Gender Essentialism

Anything to do with gender and the status of women and men.

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Phil8659
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Re: Gender Essentialism

Post by Phil8659 »

Immanuel Can wrote: Tue Jul 05, 2022 6:27 pm
Phil8659 wrote: Tue Jul 05, 2022 6:25 pm What type of person cannot think any better than a vegetable, search Aristotle.
The same type of person who cannot do grammar.
Good,

Now show you know the basic principles of grammar and answer the questions I asked.
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Immanuel Can
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Re: Gender Essentialism

Post by Immanuel Can »

Phil8659 wrote: Tue Jul 05, 2022 6:30 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: Tue Jul 05, 2022 6:27 pm
Phil8659 wrote: Tue Jul 05, 2022 6:25 pm What type of person cannot think any better than a vegetable, search Aristotle.
The same type of person who cannot do grammar.
Good,

Now show you know the basic principles of grammar and answer the questions I asked.
No, thank you. You're not interesting.

And what's really, really boring is the kind of "flame war" you're hoping to gin up in place of a conversation. I find that sooooo boring! :roll:

So no, I'm not interested. If you had said something worthwhile, thoughtful, or relevant I might have been. But you didn't, and now I'm not.
Phil8659
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Re: Gender Essentialism

Post by Phil8659 »

Immanuel Can wrote: Tue Jul 05, 2022 6:32 pm No, thank you. You're not interesting.

And what's really, really boring is the kind of "flame war" you're hoping to gin up in place of a conversation. I find that sooooo boring! :roll:

So no, I'm not interested. If you had said something worthwhile, thoughtful, or relevant I might have been. But you didn't, and now I'm not.
And again, the turtle draws it's head back into its transparent shell.

You must be very young. Only children believe that imocons are a form of conversation.
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Astro Cat
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Re: Gender Essentialism

Post by Astro Cat »

Immanuel Can wrote: Tue Jul 05, 2022 6:22 pm
Phil8659 wrote: Tue Jul 05, 2022 6:20 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: Tue Jul 05, 2022 6:15 pm
The data are there. Make use of them, or hide your head in the sand.

Which you do, I care not. 8)
So, when are you going to show anyone that you can answer the questions...
When you have a relevant question, one the suppositions of which I can even accept as a starting point.

About then. :wink:
I stifled a giggle when he said “gibberish”

Anyway, I’ll be back with a keyboard finally tonight.
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Astro Cat
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Re: Gender Essentialism

Post by Astro Cat »

Immanuel Can wrote: Sun Jul 03, 2022 11:31 pm Why should anybody expect human beings to be somehow radically different in these ways from other mammals? How do you explain it?
Why humans have different complex cognitive abilities than animals like abstraction, planning, language, culture, etc.? It's not entirely qualitative because some non-human animals have these things in some degree, even culture (e.g., apes passing down knowledge of tool using skills while other groups of the same primates lack the knowledge). This seems like a neuroscience question to me (at least on the worldview that minds are emergent of brains, which I hold). I think this is explained on such a view, even without my being able to give exact neuroscience details.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote:I think we need to draw a distinction between trans issues in children and trans issues in adults.
Well, I'm not sure we do. I mean, I recognize that children are less able to make good decisions than adults are, but I don't even see that in this case the adults are making a good decision.

If body dysmorphia is a mental disorder, then it's not good in either case.
Astro Cat wrote:With an adult trans person, it's their body and their choice
Why?

Would we say, "Well, with an adult heroin addict, it's his choice." Or would we say, "With an adult self abuser, it's her choice?" Really?

This gets the the heart of the matter. What we need to realize is that nobody is hating on transers here. Rather, there are two different thoughts about the appropriate response to trans ideation: one group says that the best way to "help" is to encourage them to do what they seem to want to do to themselves, and to "normalize" it for them. The other group says, "That's not caring at all; what we need to do to help these people is to treat their mental illness, so they can adjust to reality and normalize themselves."

Nobody's trying to be uncaring, except the virtue signallers, who are simply using trans people to pose as "accepting" or "open minded," but who don't actually give a fig about how much suffering they contribute to. Among the well-intended, there are those who want to mainline the disorder, and those who want to treat it. But both agree on only this one thing: transers are (for one reason or another) in a bad place; and the right thing to do is to help them.

They experience suicidal ideation at a rate higher than any other demographic. Not because of prejudice, because they don't experience worse rejection than young black males (who have the lowest rate of suicidal ideation) or Jews during the Holocaust (who had almost the equivalent rate of suicidal ideation, the highest). But more than that, we know that post-trans dysmorphics have exactly the same rates of suicidal ideation as those prior to transition...around 46%. And it seems to make no difference if they can "pass" or not, either.

What the data shows is that body dysmorphia is a very serious mental illness, and is highly indexed to self-loathing and self-mutilation, and to the desire to die...and that "normalizing" it provides no treatment at all.

So advocating for "normalization" isn't treatment, and isn't helping. So what is it? :?
Where did you get your figures that gender-affirming transitioning doesn't impact suicidal ideation? For instance, according to this paper from Harvard Medical School authors:
Almazan & Keuroghlian 2021 wrote:Of the 27 715 respondents, 3559 (12.8%) endorsed undergoing 1 or more types of gender-affirming surgery at least 2 years prior to submitting survey responses, while 16 401 (59.2%) endorsed a desire to undergo 1 or more types of gender-affirming surgery but denied undergoing any of these. Of the respondents in this study sample, 16 182 (81.1%) were between the ages of 18 and 44 years, 16 386 (82.1%) identified as White, 7751 (38.8%) identified as transgender women, 6489 (32.5%) identified as transgender men, and 5300 (26.6%) identified as nonbinary. After adjustment for sociodemographic factors and exposure to other types of gender-affirming care, undergoing 1 or more types of gender-affirming surgery was associated with lower past-month psychological distress (adjusted odds ratio [aOR], 0.58; 95% CI, 0.50-0.67; P < .001), past-year smoking (aOR, 0.65; 95% CI, 0.57-0.75; P < .001), and past-year suicidal ideation (aOR, 0.56; 95% CI, 0.50-0.64; P < .001).
(Emphasis added).

Described in plain English here:
FenwayHealth wrote:The study, titled “Association Between Gender-Affirming Surgeries and Mental Health Outcomes,” compared the psychological distress, substance use, and suicide risk of 3,559 transgender people who had undergone gender-affirming surgery with those of 16,401 transgender people who desired gender-affirming surgery but had not yet undergone any. It found that transgender people who had received one or more gender-affirming surgical procedures had a 42% reduction in the odds of experiencing past-month psychological distress, a 35% reduction in the odds of past-year tobacco smoking, and a 44% reduction in the odds of past-year suicidal ideation.

This study also found that people who received all of the gender-affirming surgeries they desired had significant reductions in the odds of every adverse mental health outcome examined, including past-year suicide attempts and past-month binge alcohol use. Furthermore, compared to people who only received some of the gender-affirming surgeries they desired, people who received all of their desired surgeries experienced even more profound mental health benefits across every outcome.
(Emphasis added).

Prior to this study, the correlation between stages of transition and suicidal ideation was just inferred (as noted here, in the Discussion section).

It seems as though the notion that gender-affirming care helps people can't just be dismissed based on the latest, most focused (on this specific relation) data.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote: Yet if I had listened to some people, I wouldn't be a scientist precisely because I am female.
I don't know who you were talking to.
One of my high school teachers (despite handing in a pre-ACT with a 34), (bless her) my Mom for a while, random-ass kids in junior and high school; and that's just the explicit stuff. Now to be fair, my school is awesome and even my PI encouraged me to get involved in the program aimed at alleviating barriers for women in STEM (which I do, when I can). But I'm just saying, this kind of shit still exists. It has a real effect on people.
Immanuel Can wrote:I do know that where I live, they're dying to get enough women into science. They're offering preferential admission, quotas, easy scholarships -- but not enough will come. Not many want it, for some reason. Why? I don't know. But it certainly isn't lack of encouragement.
You can hold a carrot at the end of a mine field and not get much interest, to be dramatic about it. The problem is multifaceted. I've yearned to work in science since I was tiny, and even I thought about turning away at times.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote: I'm happy to be a woman
How do you know you are? :shock:

What makes you sure? What is a "woman"?

I'm not being snide...I genuinely want us to ask what criteria we're accepting when we call somebody a "woman," or say, "I know I'm a woman."

If "being a woman" has no essence, no special reality, no unique feature, then what can you mean when you say "I"m happy to be a woman?"
Remember, the worldview on gender is that gender and sex are separate and there are two contexts to these words. Humans are pretty good at flipping between contexts once they understand them. In this case I was talking about my phenotypic, biological sex (female) and being happy that my gender aligns with my sex.
Immanuel Can wrote: Not necessarily. Maybe it only becomes complex when we try to interpret it through an incoherent paradigm. It seems to me that body dysmorphia is what's involved...mental illness. But mental illness has been turned into a fad, through social contagion, which is powered by a combination of both social media and the virtue signallers in the public. And the victims of it are primarily young women going through their normal uncertainty period in the early teen years.

That's what all the data shows. So I think we should stick with the data, not with a speculative narrative arranged for us by the mentally ill or mendacious. The data will be our friend here.
And the data shows that gender-affirming care helps adult trans people. This is why I think the issue of pushing young people is a separate issue in a complex web of issues. We will probably agree more often than not on what's appropriate for children expressing curiosity in trans issues.
Immanuel Can wrote: Well, there are a couple of issues here is who has control of my language. My answer is, "I do." My speech is not dictated by others. And I am willing to bear full responsibility for what I say. In this matter, I choose to speak truth, and not to lie to people, even when the PC crowd wants me to.

But the second issue is even more important. I don't believe that encouraging delusions is actually a kind or loving action. I believe it would be hateful and selfish of me to speak lies to the mentally ill, encouraging them to plunge deeper into their delusion while seeking to curry favour with the PC set. So out of kindness to the body dysmorphic individual, I choose to remind them (gently and appropriately) of what their true biological reality is. For their happiness, I believe, consists in coming to grips with the givenness of what they truly are.

And the third issue is most important of all. I would be telling lies before the face of my God. I make enough errors all by myself; I would be ashamed before Him to be caught deliberately lying, and thus doing harm to others. How would I make my account, then?
Using a person's chosen name or gender-appropriate pronouns aren't lies, though. They are only lies on the worldview that gender is exactly the same thing as sex. But the trans person isn't saying that gender is the same thing as sex, are they? Even if you disagree with their worldview, you may have to re-evaluate whether what they're doing is lying. The worldview on gender is that gender is a social and psychological construct, just a signal to society about how a person is going to act and how they want to be treated in a gendered way. If a trans person says her pronouns are she/her, she's not lying: she's saying "I'm going to behave in a feminine way and I'd ask you to treat me in a feminine way, please." She's not saying "I am a phenotypic/biological female," which of course would be delusional/lying. But that's not what she's doing.

As for names, surely we all have the sovereignty over our own names. It is a bullying tactic on playgrounds to, for instance, take someone that goes by a shortened nickname, use their full name (or an embarrassing middle name or something), and then when they protest say "well it's your name, isn't it?" It's mean-spirited, and the bully could of course make righteous arguments about how they're only speaking the truth. (Now, I don't think you are ill-intentioned or a bully. But I am saying that despite your good intentions, you could be having an adverse effect on peoples' mental health. I understand you feel the reverse about my worldview. Just laying it out as I see it).
Immanuel Can wrote:May I encourage you not to [skip the Matt Walsh part]?

There is a particularly amazing part of the film, where he is talking to a de-transitioner. And I am certain you would not find your heart unwrung by the manifest pain this courageous person has gone through. It's a woman, now a man, named Scott Newgent. It's really something you have to see...if you have a sincere concern for this issue.
I would be lucky to find the time, plus this is not something I need to be convinced of (I am fully aware that de-transitioners are in heart-wrenching pain and anguish). You want to make me cry? :(

I do not delegitimize de-transitioners' stories, experiences, and issues. I would understand needing to watch it if I did.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote: As for this "gammas" thing, I do not at all ascribe to the alpha/beta/gamma/omega/whatever
Okay. But there's really something to it. And men, who live in a different value scheme than women do, all know there's something to it.

Alphas are a real thing. So are gammas. And men know which is which. You can debate some other classes...like "what's a beta or a delta," or "is anybody really so gone as an "omega." That's fine. But the broad idea of the "ladder" or "hierarchy" of males is a definite male reality... one that you're just going to have to take on faith, since you probably can't even experience it yourself.
Perhaps I can't, but I feel like the hierarchy concept is just binning a multitude of wildly varying personality traits with extra steps. Anyone I've ever seen described or self-described as an "alpha" has just been an asshole. The men in my life are even in my life because they are strong, empathetic, perceptive, and intelligent men. Some might be closer to the stereotypical tops of the chart you posted, but others are more the brooding thinking type, even nurturing (and there is nothing feminine about how they go about it). I feel like the labels on the chart just don't help because they try to pigeonhole too many disparate personality types into too few bins, often with undeserved negative connotations.

Besides, we'd be kidding ourselves if we didn't think there is hierarchy in women, because there certainly is. I think personalities and hierarchies are far more complex than the greek letter system (built on fundamentally wrong understanding of wolves from my understanding, by the way: the so-called "alphas" ended up indeed having a special authority and relationship over the pack: they were the parents).
Immanuel Can wrote:It's interesting...If I tried to tell you there was no such thing as female cruelty to females, you'd (probably quite rightly) spit your drink across the table in astonishment, wouldn't you? But men often are oblivious to the many ways in which females take revenge on each other. In the same way, a woman's world is not like the man's world, in these things: all men know the male power hierarchy exists. And they all know what a gamma (or weak, female-appeasing, vengeful manling) is. They've all seen them, dealt with them, and (if they're sensible) despised them. And good men know you never trust a gamma.

A wise woman will listen to what men are telling her about that. Your "allies" may not be allies. Be careful. Be especially careful with men who never seem to "cross" you, and won't tell you if they disagree with you, and won't stand up for any principles you don't approve for them first. These are not good men. Trust me.

And females actually sense this. Smart ones reject gammas, because they can feel something "not right" and "not really masculine" radiating off them.
I mean I know the kind of man you're talking about when you describe a gamma's traits, but it feels like you apply the label too broadly. Such men don't last long in women's groups, movements, or my friends circles. They are common enough to be understood but not common enough, I think, to talk about male allies as though they're mostly or even largely this kind of man.
Immanuel Can wrote:Yes, of course. And if my daughter wants to take a firearms course, she can. And if my son wants to take literature instead of STEM, he can. No problem. But I don't have to tell my son that studying literature makes him "female," or my daughter than snapping off a few rounds from a .22 makes her a "boy." My goal would be for both to like the body they were born in, be grateful and well-adjusted, and find an appropriate way of using the given for the glory of God.

But a boy is still a boy, and a girl is still a girl; and I would not betray them by teaching them that they can thwart DNA, reality and God by pretending to be something they simply are not, and definitely not by way of self-mutilation. There remain two sexes, and regardless of what activities they undertake, those two are still all there is. I'd want them to know that, and be good with that.
Then we are in agreement if we're not going to discourage girls or boys from pursuing what piques their interest on gendered accounts (e.g. not discourage the boy from a nurturing career, not discourage the girl from an analytical one).

The last thing in your post was the image of the "socio sexual hierarchy," and I've given some of my opinions on that. I still don't find it useful, if anything, it makes some people more obnoxious as they badly try to emulate traits they think belong higher on the hierarchy and it might irk people that are still fantastic people that hold different traits.

You say all men know the power hierarchy exists, but I think it doesn't hold as much sway over men that you think it might. I doubt the men I know even think or care about such things (though then again they don't seem to have trouble getting laid, girlfriends, wives, boyfriends, husbands, whatever, so maybe they are simply all alphas or whatever).

Anyway! Sorry for the long delay, it was a long weekend. I'll be out of town this weekend starting Friday as well to cross off a bucket list show and do some touristy stuff in Chicago. I'll still be responding through Thursday though.
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Immanuel Can
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Re: Gender Essentialism

Post by Immanuel Can »

Astro Cat wrote: Wed Jul 06, 2022 7:00 am
Immanuel Can wrote: Sun Jul 03, 2022 11:31 pm Why should anybody expect human beings to be somehow radically different in these ways from other mammals? How do you explain it?
Why humans have different complex cognitive abilities than animals like abstraction, planning, language, culture, etc.?
Sure. But these are only further indicators that men are NOT mere animals. They're something quite special, something far more than any animal or all of them.

But why? That's the key question: why should only one creature on the face of the planet be capable of these radical differences?
It's not entirely qualitative
Did you mean "quantitative"? As in, "with higher complexity"? Or did you mean "qualitative," as in "different in quality?"
...because some non-human animals have these things in some degree, even culture (e.g., apes passing down knowledge of tool using skills while other groups of the same primates lack the knowledge). This seems like a neuroscience question to me (at least on the worldview that minds are emergent of brains, which I hold). I think this is explained on such a view, even without my being able to give exact neuroscience details.
Well, "emergence theory" is a non-explanation, I would say.

I've done quite a bit of study on it. And I highly recommend the writings of Jaegwon Kim, if you want to see the particular problems with trying to explain mind by way of "emergence." But to be brief,one huge problem is that "emergence" theory says that once an organism (I.e. man, for they do not posit it for any other creature) reaches a certain level of complexity, a new phenomenon discontinuous with all the previous ones (i.e. mind) sort of magically "leaps out" or "emerges" from the organism. No cause, no explanation of the how, or of the mechanics of it, or of the relation between mind and brain matter: just "emerges." :shock:

Really, all they are trying to say is that when the human brain reaches a certain complexity (and they cannot define the point), mind just pops out like a jack-in-the-box (for no reason they can tell you). So it's a total failure as a material explanation. It explains absolutely nothing. It says little more then "Mind happens." :?
Where did you get your figures that gender-affirming transitioning doesn't impact suicidal ideation?
A bunch of places.

But let's start here: https://www.heritage.org/gender/comment ... e-evidence

https://womanmeanssomething.com/transit ... -outcomes/

We should add this, too suicidal ideation on both sides of the dysmorphia equation are all far, far higher than the national average, and far lower than populations that claim to experience far more discrimination and have far less success in passing as any other identity. (black males are a good example). And we also need to consider that in cases of early body dysmorphia, about 95% of the early reporters can self-correct to normal by adulthood if they are not interfered with and given gender reassignment or sex suppression "therapies."

In short, it's not just "teachers" who need to "leave them kids alone"; it's the whole medical industry.
Immanuel Can wrote:I do know that where I live, they're dying to get enough women into science. They're offering preferential admission, quotas, easy scholarships -- but not enough will come. Not many want it, for some reason. Why? I don't know. But it certainly isn't lack of encouragement.
You can hold a carrot at the end of a mine field and not get much interest, to be dramatic about it.
No, I don't think that's it...there are just too many positives being offered. I honestly don't think the universities and other agencies could be MORE enthused about getting women in. And if they could, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anything they could do that they haven't already done; which means that even if there were some barriers remaining, there'd be nothing left to be done but for the women in question to decide not to let them stop them.
The problem is multifaceted. I've yearned to work in science since I was tiny, and even I thought about turning away at times.
Because somebody told you to? Or did you have indecision of your own?
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote: I'm happy to be a woman
How do you know you are? :shock:

What makes you sure? What is a "woman"?

I'm not being snide...I genuinely want us to ask what criteria we're accepting when we call somebody a "woman," or say, "I know I'm a woman."

If "being a woman" has no essence, no special reality, no unique feature, then what can you mean when you say "I"m happy to be a woman?"
Remember, the worldview on gender is that gender and sex are separate and there are two contexts to these words.
No, that's not true.

That's neo-Marxist ideology. It bares no resemblance at all to reality, like most neo-Marxist propgaganda. "Sex" is the correct term. And for "gender" the term "sexual practices" is apt. There's no magical "gender" that is both essentializable and not essentializable -- which is what neo-Marxism asks us to think.

For they tell us that a dysmophic person both is not their sex (hardcore anti-essentialism) and imperatively must be made into the new sex (hardcore essentialism). :shock: :shock: :shock:

But you can't "need to be made into" something that simply does not exist. If there is no such essential thing as a "woman," then Bruce Jenner cannot "need to be made into one." And if Bruce's femaleness IS essentializeable, then so is Bruce's maleness.

It is utterly impossible for both to be true. But illogic never stopped neo-Marxists.

So we have to ask, again, "What is a woman?" That's the pressing question. If there's no such thing, nobody can need to be one. If there IS such a thing, then nobody can simply elect to be one.

You're a woman, you say. And again I ask, "How do you know?" :shock: How? How? What do you look at, that tells you you are? What's the essence of being what you claim you essentially are?
...the data shows that gender-affirming care helps adult trans people.

You really, really need to see the interview section on Scott Newgent. I think you'll have quite a different perspective.

But here's some other data to consider: https://post-trans.com/Detrans-Resources
Immanuel Can wrote: Well, there are a couple of issues here is who has control of my language. My answer is, "I do." My speech is not dictated by others. And I am willing to bear full responsibility for what I say. In this matter, I choose to speak truth, and not to lie to people, even when the PC crowd wants me to.

But the second issue is even more important. I don't believe that encouraging delusions is actually a kind or loving action. I believe it would be hateful and selfish of me to speak lies to the mentally ill, encouraging them to plunge deeper into their delusion while seeking to curry favour with the PC set. So out of kindness to the body dysmorphic individual, I choose to remind them (gently and appropriately) of what their true biological reality is. For their happiness, I believe, consists in coming to grips with the givenness of what they truly are.

And the third issue is most important of all. I would be telling lies before the face of my God. I make enough errors all by myself; I would be ashamed before Him to be caught deliberately lying, and thus doing harm to others. How would I make my account, then?
Using a person's chosen name or gender-appropriate pronouns aren't lies, though.
But to pretend a man is a woman, or a woman is a man? That's a lie.
Even if you disagree with their worldview, you may have to re-evaluate whether what they're doing is lying.
I didn't say they were. I said they are deceived, and mentally ill. So they say things that aren't true, but they're not trying to lie.

What I said is that I will not lie. I will not strengthen their delusion or cultivate mental illness in them. That would be wicked. And nobody has a right to try to make me lie, because nobody has such authority over me.
She's not saying "I am a phenotypic/biological female," which of course would be delusional/lying. But that's not what she's doing.
Why would I, why would you, strengthen the "delusion" (as you call it) of a mentally-ill person? That's not an act of kindness.
Immanuel Can wrote:May I encourage you not to [skip the Matt Walsh part]?

There is a particularly amazing part of the film, where he is talking to a de-transitioner. And I am certain you would not find your heart unwrung by the manifest pain this courageous person has gone through. It's a woman, now a man, named Scott Newgent. It's really something you have to see...if you have a sincere concern for this issue.
I would be lucky to find the time, plus this is not something I need to be convinced of (I am fully aware that de-transitioners are in heart-wrenching pain and anguish). You want to make me cry? :(
You very much might. When I heard Scott's story, it pretty much was devastating. But some things are worth knowing, even if it's painful. This matter is, by all accounts, a serious matter, and deserves full information.

One thing Scott talks about, that most people never think about, is the windfall to big pharma and big medicine that comes every time a child "transitions." It's a huge cash cow. Scott says it's something like 70-100 thousand dollars, if I remember what she said accurately (Scott now identifies back as a woman, though unfortunately for her, now looking exactly like a man.) Anyway, that somebody's got cash in the game, and a lot of it, is a very disconcerting realization, for sure.
I do not delegitimize de-transitioners' stories, experiences, and issues. I would understand needing to watch it if I did.

I don't even know what that means: "de-legitimize" their stories. You mean accuse them of lying?

Well, if Scott et al. are not lying, then the one thing you're going to realize is that there ARE definite cases in which gender-transitioning is mental, physical and economic abuse of the highest order. And so you'll be unlikely to leap to advocacy for transitions for dysmoprhic individuals. You'll realize that it can be quite an atrocity.
Anyone I've ever seen described or self-described as an "alpha" has just been an asshole.
Real alphas and sigmas never need to tell you what they are.

It's the gammas who will want you to believe they're alphas when they're not.
Besides, we'd be kidding ourselves if we didn't think there is hierarchy in women, because there certainly is.
Yes, but it's different.

With women, it seems the hierarchies form groups, and power is distributed within groups. But with men, it's more like living on a ladder. Relative position is always known; and even when two men are, generally speaking, on the same "rung," they each have different "rungs" for different things...and tend to be very aware of that.

All I can tell you is that it's different. And a lot of what women accuse men of failing to do or be comes from their mistaken attributions of how men actually think about and experience the world -- and I know you'll find the same happens in the case of women: that men who assume women think the way they do are almost always wrong.

A good example is the one I gave earlier: crying. Men just think about the act of weeping differently than women do. They tend to experience different emotions when it happens, and have different senses of social context of tears. If a woman burst into tears in a gathering of women, she gets sympathy, probably. If a man suddenly bursts into tears, shock and horror is what he's more likely to get...and rightly so, because he's likely mentally ill. For sure, something is terribly, terribly wrong, and it has caused this poor man to break. And when you give sympathy to the woman, she'll feel reassured and loved; but the man will feel ashamed, looked-down at, and humiliated by the pity. What he wants to hear is something more like, "Dude; we can handle this: get it together, 'cuz we're not beaten yet." That restores his composition, his status and his sense of power, which are essential to his view of himself as a man. For a woman, the message "Get it together" would sound hostile and unsympathetic.

It's just different, you see.
I think personalities and hierarchies are far more complex than the greek letter system
They are: it's admittedly a simplification. But it's not really wrong, for all that. It gets to something real about the patterns evident in male social dynamics.

And women know it, too, on a visceral level. The alphas and sigmas get most of the girls, statistically. The rest have to make do as they can, and wait to see what's left over and available. And it's the women who make that choice, not the men.
Immanuel Can wrote:It's interesting...If I tried to tell you there was no such thing as female cruelty to females, you'd (probably quite rightly) spit your drink across the table in astonishment, wouldn't you? But men often are oblivious to the many ways in which females take revenge on each other. In the same way, a woman's world is not like the man's world, in these things: all men know the male power hierarchy exists. And they all know what a gamma (or weak, female-appeasing, vengeful manling) is. They've all seen them, dealt with them, and (if they're sensible) despised them. And good men know you never trust a gamma.

A wise woman will listen to what men are telling her about that. Your "allies" may not be allies. Be careful. Be especially careful with men who never seem to "cross" you, and won't tell you if they disagree with you, and won't stand up for any principles you don't approve for them first. These are not good men. Trust me.

And females actually sense this. Smart ones reject gammas, because they can feel something "not right" and "not really masculine" radiating off them.
I mean I know the kind of man you're talking about when you describe a gamma's traits, but it feels like you apply the label too broadly. Such men don't last long in women's groups, movements, or my friends circles.
That's very true: the successes of gammas are always short lived. Women tend to "friend-zone" them fast. And as you know, "friend zone" for women does not mean actual "friendliness": it often means no more than "Don't hate me for rejecting you as a potential partner; hang around and be nice."

But yeah, if a man takes the label "ally," you can be almost certain he's a gamma.
You say all men know the power hierarchy exists, but I think it doesn't hold as much sway over men that you think it might.
I assure you, it does.

Men know men in ways women never do...just as women know women in ways men never will.
I doubt the men I know even think or care about such things (though then again they don't seem to have trouble getting laid, girlfriends, wives, boyfriends, husbands, whatever, so maybe they are simply all alphas or whatever).
An alpha or sigma, as I say, will never bother to tell you he's one. He's quite certain about himself, and feels no need to tell anyone. And as you say, alphas and sigmas tend to get plenty of interest from women, and often look quite effortless doing it.

The complainers are the gammas. The self-promoters are the gammas. The suck-ups and wanna-bes are gammas. And the self-appointed allies of women's causes are almost always gammas. They're there in hopes somebody female will mistake them for somebody better than they are.
Anyway! Sorry for the long delay, it was a long weekend. I'll be out of town this weekend starting Friday as well to cross off a bucket list show and do some touristy stuff in Chicago. I'll still be responding through Thursday though.
Chicago's a great town...except the south side, which you'll want to avoid. They're shooting people there. But the north part has some really cool stuff...great architecture (skyscraper) and tours, and the art gallery's world class.

No problem on the delay...PN is an optional forum, of course, and is here at convenience. You enjoy yourself.
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Meanwhile...

Post by uwot »

...in the irony void between Mr Can's ears:
Immanuel Can wrote: Wed Jul 06, 2022 3:15 pmAn alpha or sigma, as I say, will never bother to tell you he's one. He's quite certain about himself, and feels no need to tell anyone.
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Re: Gender Essentialism

Post by Immanuel Can »

Astro Cat wrote: Wed Jul 06, 2022 7:00 am
Immanuel Can wrote:It's really something you have to see...if you have a sincere concern for this issue.
I would be lucky to find the time,
Can you spare a minute or so? Is that to much to ask?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB4XyJLyY7s
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Re: Gender Essentialism

Post by Astro Cat »

Immanuel Can wrote: Wed Jul 06, 2022 3:15 pm Sure. But these are only further indicators that men are NOT mere animals. They're something quite special, something far more than any animal or all of them.

But why? That's the key question: why should only one creature on the face of the planet be capable of these radical differences?
Astro Cat wrote:It's not entirely qualitative
Did you mean "quantitative"? As in, "with higher complexity"? Or did you mean "qualitative," as in "different in quality?"

...

Well, "emergence theory" is a non-explanation, I would say.

I've done quite a bit of study on it. And I highly recommend the writings of Jaegwon Kim, if you want to see the particular problems with trying to explain mind by way of "emergence." But to be brief,one huge problem is that "emergence" theory says that once an organism (I.e. man, for they do not posit it for any other creature) reaches a certain level of complexity, a new phenomenon discontinuous with all the previous ones (i.e. mind) sort of magically "leaps out" or "emerges" from the organism. No cause, no explanation of the how, or of the mechanics of it, or of the relation between mind and brain matter: just "emerges." :shock:

Really, all they are trying to say is that when the human brain reaches a certain complexity (and they cannot define the point), mind just pops out like a jack-in-the-box (for no reason they can tell you). So it's a total failure as a material explanation. It explains absolutely nothing. It says little more then "Mind happens." :?
I did mean quantitative (by saying "it's not entirely qualitative"). This section seems like it may be becoming a separate topic, I am unsure whether or not we want to make an appropriate post elsewhere for it.

I have read the Wikipedia entry for Jaegwon Kim's philosophy of mind, and it does look fairly interesting. I will try to give some of his later work a read whenever I might have the time. I note that in his later work he still considers his pseudo-dualism to be "physicalist, or close enough." I should also note that I'm not committed to ontological physicalism, which I think self-refutes.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote:Where did you get your figures that gender-affirming transitioning doesn't impact suicidal ideation?
A bunch of places.

But let's start here: https://www.heritage.org/gender/comment ... e-evidence

https://womanmeanssomething.com/transit ... -outcomes/
Regarding the first link: This is the work of a single man that isn't even published in peer review, told by a conservative think-tank. Let's stick to scientific resources like the one I provided.

Regarding the second link: Here we have an organization that clearly has an agenda, which is just a red flag at the start; but let's look into the link itself. This is going to be some work because it covers a broad range of topics. The link comments on a few papers:

Nobili 2018, which is nearly entirely about why a lot of transgender studies are insufficient for drawing conclusions about gender-affirmation and quality of life. For instance, it notes many earlier studies don't even compare to pre-transition trans people. Scroll down and read the QoL sections (voice QoL, sex QoL, etc.) and everything you see there will be like "this study used cisgender people as a control," "this study didn't use pre-transition trans people as a comparison," so on and so forth. So, this paper is entirely about how we need newer, better studies to draw any conclusions. But I have posted one such newer, better-controlled study in my last post, which overwhelmingly supports gender-affirmation treatment as beneficial to the quality of life of trans people.

In Asscheman 2011, again we don't find a comparison to gender affirmation vs. non-affirmation, we just find statistics about death rates from suicide, AIDS, and drugs, all of which is a separate issue from gender affirmation (extremely marginalized people can often be driven to problems like these, so I don't know why these would be surprising results. It doesn't tell us anything about whether affirmation helps, it only tells us that trans people struggle with substance abuse, risky sex, and suicide).

In Dhejne 2011, again we find that the controls were cis people (from patients' birth sex, even; not from their affirmed gender). This study basically says that post-op trans people still have a higher suicide rate than cis people. But why should that be surprising? This says nothing at all about whether gender affirmation helps trans people, e.g., the control should have been pre-affirmation trans people. Again, the paper I posted does show that gender affirmation lowers the suicidal ideation rate.

In Simonsen 2016, even the "womenmeanssomething" group admits that the low study number makes it a poor quality study. What does the study say? Inconclusive: "Overall, 27.9% of the sample were registered with psychiatric morbidity before SRS and 22.1% after SRS (p = not significant). A total of 6.7% of the sample were registered with psychiatric morbidity both before and after SRS. Significantly more psychiatric diagnoses were found before SRS for those assigned as female at birth. Ten individuals were registered as deceased post-SRS with an average age of death of 53.5 years."

And so it goes down the list.

I will say probably the most important line from this second link is this one: "Some of the most recent findings of studies in the five-year follow-up range are also beginning to show cracks in the affirmation-only narrative."

But this is something of a good point. An affirmation-only narrative is a bad idea. I agree. But that's why people that are getting gender-affirmation care need evaluation. And again, as I showed in my last post, gender affirmation is sometimes the best route for trans people -- sometimes. But that is the point when the position I'm contesting is that it's never the best option.
Immanuel Can wrote: No, I don't think that's it...there are just too many positives being offered. I honestly don't think the universities and other agencies could be MORE enthused about getting women in. And if they could, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anything they could do that they haven't already done; which means that even if there were some barriers remaining, there'd be nothing left to be done but for the women in question to decide not to let them stop them.
As you've asked me to trust you about things regarding men, I may have to ask you to trust me that the barriers women face in STEM aren't just whether or not positions are open and scholarships available. Many of these barriers are psychosocial. Many people (regardless of sex or gender) drop out of advanced degrees because of imposter syndrome, just as one example: it is a very common thing nearly all grad students struggle with, but it's made worse for women and minorities because of underlying implicit biases.

Would you be surprised to hear that something like 2.5% of physicists are Black? Yet I doubt that you would argue (I hope you wouldn't!) that there's something "essential" to being a Black person and not wanting to be a physicist. The explanation is obviously due to cultural reasons even despite there existing similar programs offering rewards to Black students for signing up.

So again, the disparity in male-to-female physicists is a sociocultural thing, and it's not an easy thing to combat because not all systemic barriers are highly visible or easily fought. It has nothing to do with women fundamentally on some essential level not wanting to do STEM. Women initially sign up for STEM at about the same level as men, the interest is there. It's that we face psychosocial barriers that wear us down. It doesn't mean we are weak: men face psychosocial barriers like imposter syndrome, too. It's just that women are more likely to face more severe versions of these kinds of barriers. (Then, in a feedback loop, our absence contributes to making it equally as bad for the next generation, and so on).
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote:The problem is multifaceted. I've yearned to work in science since I was tiny, and even I thought about turning away at times.
Because somebody told you to? Or did you have indecision of your own?
Yes, as I said, some people told me so. Or because people treated me differently. It doesn't take being an explicit misogynist to make things awkward for a woman already feeling like a fish out of water. It could be behaving nervously around her, or talking over her, or repeating things she's already said and getting credit for it, and a whole litany of things. It's exhausting. I don't expect you to be able to just intuitively understand but I hope that you can imagine it.
Immanuel Can wrote: That's neo-Marxist ideology. It bares no resemblance at all to reality, like most neo-Marxist propgaganda. "Sex" is the correct term. And for "gender" the term "sexual practices" is apt. There's no magical "gender" that is both essentializable and not essentializable -- which is what neo-Marxism asks us to think.

For they tell us that a dysmophic person both is not their sex (hardcore anti-essentialism) and imperatively must be made into the new sex (hardcore essentialism). :shock: :shock: :shock:

But you can't "need to be made into" something that simply does not exist. If there is no such essential thing as a "woman," then [Jenner] cannot "need to be made into one." And if [Jenner]'s femaleness IS essentializeable, then so is [Jenner]'s maleness.

It is utterly impossible for both to be true. But illogic never stopped neo-Marxists.
Quote modified to remove deadname, brackets used where modified (I'm sorry, I will not contribute to deadnaming, but I will not just change a quote without documenting where it's changed).

I am not sure what "neo-Marxism" is supposed to be. I don't know if Marx ever wrote about sex and gender; I would be surprised if so.

Again, the notion is that gender is not the same as sex, that it's a cultural flag essentially about how a person will behave and wants to be treated. I've used the example of how I know what I'm doing when I put on my makeup or choose my clothes, I'm putting up a flag about how femininely I'd like to be treated. If I want to mostly be ignored I'll wear a baggy hoodie or something. If I want to turn heads, I've got plenty of wardrobe for that. If I just want to be more acknowledged as feminine on a day, I'll wear something more evocative of femininity than a blouse with leggings. I may not be changing my gender as my gender is simply the same as my sex (woman), but I am still putting up a flag for how I want to be treated.

A trans person does the same thing with their gender, that's what is meant by gender: to be a woman (the gender) is to have that flag up to act and be treated like a woman (the sex).
Immanuel Can wrote:So we have to ask, again, "What is a woman?" That's the pressing question. If there's no such thing, nobody can need to be one. If there IS such a thing, then nobody can simply elect to be one.
Again, there are two contexts. The sex context has a couple of different ways to go about telling the difference, such as a gamete picture (someone that produces sperm is a man, someone that produces eggs is a woman) or the chromosomal picture (which is a little less cut and dry because of some chromosomal differences, e.g. SRY gene issues, XXy people and other variations, etc;, but it still mostly forms a pretty good depiction of sex).

The gender context is just that a man (the gender) is someone that wants to be treated like a man (the sex) by society, while a woman (the gender) is someone that wants to be treated like a woman (the sex) by society. They're defined by historicity. Historically society treated people based on sex. The notion of gender is that society can treat people based on their choice of how they want society to treat them.
Immanuel Can wrote:You're a woman, you say. And again I ask, "How do you know?" :shock: How? How? What do you look at, that tells you you are? What's the essence of being what you claim you essentially are?
Because I'm ostensibly XX, I have a uterus and make eggs, if you're asking about sex. If you're asking about gender, because I want to be treated like a woman by society. In my case my gender matches my sex. In a trans person's case it might not. That's it. It's not really confusing, I don't think.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote:...the data shows that gender-affirming care helps adult trans people.

You really, really need to see the interview section on Scott Newgent. I think you'll have quite a different perspective.

But here's some other data to consider: https://post-trans.com/Detrans-Resources
But as I said, I don't doubt de-transitioners' experiences, stories, or pain. I haven't advocated that all people questioning their gender should transition. I have made the case that for many, it is the right choice. For some, it is not the right choice. I've never disputed that.
Immanuel Can wrote: A good example is the one I gave earlier: crying. Men just think about the act of weeping differently than women do. They tend to experience different emotions when it happens, and have different senses of social context of tears. If a woman burst into tears in a gathering of women, she gets sympathy, probably. If a man suddenly bursts into tears, shock and horror is what he's more likely to get...and rightly so, because he's likely mentally ill. For sure, something is terribly, terribly wrong, and it has caused this poor man to break. And when you give sympathy to the woman, she'll feel reassured and loved; but the man will feel ashamed, looked-down at, and humiliated by the pity. What he wants to hear is something more like, "Dude; we can handle this: get it together, 'cuz we're not beaten yet." That restores his composition, his status and his sense of power, which are essential to his view of himself as a man. For a woman, the message "Get it together" would sound hostile and unsympathetic.
I mean, I have seen some of my male friends cry and they weren't at all bothered by it. The dog death example was on my mind for a reason. I'm pretty sure everybody in the room cried while we were watching the S4 finale of Stranger Things. I just wonder if maybe some groups of men do spend their time worrying about some "socio sexual hierarchy" while some men might not. I know I've seen some of my friends roll their eyes at mentions of "alpha males" and the like, I'm already pretty sure I know what their opinions are on that.

Would you be opposed to me showing a post to some of them and asking what they think to get a male perspective from people close to my worldviews?
Immanuel Can wrote: That's very true: the successes of gammas are always short lived. Women tend to "friend-zone" them fast. And as you know, "friend zone" for women does not mean actual "friendliness": it often means no more than "Don't hate me for rejecting you as a potential partner; hang around and be nice."

But yeah, if a man takes the label "ally," you can be almost certain he's a gamma.
No, the people described as "gammas" wouldn't be 'friend-zoned' because anyone that I know wouldn't even want them to be around at all. I wouldn't friend some mewling sycophant just trying to appease me or my friends to get in our pants. People get 'friend-zoned' when they want a romantic or sexual relationship but the woman isn't interested in that way (some of my male friends were met in this way; I simply bat for the same team so to speak). But then real men wouldn't bother with the term because they don't resent being friends. So the term itself is sort of weird and seems reserved for crappy people that think friendship is a bad thing.

In any case, I vehemently disagree that "if a man takes the lable 'ally,' you can be almost certain he's a gamma." I know the sort you're talking about. But in no way, shape, or form are most men in and around the various movements "gammas." Most of them are genuinely good men. I can tell the difference.
Immanuel Can wrote: Chicago's a great town...except the south side, which you'll want to avoid. They're shooting people there. But the north part has some really cool stuff...great architecture (skyscraper) and tours, and the art gallery's world class.

No problem on the delay...PN is an optional forum, of course, and is here at convenience. You enjoy yourself.
I'm excited for the aquarium and the field museum for sure. We're still debating our schedule and getting around safely as it's just my girlfriend and I. It started with just getting tickets to a show, decided to make a weekend of it.
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Re: Gender Essentialism

Post by Astro Cat »

Immanuel Can wrote: Thu Jul 07, 2022 2:16 am
Astro Cat wrote: Wed Jul 06, 2022 7:00 am
Immanuel Can wrote:It's really something you have to see...if you have a sincere concern for this issue.
I would be lucky to find the time,
Can you spare a minute or so? Is that to much to ask?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB4XyJLyY7s
I didn’t see this, I’m out smoking right now. I’ll watch it when I get back to my study.
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Re: Gender Essentialism

Post by Immanuel Can »

Astro Cat wrote: Thu Jul 07, 2022 3:34 am I will say probably the most important line from this second link is this one: "Some of the most recent findings of studies in the five-year follow-up range are also beginning to show cracks in the affirmation-only narrative."

But this is something of a good point. An affirmation-only narrative is a bad idea. I agree. But that's why people that are getting gender-affirmation care need evaluation.
I would argue that even "affirming" the 5% for whom dysmorphia is chronic and incurable needs to be justified, since affirmers are deciding on their behalf that they're incurable. That's not the sort of judgment anybody should be making, I think...and certainly it cannot be mandated, as it is in the case of so many "affirmation only" regulations now placed on educators and mental health professionals.
Immanuel Can wrote: No, I don't think that's it...there are just too many positives being offered. I honestly don't think the universities and other agencies could be MORE enthused about getting women in. And if they could, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anything they could do that they haven't already done; which means that even if there were some barriers remaining, there'd be nothing left to be done but for the women in question to decide not to let them stop them.
As you've asked me to trust you about things regarding men, I may have to ask you to trust me that the barriers women face in STEM aren't just whether or not positions are open and scholarships available.
I do. Your polity must be quite different from the one in which I live. Where I live, the enthusiasm for women getting into STEM is so strong that they're actively pushed in that direction.

And if, after all that, women are still choosing not to go into STEM fields, what further measures can we suggest? I can think of none. The missing component would be a voluntary adjustment in the psyche of the young women in question...unless, of course, they're disinclined to do it anyway, for which I can foresee no "cure." And I'm not sure we should want one. Shouldn't people be allowed to choose their professions?

That is, in fact, what the Sweden example has shown. Give men and women free choice, and they tend, as groups, to maximize their differences, not to reduce them. So it's voluntary, it would seem.
...underlying implicit biases...
I don't believe in such things.

An "underlying, implicit bias," it seems to me, simply means "we would like to think it's a bias, but we have no specific evidence that it is."
Would you be surprised to hear that something like 2.5% of physicists are Black? Yet I doubt that you would argue (I hope you wouldn't!) that there's something "essential" to being a Black person and not wanting to be a physicist.

Perhaps. But I don't share the assumption, so common today, that inequality inevitably signals injustice. In the men-woman case, that's pretty obviously untrue. The lack of female bricklayers and lumberjacks is very unlikely, it seems to me, to be explained with reference to injustice, just as the overrepresentation of women in education, nursing and social work signals prejudice against men.
The explanation is obviously due to cultural reasons
That's possible. It could be that the culture in question does not admire black physicists or female bricklayers, and thus does not tend to produce them. But what culture has those features?
So again, the disparity in male-to-female physicists is a sociocultural thing,
Well, logic tells us that that's a hasty conclusion, and one I think we can't prove. Correlation is not causality, as the aphorism goes.

It could be very much like the disparity in female-to-male educators and nurses: a product of choice, not bias. We would have to find out. And one of the things we would definitely need is concrete proof of discrimination.

What would we offer for that, given the proliferation of incentives for women and minorities in STEM?

I'm prepared to believe that women are still discriminated against in STEM. But I think we can't say so until we have some reason, some specific evidence of that. And the mere disparity of numbers is not it: that can be explained in other ways, such as free choice. So what is our evidence that women are being mistreated in STEM?
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote:The problem is multifaceted. I've yearned to work in science since I was tiny, and even I thought about turning away at times.
Because somebody told you to? Or did you have indecision of your own?
Yes, as I said, some people told me so. Or because people treated me differently. It doesn't take being an explicit misogynist to make things awkward for a woman already feeling like a fish out of water. It could be behaving nervously around her, or talking over her, or repeating things she's already said and getting credit for it, and a whole litany of things. It's exhausting. I don't expect you to be able to just intuitively understand but I hope that you can imagine it.
Well, I've seen this: that men do not do well in places in which the conversation style or the discourse procedes by feminine rules. And by the same token, women often fail to do well in situations in which the dominant discourse style tends to be male. The problem is that the different sexes interpret each other's discourse patterns not in the same way the speaker does. To women, for example, men often come across as too direct, callous or rude; and to men, women's conversation seems unduly long, circuitous, indirect and uncommitted to definite propositions.

This is not a new observation, or one unbacked by scientific studies. I liked Deborah Tannen's work on this, for example. Men and women really do talk differently. And this can generate the kind of undefined, nebulous sense of being excluded that you're suggesting.
I am not sure what "neo-Marxism" is supposed to be.
It's sex and race based Marxism, which is all the rage in the universities these days. I'm sure you've run across it, even if you didn't realize what it was. It's just Marxism rebranded, really, using categories like sex, women, fatness, disabilty, race and so on in the place of Marx's old "class" critiques. Everybody's said to be "marginalized," "oppressed," "discriminated against," and things are "inequitable," "misogynist," "colonial," and so on. That's all neo-Marxism.
Again, the notion is that gender is not the same as sex,
Well, we can disagree about that, I guess.
Immanuel Can wrote:So we have to ask, again, "What is a woman?" That's the pressing question. If there's no such thing, nobody can need to be one. If there IS such a thing, then nobody can simply elect to be one.
Again, there are two contexts.
No, you get the same problem if you insist on "gender," actually. "Gender" is the way of saying, "sex isn't essentializable," and "sex" is the way of saying it is.

The point is that a "trans-person" cannot need to be a woman if "woman" is nothing essentializable. And he can't leave his maleness if it is something essential. It's that simple.

So on no terms can trans dogma be made coherent. It just doesn't work. That's one reason why the mental-illness hypothesis makes way more sense; when people begin believing opposite, mutually-impossible things at the same time, that's a good indicator of loss of logic, at least, and serious mental breakdown, at worst.
Immanuel Can wrote:You're a woman, you say. And again I ask, "How do you know?" :shock: How? How? What do you look at, that tells you you are? What's the essence of being what you claim you essentially are?
Because I'm ostensibly XX, I have a uterus and make eggs, if you're asking about sex.
Great! We agree...you're a woman. And I agree with your criteria, although I'd settle for simply saying, "adult, human female."

But Bruce Jenner is XY, has no uterus, and makes no eggs. And he's an adult and human, but not female. As for those criteria you name, he never has, never can, and never will have those characteristics. So what is he?

I'm not "deadnaming." I'm truenaming.
Would you be opposed to me showing a post to some of them and asking what they think to get a male perspective from people close to my worldviews?
It's a good idea. I'd be interested in seeing what sort of feedback you get. But you'll have to be careful: if they suspect you "want" a particlar kind of answer, or expect them to answer a certain way, they're likely only to give you exactly what they think you want. For there is a lot men actually think that they know better than to say in the presence of female friends, or in mixed company. And I'm sure the reverse is true, too.

So I don't know how you'll manage to avoid skewing the data. But if you find a way, you might get an honest answer. And that would be very interesting.

A funny story along these lines. A guy I know, an alpha type, was sitting in a bar with his wife and his best friend. And they were talking about this sort of thing. And the husband says to the wife, "Every guy in this place knows where the pretty women are in this room."

She says, "No, they don't. It's only you who thinks like that. You've got wandering eyes."

So he elbows his best friend, and says, "Hey Dan, without turning around, tell me where all the hot girls are in this bar."

And Dan says, "Well, there's one that just came in, but she's kind of short for my tastes. And there's a girl by the third window who's super-hot, but she's with some loser. And there's the girl who just went to the ladies room, and her friend's also hot, but they are in a group that has three that are not..."

Guys don't always tell you what they think. But they think it nonetheless.
...the people described as "gammas" wouldn't be 'friend-zoned' because anyone that I know wouldn't even want them to be around at all.

Hey, I agree with that. But "male-female friends" is a whole new topic. Interesting, but quite different.
I can tell the difference.
Good. That's handy.
I'm excited for the aquarium and the field museum for sure. We're still debating our schedule and getting around safely as it's just my girlfriend and I. It started with just getting tickets to a show, decided to make a weekend of it.
The bus architecture tour is excellent. The riverboat tour is good, too. The main drag has great shopping, if you're into that. And don't forget to have some Chicago-style pizza...I recommend Giordanos, but there are a couple of other legendary ones, too.
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Re: Gender Essentialism

Post by Astro Cat »

Immanuel Can wrote: Thu Jul 07, 2022 5:52 am I would argue that even "affirming" the 5% for whom dysmorphia is chronic and incurable needs to be justified, since affirmers are deciding on their behalf that they're incurable. That's not the sort of judgment anybody should be making, I think...and certainly it cannot be mandated, as it is in the case of so many "affirmation only" regulations now placed on educators and mental health professionals.
Where did you get this 5% figure? Also, a lot of these comments seem to be ignoring the research I posted a few posts back.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote: As you've asked me to trust you about things regarding men, I may have to ask you to trust me that the barriers women face in STEM aren't just whether or not positions are open and scholarships available.
I do. Your polity must be quite different from the one in which I live. Where I live, the enthusiasm for women getting into STEM is so strong that they're actively pushed in that direction.

And if, after all that, women are still choosing not to go into STEM fields, what further measures can we suggest? I can think of none. The missing component would be a voluntary adjustment in the psyche of the young women in question...unless, of course, they're disinclined to do it anyway, for which I can foresee no "cure." And I'm not sure we should want one. Shouldn't people be allowed to choose their professions?

That is, in fact, what the Sweden example has shown. Give men and women free choice, and they tend, as groups, to maximize their differences, not to reduce them. So it's voluntary, it would seem.
A few things here:
1) The enthusiasm is strong on the institutional side to get women to join STEM, but women are still facing psychosocial barriers. As I said, it doesn't matter if you dangle a carrot at the end of a minefield.

2) I got curious about what you were talking about with Sweden, so I found this reported by The Atlantic and parroted by Jordon Peterson and so on. However, the authors have come forward with a clarification which admits that the "paradox" premise arose from obfuscated methodology and data massaging, and Harvard has also since refuted the calculations and fundamental premise.

Harvard philosopher of science Sarah S. Richardson and one of her graduate students clarified more in a blog post rendering much of the clarification by the authors and the response paper into more plain readable English to non-sociologists.

So, tl;dr, there isn't really evidence for the supposition that "left to their own devices, women will avoid STEM when they have the resources to enter the humanities instead." Many women do obviously avoid STEM, but it isn't attributable to some kind of natural womanly proclivity. It's possible such a proclivity exists, but if it does, it would be a curve with overlap; and there is plenty to suggest that the proclivity is informed by nurture and psychosocial reasons rather than nature.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote:...underlying implicit biases...
I don't believe in such things.

An "underlying, implicit bias," it seems to me, simply means "we would like to think it's a bias, but we have no specific evidence that it is."
But there are mountains of evidence that implicit biases are real.

That's not even addressing other interesting facts (which I guess could fall under implicit bias umbrellas) such as the fact that ethnic names on résumés (with controls using the same résumé with a "white" sounding name) get called back as few as 50% times less, or how about the fact that science faculty (interestingly, both male and female -- this is the thing with implicit bias!) given identical résumés (where the only difference was a male or a female name) consistently rated the male-named applicant "significantly" more competent, more hirable, and offered a higher starting salary.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote:The explanation is obviously due to cultural reasons
That's possible. It could be that the culture in question does not admire black physicists or female bricklayers, and thus does not tend to produce them. But what culture has those features?
Immanuel Can wrote:So again, the disparity in male-to-female physicists is a sociocultural thing,
Well, logic tells us that that's a hasty conclusion, and one I think we can't prove. Correlation is not causality, as the aphorism goes.

It could be very much like the disparity in female-to-male educators and nurses: a product of choice, not bias. We would have to find out. And one of the things we would definitely need is concrete proof of discrimination.

What would we offer for that, given the proliferation of incentives for women and minorities in STEM?

I'm prepared to believe that women are still discriminated against in STEM. But I think we can't say so until we have some reason, some specific evidence of that. And the mere disparity of numbers is not it: that can be explained in other ways, such as free choice. So what is our evidence that women are being mistreated in STEM?
Well, the disparity in female bricklayers is not very surprising, though: nobody in their right mind disputes that there is sexual dimorphism in humans when it comes to our bodies and muscle mass. If a woman dreamed of being a bricklayer it's possible that she may just not be able to hack it because of her body.

The difference when it comes to things like a career in STEM is that there is good reason to think that there is not sexual dimorphism in our cognitive abilities and proclivities, but that culture and psychosocial reasons do have an effect on women's proclivities -- note that this would mean the difference in whether a woman joins and stays in STEM is likely nurture and cultural, not nature.
Immanuel Can wrote:Well, I've seen this: that men do not do well in places in which the conversation style or the discourse procedes by feminine rules. And by the same token, women often fail to do well in situations in which the dominant discourse style tends to be male. The problem is that the different sexes interpret each other's discourse patterns not in the same way the speaker does. To women, for example, men often come across as too direct, callous or rude; and to men, women's conversation seems unduly long, circuitous, indirect and uncommitted to definite propositions.

This is not a new observation, or one unbacked by scientific studies. I liked Deborah Tannen's work on this, for example. Men and women really do talk differently. And this can generate the kind of undefined, nebulous sense of being excluded that you're suggesting.
This is true, though in my case I feel like I can hang with the boys pretty well. Arguably someone would have to know they can let down their guard and just speak normally I guess, so point still taken. But this is a problem that would be less of a problem as diversity in STEM becomes more natural.
Immanuel Can wrote:No, you get the same problem if you insist on "gender," actually. "Gender" is the way of saying, "sex isn't essentializable," and "sex" is the way of saying it is.

The point is that a "trans-person" cannot need to be a woman if "woman" is nothing essentializable. And he can't leave his maleness if it is something essential. It's that simple.

So on no terms can trans dogma be made coherent. It just doesn't work. That's one reason why the mental-illness hypothesis makes way more sense; when people begin believing opposite, mutually-impossible things at the same time, that's a good indicator of loss of logic, at least, and serious mental breakdown, at worst.
The notion is that there are multiple contexts of words like male, man, female, woman: a sex context (which is essential) and a gender context (which is constructed). Trans people don't deny the essential part (well, I should say most don't). Being a male (in the sex context) is to be essentially male with sperm gametes, being born with testicles and a penis, etc. But such a male can be a female (or woman, again each of these words have both contexts under the view of gender as a cultural construct) in the gender context; which is just to say that their culturally constructed identity is to behave feminine and to be treated in a feminine way. Again, it's defined historically: to be of the gender of "woman" is to signal that you're going to behave like and be treated like a woman (in the sex context) would have historically. When a transwoman says "I'm a woman," that's what's being said. They're not saying "I'm a woman (in the sex, essential context)." They're not contradicting themselves.
Immanuel Can wrote:You're a woman, you say. And again I ask, "How do you know?" :shock: How? How? What do you look at, that tells you you are? What's the essence of being what you claim you essentially are?
Astro Cat wrote:Because I'm ostensibly XX, I have a uterus and make eggs, if you're asking about sex.
Great! We agree...you're a woman. And I agree with your criteria, although I'd settle for simply saying, "adult, human female."

But [Jenner] is XY, has no uterus, and makes no eggs. And he's an adult and human, but not female. As for those criteria you name, he never has, never can, and never will have those characteristics. So what is he?

I'm not "deadnaming." I'm truenaming.
An essential, chromosomal, phenotypical male; but again, trans people aren't denying that. The notion is that there is being a woman (the sex), which a transwoman isn't claiming to be, and there is being a woman (the cultural designation, the gender) which is to say they are a class of people that society treats the way society has historically treated women (the sex). This is not delusional.

As for names, surely we have autonomy over our own names. Do you call Vin Diesel "Vin Diesel?" Or do you insist that he is "Mark Sinclair?"

Refusing to use a chosen name goes beyond some presumed disagreement with trans issues and into pettiness, the likes of which bullies on the playground might pick on someone with an embarrassing name. They might have taken on a new nickname that they like better, but the bully will call them by their full name or whatever, insisting "but it's your name, isn't it?" The bully can declare that they are simply "truenaming" the victim. This has the same feel as that. Again, I don't think you're a bully. But I think you should think about at least the name thing a little more.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote:Would you be opposed to me showing a post to some of them and asking what they think to get a male perspective from people close to my worldviews?
It's a good idea. I'd be interested in seeing what sort of feedback you get. But you'll have to be careful: if they suspect you "want" a particlar kind of answer, or expect them to answer a certain way, they're likely only to give you exactly what they think you want. For there is a lot men actually think that they know better than to say in the presence of female friends, or in mixed company. And I'm sure the reverse is true, too.

So I don't know how you'll manage to avoid skewing the data. But if you find a way, you might get an honest answer. And that would be very interesting.

A funny story along these lines. A guy I know, an alpha type, was sitting in a bar with his wife and his best friend. And they were talking about this sort of thing. And the husband says to the wife, "Every guy in this place knows where the pretty women are in this room."

She says, "No, they don't. It's only you who thinks like that. You've got wandering eyes."

So he elbows his best friend, and says, "Hey Dan, without turning around, tell me where all the hot girls are in this bar."

And Dan says, "Well, there's one that just came in, but she's kind of short for my tastes. And there's a girl by the third window who's super-hot, but she's with some loser. And there's the girl who just went to the ladies room, and her friend's also hot, but they are in a group that has three that are not..."

Guys don't always tell you what they think. But they think it nonetheless.
Heh, well I feel like the guys I know are themselves around me. After all, I'll look at the women right along with them. I'm obviously out of town this weekend but maybe I'll figure out how to ask about these concepts (or show them your post without seeing my response) to see what they say. I just really get the sense that they probably don't give a shit about a "socio sexual hierarchy." But that is maybe what you would call alpha types if they don't have to care about it. (But then you might be surprised to know that they are happy to be feminist allies, to give rides to and from events, to act as protection, etc.! They are not "woman appeasers," as you said at one point; they are more than happy to disagree or speak their mind). That seems to be true for several different circles. Then again, I have curated my friends since my 20's to have much more quality over quantity. Could have been a different story some years ago.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote:I'm excited for the aquarium and the field museum for sure. We're still debating our schedule and getting around safely as it's just my girlfriend and I. It started with just getting tickets to a show, decided to make a weekend of it.
The bus architecture tour is excellent. The riverboat tour is good, too. The main drag has great shopping, if you're into that. And don't forget to have some Chicago-style pizza...I recommend Giordanos, but there are a couple of other legendary ones, too.
Giordanos, I may have to remember that. We have a float trip in a couple of weeks and have been maintaining bikini bodies, but I think a bit of pizza couldn't hurt with all the walking we'll be doing.
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Immanuel Can
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Re: Gender Essentialism

Post by Immanuel Can »

Astro Cat wrote: Fri Jul 08, 2022 4:28 am Where did you get this 5% figure?
Soh, Anderson and Shrier...they all quote it.
Also, a lot of these comments seem to be ignoring the research I posted a few posts back.
Like Nobili, Asschemann et al? They all just say, "We don't really know." I didn't find that a particularly helpful research finding.

But I'm also acutely aware how corrupt social sciences studies on questions involving sex are right now. They're almost all being driven by PC conclusions taken in advance, since the penalties for stepping out of line regarding it are absolutely draconian right now. If you want to survive as a social scientist, you can nowadays only repeat the PC talking points, or else look for a new career. Those are the only options.

And also, of course, I don't know what to do with the fact that you dismiss the studies I cited as merely "conservative" propaganda. After all, whether they're "conservative" or not is not a function of what they reveal, one way or the other. If they have good data and treat it the right way, then that doesn't indicate anything wrong. To think otherwise would just be a species of the genetic fallacy, really, or even the ad hominem fallacy.
1) The enthusiasm is strong on the institutional side to get women to join STEM, but women are still facing psychosocial barriers. As I said, it doesn't matter if you dangle a carrot at the end of a minefield.
Well, here, there's no "minefield." You get a carrot, then over the top praise, then a promotion based on your sex, not your competency, then a career for as long as you want it...hardly a minefield.
2) I got curious about what you were talking about with Sweden, so I found this reported by The Atlantic and parroted by Jordon Peterson and so on. However, the authors have come forward with a clarification which admits that the "paradox" premise arose from obfuscated methodology and data massaging, and Harvard has also since refuted the calculations and fundamental premise.
Naturally that conclusion is contested, because the PC set does not want the data to show that result. So it's utterly unsurprinsing to see people lining up to argue that the data was rigged. However, it's also confirmed by ordinary observation and experience so routine that it would take a systematic indoctrination to make the ordinary person not know it was true.

Anybody who's been in a mixed class sees a divergence in the gross numbers of males and females gravitating to diffferent activities. It's not an either-or, of course; there are always exceptions, and sometimes quite a few; but take the gross numbers, and you see two bell curves with a degree of overlap, but distinct ends.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote:...underlying implicit biases...
I don't believe in such things.

An "underlying, implicit bias," it seems to me, simply means "we would like to think it's a bias, but we have no specific evidence that it is."
[url=https://repository.ubn.ru.nl/bitstream/ ... sequence=1]
You're not yet understanding my objection. It's not to the word "bias." Sure, biases of all kinds do exist...racial, sex, ability, and so on. That's well documented, as you point out.

It's to the adjective "implicit." "Implicit" is a weasel-word, a cheat of the Left. If bias is "implicit," then they don't have to prove it exists at all. For to identify the cause of the bias would make it "explicit," or better, just "bias." And we can deal with "bias" in such a plain form. We just say, "Who's doing it, what's the evidence for it, and how do we fix it?" Problem solved.

But when we add the term "implicit," we're saying, "You can't find this kind of bias, but we're still going to insist it's bias. We're going to assert that it just drifts nebulously 'around' some system." It's ghost-hunting. It's fakery. There's no person culpable, no specific evidence that bias is involved (if there were, it would be "explicit bias"), but still we're supposed to jump to the conclusion that it's bias?

And there's no possibility of solving "implicit" bias. Since it cannot be identified and attributed a specific cause or a specific agent, it cannot ever be cured. So the Left gets a permanent excuse for whining and it's own privilege, but never has to ante up and show that a situation of discrimination or prejudice is actually implicated at all.

What the Left is doing is one of its old tricks: and that is, to use any evidence of disparities between any two groups as automatic evidence of nothing other than bias. It's not allowed to indicate any difference of competence, interest, culture, inclination, intelligence, or for that matter, sex. It has to be bias, prejudice, racism, or some other such evil.

The effect is to distort all the data by receiving only one kind of conclusion and banning the rest. It's utterly unscientific, as you must know, being in STEM.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote:The explanation is obviously due to cultural reasons
That's possible. It could be that the culture in question does not admire black physicists or female bricklayers, and thus does not tend to produce them. But what culture has those features?
Immanuel Can wrote:So again, the disparity in male-to-female physicists is a sociocultural thing,
Well, logic tells us that that's a hasty conclusion, and one I think we can't prove. Correlation is not causality, as the aphorism goes.

It could be very much like the disparity in female-to-male educators and nurses: a product of choice, not bias. We would have to find out. And one of the things we would definitely need is concrete proof of discrimination.

What would we offer for that, given the proliferation of incentives for women and minorities in STEM?

I'm prepared to believe that women are still discriminated against in STEM. But I think we can't say so until we have some reason, some specific evidence of that. And the mere disparity of numbers is not it: that can be explained in other ways, such as free choice. So what is our evidence that women are being mistreated in STEM?
Well, the disparity in female bricklayers is not very surprising, though: nobody in their right mind disputes that there is sexual dimorphism in humans when it comes to our bodies and muscle mass. If a woman dreamed of being a bricklayer it's possible that she may just not be able to hack it because of her body.
Okay. But if a woman has a specific type of "body," that's an "essence" feature. So without intending to, perhaps, you've started building a definition of "woman" there, beginning with the physiological.

But if there are no physiological differences between a "man" and a "woman" by definition, then there is no excuse for the dearth of female bricklayers and lumberjacks, and no explanation for the proliferation of female nurses and teachers.

What are we going to go with there, "implicit bias"? :shock:
Immanuel Can wrote:Well, I've seen this: that men do not do well in places in which the conversation style or the discourse procedes by feminine rules. And by the same token, women often fail to do well in situations in which the dominant discourse style tends to be male. The problem is that the different sexes interpret each other's discourse patterns not in the same way the speaker does. To women, for example, men often come across as too direct, callous or rude; and to men, women's conversation seems unduly long, circuitous, indirect and uncommitted to definite propositions.

This is not a new observation, or one unbacked by scientific studies. I liked Deborah Tannen's work on this, for example. Men and women really do talk differently. And this can generate the kind of undefined, nebulous sense of being excluded that you're suggesting.
This is true, though in my case I feel like I can hang with the boys pretty well.
That could be one reason why you're comfortable in STEM. If STEM is a field more strongly compatible, or conditioned by (shall we say), the male conversational style or pattern of delivering information (direct, blunt, competitive, debative, factual, impersonal, objective, or whatever), then you would continue to feel able to stay 'in the game' when other women would tend to back out.

And further, it's quite reasonable to think that particular disciplines favour particular conversation styles. For example, in Education or Social Work, they often use pseudo-scientific patter and questionable 'data' from things like "ethnographies" or "deep descriptions" as if they were hard data, or include things under "mixed methodologies" that would be immediately disallowed from STEM. These fields lack a core of methodological discipline that keeps them from being true sciences at all. Such things are much more compatible with a female conversation style, so it wouldn't be surprising that many women feel more comfortable in Education than in STEM.
Arguably someone would have to know they can let down their guard and just speak normally I guess, so point still taken. But this is a problem that would be less of a problem as diversity in STEM becomes more natural.
I'm not sure that "feminizing" the style of discourse in STEM would necessarily improve it. There may be good reasons, inherent to the discipline itself and its methods, that a more "masculine" discourse style is advantageous. For example, if factuality and disagreeability are virtues in the formulation of scientific studies, then agreeability and intuitionism would be liabilities there. (That's just an example of the sort of divergence I'm pointing to, not a comprehensive description of if.)
Immanuel Can wrote:No, you get the same problem if you insist on "gender," actually. "Gender" is the way of saying, "sex isn't essentializable," and "sex" is the way of saying it is.

The point is that a "trans-person" cannot need to be a woman if "woman" is nothing essentializable. And he can't leave his maleness if it is something essential. It's that simple.

So on no terms can trans dogma be made coherent. It just doesn't work. That's one reason why the mental-illness hypothesis makes way more sense; when people begin believing opposite, mutually-impossible things at the same time, that's a good indicator of loss of logic, at least, and serious mental breakdown, at worst.
The notion is that there are multiple contexts of words like male, man, female, woman
"Contexts"? Not biologically. The linguistic games the Left wants to play don't alter the facts.

"Gender" just means "behaviour," really. We're talking about a woman "acting like a woman," or "acting like a man." But even to talk that way is to essentialize both. :shock: You can't "act like" something that simply doesn't exist! :shock:

So we run into the same problem again, immediately: the language of "gender" asks us to believe, at one and the same time, that sex is both essential or basic AND non-essentializable. Logically, there's just no way that works.
Immanuel Can wrote:You're a woman, you say. And again I ask, "How do you know?" :shock: How? How? What do you look at, that tells you you are? What's the essence of being what you claim you essentially are?
Astro Cat wrote:Because I'm ostensibly XX, I have a uterus and make eggs, if you're asking about sex.
Great! We agree...you're a woman. And I agree with your criteria, although I'd settle for simply saying, "adult, human female."

But [Jenner] is XY, has no uterus, and makes no eggs. And he's an adult and human, but not female. As for those criteria you name, he never has, never can, and never will have those characteristics. So what is he?

I'm not "deadnaming." I'm truenaming.
An essential, chromosomal, phenotypical male; but again, trans people aren't denying that.
Actually, they are.

When they say, "Bruce Jenner IS a woman," they mean that he has an absolute right to be treated as the essentialized thing known as "woman." But when they say "Bruce Jenner IS NOT a man," they mean that he absolutely has no essential reality to his maleness, and can shed it by choice. Those two things don't make sense. He can't both "not be" an essential man, and "need to be" an essential woman.

An aside: I find it so interesting that you feel compelled to "correct" my use of language as if it were your own. You can't even bring yourself to quote my actual wording, apparently, so deep is the taboo with which you seem to have been drilled about "deadnaming" (which is surely obviously nothing more than a Left-invented propaganda term, one that didn't even exist until very recently). But it is the real identity of Bruce Jenner that we are debating, so you really can't ask me to concede your usage in such a way that that debate is surrendered before it begins, can you?
As for names, surely we have autonomy over our own names. Do you call Vin Diesel "Vin Diesel?" Or do you insist that he is "Mark Sinclair?"
I call people by the things they present as, to me. I call them whatever I happen to think they really are. Until this moment, I did not know "Vin Diesel's" real name. If I did meet him, I would probably prefer to call him "Mark," to let him know I was appreciating the real person, rather than responding to his public image or persona. I think most of us would rather be addressed as the person we really are.

But either way, my words are not his property. They are mine. I choose them, I use them, and I accept the results of my usage. That's what it means to speak honestly, rather than to be manipulated from externals. That's freedom of speech, too: because having free speech only has meaning when one's right to say something is capable of being contested by somebody. One really doesn't need "freedom" to parrot back what everybody always finds pleasing. One needs "freedom" to speak one's mind honestly, at the risk of offence.
Heh, well I feel like the guys I know are themselves around me. After all, I'll look at the women right along with them.

That's an interesting question, isn't it? Do lesbians "look at" women in a "male" way? Would a lesbian be as acutely aware of other pulchritudinous females in the vicinity as would an ordinary male? I don't know if anybody would allow anyone to do a study on that, though, because its premise would necessarily essentialize the terms "male awareness," "female awareness," and "lesbian," as if they really referred to objective things.

I doubt that the trans lobby would sit still for any such breach of its protocols. They'd eat you alive if you tried it. So maybe that means we'll never be able to study what "lesbians" think, because for the trans lobby, there are no such essential things in the world, just as there are no essential "women."

I hope Chi-town was fun.
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Re: Gender Essentialism

Post by Astro Cat »

Immanuel Can wrote: Mon Jul 11, 2022 3:27 pm
Astro Cat wrote: Fri Jul 08, 2022 4:28 am Where did you get this 5% figure?
Soh, Anderson and Shrier...they all quote it.
Do you happen to remember which papers? I need to see context on the 5% figure.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Also, a lot of these comments seem to be ignoring the research I posted a few posts back.
Like Nobili, Asschemann et al? They all just say, "We don't really know." I didn't find that a particularly helpful research finding.

But I'm also acutely aware how corrupt social sciences studies on questions involving sex are right now. They're almost all being driven by PC conclusions taken in advance, since the penalties for stepping out of line regarding it are absolutely draconian right now. If you want to survive as a social scientist, you can nowadays only repeat the PC talking points, or else look for a new career. Those are the only options.

And also, of course, I don't know what to do with the fact that you dismiss the studies I cited as merely "conservative" propaganda. After all, whether they're "conservative" or not is not a function of what they reveal, one way or the other. If they have good data and treat it the right way, then that doesn't indicate anything wrong. To think otherwise would just be a species of the genetic fallacy, really, or even the ad hominem fallacy.
I didn't dismiss studies as conservative propaganda, just some unpublished/non-peer review stuff written by a highly biased source. I've only got so much time to work with so it's not really worth digging into suspect materials. I wouldn't expect you to take anything too seriously I might post that isn't peer-reviewed and is done by "Progressive Think Tank Dot Com" or something like that either. This isn't fallacious, more like practicality. We should stick to reputable, published science.
Immanuel Can wrote: Well, here, there's no "minefield." You get a carrot, then over the top praise, then a promotion based on your sex, not your competency, then a career for as long as you want it...hardly a minefield.
The minefield is social and psychological, as mentioned in sprinkles throughout the conversation. The barriers to women in STEM start from when women are very young and continue indefinitely. We talk about biases further below, so I'll say more there.
Immanuel Can wrote: Naturally that conclusion is contested, because the PC set does not want the data to show that result. So it's utterly unsurprinsing to see people lining up to argue that the data was rigged. However, it's also confirmed by ordinary observation and experience so routine that it would take a systematic indoctrination to make the ordinary person not know it was true.

Anybody who's been in a mixed class sees a divergence in the gross numbers of males and females gravitating to diffferent activities. It's not an either-or, of course; there are always exceptions, and sometimes quite a few; but take the gross numbers, and you see two bell curves with a degree of overlap, but distinct ends.
The details of contesting the original are in the links provided, including by the original authors. This is not a "PC conspiracy." The flaws and reasonings are laid out in the links and made accessible for non-sociologists in the blog post (of one of the authors) I posted.

As much as you want to say some conclusions are an agenda because of some kind of "PC" conspiracy, you have to be careful not to do the opposite (where you accept or reject a conclusion because of your own biases.

That women trickle out of STEM isn't in dispute: you mention dwindling numbers in higher mixed classes; but this is the leaky pipeline phenomenon. What's in question is whether there is something essential about being a woman and moving away from STEM or whether there is something more psychosocial going on. I've shown that there isn't any evidence that something biologically essential going on, but there is plenty of evidence that there is something psychosocial going on.

That's where this discussion turned, in some sense: there are at least two views on why there is a shortage of women in STEM.

1) On one view, which we can call the nature view, it's because there is something about being a biological/phenotypic female that leads to personality traits that are less interested in STEM or at least more interested in other things. On this view, you could raise a bunch of women in a vacuum away from the influences of society and they would still not choose to be interested in STEM because that's just the way that they are.

2) On another view, which we can call the nurture view, it's because there is something about the way society treats women (how they are raised, how they are interacted with, what they're encouraged to do, what peer pressures they face, that sort of thing) that lead women to lose interest in STEM. On this view, you could raise a bunch of women in a vacuum away from the influences of society and you wouldn't notice the same "leaky pipeline" effect because the women aren't under the same lifelong gendered pressures.

There could of course be some other explanation. For instance we could consider a hybrid of the two, where there is some mixture of nature and nurture at work (which I think is probably the most likely scenario). It would then be a question as to how much contribution each effect has on women.

Well, so far the evidence for the nature picture being the whole case or a majority of the case doesn't really hold up. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that the nurture picture has a large contribution to the leaky pipeline effect, though.
Immanuel Can wrote: You're not yet understanding my objection. It's not to the word "bias." Sure, biases of all kinds do exist...racial, sex, ability, and so on. That's well documented, as you point out.

It's to the adjective "implicit." "Implicit" is a weasel-word, a cheat of the Left. If bias is "implicit," then they don't have to prove it exists at all. For to identify the cause of the bias would make it "explicit," or better, just "bias." And we can deal with "bias" in such a plain form. We just say, "Who's doing it, what's the evidence for it, and how do we fix it?" Problem solved.

But when we add the term "implicit," we're saying, "You can't find this kind of bias, but we're still going to insist it's bias. We're going to assert that it just drifts nebulously 'around' some system." It's ghost-hunting. It's fakery. There's no person culpable, no specific evidence that bias is involved (if there were, it would be "explicit bias"), but still we're supposed to jump to the conclusion that it's bias?

And there's no possibility of solving "implicit" bias. Since it cannot be identified and attributed a specific cause or a specific agent, it cannot ever be cured. So the Left gets a permanent excuse for whining and it's own privilege, but never has to ante up and show that a situation of discrimination or prejudice is actually implicated at all.

What the Left is doing is one of its old tricks: and that is, to use any evidence of disparities between any two groups as automatic evidence of nothing other than bias. It's not allowed to indicate any difference of competence, interest, culture, inclination, intelligence, or for that matter, sex. It has to be bias, prejudice, racism, or some other such evil.

The effect is to distort all the data by receiving only one kind of conclusion and banning the rest. It's utterly unscientific, as you must know, being in STEM.
You say "If bias is 'implicit,' then they don't have to prove it exists at all." Yet, clearly psychologists/sociologists spend a lot of time and effort doing just that in order to study it, as indicated by the multitude of links I dropped to make that point (I don't expect you to read all of those, and I should have been clear about that. The point I was trying to make was that the research and data is so ubiquitous that it's easy to find the work).

You ask "Who's doing it, what's the evidence for it, and how do we fix it?" Well, the literature is rife with the first two. The difference between implicit and explicit bias is how consciously aware a person is of the bias. That's all. Take for instance the examples with the résumés where people rank them as more competent (even when they're 100% identical) if the name on the résumé sounds like a white person or a man. Do you think the people looking at these résumés are racists and/or misogynist? They probably aren't! But that's why we have a term for why they can participate in a systemic barrier to people they don't even explicitly hold hateful or negative views toward. Implicit bias is unconscious, informed more by the culture around us than it is by our own conscious beliefs. I have implicit biases, you have implicit biases. We are influenced by our culture in ways we don't even think about.
Immanuel Can wrote: Okay. But if a woman has a specific type of "body," that's an "essence" feature. So without intending to, perhaps, you've started building a definition of "woman" there, beginning with the physiological.

But if there are no physiological differences between a "man" and a "woman" by definition, then there is no excuse for the dearth of female bricklayers and lumberjacks, and no explanation for the proliferation of female nurses and teachers.
Yet we've already been over that there isn't a dispute that there are essential features for the sex context.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote: This is true, though in my case I feel like I can hang with the boys pretty well.
That could be one reason why you're comfortable in STEM. If STEM is a field more strongly compatible, or conditioned by (shall we say), the male conversational style or pattern of delivering information (direct, blunt, competitive, debative, factual, impersonal, objective, or whatever), then you would continue to feel able to stay 'in the game' when other women would tend to back out.

And further, it's quite reasonable to think that particular disciplines favour particular conversation styles. For example, in Education or Social Work, they often use pseudo-scientific patter and questionable 'data' from things like "ethnographies" or "deep descriptions" as if they were hard data, or include things under "mixed methodologies" that would be immediately disallowed from STEM. These fields lack a core of methodological discipline that keeps them from being true sciences at all. Such things are much more compatible with a female conversation style, so it wouldn't be surprising that many women feel more comfortable in Education than in STEM.

...

I'm not sure that "feminizing" the style of discourse in STEM would necessarily improve it. There may be good reasons, inherent to the discipline itself and its methods, that a more "masculine" discourse style is advantageous. For example, if factuality and disagreeability are virtues in the formulation of scientific studies, then agreeability and intuitionism would be liabilities there. (That's just an example of the sort of divergence I'm pointing to, not a comprehensive description of if.)
What I'm saying is that these so-called "masculine" and "feminine" ways of speech may be more informed by culture than sex. I am not advocating reducing the analytical, competitive, debating, direct, impersonal, objective nature of scientific conversation by including women. I'm saying that as more women naturally stick with STEM (among other things), this sort of speech will stop seeming gendered at all. Men and women do speak differently in aggregate, but again, there is a nature picture of why they do that and a nurture picture of why they do that. The notion is that it's likely the nurture picture plays a significant role in this, which means the way society views speech patterns as gendered can change. In fact, it'd be interesting to see if it has already begun to with more and more women in STEM and other postgraduate careers.
Immanuel Can wrote: "Contexts"? Not biologically. The linguistic games the Left wants to play don't alter the facts.

"Gender" just means "behaviour," really. We're talking about a woman "acting like a woman," or "acting like a man." But even to talk that way is to essentialize both. :shock: You can't "act like" something that simply doesn't exist! :shock:

So we run into the same problem again, immediately: the language of "gender" asks us to believe, at one and the same time, that sex is both essential or basic AND non-essentializable. Logically, there's just no way that works.
Yes, contexts; with one being biological and essential and the other being sociocultural. I don't know how to keep repeating this, though :P

You say that we're asked by trans people to believe "at one and the same time," but that's not what they're doing. The notion, again, is that there are two contexts of words like "woman," one which is essential and about things like gametes and chromosomes, while the other context is sociocultural and deals with the historicity of the other context (e.g., societal behavior historically towards phenotypical women). These needn't be equivocated as you seem to want to do when you assert that trans people are asking for the words to mean both at the same time, which they're not doing. (Perhaps you can find some that do that. But as you should know, there are non-philosophically inclined people in any kind of group).
Immanuel Can wrote: An aside: I find it so interesting that you feel compelled to "correct" my use of language as if it were your own. You can't even bring yourself to quote my actual wording, apparently, so deep is the taboo with which you seem to have been drilled about "deadnaming" (which is surely obviously nothing more than a Left-invented propaganda term, one that didn't even exist until very recently). But it is the real identity of [Jenner] that we are debating, so you really can't ask me to concede your usage in such a way that that debate is surrendered before it begins, can you? [/color]
As I explained, I'm not "correcting" anything, I'm just not participating in something I find to be impolite.
Immanuel Can wrote: I call people by the things they present as, to me. I call them whatever I happen to think they really are. Until this moment, I did not know "Vin Diesel's" real name. If I did meet him, I would probably prefer to call him "Mark," to let him know I was appreciating the real person, rather than responding to his public image or persona. I think most of us would rather be addressed as the person we really are.

But either way, my words are not his property. They are mine. I choose them, I use them, and I accept the results of my usage. That's what it means to speak honestly, rather than to be manipulated from externals. That's freedom of speech, too: because having free speech only has meaning when one's right to say something is capable of being contested by somebody. One really doesn't need "freedom" to parrot back what everybody always finds pleasing. One needs "freedom" to speak one's mind honestly, at the risk of offence.
I think we just won't agree on this. I think people have autonomy over their names and that other people ought to respect that autonomy. I think it's rude under most circumstances when someone doesn't. I don't deny that anyone has the "freedom" to say whatever they wish (just as anyone has the freedom to do anything else that's inconsiderate or rude), but then the rest of us have the freedom to respond to that rudeness with denouncements, judgment, etc.

I'm OK with my name, but if for whatever reason I wasn't and someone refused to respect my chosen name for myself, they certainly have that freedom -- but I would be free to think they're a twat for doing it. But I think that's somewhat what you were saying anyway. So, we will probably just disagree on whether we should use peoples' chosen names or not. I'm just not going to participate in it though, I do find it jerkish. I'll either not quote bits or mark where edits are made to quotes.
Immanuel Can wrote:
Astro Cat wrote: Heh, well I feel like the guys I know are themselves around me. After all, I'll look at the women right along with them.

That's an interesting question, isn't it? Do lesbians "look at" women in a "male" way? Would a lesbian be as acutely aware of other pulchritudinous females in the vicinity as would an ordinary male? I don't know if anybody would allow anyone to do a study on that, though, because its premise would necessarily essentialize the terms "male awareness," "female awareness," and "lesbian," as if they really referred to objective things.

I doubt that the trans lobby would sit still for any such breach of its protocols. They'd eat you alive if you tried it. So maybe that means we'll never be able to study what "lesbians" think, because for the trans lobby, there are no such essential things in the world, just as there are no essential "women."
Well, I took a few short stabs at finding out by typing a few things into Google Scholar (which obviously isn't a great research methodology, but as I said: short stabs). While I'm not quite sure how I would need to word such a query, don't know any existing authors working in similar things to search by author, etc., I did find a lot of studies looking at differences between lesbians and heterosexual women under a lot of other contexts.

So, I think this "PC chilling effect conspiracy" you're talking about may not hold that much water. Seems like scientists have been up to all kinds of interesting things looking into differences between gay and straight women.
Astro Cat wrote: I hope Chi-town was fun.
It was! Though, I had no idea how expensive it would be just for simple things like parking. I've been all over the map, and Chicago has one of the most monetized parking systems I've ever seen.

I did take your suggestion to try Giordano's. We got the Chicago Classic, and I loved it. Otherwise had a great time at the aquarium, planetarium, field museum, and the show I was originally heading that way to catch in the first place. Good times!
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Re: Gender Essentialism

Post by Astro Cat »

Which, speaking of the planetarium, that reminds me: they had a really neat touchscreen table to crowdsource galaxy morphology identification somewhere on the lower floors. My girlfriend and I spent a long time working on that, LOL. I figured I'd help their data by having at least one person that really knew what they were doing contributing.

I use similar work in my current research that my PI contributed to: CANDALS Visual Classifications

I needed to remember to contact the planetarium and find out who's doing the research. I could literally use it depending on which deep fields they're cataloging.
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