males -- while the female only has one. But some males are "gender non-conforming" because they exhibit the feminine gender, the form typical of females but not unique to them.
And you also may wish to consider a neat and quite illuminating analogy on the difference between sex and gender from the late great US Justice Anton Scalia:
AS: "The word ‘gender’ has acquired the new and useful connotation of cultural or attitudinal characteristics … distinctive to the sexes. That is to say, gender is to sex as feminine is to female and masculine is to male."
Finally and relative to definitions, you might consider philosopher Will Durant's take on a Voltaire quip:
WD: "If you wish to converse with me,” said Voltaire, “define your terms.” How many a debate would have been deflated into a paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms! This is the alpha and omega of logic, the heart and soul of it, that every important term in serious discourse shall be subjected to strictest scrutiny and definition. It is difficult, and ruthlessly tests the mind; but once done it is half of any task.
Kinda think Gussman went off the rails and into the weeds in his opening paragraph:
SG: "And 'gender dysphoria' doesn’t exist because 'gender' doesn’t exist." [Ipse dixit; so let it be written, so let it be done.]
But what he followed up with only confirms the point. He certainly provides some examples of incoherent, wooish, and quite unscientific "definitions" and interpretations for the term "gender", but nowhere even genuflects to the many more coherent, useful, and common definitions for it.
For example, an editorial in British Medical Journal draws a useful distinction between sex and gender even if they're kind of vague on the specifics:
BMJ: "Sex and gender are not synonymous. Sex, unless otherwise specified, relates to biology: the gametes, chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive organs. Gender relates to societal roles, BEHAVIOURS [AKA personalities], and expectations that vary with time and place, historically and geographically. These categories describe different attributes that must be considered depending on the purpose they are intended for. The World Health Organization states, 'Gender is used to describe the characteristics of women and men that are socially constructed, while sex refers to those that are biologically determined.' ...."
I respond to this definition of, "gender," explicitly and at length in the article.[1] That definition is no more scientific than if I were to propose right now that what we heretofore understood as, "sex," differences in the body now compromise two separate concepts. Those differences between males and females below the waste are, "sex," differences. Those above the waste are, "zex," differences. Does my proposal help or hinder our understanding of the human animal? "Zex," like, "gender," is redundant, therefore we should use the word sex for all of this.
1. "But starting mid-century, a more technical meaning began to take shape among the more academically inclined: “gender” was to socio-culture as ‘sex’ was to biology... Today’s intelligentsia are apt to call females’ greater interest in people (or males’ greater interest in things) a “gender difference”, due to the overlapping bell curves that illustrate these differences, but no one would call males’ greater height a “gender difference”. Everyone sane enough to recognize the phenomenon calls greater male height a “sex difference”, and like most sex differences, it too is represented by overlapping bell curves... Still others contend that “gender” is of the mind. But implicit in the splitting of “gender” for the mind and “sex” for the body is of course the kind of mind-body dualism denied by modern biology. The mind evolved by natural selection and, somehow, emerges from the brain — a piece of “brute morphology” to be perhaps unkind to the most complex object in the known universe."
Edit: I've only at this point read what I responded to--this subthread with Keith.
> "Everyone sane enough to recognize the phenomenon calls greater male height a “sex difference”, and like most sex differences, it too is represented by overlapping bell curves... "
But height differences aren't intrinsic to the sexes. Why there are many women -- about 40% -- who are taller than the same percentage of men. The issue is what is the essential and defining difference between males and females. And, by definition, males produce sperm, and females produce ova. That is IT -- that is ALL that "male" and "female" mean to any biologist worth their salt.
But height and all the other differences are just "accidental properties" of the categories male and female, not essential ones. A fairly durable philosophical principle which you might want to read up on. My kick at the kitty:
And you might want to pay close attention to this bit in particular:
PG: Something gets to be a 'male' or 'female' characteristic in a particular species because it is common in males or females in that species: sexual characteristics are defined by sexes, not the other way around.
Sexual dimorphism writ large. One can't possibly say which traits are more common to which sex if one hasn't FIRST said exactly what it takes to qualify as male and female in the first place.
> "Still others contend that “gender” is of the mind.
So are personalities. Which are more or less quantifiable. And those are generally differences which come in under the rubric of "gender". You really might want to read about the ubiquity of those differences which you don't seem to have much awareness of:
"Global sex differences in personality: Replication with an open online dataset"
What’s the use of a concept that is “a matter of definition” and varies from person to person? Gender theorists will actually reject any “essentialist” definition, i.e., anything practically verifiable, and instead propose “you are gender X if you identify as gender X.” Circular muddiness.
"personality" -- by definition -- varies from person to person. And there's a whole raft of various personality types that are more or less quantifiable -- see, for example, the articles on the Big Five Personality Traits and the (much less credible) Myers–Briggs Type Indicator:
And those personality types are, in large part, what is MEANT by "gender". At least by saner and more scientifically-grounded users of that term.
But I don't think you read or thought much about my previous comment, particularly the analogy from the late great US Justice Anton Scalia. He more or less explicitly endorsed the above point of view and interpretation of "gender" being equivalent to all of those different personality types. You might try giving a bit of thought to what he said.
To make that interpretation clearer, you might also take a look at this post by Dr. Maja Bowen on "How conflation of sex and gender became a tool of transgender ideology":
Though it's more a conflation of what it takes to qualify as females or males -- ovaries or testicles -- with the personality traits that are typical of each sex.
But she also has quite an illuminating table of the ranges [spectra] of personality types or traits that are encompassed by the masculine and feminine genders:
The masculine and feminine genders comprise a binary, but each gender is a spectrum -- a range, a list -- of those different feminine and masculine personality types. So "gender" is both a binary and a spectrum which is probably one of the many points where so many people go off the rails and into the weeds over the whole concept.
As for your, "you are gender X if you identify as gender X" characterization, I quite agree with your "circular muddiness". But not all "gender theorists" are quite so clueless about the distinction between the types of reproductive abilities -- ovaries and testicles -- and the personality traits typical of people with each type.
You might just as well reject all of quantum mechanics because some people peddle quantum mysticism and quantum woo:
Sorry, I didn't read your original comment in full, as it had terrible economy (you diverge a lot).
What you propose is the one coherent definition of gender I could theoretically accept but it has to be rejected in practice because:
(1) It just means stereotypically male (masculine) personality and stereotypically female (feminine) personality. We don't need another word for "feminine" and "masculine" and "personality".
(2) It doesn't correspond to how the word is used (i.e. its real meaning). It flies in the face of gender by self-identification which is the norm. Ain't nobody going around handing out BIG-5 questionnaires and assigning genders. Also, none of these follow from your neat definition: arbitrarily chosen pronouns, compelled speech totalitarianism, conflation with biology, emptying of the terms man and woman.
So in summary, you cannot _redefine_ a term (that is already widely used) to your liking. You instead discern its definition from the way it's used. This term was used by ideologues to push a political agenda, even if partly well-intentioned, it led to catastrophic side effects (ROGD, loosened social norms allowing predators in women's and children's spaces). This should be pointed out over and over and the term should be rejected.
There is only a baby trojan horse in the bathwater. Drain at max speed please!
Marvin: "Sorry, I didn't read your original comment in full, as it had terrible economy (you diverge a lot).
I generally try to follow the Point-Reason-Example-Summary principle. For each point I make in a progression -- from premises to conclusion -- I try to buttress it with at least a reason and an example:
Marvin: "What you propose is the one coherent definition of gender I could theoretically accept ... "
Hallelujah! Progress! 😉🙂 But good thing since that's a fairly common definition. From Google's AI, Gemini:
Gemini: "Feminine" describes qualities, behaviors, and roles traditionally associated with women, such as being nurturing, gentle, and graceful. The term can also refer to the feminine gender in grammar, where it denotes nouns that are typically feminine, like "actress" or "girl". In a broader sense, "feminine" is used to describe things that have characteristics considered typical of or appropriate for women, like a feminine fashion style.
Do note the connection between "feminine" and "gender". THAT is what "gender" encompasses -- the masculine and the feminine, the "qualities, behaviors, and roles traditionally associated with" men and women, respectively.
Marvin: "... but it has to be rejected in practice because ..."
That some people want to mash a bunch of "magic and religion" into the concept really says nothing at all against the above noted concept to begin with. You might reflect on the idea of steelmanning an argument:
The concept of gender has -- sort of like a cancer -- metastasized through the whole body politic. It's everywhere from schools to government departments to legal rulings -- Scalia's analogy being a case in point. See also:
Removing it entirely would probably kill the patient. The best if not only solution is to emphasize and utilize the more scientifically justified definition, to do a bit of judicious steelmanning, to emphasize that "gender" is an entirely different kettle of fish from "sex" (testicles and ovaries).
I refuse to legitimate that word because it demarcates sex and behavior; the latter flows out of the former as unrecognized phenotypes. Behavior is located in the brain and is not spiritual. 'Tomboys' are androgenized females; they were exposed to high prenatal testosterone in utero. Their femininity, the suite of phenotypes most applicable to female gametes, are replaced in part by the suite of phenotypes (behavior) for male gametes. I consider it to border on disorder.
So, I meant fixed in the way that gender is not strictly dictated just by certain behaviors, attitudes, “feminine-masculine” attributes. Meaning it has a definition that we make up as we go (as a society) and the purpose of it has been exploited to the point where instead of being just a way to name certain things it became a “cage” for everyone, not allowing them to just “be”. As to sex: male, female, even tho it’s also a construct, it has a typical use in official documents, drs etc. but mainly gender has been wildly manipulated in control :)
Sex is not a 'construct'. The word 'sex' is invented, like all words, but what it refers to is as real as anything else. The vast majority of people do not have intentionally curated 'genders' just like most people don't really pay attention to fashion, although loosely speaking everyone has a fashion.
I would highly recommend my article since I go in more depth with these subjects. The word sex, as you said, is made up as any language, right? But the definition for it is not a definitive one, which I found to be soooo interesting, it’s just more commonly used in a certain context, but sex (male female) is as flexible as any other word that we want to make up in a society that values 2 parts , as only.
This article rightly dismantles the term ‘gender’ as a floating category divorced from the primal form of being. But we also require a positive account of the form it shadows.
Almost everywhere, we see life divide along the male/female polarity. This is not only biology; it is the metaphysical grammar of being and becoming. We should not only discard the term 'gender' but return to the real polarity of male and female, and reckon with what that means for Western culture, symbolism, and the future of our civilisation.
In short: gender does not exist as an independent ontological reality. But male and female most certainly do, and our culture must reckon with it.
"“How many sexes are there?” The answer depends on the definition used. If we consider the reproductive role, the answer is “two,” and no more. If we look at the genetic level, it is also “two,” but with a few rare exceptions. If we take the gonadal point of view, it will be “two,” but again, with exceptions, gonads that have an intermediate form. Finally, if we look at anatomical sex, then it is a continuum, which could be described as a “bimodal distribution” (distribution around two frequency peaks)."
"Gender refers to the conception of male and female roles and the relationships between men and women in a given society. This division implies a specialization of tasks between the sexes and a hierarchy of associated values and representations. Different schools of thought in sociology and psychology debate whether these social representations of gender are socially constructed or whether they stem in part from interests, preferences, and behaviors that are intrinsically different between males and females. This is a fundamental question, and it may indeed be that biology comes into play here once again."
"Gender identity can be defined as identifying more or less as a man or a woman, feeling more or less in line with male or female models. For most people, this question is meaningless.
However, the concept of gender identity is useful because this is not the case for everyone. There are people who, as a matter of fact, identify with the opposite sex or the gender that corresponds to the opposite sex (between 0.12% and 0.79% according to a 2021 Canadian census, with a decrease according to age group). These are the people we refer to as “transgender,” “people whose biological sex is not aligned with their gender identity.” "
"Gender dysphoria is defined in the DSM-5 (the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association that defines the diagnostic criteria for all mental disorders) as follows: “a marked incongruity between the gender experienced or expressed and the assigned gender, present for at least six months, associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other areas of functioning” [27]. The criteria are then refined for children and adolescents.
"It does not say that having a gender identity opposite to one's sex is in itself a mental disorder, but that it becomes one if this condition is associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. In other words, being transgender, identifying with the gender of the opposite sex, is not a problem in itself. However, if it causes the person to feel extremely uncomfortable in their own skin because they feel at odds with their body, and if this makes them depressed and gives them suicidal thoughts (which is the case for many people affected [28]), then there is a real disorder that needs to be treated.
In the DSM-5, the fact that an individual's characteristic only becomes a disorder when it causes distress or suffering is not unique to gender dysphoria. It is a general criterion required for all diagnoses."
If there are only two reproductive sexes, how could there be more than two (even if rare) gonads?
There are no gonads that have an intermediate form. They are either sperm-generating or egg-generating. There are no intermediate forms of gonads that generate intermediate gametes. (Spergs?) What you might be thinking of are gonads called ovotestes that have islands of testicular tissue and islands of ovarian tissue, often only partly formed and mixed in with a lot of inert fibrous stroma tissue. Something has gone very seriously wrong in these cases. So far as I know, no human has ever been identified who makes fully mature gametes of both sexes. (Most make no gametes from either the ovarian or the testicular tissue.) Differentiation of the associated Mullerian or Wolffian structures and external genitalia is highly variable. These conditions are so rare that it's hard to make any general rules about what develops. But they aren't intermediate gonads representing a spectral sex.
The DSM-5 is being discredited the more we learn about how it was created by circular citations between WPATH and the Endocrine Society, with nobbling from outside by activists in the Biden Administration. The DSM is really just a bunch of psychiatrists sitting around trying to form a socially acceptable consensus. Homosexuality was a mental illness for decades and then all of a sudden in 1973 it wasn't anymore. Sigmund Freud rose and fell. Lobotomy came and went. Gender dysphoria is the new fad. Just because it's in the DSM doesn't mean it has any external validity. All it means is what psychiatrists currently mostly agree about.
Very nice exposition, especially of how the term innocuously originated and then was incrementally mutated into a destructive phenomenon of transgenderism. It also shows how adept leftists are at using and manipulating language to their advantage.
I agree we should reject their manipulative terms, though I'm not sure if the proposed one is the best. I'd go with the established terms like transsexuality, autogynephilia, and perhaps sex dysphoria.
Yes, transsexualism was the diagnosis in DSM-III, then changed to gender identity disorder in DSM-IV, and finally to gender dysphoria in DSM-5. So essentially the same condition progressively euphemized for cultural/political reasons.
Autogynephilia describes a subset of transsexuals, so it belongs in the same category.
Thank you for the kind words, Marvin. In my view, "transsexual," implies that you really can change sexes, and I do not believe that you can (well, in principle it's all physics, but we don't have Star Trek technology to rearrange particles as we please). Autogynephilic is more of a symptom (or a type of, to use my term, sex dysmorphic), and likely doesn't apply to everyone we would put into these groups (perhaps especially natal girls). "Sex dysphoria," would be a welcome improvement on, "gender dysphoria," but at least in the present era, it's the only time the word, "dysphoria," ever shows up, and has become absolutely loaded with gender ideology.
“Transsexual” doesn’t imply to me that one can actually change their sex. As you rightly point out, that’s impossible. It simply implies that the person feels they are, or wishes to be, the opposite sex in some respect. But I accept interpretations are pretty free here.
I would actually welcome much finer granularity for the various conditions currently lumped together under “gender dysphoria” or “transgender.” We definitely need to distinguish, for example, autogynephilic males from teenagers succumbing to social contagion driven by mental fragility or psychiatric comorbidities. Very different conditions. No need to mention that "transgender" now includes all kinds of pervs and predators that just take advantage of the confused social rules.
Your proposed term “dysmorphia” doesn’t seem to fit individuals who experience no genuine discomfort with their sex/body and are motivated solely by a cross-dressing sexual fetish (which applies to some autogynephiles). “Dysphoria” has the same limitation. All in all, we need to disentangle and create separate, specific categories. Easy to conceive, hard to achieve due to politics.
Can't say I've changed my mind, re, "trans," terminology, but you make good points that different illnesses are conflated. I do like the ROGD distinction, though I guess if I had my way it would be ROSD. ;P I suppose sex dysmorphia could be a member of some class like how body dysmorphia is one specific member of the eating disorder class.
There was the aptly named category "Psychosexual Disorders" in older DSMs under which all these could be (and historically already were) grouped. Of course it had to go to not traumatize activists with reality and to compassionately facilitate the spread of ROGD and pervs in women spaces.
So I think almost all the required nomenclature had already been invented; we just need to get back to our senses. Then we can nitpick the specifics.
I always thought "gender" was a useful concept in only one way. It is helpful for understanding a very simple and basic idea: that some differences in the way men and women dress and behave, and the socio-economic roles that they play, are imposed by culture and not sex. Biology says that women must bear children; culture says men wear pants and women wear dresses. The former is a sex difference, the latter a gender difference.
Once that's established, a social scientist can refer to "sex" or "gender" differences without having to explain again the distinction between biologically-determined and socially-determined roles and behaviors. In the 1940s and 1950s, when "gender" first started seeing use in this way, that may have been helpful. It's sort of self-evident now.
This might be the most coherent definition I've seen, and is the only one that's given me pause.
I'm a pretty hard adaptationist, so this kind of distinction can only go so far for me. Whatever you want to say about the adaptationists, the, "environmentalists," dubiously ascribe everything to accidents of history and whims of culture which are allegedly perfectly arbitrary. I don't believe that. I'm ignorant on the true extent of variation in cultural norms (I know it's greatly exaggerated). But I will say this: culture is as thoroughly biological a concept as you can get.
Aside from that, *why* should sex differences which were naturally and sexually selected be called "sex differences" while those which were arbitrarily decided by culture be called "gender differences"? Of what utility is that? And how could an individual be said to possess a gender under this definition? I confess that I don't think anyone uses it this way outside of repeating, "gender is a social construct" (by which they mean different things).
I agree that no one "has" a gender, or even a "gender identity," which is just another way of saying one would prefer that a different set of social expectations would apply than those with which one was blessed at birth. But gender, as a set of conceptual categories for looking at human behavior, is a valid and somewhat useful analytical tool. It is helpful to understand that the outward trappings of sex in a given society, such as clothing, are arbitrary and not dictated by biology, and it's a valid field of study to understand how far these societal diktats extend. Yes, it's not an earth-shattering idea, but it's helpful to have an easy term with which to refer to the concept.
I agree, most don't appreciate the degree to which the American Founders / the liberal Enlightenment viewed themselves as doing for politics / law what the protestants did for religion (returning matters of interpretation / argument to the people rather than an elite priesthood). I wrote about that, here: https://footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2024/05/founders-or-unfounded.html.
The belief that one is female can be a delusion; the desire to be female cannot--it's simply a desire. Many non-woke AGPs and HSTSs recognize that they aren't and can't become female, but still desire to present as women.
The problem with the academy these days is that it takes outlier issues and predicates entire social movements and solutions upon them. In an effort to "include" the "marginalized" we're all supposed to act as if we don't look like our biological sex ergo we need to tell everyone what we think we are. There is domestic violence therefore all men are bad, therefore divorce is the go-to solution for marital problems, some people are not heterosexual ergo we should obsess about being gay...
The whole dysphoria thing demands that a mental issue be "normalized." Throughout most people's lives, there is a struggle with one's physical self. I have periodically felt uncomfortable in my body for a variety of reasons; hacking it into pieces obviously would not have been the solution.
Now everyone has "trauma" and some "mental illness" -- we need to collectively get off this victim train back into some semblance of sanity.
It sounds like we are not a million miles away in our general understanding. I take the point that overlapping distributions are not formally bimodal unless the modes are resolved visually. However as a scientist this is somewhat semantic, as if the data generating process is bimodal it explains the data better to model accordingly. The question, after significance is confirmed is then how meaningful the effect size is, it is quite a large effect as far as effects go, even if the natural variance due to other genetic and environmental factors obscures the individual peaks in a plot.
As to the examples, marathons may be more even than other sports. Women actually have an advantage in ultramarathon events as they can better maintain fat stores. Weightlifting, I would guess,conditioned on weight, would pretty nearly divide men and women at a given threshold.
As an aside, when modelling the mean it's not the underlying variable distribution that needs to be normal, it's the errors (for the best linear unbiased estimator). If you posit gender is significantly different and it actually is then you will reduce the overall error in your model and the error distribution will also be normal.
As to whether the effect is relevant enough against other factors, that is another question but from a purely descriptive stats perspective you would always include a variable if it's significant (and also potentially even if it's not, if it's reasonable to assume it is based on other research etc).
It's also worth noting that bimodality is a rather misleading lens of thinking about measurable difference. It's really asking for a model with near perfect predictive power and nothing in practical terms could be expected to achieve this. But this overlooks what we can know in regards to things are statistically significant. Gender is, so it points to a causal evolutionary mechanism, which is well explained by our different evolutionary trajectories.
You mentioned that sex is binary in nature. It’s worth being precise. It is largely correct for terrestrial vertebrates. However, fish often have no differentiated sex chromosomes but instead environmental factors determine their sex. Some species are even sequential hermaphrodites.
The bell curves in height distributions of men and women overlap to such a great degree that they do not count as bimodal at all. This even though 'everyone knows' that height is bimodal in humans. It's not. Be skeptical if anyone tells you that anything else is bimodal in men vs women.
Someone should look to see what the modal bench press weight is, or number of real male-type pushups each of several thousand randomly selected people can do, and see if even upper-body strength is truly bimodal. I suspect it is, but "agreeableness" or "competitiveness" probably isn't.
To be bimodal, the two modes have to be separated by at least two standard deviations in the character being measured. Height has just a single smeared-out ("skewed") mode, with a longer rightward tail because extremely tall people are nearly always male, while extremely short people can be of either sex.
Height is bimodal because the distribution doesn’t look the same at all for each sex.
Even though the averages are not too far and if you concern yourself with only what’s around the average you might conclude that it’s similar enough to pretend it’s the same.
But the much more spread out distribution for men is precisely what makes it bimodal.
What’s more, if you add a single variable to height, the difference will become even more obvious. Any subsequent variable addition will only pile up on this distinction.
Trying to pretend the sex are not very different by looking at a single variable in isolation is extremely dishonest.
What make the sexes different is all the variables combined that gives a specific result that is completely improbable/impossible for the opposite sex.
I was talking about height only, which is not bimodal. You can look this up.
I'm not trying to pretend the sexes aren't very different in aggregate, so don't accuse me of dishonesty. Of course they are. I'm only trying to discourage use of bimodalty in its cartoon senses of artificially drawn bell curves on unlabeled graphs in PowerPoint presentations.
Well it does look like that you are trying to argue that height isn’t bimodal.
I wasn’t sure about this, so I looked it up and not only it definitely is bimodal but the average for each sex also has quite a significant difference.
In this page they go through all the differences for the whole world but also per country/region.
Towards the end the page they present a graph of the distribution for each sex. It is bimodal and the curves area intersect much less than they diverge.
The two curves are separated by a little less than one standard deviation. As I said in my first comment, true bimodality is defined when the two modes differ by two standard deviations. Therefore height is not bimodal according to that definition.
Oh ok I see, you are actually arguing the absolute correctness of the vocabulary. I didn’t get it in the first comment because it didn’t seem relevant.
I’m no statistician and my last stats course was quite a while ago but I’ve looked up quickly and you can commonly find that a bimodal distribution is when there is 2 distinct pics in the distribution.
That makes perfect sense and is precise/general enough to be useful in most cases.
Now maybe the « official » definition in stats course is the requirement of 2 std separation but that seems like something that would only be invoked if the distribution wasn’t distinct enough to be sure of bi modality.
Maybe statistician are more pedantic than French language academicians, kind of hilarious.
So you are probably right but arguing that height distribution isn’t bimodal when a cursory glance at the curve tells you otherwise is very weird to me.
I think I can explain why we are confusing each other. Go back to that figure of the histograms you cited from Our World in Data, upthread. Note that they don't depict a single population with (allegedly) two peaks (or modes). They depict *two populations* pre-separated by sex, one is men, the other is women, displayed on the same graph. (Technically they aren't populations, they are large samples used to estimate the height, in each population from which they are drawn.) So it's not depicting *a* bimodal population. It's depicting two populations on the same graph, the populations separated by sex before counting the heights of each member of each sample. Clear so far?
Now, imagine combining the two samples back into the common population (males and females) from which both were drawn. To do this, you count at each height along the horizontal axis the number of men at that height and the number of women at that height, add them together, and put a dot above that height at the vertical axis for that summed number. The vertical axis doesn't have any units so you'll have to just measure in millimetres or whatever. At -2SD for women (150.6 cm) you won't add any men, because almost none are that short. At -1SD for women (157.6 cm) you'll add only a few millimetres worth of men. At the mean for women (164.7 cm, which = mode in normal distributions), you add about 20 mm worth of men (based on eyeballing my computer screen) to the 100 mm or so of women at the mean. At +1SD for women, you add about 60 mm worth of men to the 60 mm worth of women because that's where the curves happen to cross. Then at the +2SD for women you add about 20 mm worth of women to the 90 mm worth of men (which happens to be the mean (=mode) for men.) The rest of the combined curve is essentially just the men, because very few women are that tall.
So if you connect together with a sketch all the dots you just placed, you will get a combined slightly lumpy curve that has a single but slightly smeary mode at about 165-171 cm because that's the one height range that had the maximum number of combined men and women. On my computer screen that single mode is about 120 mm high, which is higher than any other summed point. The modal height in this mixed human population is 171 cm because a lot of women are that tall (even though it's taller than their female mode) and a lot of men are that short (even though it's shorter than their male mode.) There's only one mode.
Crucially, even though there is a deep valley between the male mode and the female mode in the separated samples, giving the illusion of bimodality, there is no valley in the combined curve.
Looking back at the figure, you see that the mean of the women's heights and the mean of the men's heights differ by less than the sum of their standard deviations -- they are only about one standard deviation apart. Therefore the combined population can be predicted not to show bimodality and it doesn't. IQ scores between blacks and whites, which are also about a standard deviation apart, would show a similar effect.
The actual accurately drawn frequency histogram of height looks like Figure 2 on page 3 of this paper. You can sort of see the taller males starting to emerge to the right out of the shorter women. But still only one mode. No valley in between.
For human height to exhibit bimodality you would have to combine all the basketball players in the NBA with a similar-sized population of dwarves. I predict from intuition that the modal heights in those two populations differs by more than the sum of their standard deviations and will be truly bimodal. There would be a valley in the middle, say 5'7" with very few dwarves and very few B-ballers. But that is obviously a cherry-picked example just to illustrate a point. The weight of humans and the weight of mice probably shows bimodality too. But the height of men and women is not bimodal. Men and women are just so much more similar to each other than they are to mice. Which kind of makes sense.
Just because you don't understand statistics doesn't mean you can ridicule its rules of inference. Bimodality has important consequences for the validity of statistical tests, which much of what we think we know in sociobiology is based on. Everybody knows that the police kill black people far out of proportion to whites. Except that good data collection and statistical analysis by Roland Fryer showed they don't.
You are correct. There are statistical test for bimodality and height is unquestionably a bimodal distribution. Bimodal just mean having two modes or peeks.
Thank you. One background addition: the Kantian phenomena (gender)/noumena (sex) distinction has been used by the phenomenologists (vs Husserl). This places the distinction as the offspring of Kantian liberalism and the ethical demand of the ‘categorical imperative’ that gives a crusading ethic to the movement.
This piece is okay and directionally correct, but the word 'gender' does have a legitimate use: a lifestyle choice loosely connected to masculinity and femininity. It's a little misleading to say it doesn't exist, although the gender ideological account is, as he pointed out, nonsense.
Thank you for reading, William! I've always seen argument you espouse as a category error. If a man happens to be more female typical in some mental traits, we say this is to do with his, "gender," but if he happens to be more female typical in some brute morphological traits (say, he's shorter than the average woman), we just call it an individual difference that bucks the on-average trend of his sex. It's even more strange when you consider how well correlated sex and, "gender," are, even in terms of lifestyle choices. Almost everyone who endorses the view you espouse would themselves have to admit that their own sex and gender are largely not at odds with each other. (I've recently seen a clip where Charlie Kirk had made this argument, that, "gender," has taken the place of, "personality," as well). To me, it's like confusing musical, "genre," with individual, "bands." It just leads to confusion.
That's not what I'm arguing. The erroneous explanations for 'gender' are legion. The question is, what legitimate use could it have? An effeminate male is not, under my account, of the female 'gender'. Note that many transwomen are quite masculine. The only thing it could mean is that you intentionally adopt the lifestyle of a, for instance, woman. That means the clothing, mannerisms, etc. 'Gender' is invented: 'transmasc', 'nonbinary', etc. They are like being a goth or a hippie. That's all it really amounts to.
"gender" is, in many reputable lexicons, NOT the same as "sex". Two entirely different kettles of fish.
As I mentioned above, here's a rather brilliant and quite insightful analogy on the difference from the late great US Justice Anton Scalia:
AS: "The word ‘gender’ has acquired the new and useful connotation of cultural or attitudinal characteristics … distinctive to the sexes. That is to say, gender is to sex as feminine is to female and masculine is to male."
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep511/usrep511127/usrep511127.pdf
Your "effeminate male" is a feminine male, but still not a female, not a possessor of ovaries. Which are, to a first approximation, the necessary and sufficient condition to qualify as a female -- no ovaries, not a female.
You being a student of philosophy, you may wish to take a gander at my elaboration on the fairly durable philosophical distinction between accidental and essential properties:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/accidental-and-essential-properties
The Cole's Notes version:
QUTOE; HUHB: But the basic principle is easy enough to understand with a simple analogy: the “essential” property of the category “teenager” is “being 13 to 19”. It is absolutely essential to be 13 to 19 to qualify as a member of the teenager category. One can’t reasonably “identify as a teenager” unless one is actually between the ages of 13 and 19 inclusive.
But there is a myriad of “accidental” properties associated with the category “teenager”. As SEP might put it, those are properties that a teenager “happens to have but that it could lack”. For example, many teenagers happen to be tall, short, male, female, white, black, brown or green with pink purple dots — all accidental properties, but they’re not “definitive”, they’re not necessary or essential to qualify as a teenager. Of course some of those accidental properties are more typical of teenagers — raging hormones, poor driving skills, bad skin, dysphoria, etc., etc. But virtually none of them are really unique to teenagers. UNQUOTE
In the case of sex and gender, the essential properties of the sexes are either ovaries (females) or testicles (males) while the accidental properties of the sexes are those traits typical of but not unique to females (feminine gender) or those traits typical of but not unique to males (masculine gender).
Unfortunately there are people "identifying" as teenagers. As a society, we have severed the tie between reality and feelings and it has terrible consequences. When we allow men to be treated as women, what argument can we have for refusing to let adults be treated as children?
I can already see the day when a grown man claims to be a child and excuses his sexual crimes against actual children, in this very manner. We are not prepared for this battle as we have already ceded too much ground.
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2024/01/25/male-50-identifies-as-15-yr-old-female-allowed-on-girls-swim-team-changes-in-locker-rooms-with-teens-1430803/
👍 Hard to imagine a more barking-mad "idea" than "self-identification". The crux of the clusterfuck in the UK over their "Gender Recognition Act", and the consequential UK Supreme Court ruling -- in their For Women Scotland case -- that, no, transwomen are most certainly not women (AKA, adult human females).
CBC News: British Supreme Court unanimously rules legal definition of a 'woman' excludes trans women's identities
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/uk-supreme-court-equality-act-ruling-1.7511411
And thanks for that BizPac link. Though rather peeved to see that that story is also in a Canadian context, that the perp in question was a Canadian "professor of behavioral science". Maybe not surprising given that Canada's erstwhile fearless leader, Justin Trudeau, once insisted -- on International Women's Day, no less -- that "trans women are women":
https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/statements/2023/03/08/statement-prime-minister-international-womens-day
He and the whole goddamn Liberal Party should be ridden out of town on a goddamn rail, if not tarred and feathered first, for that ideological article of faith, for that antiscientific claptrap.
But you might also have some interest in this post from the "punny" TransAtlantic, and my comment thereon, on that self-identification BS:
" 'Nullius in Verba' - Identity Ideology vs. the Scientific Disposition; The Dangers of Self-ID";
https://thetransatlantic.substack.com/p/self-id-or-nullius-in-verba-between
https://thetransatlantic.substack.com/p/self-id-or-nullius-in-verba-between/comment/47238283
Kinda think you and far too many others are spinning your wheels, are simply "muddying the waters to make them seem deep".
"gender" seems just a matter of definition, and there are many existing uses where the implicit definition boils down into sexually dimorphic personality and behavioural traits:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_dimorphism
And many people quite reasonably argue that those traits more typical of -- but not unique to -- males are masculine -- are in the masculine gender -- and those traits more typical of -- but not unique to -- females are in the feminine gender. "gender" is then both a binary -- masculine and feminine -- while each gender is in turn a spectrum, a range of those typical traits.
As an analogy, you might consider the reddish and bluish halves of the visible spectrum -- a binary -- but each half is a spectrum in itself.
But, for example, that a male has some traits more typical of females does not, in any way, make them a female since the necessary and sufficient condition to qualify as a female is, to a first approximation, to have ovaries. Such males are then simply "gender non-conforming", not a case of some people "born in the wrong body".
For a rather neat example of that "gender non-conformance" and a case of sexual dimorphism in the animal kingdom, consider this article by evolutionary psychologist Paula Wright on "Ruff Sex and Sneaky Fuɔkers":
https://www.paulawrightdysmemics.com/p/ruff-sex-and-sneaky-fukers
The male basically has two "genders" -- morphs or forms more typical of males -- while the female only has one. But some males are "gender non-conforming" because they exhibit the feminine gender, the form typical of females but not unique to them.
And you also may wish to consider a neat and quite illuminating analogy on the difference between sex and gender from the late great US Justice Anton Scalia:
AS: "The word ‘gender’ has acquired the new and useful connotation of cultural or attitudinal characteristics … distinctive to the sexes. That is to say, gender is to sex as feminine is to female and masculine is to male."
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep511/usrep511127/usrep511127.pdf
Finally and relative to definitions, you might consider philosopher Will Durant's take on a Voltaire quip:
WD: "If you wish to converse with me,” said Voltaire, “define your terms.” How many a debate would have been deflated into a paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms! This is the alpha and omega of logic, the heart and soul of it, that every important term in serious discourse shall be subjected to strictest scrutiny and definition. It is difficult, and ruthlessly tests the mind; but once done it is half of any task.
https://quotefancy.com/quote/3001527/Will-Durant-If-you-wish-to-converse-with-me-said-Voltaire-define-your-terms-How-many-a
Wow, you think the article 'muddies the waters'? I thought precisely the opposite, that it was clarity itself. Maybe you actually meant you disagree?
Kinda think Gussman went off the rails and into the weeds in his opening paragraph:
SG: "And 'gender dysphoria' doesn’t exist because 'gender' doesn’t exist." [Ipse dixit; so let it be written, so let it be done.]
But what he followed up with only confirms the point. He certainly provides some examples of incoherent, wooish, and quite unscientific "definitions" and interpretations for the term "gender", but nowhere even genuflects to the many more coherent, useful, and common definitions for it.
For example, an editorial in British Medical Journal draws a useful distinction between sex and gender even if they're kind of vague on the specifics:
BMJ: "Sex and gender are not synonymous. Sex, unless otherwise specified, relates to biology: the gametes, chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive organs. Gender relates to societal roles, BEHAVIOURS [AKA personalities], and expectations that vary with time and place, historically and geographically. These categories describe different attributes that must be considered depending on the purpose they are intended for. The World Health Organization states, 'Gender is used to describe the characteristics of women and men that are socially constructed, while sex refers to those that are biologically determined.' ...."
https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n735
So you may wish to take a closer look at my original comment above, and my more recent follow-up:
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/gender-doesnt-exist/comment/176714951
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/gender-doesnt-exist/comment/177057438
I respond to this definition of, "gender," explicitly and at length in the article.[1] That definition is no more scientific than if I were to propose right now that what we heretofore understood as, "sex," differences in the body now compromise two separate concepts. Those differences between males and females below the waste are, "sex," differences. Those above the waste are, "zex," differences. Does my proposal help or hinder our understanding of the human animal? "Zex," like, "gender," is redundant, therefore we should use the word sex for all of this.
1. "But starting mid-century, a more technical meaning began to take shape among the more academically inclined: “gender” was to socio-culture as ‘sex’ was to biology... Today’s intelligentsia are apt to call females’ greater interest in people (or males’ greater interest in things) a “gender difference”, due to the overlapping bell curves that illustrate these differences, but no one would call males’ greater height a “gender difference”. Everyone sane enough to recognize the phenomenon calls greater male height a “sex difference”, and like most sex differences, it too is represented by overlapping bell curves... Still others contend that “gender” is of the mind. But implicit in the splitting of “gender” for the mind and “sex” for the body is of course the kind of mind-body dualism denied by modern biology. The mind evolved by natural selection and, somehow, emerges from the brain — a piece of “brute morphology” to be perhaps unkind to the most complex object in the known universe."
Edit: I've only at this point read what I responded to--this subthread with Keith.
> "Everyone sane enough to recognize the phenomenon calls greater male height a “sex difference”, and like most sex differences, it too is represented by overlapping bell curves... "
But height differences aren't intrinsic to the sexes. Why there are many women -- about 40% -- who are taller than the same percentage of men. The issue is what is the essential and defining difference between males and females. And, by definition, males produce sperm, and females produce ova. That is IT -- that is ALL that "male" and "female" mean to any biologist worth their salt.
But height and all the other differences are just "accidental properties" of the categories male and female, not essential ones. A fairly durable philosophical principle which you might want to read up on. My kick at the kitty:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/accidental-and-essential-properties
You might also want to take a close read of philosopher of science Paul Griffiths on "What are biological sexes?":
https://philarchive.org/rec/GRIWAB-2
And you might want to pay close attention to this bit in particular:
PG: Something gets to be a 'male' or 'female' characteristic in a particular species because it is common in males or females in that species: sexual characteristics are defined by sexes, not the other way around.
Sexual dimorphism writ large. One can't possibly say which traits are more common to which sex if one hasn't FIRST said exactly what it takes to qualify as male and female in the first place.
> "Still others contend that “gender” is of the mind.
So are personalities. Which are more or less quantifiable. And those are generally differences which come in under the rubric of "gender". You really might want to read about the ubiquity of those differences which you don't seem to have much awareness of:
"Global sex differences in personality: Replication with an open online dataset"
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/jopy.12500
What’s the use of a concept that is “a matter of definition” and varies from person to person? Gender theorists will actually reject any “essentialist” definition, i.e., anything practically verifiable, and instead propose “you are gender X if you identify as gender X.” Circular muddiness.
"personality" -- by definition -- varies from person to person. And there's a whole raft of various personality types that are more or less quantifiable -- see, for example, the articles on the Big Five Personality Traits and the (much less credible) Myers–Briggs Type Indicator:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indicator
And those personality types are, in large part, what is MEANT by "gender". At least by saner and more scientifically-grounded users of that term.
But I don't think you read or thought much about my previous comment, particularly the analogy from the late great US Justice Anton Scalia. He more or less explicitly endorsed the above point of view and interpretation of "gender" being equivalent to all of those different personality types. You might try giving a bit of thought to what he said.
To make that interpretation clearer, you might also take a look at this post by Dr. Maja Bowen on "How conflation of sex and gender became a tool of transgender ideology":
https://lascapigliata.com/2018/03/27/how-conflation-of-sex-and-gender-became-a-tool-of-transgender-ideology/
Though it's more a conflation of what it takes to qualify as females or males -- ovaries or testicles -- with the personality traits that are typical of each sex.
But she also has quite an illuminating table of the ranges [spectra] of personality types or traits that are encompassed by the masculine and feminine genders:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!AE2z!,w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd71e4a96-0d94-490e-8821-aa96e5a7c1cc_648x674.jpeg
The masculine and feminine genders comprise a binary, but each gender is a spectrum -- a range, a list -- of those different feminine and masculine personality types. So "gender" is both a binary and a spectrum which is probably one of the many points where so many people go off the rails and into the weeds over the whole concept.
As for your, "you are gender X if you identify as gender X" characterization, I quite agree with your "circular muddiness". But not all "gender theorists" are quite so clueless about the distinction between the types of reproductive abilities -- ovaries and testicles -- and the personality traits typical of people with each type.
You might just as well reject all of quantum mechanics because some people peddle quantum mysticism and quantum woo:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism
Rather bad form to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Which is largely what Gussman and many others are doing.
Sorry, I didn't read your original comment in full, as it had terrible economy (you diverge a lot).
What you propose is the one coherent definition of gender I could theoretically accept but it has to be rejected in practice because:
(1) It just means stereotypically male (masculine) personality and stereotypically female (feminine) personality. We don't need another word for "feminine" and "masculine" and "personality".
(2) It doesn't correspond to how the word is used (i.e. its real meaning). It flies in the face of gender by self-identification which is the norm. Ain't nobody going around handing out BIG-5 questionnaires and assigning genders. Also, none of these follow from your neat definition: arbitrarily chosen pronouns, compelled speech totalitarianism, conflation with biology, emptying of the terms man and woman.
So in summary, you cannot _redefine_ a term (that is already widely used) to your liking. You instead discern its definition from the way it's used. This term was used by ideologues to push a political agenda, even if partly well-intentioned, it led to catastrophic side effects (ROGD, loosened social norms allowing predators in women's and children's spaces). This should be pointed out over and over and the term should be rejected.
There is only a baby trojan horse in the bathwater. Drain at max speed please!
Marvin: "Sorry, I didn't read your original comment in full, as it had terrible economy (you diverge a lot).
I generally try to follow the Point-Reason-Example-Summary principle. For each point I make in a progression -- from premises to conclusion -- I try to buttress it with at least a reason and an example:
https://magicalbali.wordpress.com/2016/02/28/tips-on-organizing-your-speech-the-p-r-e-s-formula/
Marvin: "What you propose is the one coherent definition of gender I could theoretically accept ... "
Hallelujah! Progress! 😉🙂 But good thing since that's a fairly common definition. From Google's AI, Gemini:
Gemini: "Feminine" describes qualities, behaviors, and roles traditionally associated with women, such as being nurturing, gentle, and graceful. The term can also refer to the feminine gender in grammar, where it denotes nouns that are typically feminine, like "actress" or "girl". In a broader sense, "feminine" is used to describe things that have characteristics considered typical of or appropriate for women, like a feminine fashion style.
Do note the connection between "feminine" and "gender". THAT is what "gender" encompasses -- the masculine and the feminine, the "qualities, behaviors, and roles traditionally associated with" men and women, respectively.
https://www.google.com/search?q=feminine&oq=feminine+&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIRCAEQIxgnGEYY-QEYgAQYigUyEAgCEC4YrwEYxwEYugIYgAQyBggDEEUYQTIGCAQQRRhBMgYIBRBFGEEyCggGEAAYsQMYgAQyBwgHEAAYgAQyBwgIEAAYgAQyCggJEAAYsQMYgAQyBwgKEAAYgAQyBwgLEAAYgAQyBwgMEAAYgAQyBwgNEC4YgAQyBwgOEAAYgATSAQkxNzQwNGowajeoAhSwAgHxBc0ahbN0bV7C8QXNGoWzdG1ewg&client=ms-android-samsung-ss&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
Marvin: "... but it has to be rejected in practice because ..."
That some people want to mash a bunch of "magic and religion" into the concept really says nothing at all against the above noted concept to begin with. You might reflect on the idea of steelmanning an argument:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man#Steelmanning
The concept of gender has -- sort of like a cancer -- metastasized through the whole body politic. It's everywhere from schools to government departments to legal rulings -- Scalia's analogy being a case in point. See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-gender_movement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-critical_feminism
Removing it entirely would probably kill the patient. The best if not only solution is to emphasize and utilize the more scientifically justified definition, to do a bit of judicious steelmanning, to emphasize that "gender" is an entirely different kettle of fish from "sex" (testicles and ovaries).
I refuse to legitimate that word because it demarcates sex and behavior; the latter flows out of the former as unrecognized phenotypes. Behavior is located in the brain and is not spiritual. 'Tomboys' are androgenized females; they were exposed to high prenatal testosterone in utero. Their femininity, the suite of phenotypes most applicable to female gametes, are replaced in part by the suite of phenotypes (behavior) for male gametes. I consider it to border on disorder.
I’d say u could check about that on my recent article! It’s a misconception we have gender is actually not fixed. https://open.substack.com/pub/contactohumanoporanna/p/gender-sex-wth-is-the-difference?r=ho7ae&utm_medium=ios
Where did I say it was fixed? Your lifestyle is largely under your control.
So, I meant fixed in the way that gender is not strictly dictated just by certain behaviors, attitudes, “feminine-masculine” attributes. Meaning it has a definition that we make up as we go (as a society) and the purpose of it has been exploited to the point where instead of being just a way to name certain things it became a “cage” for everyone, not allowing them to just “be”. As to sex: male, female, even tho it’s also a construct, it has a typical use in official documents, drs etc. but mainly gender has been wildly manipulated in control :)
Sex is not a 'construct'. The word 'sex' is invented, like all words, but what it refers to is as real as anything else. The vast majority of people do not have intentionally curated 'genders' just like most people don't really pay attention to fashion, although loosely speaking everyone has a fashion.
I would highly recommend my article since I go in more depth with these subjects. The word sex, as you said, is made up as any language, right? But the definition for it is not a definitive one, which I found to be soooo interesting, it’s just more commonly used in a certain context, but sex (male female) is as flexible as any other word that we want to make up in a society that values 2 parts , as only.
You can make up new meanings, but why? To confuse and trick people? What's the point?
Blank Slatism has poisoned the minds of Modern People
This was a great post. Your Philosophy of Science book looks interesting.
Thank you for the kind words :)
This article rightly dismantles the term ‘gender’ as a floating category divorced from the primal form of being. But we also require a positive account of the form it shadows.
Almost everywhere, we see life divide along the male/female polarity. This is not only biology; it is the metaphysical grammar of being and becoming. We should not only discard the term 'gender' but return to the real polarity of male and female, and reckon with what that means for Western culture, symbolism, and the future of our civilisation.
In short: gender does not exist as an independent ontological reality. But male and female most certainly do, and our culture must reckon with it.
"“How many sexes are there?” The answer depends on the definition used. If we consider the reproductive role, the answer is “two,” and no more. If we look at the genetic level, it is also “two,” but with a few rare exceptions. If we take the gonadal point of view, it will be “two,” but again, with exceptions, gonads that have an intermediate form. Finally, if we look at anatomical sex, then it is a continuum, which could be described as a “bimodal distribution” (distribution around two frequency peaks)."
"Gender refers to the conception of male and female roles and the relationships between men and women in a given society. This division implies a specialization of tasks between the sexes and a hierarchy of associated values and representations. Different schools of thought in sociology and psychology debate whether these social representations of gender are socially constructed or whether they stem in part from interests, preferences, and behaviors that are intrinsically different between males and females. This is a fundamental question, and it may indeed be that biology comes into play here once again."
"Gender identity can be defined as identifying more or less as a man or a woman, feeling more or less in line with male or female models. For most people, this question is meaningless.
However, the concept of gender identity is useful because this is not the case for everyone. There are people who, as a matter of fact, identify with the opposite sex or the gender that corresponds to the opposite sex (between 0.12% and 0.79% according to a 2021 Canadian census, with a decrease according to age group). These are the people we refer to as “transgender,” “people whose biological sex is not aligned with their gender identity.” "
https://www.afis.org/IMG/jpg/210-definition-06.jpg
"Gender dysphoria is defined in the DSM-5 (the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association that defines the diagnostic criteria for all mental disorders) as follows: “a marked incongruity between the gender experienced or expressed and the assigned gender, present for at least six months, associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other areas of functioning” [27]. The criteria are then refined for children and adolescents.
"It does not say that having a gender identity opposite to one's sex is in itself a mental disorder, but that it becomes one if this condition is associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. In other words, being transgender, identifying with the gender of the opposite sex, is not a problem in itself. However, if it causes the person to feel extremely uncomfortable in their own skin because they feel at odds with their body, and if this makes them depressed and gives them suicidal thoughts (which is the case for many people affected [28]), then there is a real disorder that needs to be treated.
In the DSM-5, the fact that an individual's characteristic only becomes a disorder when it causes distress or suffering is not unique to gender dysphoria. It is a general criterion required for all diagnoses."
(in french : https://www.afis.org/Sexe-et-genre-de-quoi-parle-t-on)
If there are only two reproductive sexes, how could there be more than two (even if rare) gonads?
There are no gonads that have an intermediate form. They are either sperm-generating or egg-generating. There are no intermediate forms of gonads that generate intermediate gametes. (Spergs?) What you might be thinking of are gonads called ovotestes that have islands of testicular tissue and islands of ovarian tissue, often only partly formed and mixed in with a lot of inert fibrous stroma tissue. Something has gone very seriously wrong in these cases. So far as I know, no human has ever been identified who makes fully mature gametes of both sexes. (Most make no gametes from either the ovarian or the testicular tissue.) Differentiation of the associated Mullerian or Wolffian structures and external genitalia is highly variable. These conditions are so rare that it's hard to make any general rules about what develops. But they aren't intermediate gonads representing a spectral sex.
The DSM-5 is being discredited the more we learn about how it was created by circular citations between WPATH and the Endocrine Society, with nobbling from outside by activists in the Biden Administration. The DSM is really just a bunch of psychiatrists sitting around trying to form a socially acceptable consensus. Homosexuality was a mental illness for decades and then all of a sudden in 1973 it wasn't anymore. Sigmund Freud rose and fell. Lobotomy came and went. Gender dysphoria is the new fad. Just because it's in the DSM doesn't mean it has any external validity. All it means is what psychiatrists currently mostly agree about.
Very nice exposition, especially of how the term innocuously originated and then was incrementally mutated into a destructive phenomenon of transgenderism. It also shows how adept leftists are at using and manipulating language to their advantage.
I agree we should reject their manipulative terms, though I'm not sure if the proposed one is the best. I'd go with the established terms like transsexuality, autogynephilia, and perhaps sex dysphoria.
To the extent these are real rather than postures or affectations, they are forms of mental illness.
Yes, transsexualism was the diagnosis in DSM-III, then changed to gender identity disorder in DSM-IV, and finally to gender dysphoria in DSM-5. So essentially the same condition progressively euphemized for cultural/political reasons.
Autogynephilia describes a subset of transsexuals, so it belongs in the same category.
Thank you for the kind words, Marvin. In my view, "transsexual," implies that you really can change sexes, and I do not believe that you can (well, in principle it's all physics, but we don't have Star Trek technology to rearrange particles as we please). Autogynephilic is more of a symptom (or a type of, to use my term, sex dysmorphic), and likely doesn't apply to everyone we would put into these groups (perhaps especially natal girls). "Sex dysphoria," would be a welcome improvement on, "gender dysphoria," but at least in the present era, it's the only time the word, "dysphoria," ever shows up, and has become absolutely loaded with gender ideology.
“Transsexual” doesn’t imply to me that one can actually change their sex. As you rightly point out, that’s impossible. It simply implies that the person feels they are, or wishes to be, the opposite sex in some respect. But I accept interpretations are pretty free here.
I would actually welcome much finer granularity for the various conditions currently lumped together under “gender dysphoria” or “transgender.” We definitely need to distinguish, for example, autogynephilic males from teenagers succumbing to social contagion driven by mental fragility or psychiatric comorbidities. Very different conditions. No need to mention that "transgender" now includes all kinds of pervs and predators that just take advantage of the confused social rules.
Your proposed term “dysmorphia” doesn’t seem to fit individuals who experience no genuine discomfort with their sex/body and are motivated solely by a cross-dressing sexual fetish (which applies to some autogynephiles). “Dysphoria” has the same limitation. All in all, we need to disentangle and create separate, specific categories. Easy to conceive, hard to achieve due to politics.
Can't say I've changed my mind, re, "trans," terminology, but you make good points that different illnesses are conflated. I do like the ROGD distinction, though I guess if I had my way it would be ROSD. ;P I suppose sex dysmorphia could be a member of some class like how body dysmorphia is one specific member of the eating disorder class.
There was the aptly named category "Psychosexual Disorders" in older DSMs under which all these could be (and historically already were) grouped. Of course it had to go to not traumatize activists with reality and to compassionately facilitate the spread of ROGD and pervs in women spaces.
So I think almost all the required nomenclature had already been invented; we just need to get back to our senses. Then we can nitpick the specifics.
Excellent article.
I always thought "gender" was a useful concept in only one way. It is helpful for understanding a very simple and basic idea: that some differences in the way men and women dress and behave, and the socio-economic roles that they play, are imposed by culture and not sex. Biology says that women must bear children; culture says men wear pants and women wear dresses. The former is a sex difference, the latter a gender difference.
Once that's established, a social scientist can refer to "sex" or "gender" differences without having to explain again the distinction between biologically-determined and socially-determined roles and behaviors. In the 1940s and 1950s, when "gender" first started seeing use in this way, that may have been helpful. It's sort of self-evident now.
This might be the most coherent definition I've seen, and is the only one that's given me pause.
I'm a pretty hard adaptationist, so this kind of distinction can only go so far for me. Whatever you want to say about the adaptationists, the, "environmentalists," dubiously ascribe everything to accidents of history and whims of culture which are allegedly perfectly arbitrary. I don't believe that. I'm ignorant on the true extent of variation in cultural norms (I know it's greatly exaggerated). But I will say this: culture is as thoroughly biological a concept as you can get.
Aside from that, *why* should sex differences which were naturally and sexually selected be called "sex differences" while those which were arbitrarily decided by culture be called "gender differences"? Of what utility is that? And how could an individual be said to possess a gender under this definition? I confess that I don't think anyone uses it this way outside of repeating, "gender is a social construct" (by which they mean different things).
I agree that no one "has" a gender, or even a "gender identity," which is just another way of saying one would prefer that a different set of social expectations would apply than those with which one was blessed at birth. But gender, as a set of conceptual categories for looking at human behavior, is a valid and somewhat useful analytical tool. It is helpful to understand that the outward trappings of sex in a given society, such as clothing, are arbitrary and not dictated by biology, and it's a valid field of study to understand how far these societal diktats extend. Yes, it's not an earth-shattering idea, but it's helpful to have an easy term with which to refer to the concept.
I don't know that French PM had the same issues we see here. I think it's the Catholicism over the Protestantism.
I agree, most don't appreciate the degree to which the American Founders / the liberal Enlightenment viewed themselves as doing for politics / law what the protestants did for religion (returning matters of interpretation / argument to the people rather than an elite priesthood). I wrote about that, here: https://footnotephysicist.blogspot.com/2024/05/founders-or-unfounded.html.
The belief that one is female can be a delusion; the desire to be female cannot--it's simply a desire. Many non-woke AGPs and HSTSs recognize that they aren't and can't become female, but still desire to present as women.
Yes, it's turtles all the way down in terms of language.
The problem with the academy these days is that it takes outlier issues and predicates entire social movements and solutions upon them. In an effort to "include" the "marginalized" we're all supposed to act as if we don't look like our biological sex ergo we need to tell everyone what we think we are. There is domestic violence therefore all men are bad, therefore divorce is the go-to solution for marital problems, some people are not heterosexual ergo we should obsess about being gay...
The whole dysphoria thing demands that a mental issue be "normalized." Throughout most people's lives, there is a struggle with one's physical self. I have periodically felt uncomfortable in my body for a variety of reasons; hacking it into pieces obviously would not have been the solution.
Now everyone has "trauma" and some "mental illness" -- we need to collectively get off this victim train back into some semblance of sanity.
It sounds like we are not a million miles away in our general understanding. I take the point that overlapping distributions are not formally bimodal unless the modes are resolved visually. However as a scientist this is somewhat semantic, as if the data generating process is bimodal it explains the data better to model accordingly. The question, after significance is confirmed is then how meaningful the effect size is, it is quite a large effect as far as effects go, even if the natural variance due to other genetic and environmental factors obscures the individual peaks in a plot.
As to the examples, marathons may be more even than other sports. Women actually have an advantage in ultramarathon events as they can better maintain fat stores. Weightlifting, I would guess,conditioned on weight, would pretty nearly divide men and women at a given threshold.
As an aside, when modelling the mean it's not the underlying variable distribution that needs to be normal, it's the errors (for the best linear unbiased estimator). If you posit gender is significantly different and it actually is then you will reduce the overall error in your model and the error distribution will also be normal.
As to whether the effect is relevant enough against other factors, that is another question but from a purely descriptive stats perspective you would always include a variable if it's significant (and also potentially even if it's not, if it's reasonable to assume it is based on other research etc).
It's also worth noting that bimodality is a rather misleading lens of thinking about measurable difference. It's really asking for a model with near perfect predictive power and nothing in practical terms could be expected to achieve this. But this overlooks what we can know in regards to things are statistically significant. Gender is, so it points to a causal evolutionary mechanism, which is well explained by our different evolutionary trajectories.
I knew that gender ideology was not just ordinary bullshit but a special kind of bullshit, and I thank you for this cogent explanation.
You mentioned that sex is binary in nature. It’s worth being precise. It is largely correct for terrestrial vertebrates. However, fish often have no differentiated sex chromosomes but instead environmental factors determine their sex. Some species are even sequential hermaphrodites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_hermaphroditism
The bell curves in height distributions of men and women overlap to such a great degree that they do not count as bimodal at all. This even though 'everyone knows' that height is bimodal in humans. It's not. Be skeptical if anyone tells you that anything else is bimodal in men vs women.
Someone should look to see what the modal bench press weight is, or number of real male-type pushups each of several thousand randomly selected people can do, and see if even upper-body strength is truly bimodal. I suspect it is, but "agreeableness" or "competitiveness" probably isn't.
To be bimodal, the two modes have to be separated by at least two standard deviations in the character being measured. Height has just a single smeared-out ("skewed") mode, with a longer rightward tail because extremely tall people are nearly always male, while extremely short people can be of either sex.
Height is bimodal because the distribution doesn’t look the same at all for each sex.
Even though the averages are not too far and if you concern yourself with only what’s around the average you might conclude that it’s similar enough to pretend it’s the same.
But the much more spread out distribution for men is precisely what makes it bimodal.
What’s more, if you add a single variable to height, the difference will become even more obvious. Any subsequent variable addition will only pile up on this distinction.
Trying to pretend the sex are not very different by looking at a single variable in isolation is extremely dishonest.
What make the sexes different is all the variables combined that gives a specific result that is completely improbable/impossible for the opposite sex.
I was talking about height only, which is not bimodal. You can look this up.
I'm not trying to pretend the sexes aren't very different in aggregate, so don't accuse me of dishonesty. Of course they are. I'm only trying to discourage use of bimodalty in its cartoon senses of artificially drawn bell curves on unlabeled graphs in PowerPoint presentations.
Well it does look like that you are trying to argue that height isn’t bimodal.
I wasn’t sure about this, so I looked it up and not only it definitely is bimodal but the average for each sex also has quite a significant difference.
https://ourworldindata.org/human-height
In this page they go through all the differences for the whole world but also per country/region.
Towards the end the page they present a graph of the distribution for each sex. It is bimodal and the curves area intersect much less than they diverge.
So what do you actually mean ?
The two curves are separated by a little less than one standard deviation. As I said in my first comment, true bimodality is defined when the two modes differ by two standard deviations. Therefore height is not bimodal according to that definition.
Oh ok I see, you are actually arguing the absolute correctness of the vocabulary. I didn’t get it in the first comment because it didn’t seem relevant.
I’m no statistician and my last stats course was quite a while ago but I’ve looked up quickly and you can commonly find that a bimodal distribution is when there is 2 distinct pics in the distribution.
That makes perfect sense and is precise/general enough to be useful in most cases.
Now maybe the « official » definition in stats course is the requirement of 2 std separation but that seems like something that would only be invoked if the distribution wasn’t distinct enough to be sure of bi modality.
Maybe statistician are more pedantic than French language academicians, kind of hilarious.
So you are probably right but arguing that height distribution isn’t bimodal when a cursory glance at the curve tells you otherwise is very weird to me.
I think I can explain why we are confusing each other. Go back to that figure of the histograms you cited from Our World in Data, upthread. Note that they don't depict a single population with (allegedly) two peaks (or modes). They depict *two populations* pre-separated by sex, one is men, the other is women, displayed on the same graph. (Technically they aren't populations, they are large samples used to estimate the height, in each population from which they are drawn.) So it's not depicting *a* bimodal population. It's depicting two populations on the same graph, the populations separated by sex before counting the heights of each member of each sample. Clear so far?
Now, imagine combining the two samples back into the common population (males and females) from which both were drawn. To do this, you count at each height along the horizontal axis the number of men at that height and the number of women at that height, add them together, and put a dot above that height at the vertical axis for that summed number. The vertical axis doesn't have any units so you'll have to just measure in millimetres or whatever. At -2SD for women (150.6 cm) you won't add any men, because almost none are that short. At -1SD for women (157.6 cm) you'll add only a few millimetres worth of men. At the mean for women (164.7 cm, which = mode in normal distributions), you add about 20 mm worth of men (based on eyeballing my computer screen) to the 100 mm or so of women at the mean. At +1SD for women, you add about 60 mm worth of men to the 60 mm worth of women because that's where the curves happen to cross. Then at the +2SD for women you add about 20 mm worth of women to the 90 mm worth of men (which happens to be the mean (=mode) for men.) The rest of the combined curve is essentially just the men, because very few women are that tall.
So if you connect together with a sketch all the dots you just placed, you will get a combined slightly lumpy curve that has a single but slightly smeary mode at about 165-171 cm because that's the one height range that had the maximum number of combined men and women. On my computer screen that single mode is about 120 mm high, which is higher than any other summed point. The modal height in this mixed human population is 171 cm because a lot of women are that tall (even though it's taller than their female mode) and a lot of men are that short (even though it's shorter than their male mode.) There's only one mode.
Crucially, even though there is a deep valley between the male mode and the female mode in the separated samples, giving the illusion of bimodality, there is no valley in the combined curve.
Looking back at the figure, you see that the mean of the women's heights and the mean of the men's heights differ by less than the sum of their standard deviations -- they are only about one standard deviation apart. Therefore the combined population can be predicted not to show bimodality and it doesn't. IQ scores between blacks and whites, which are also about a standard deviation apart, would show a similar effect.
The actual accurately drawn frequency histogram of height looks like Figure 2 on page 3 of this paper. You can sort of see the taller males starting to emerge to the right out of the shorter women. But still only one mode. No valley in between.
https://staff.washington.edu/tamre/IsHumanHeightBimodal.pdf
Not bimodal.
For human height to exhibit bimodality you would have to combine all the basketball players in the NBA with a similar-sized population of dwarves. I predict from intuition that the modal heights in those two populations differs by more than the sum of their standard deviations and will be truly bimodal. There would be a valley in the middle, say 5'7" with very few dwarves and very few B-ballers. But that is obviously a cherry-picked example just to illustrate a point. The weight of humans and the weight of mice probably shows bimodality too. But the height of men and women is not bimodal. Men and women are just so much more similar to each other than they are to mice. Which kind of makes sense.
Just because you don't understand statistics doesn't mean you can ridicule its rules of inference. Bimodality has important consequences for the validity of statistical tests, which much of what we think we know in sociobiology is based on. Everybody knows that the police kill black people far out of proportion to whites. Except that good data collection and statistical analysis by Roland Fryer showed they don't.
Hope this was helpful.
You are correct. There are statistical test for bimodality and height is unquestionably a bimodal distribution. Bimodal just mean having two modes or peeks.
Thank you. One background addition: the Kantian phenomena (gender)/noumena (sex) distinction has been used by the phenomenologists (vs Husserl). This places the distinction as the offspring of Kantian liberalism and the ethical demand of the ‘categorical imperative’ that gives a crusading ethic to the movement.