I remember when I was younger I would snap at the silliest moments, mostly when I wasn't getting my way. This went on for about 16 years, so there was a point I was very dangerous to be around if I lost it. What I find interesting looking back is how now I don't really get all that mad and at worse I'll just snarky or rude. I don't know what's changed over time (hormones maybe?) but I do know that unless someone really pushed me I probably wouldn't go into a ragefit.
Part of the function of your frontal lobes is to moderate impulses, and they actually continue growing and maturing for several years past age 18. It sounds like you just had a little more growing up to do.
This is somewhat true, but I actually use to be very verbally abusive until three years ago. Then again I was dealing with not even having a therapist to talk about my gender dysphoria (not being out sucks for me). So who knows wth is going on with me.
"We’re constantly dividing people into “us” vs. “them.” And once we put someone in the “them” category, it can open up the floodgates for violence and is the root of a lot of human misery and wars."
Some may call this naive, but this is the reason we need more unity in the world. Less division. More us...less us and them. The media seems to do a great job of pitting one side against the other. I think many of our attitudes and perspectives are learned and perpetuated by the media.
We live in a world of niches and algorithms that pander to our every whim, only showing us what we 'like', we're only getting more divided as a people.
> Some may call this naive, but this is the reason we need more unity in the world. Less division. More us...less us and them.
Then you have learned nothing. The tribalism in humans is hardwired. It's not going away, whatever we may wish or do. The media doesn't create the divisions, they just profit from them.
The key to peaceful coexistence is properly delineated regions and nations, so that each thede can have their land without being afraid of being invaded and replaced.
I'd just like to take this to task for how much supposition is floating around. Early on we are introduced to the idea of snapping via an anecdote. We are given a neuronal hook via something called a 'hypothalamic attack region', which produces rage in rats.
Is this region responsible for the opening episode of rage? We have no idea; it is pure speculation to assume it is. All of the subsequent examples (crime, heroism) are imputed to this circuit similarly without evidence.
Then we are given a model (LIFEMORTS), which is extended to cover race relations and much else. We are told our thinking is 'tribal'; we are expected to believe this is science, because recall the existence of the hypothalamus attack region! But there is no evidence chaining these three together (neurons, the model, the behavior) - we have zero reason to accept the model view of what happened in Baltimore. It is pure speculation.
R Douglas Fields grossly misinterprets how much people are exposed to influences their behavior. "Something like 90 percent of the people in prison for violent crimes are men."
Something about all these people make them terrible humans, but it's not an adrenaline response. He's belittling all the social problems in his book by attributing them to neurological reflexes.
Not at all. He's saying that what likely landed many, though probably not all, of them in jail ("snapping") has its basis in neurology, but flat out states that that response is due to numerous outside triggers, including things like stress, and that our responses to those triggers are something we can control once we recognize they're pressing these deeply wired buttons.
That said, I do agree, the story as told here is still a bit black and white for my taste. For me it was the heroism angle that threw me... E.g., maybe the majority of decorated vets are men because, until recently, only men were eligible for combat roles.
Interesting that the the "Deed of Trust" starts off,
> Gentlemen
The first paragraph goes on to talk about supporting widows and children. Thankfully the paragraph does end with, "Grants of sums of money may also be made to heroes or heroines as the Commission thinks advisable-each case to be judged on its merits."
But by the third paragraph, it's back to "A medal shall be given to the hero, or widow, or next of kin ..."
I'm sure that language doesn't bias anyone on the Commission.
I do wonder if incarceration rates are different because women are treated differently at trial for violent offences. It's certainly not the only factor, but it could skew things even further than they would otherwise be.
Is it presumed that women are unlikely to reoffend where men are assumed to be likely to?
It's like how it's difficult to get female abusers prosecuted for just about anything, including rape or spousal abuse. There's some kind of bias here.
At most its 50% environment, 50% genetic. Its really all about what degree of self control you have. Of course I agree with you in an instant that a poor, less educated society tends to be more violent but environment never paints the whole story.
> We’ve all been there: Some jerk cuts you off on the highway. You lean on the horn, scream abuse. You want to get out the car and kick the @#$% out of the bozo’s SUV.
"The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found that between 1990 and 1996 road rage contributed to 218 deaths and 12,610 injuries. The study analyzed 10,037 police reports and newspaper stories about traffic accidents that led to violence. What's more, AAA found that road rage incidents increased nearly 7 percent each year within that six-year period."
Not sure what you're trying to say, exactly. "There is proof that road rage exists"? OP didn't say "Road rage doesn't exist", he said "It's not universal". A universal quantifier ("all" or "none") can be disproven with a counter-example (op to article), an existential quantifier ("some" or "not all") can't (you, if I understand it correctly, to op).
Yeah. I know road rage isn't rare, but some people talk about it like its normal behavior. Most people I know, including myself, don't let minor annoyances get to them like that.
> When you look at the subject of aggression there is no more important factor than gender. Something like 90 percent of the people in prison for violent crimes are men. Men have different brains than women, which comes from our different roles during evolution, when the brain was formed. Men had a role of being aggressive, which makes no sense for a woman because a woman was not endowed with the physical strength of a man, who probably outweighs her. But although 90 percent of those in jail are men, 90 percent of people who have been awarded medals by the Carnegie Institute for heroism are also men.
What is wrong with this guy? Doesn't he know that gender is a social construct?
You're implying that people learn this at university. My experience was the opposite; I took an animal behaviour course at university that presented much of this information. Sexual dimorphism is a fairly major topic in animal behaviour.
For instance, I learned that in every society where it was tested, men are more violent than women. But interestingly, the society itself was important as well; for instance, American society is overall more violent than Icelandic culture, and accordingly American women commit more violent crimes than Icelandic men. So there are differences in between the sexes, but the culture is a very important input if we look at how extreme the trait is.
Steven Pinker's'The Blank Slate' explains it well. Western culture has a bias toward nurture explanations rather than nature explanations because admitting nature affects people's perceptions of their abilities and our sense of agency as a culture. If all differences are culture we can fix them. That's why it becomes political.
Another reason to favor nurture explanations is that nurture explanations carry less weight in an argument than nature explanations.
There's no arguing with nature, it's the ultimate citation.
But nurture means that you, or somebody involved, had a choice. So the buck stops at, rather than the faceless divinity of nature, a mere human. And those are much easier to dismiss.
So we paint the opposing argument as arising from nurture rather than nature. And those arguments stick around and get cited. And a "it's all nurture" model develops.
I disagree. The opposite is ridiculously pushed from what I can tell of the online-manifestation of western culture. Rather, what I'd argue is the elephant in the room, is that it doesn't matter which of the two is the right answer. We should take responsibility for doing the right thing, regardless if our nature or our surroundings made us a certain way.
Barring certain extreme cases, of course, such as mental illness and such.
I wasn't talking about which one is right. It's just an interesting feature of American culture. The positive side is that people are proud of their successes, they are encouraged, every kid is told they can one day become President etc (obviously exaggerated, but the Tall Poppy Syndrome is not characteristic of the US).
The stereotypical US things, like no universal health care, no tuition-free education, lax gun laws, mass incarceration, death penalty etc. are also a manifestation of this attitude.
You must take care of yourself, you must protect yourself, if you make it then great! If you become a criminal, you become subhuman and can be executed and treated brutally by the police. If you become dirt poor, that's your fault, you can become homeless, there's no welfare.
Now again, I'm exaggerating somewhat to emphasize what I mean. And yes I also know the historical origins of this mentality, and as I said, there are also positive consequences, like most major innovations and scientific discoveries coming from the US, the huge dynamic market where anyone can start a new company with manageable levels of bureaucracy (compared to most European countries) etc.
Pinker is full of shit on this subject. I remember his intro to psych lecture including an example of a how gendered thinking is hard-wired involving small boys playing with guns. Obviously an example of socialization; evolution did not teach anything to anyone about guns. There is a huge amount of sloppy thinking in this subject.
People have been using bows for 500+ generations and ranged weapons for even longer. That's plenty of time for a preference for ranged combat to show up (ed: become frequent).
This is the kind of argument I am criticizing; "its possible based on our vague understanding of the evolutionary background and selection that this behavior is adaptive, therefore my speculation that this behavior is genetic and the product of evolution is correct."
That's not what I said. I said there was enough time, not that anything actually happened. Thus evolution did not teach anything to anyone about guns is not a supported statement.
Also, a preference for guns may or may not be there. But, males having more accurate spatial reasoning due to ranged weapons, or hunting, and or fighting seems likely. The obvious alternatives are men developed better spatial reasoning due to very widespread cultural factors seems suspicious. Or women scarified spacial reasoning for some competing features.
Anyway, the important thing is not to debate this stuff it's to actually test it. Until then it's all just hot air.
Based on my understanding of genetics this reasoning is very unattractive. 500 generations is the blink of an eye in genetic terms, certainly not enough to establish a pervasive biological truth that splits the whole species across gender lines; maybe you could drive a single variant to global fixation in that time, certainly not a whole host of them. We also know nothing about how strong the selection in question might be. We know nothing, in fact, to suggest that evolution is "likely" other than our own gut feeling that it must be.
As for testing, that would be great. But it turns out that proving anything about human evolution is very hard, because most of the evidence is lost.
For clarity, 500 generations is easily enough for some things to shift frequency, but I agree it would be fast for a mutation to go global. However, thrown weapons are on the order of ~20,000+ generations which is plenty of time for mutation and adaptation.
As to testing, I suspect we are going to get good at decoding and editing human DNA fairly soon which is going to have a lot to say about these debates. This stuff is either there or not, when and how it showed up (or not) is a separate issue.
>when and how it showed up (or not) is a separate issue.
I don't think new data will help. We know the changes in the human lineage; even if we knew their functional meaning, we cannot conclude whether they are adaptive or not; fixed alleles reveal little about their fixation time, etc.
They believe the haast eagle evolved from the little eagle diverging just 700 000 years ago. That's going from one of the smallest eagles(0.8kgs) to the largest (11.5-14kgs) in under a million years.
> "You find that people cooperate, you say, ‘Yeah, that contributes to their genes' perpetuating.’ You find that they fight, you say, ‘Sure, that’s obvious, because it means that their genes perpetuate and not somebody else's. In fact, just about anything you find, you can make up some story for it."
Cordelia Fine also does a great breakdown of all of these "monkey does this, therefore women shopping men guns" arguments.
The nurture side of the debate has its "no nature" clowns, but the caricature by the top-level post is completely uncalled for in this context.
Distaff side here. I loved playing with guns when I was a kid. My parents though thought they weren't suitable for girls, so they were quickly banned. So I made my own bow and arrow set, needless to say, that didn't last long in the suburbs. Then I finally got smart, and they never found about the slingshot.
They could be; its just difficult to conclude that based on observing that they play with weapons, since obviously they must be taught what weapons are, and along with that who (men, women) should use them. Pinker makes little effort to account for such problems and often makes the "widely observed == genetic" fallacy.
The hostility isn't to sexual dimorphism per se. If only because of hormones and reproduction, there is clearly sexual dimorphism. Anybody can see that.
The hostility is to the tendency to attribute differences between men and women to sheer biology without a careful consideration of other factors.
To split hairs a bit: Gender identity is a social construct while biological sex is not.
I think the author meant sex, not gender, and GP meant gender, not sex.
It's easy to conflate the two in conversation, but keeping a semantic barrier between them will help maintain civil discourse without the risk of devolving the discussion into a flame war.
The thing is, gender identity is very much affected by sex too. Many outward behaviors that are often classified as masculine or feminine have roots in different hormone levels in the sexes. That's why I dislike that many attack gender roles and other social gender norms indiscriminately. Some of them have a basis in nature and it's healthy for the vast majority of people to embrace them. At the same time there shouldn't be any room for attacking those who don't follow the norms either. And of course some norms are just harmful. It's not so easy to just throw them all out.
> The thing is, gender identity is very much affected by sex too.
Affected by? Yes.
The same thing? No.
> That's why I dislike that many attack gender roles and other social gender norms indiscriminately.
Huh. That sounds like something I'd expect to read about firsthand on Tumblr moreso than something that reasonable people would do.
> At the same time there shouldn't be any room for attacking those who don't follow the norms either. And of course some norms are just harmful. It's not so easy to just throw them all out.
I hate to break it to you. But behavior and gender is determined by genetics. Therefore gender identity is not just a social construct but a biological one as well.
Take for example the correlation between feminine behavior and two X chromosomes (XX). There is high correlation between these two factors. Additionally examine the correlation between masculine behavior and XY. Again another high correlation implying the possibility of a causal connection between gender and genes.
Though correlation doesn't imply causation it lends more credibility to the hypothesis. What if we were to raise a child, born a boy, as a girl? If gender were truly a social construct there would be no issue.
> I hate to break it to you. But behavior and gender is determined by genetics. Therefore gender identity is not just a social construct but a biological one as well.
I must admit my knowledge of the scientific literature around the relationship between biological sex and gender identity is limited. Have they found a genetic/epigenetic/hormonal marker that correlates with 95%+ of transgendered people yet?
They have not found a definitive biological causal mechanism that causes transgendered traits. They have found correlations between certain biological mechanisms and transgendered traits. However these findings lead to only about a 70% correlation at most.
Please note that the 70% correlation cannot be ignored. It indicates high likelihood of a causal connection. It is unwise to dismiss this correlation even if it is below a 95% criteria. My intuition tells me that 70% is only a statistic for a single causative biological agent out of several. Once all biological markers are discovered and correlated together, I believe that the number will be 99%.
Please also note that the correlation between the XX chromosomes and the female gender is above 95%, same with the XY chromosomes and the male gender. These correlations meet your criteria. There is no scientific study that proves this but you will note through common sense that males and females tend to act within their gender role over 95% of the time.
> There is no scientific study that proves this but you will note through common sense that males and females tend to act within their gender role over 95% of the time.
Then I propose such a scientific study be performed.
I don't like appeals to "common sense" in political matters (and unfortunately gender and sexuality is very political right now). Because, hey, if you're wrong, wouldn't that be an interesting result?
I take it back. There have been studies. Common sense and science are in line in this case. The amount of people who admit to operating outside of gender norms is <4% according to certain studies.
>I don't like appeals to "common sense" in political matters
All things must often appeal to common sense regardless of the politics behind the issue. Males have penises and females don't, does a scientific study need to be conducted to prove this point? No. Because if we needed a scientific study for every possible issue without regard to common sense we would make zero progress on any topic.
I'm not sure what your politics are, but a lot of people who have traveled down this path in a conversation ended up expressing very intolerant opinions towards transgendered people. If you do feel contempt for someone whose gender identity and/or assumed gender role doesn't match their biological sex, please don't share that opinion with me.
Look at children: male brains develop differently to female brains. Their blood contains different chemicals. There are differences and those differences have effects.
Way to miss the point. And a very important point it is. But lets just snark about vocabulary instead. Its the activist way - invent a new jargon, or redefine the old one, as a way to draw a circle around the in crowd of savvy activists, and all the rest of us jerks.
Because the conceptual difference doesn't exist for about 99.9% of people.
Also, most languages have no such distinction. For example in my native language Hungarian we either use the English word "gender" or say (the equivalent of) "social sex" and "biological sex".
It's a niche thing. I understand that some people feel sensitive about sex/gender or the differences between transsexual/transgender/transvestite/queer/crossdresser/drag-queen etc. But for the vast majority of the people this just isn't a topic of interest.
Around 0.3% of the population in the US can be identified as transgender, so that knocks it down to 99.7%. Then there's other factors, where people don't adhere to any particular binary gender at all, which erodes that even further.
When you include the full spectrum of LGBTQI you probably have to cut that down to no more than 95%, possibly less.
When you say "for the vast majority" you presume they operate in isolation, but they don't. Most people will end up knowing at least one person that doesn't conform to the traditional gender patterns, which means it's a problem everyone faces.
I was talking about the T (since the question was how come someone doesn't get that sex != gender). The LGB part is a lot more, some estimates are even around 10%. The "gender issue" is almost 2 orders of magnitude smaller than the sexual orientation issue.
So that's the explanation why most people don't "get" or even think about the distinction, but they know about gays and lesbians.
I've known three, and I don't have an awful lot of friends and acquaintances. I also don't go out of my way to only talk to LGBTQI folks. (I do, however, go out of my way to talk to people interested in technology and especially computer security.)
If you pool the various genetic causes of intersex conditions (neither unambiguously male nor unambiguously female) it's about the same percent of the population as natural red hair. Should we ignore people with red hair?
I'm not saying we should ignore them. Just that for most people the two concepts "sex" and "gender" aren't separate, and trans people are simply regarded as quirky. For example there are people born with 6 functional fingers per hand but we still say that humans have 5 fingers per hand and don't say that humans have anywhere between 0 and 8 fingers per hand.
Treating sex and gender separately makes it seem like they just accidentally coincide in case of 99.x% of the people.
One needs a very special kind of schooling and/or social circle to even imagine there's a difference. It seems to be very limited to (some) Americans.
Some people suffer from phantom limb syndrome. The pain is real, but the limb is not. We've not yet reached a point where the politically correct thing to do is to pretend otherwise.
Everyone understands that in the vast majority of times we use man/woman, he/she, or him/her, the intention is not to specifically draw attention to a person's reproductive organs. It doesn't take special schooling to detect this distinction, though it does require some thought to figure out what to make of it.
There would only be PC pressure to pretend a trans man has a penis if "having a penis" were a vital component of being a man, which it is not. In any case, the circumstances under which one finds themselves having to confirm the presence/character of another persons genitals usually either fall outside of or supersede the jurisdiction of "political correctness".
gender = {biological sex, social structures, gender identity, ...}
There's no reason to assume that the author has any ill will toward the LGBT community. It's a misunderstanding that people are (with good reason) very passionate about, but something that the author probably hasn't given much thought to.
It's not a clear distinction. It's easy to point to, say, trans people, and cite them as an example of people with differing sex and gender. Yet that's not quite true: a trans person who has undergone hormone treatment, for example, is not quite their birth-assigned sex.
As fluid as people wish it was, certain gender identities highly correlate with certain sexes. To be male sexually and female behaviorally is abnormal, statistically speaking.
This gender =/= sex is a recent concept invented by mankind.
The concept has only recently become popularized in the west, but the reality is not new that societal upbringing, reproductive sex, and mental self-image, while strongly correlated, aren't intrinsically linked.
That is a reality I do not agree with. Strong correlation indicates the high possibility of an intrinsic link, unless evidence states otherwise.
Below is a true story of a man raised as a woman, but unable to complete the sexual transition despite cultural upbringing, injections of testosterone and even testicular castration.
There is evidence in the form of the existence of transgender people. Some societies (as noted above) have been aware of the lack of an intrinsic link between apparent reproductive sex at birth and mental/social gender for quite a while, and analogous behavior is observed in some animals.
Just as you can't conversion therapy someone out of being transgender, David Reimer is evidence that you can't conversion therapy someone into being transgender.
Just because someone is born male, and raised as a boy, doesn't mean they'll agree once they can decide for themselves. They probably will, >99% of the time, but not always.
>There is evidence in the form of the existence of transgender people.
The link I describe isn't a link that ALWAYS holds. The link, like all links in science, is just a causal correlation.
So in short, being of the male sex doesn't guarantee that you will be of male gender, but it makes it highly highly like you will be of the male gender. That is the intrinsic connection and link I describe.
Gender is social and genetic; like most human behavior, nature and nurture are both involved. Pretending it's exclusively one or the other is foolishly reductionist, no matter which side you're on.
> Gender is social and genetic. Pretending it's exclusively one or the other is foolishly reductionist, no matter which side you're on.
Gender (both ascribed gender and gender identity, though the two are distinct but related) is social but references, in different ways, biological sex; biological sex is phenotype, and as such a mixture of genetic and environmental (but not at all social, except to the extent that the elements of phenotype that are defined to be "sex" are, like all definitions, a social construct.)
Furthermore, the role of sex/gender in prisons is not fixed in time and culture.
For example, this article [1] shows that from 2003 to 2013, women in Chinese prisons increased by 46 percent. In that same period, women in American prisons increased by 15 percent. This is evidence that gender/sex does not impart a natural, fixed amount of criminality. Criminality varies in time and in response to stimulus.
