Talk:Gender identity/Archive 2

message: I don't like to edit the gender articles, but some one put this on the Homosexuality discussion, and it was suggested that it may be useful in this article.  Text below: (Paige 19:16, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: "The scientific dogma used to be that hormones alone could “masculinize” the brain, he said. But he identified 54 genes that work differently in the brains of male and female mouse embryos just 10 days after conception — before sex hormones are ever produced.  Doctors also once thought that how people were raised and their genitalia were enough to determine gender...But Reiner began seeing children who had been assigned to one sex as babies and a few years later began identifying themselves as the other." 
--Nectarflowed 19:28, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Text from [[Talk:Homosexuality]]

message: I think this associated press quote has interesting bearing on this topic: 
:"The scientific dogma used to be that hormones alone could “masculinize” the brain, he said. But he identified 54 genes that work differently in the brains of male and female mouse embryos just 10 days after conception — before sex hormones are ever produced.  Doctors also once thought that how people were raised and their genitalia were enough to determine gender...But Reiner began seeing children who had been assigned to one sex as babies and a few years later began identifying themselves as the other." 
--Nectarflowed 19:28, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Determination of neural gender in utero

message: Sex is a concrete noun (refering to male, female, intersex).   Gender is an abstract noun (refering to masculine, feminine, androgynous).  However, laymen sometimes borrow the word Gender to refer to concrete noun (male/female/intersex).
Sexuality is an abstract noun.  Sexuality and Gender can be used interchangably.
Sexuality can refer to sexual-identity (masculine, feminine, androgynous), sexual-orientation (heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual), and sexual-receptivity (celibacy, hypersexuality) depending on the context.
Gender Identity and Sexual Identity can also be used interchangably. 
aCute 04:57, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No, "sexuality" and "gender" are not interchangeable. I suggest reading Gender if you want to understand why this isn't so. Catamorphism 18:30, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

text: I think it's not as simplistic as you're making it out to be. "Butch" and "femme" are both terms that are more commonly applied to females than males, for example, even though there's nothing contradictory about using them to describe males. Also, your description of what "trans" means is completely inaccurate. Trans people aren't any more likely to be heterosexual than non-trans people. If you want to edit articles on gender, please do some research on it first. I suggest Kate Bornstein's My Gender Workbook to start with. Catamorphism 05:29, 26 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sex vs Gender as well as their Identification 

message: Nowhere in the gender or gender-related articles could I find a "Critisism" section, and I think there needs to be one (but don't consider myself as qualified enough to be the one to write it up). Specifically, some people profess the idea that "gender" is a social construct and only exists insofar as people believe in the concept, that people only have a sex, and the concept of a gender beyond that is fabricated/imagined. This seems important to address. Or maybe this is covered somewhere and I just missed it. In that case, could someone point me in the right direction?
::Evidence for the part after "only exists"? 金 (Kim)
:Maybe the article is not clear enough in this regard. The whole point with Gender role is that it is a social construct.  One's gender role is the easy part to get ahold of -- that and one's apparent sexual characteristics.  And John Money appears to have believed early on in his career that one's gender identity was entirely a social construct. He believed that it could be controlled at will by the family and the community, and that if a child happened to be born with a far-from-perfect penis then the child could be "surgically reassigned" as a female (could be castrated and given a vagina) and raised as a girl. Even at that early time in his career he raised the caveat that the longer the family waited to treat Francis as Frances the less sure was the prognosis.  So one question is what has to be done to construct a gender role?
A gender role, like Janus, has two faces.  One is the face that the individual sees or wants to see, and one is the face that the society sees or wants to see.  If the individual decides, "I am a boy," then it is understandable that "he" would not want to behave in sissy ways, wear sissy clothes, etc. What the individual does to "be like a real boy" depends on the culture. In ancient Scotland, the boy would want to wear a kilt like his father. In ancient Ireland, the teenage boy would perhaps want to wear his hair long and go naked into battle like his elder brother. The problem would come when he disrobed and his clan members discovered that he did not have male genitalia.  They would then define him as a female (if nobody had figured it out before) and insist that she stop deceiving people. 
The trouble is that we do not easily understand why an individual who appears to have male external genitalia may experience herself as a girl and later as a woman.  We know that one of John Money's patients was surgically reassigned as a female but stubbornly asserted a masculine gender identity -- despite having all objective factors constrained to support the fiction that "she" had always been a male. We may suspect, and Money's research supports this conclusion, that brain developments must occur to turn the individual into a boy/man mentally, and that this transformation is irreversible.  But the physical evidence for brain differentiation is not yet conclusive in the opinion of most specialists who study these matters.  
Something is there in the beginning. It happens that regardless of whether one is XX, XY, or one of the other possibilities, one will turn out to have a female body type unless masculinizing hormones are present at appropriate times and in appropriate amounts during gestation, and that means that XX individuals can turn out to have a "male" body (except for the absence of functioning testes) if something goes drastically wrong during gestation (such as the mother's having a cancerous growth in tissue that produces androgens).  So one starts as XX, XY, XYY, etc., and then things happen during gestation that interact with those chromosomal conditions.  So it's already a "construct," it's something nutritive being used to construct something on the original genetic identity. And after birth the way the child is socialized will add further modifications and fulfillments.  Children learn gender signals that we are typically unconscious of even though we react to them. In the dominant U.S. culture, for instance, boys learn to tilt their pelvises back (keeping those nasty genitals from poking an outline out through one's trousers), and girls learn to tilt their pelvises forward.  In China and Japan, however, it is the men who tilt their pelvises forward and the women who tilt them back out of harm's way. (See Edward Hall, The Silent Language.)  So the modest Iowa farmboy who goes to China looks a bit... odd... but nobody can figure out quite what it is about him. Male children who grow up without any male role models may pick up feminine mannerisms that become problematic because the only way they see things done is the feminine way.  So these things are clearly social constructs. That's almost  the whole point.
That it is a social construct is almost the entire point when the worst mis-match we have to deal with is the man or woman who moves to a new culture--and in those cases people normally learn to make allowances on both sides, but it is not the whose story when the individual has a clear and powerful awareness of self that is opposed to his/her external genitalia. It would be extremely arrogant for me to assume that someone else has decided that "he is a boy," "she is a woman," "he is a man," "she is a girl," or whatever it may be -- just to give me a hard time. To the best of my knowledge, people are much more likely to hit themselves with a hammer than they are to decide on a whim to offend their parents, their church, their schoolmates, their community, the law enforcement people in jurisdictions where being a "transvestite" is a crime, and anybody else who is nosy enough to intervene in their affairs.  People who do decide to offend on such a whim typically wear a Mohawk for a while and then give up on it in favor of something else about equally ephemeral. People who express a gender identity and role that is at variance with their external genitalia typically do so at great cost, even anguish, to themselves. The only worse thing for them seems to be the anguish of living as one thing knowing oneself to be the other. 金 (Kim) 04:35, 9 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Argument against the concept of gender identity. 

message: Does anyone have a suggestion for a better title for this section? "Theoretical development"? "Conceptual origins"? The current section title seems a bit verbose. Kaldari 22:56, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I've changed it to "Conceptual origins" for now. Let me know if anyone comes up with a better idea. Kaldari 21:09, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Development of the concept of gender identity