How to get out of an uncomfortable egg culture situation with this one simple trick.
Real talk: Calling people eggs is a violation of the egg prime directive, and is considered invalidating as you are trying to say that a person is not the gender they identify as, that their identity is invalid. Don’t call people eggs, like ever, it’s extremely uncool.
You are taking the science of neuro-correlates beyond what can really be said, especially for something as multifaceted as gender.
For example, how does one parse the causes of gender itself from dimorphic sex/gender differences?
There are numerous psychological traits that tend to correlate heavily with sex, and from what limited research exists on trans people, correlate based on identified gender as well. However, it would be totally false to say that these traits are determinant of gender, as many people don’t fit within those generalizations. In all likelihood, few people probably follow the trends aligning with their gender to the letter. Most women have a handful of things that they differ from other women on, and it is the same with men. These traits cannot be understood as the cause of gender with current data, and any theory that claims to do so would be speculation at best. So whenever you look at these neurocorrelates of gender, you must recognize that they might not be due to gender itself. The differences between different gendered brains is important, but it could actually be measuring dimorphic traits instead of gender itself.
Also, the way you dismiss genderfluidity as not a genuine identity is serious overreach. There are few studies on nonbinary identities in general, so saying things about them like that isn’t scientific. It seems more based on your own experience of gender than anything else. For all you know, there is a constant fluidity to everyone’s gender, with some having more than others. Maybe you never dip into another gender, but how can you say others don’t?
We also can’t say that gender truly does not change, only that we don’t know how it could change, and that all attempts to alter it carry near certain risk of serious harm. There aren’t many elements of our psychology or personality that can never change, as our brains are physical substrates that can change in countless ways. The fact that we’ve seen little evidence of gender changing with brain damage indicates that it is a more distributed phenomenon. This makes it similar to consciousness, which does not have clear correlates either.
We are at the infancy of understanding gender, and psychology in general is in its infancy. You’re missing the point in how you’re interpreting the evidence. It’s ok to simply not know. It’s ok to not have an answer. That’s a fundamental part of all science.
In the research I linked like the 2015 brain mosaic article, they actually find the situation is more complex than that, that most people actually don’t follow trends with their gender and the brain doesn’t fit a dimorphic model at all.
They are certainly trying to measure dimorphic traits and not the gender itself, I am not sure why you thought I believed otherwise. My statement that gender identity cannot be altered and that brain sex seems to be a reason why is not the same as claiming that we inspect gender in the brain directly or that you can’t be anything but what your brain tells you you are. Gender clearly has social as well as biological components, bioessentialism does not work as a theory at all.
If I came across as dismissive I think I failed in my communication, there is no such thing as a non-genuine identity so long as people genuinely identify that way. We have already established that self-identity is paramount and respected.
I do tend to think a lot of the labels and identities that are being created are early theorizing based on phenomenology, which is entirely reasonable.
Regarding non-binary identities and science, there are at least studies like the brain mosaic MRI studies that show that most people (>95%) have what might be characterized as “non-binary” brains. I think this is pretty compelling and “validating”, but no matter what the science shows we still hold the principle of respecting and validating self identification. That is fundamental and axiomatic.
What I said in my comment is that I do experience what I think people would classify as genderfluidity, i.e. I absolutely do experience fluctuations in my sense of gender. There are mornings I wake up as a “man”, and times where I feel completely like a “woman”. Sometimes it seems like those fluctuations match hormonal shifts. Other times it seems like it has to do with social situations and the way that I dress and whether I am wearing makeup.
My point about genderfluidity was not a dismissal but a distinction, that I tend to think people who identify as genderfluid are probably doing so based on the kind of phenomenology they are experiencing (and which I think I incidentally experience as well). This distinction is important because it separates what we have empirically established, which is that gender identity seems to be developmentally fixed, from what the phenomenology is, which is that our sense of gender can be quite complex and appear to us as not-fixed. I don’t think these two claims conflict at all, but I think some people might wrongfully interpret it that way.
I do think this is a meaningful distinction of sorts, I think what you are trying to get at is that nothing is truly “essential” and it’s just a limit of techhnology that keeps us from altering something like the brain’s role in generating unconscious sex. I agree with this, but I do feel like you are skirting around the context I was in, which was emphasizing that we should take a hard line that trans identities should not be seen as “choices” but respected as based in early developments of the brain which are not readily changed. This is a way that we can use the science to back a socially humanistic approach to trans identity, and to push against reactionary elements that wish to erase trans people by any means necessary, including forced detransition and conversion therapy to force us to align with our assigned sex. The fact that this has not worked historically and that we now have good working theories based in evidence as to why it does not work is pragmatic and useful, particularly in getting a medical establishment to recognize the importance of gender affirming care and establishing that conversion therapy is contrary to scientific evidence.
Yes of course, but skepticism will always be the strongest position to take, meanwhile we have to make inferences to the best explanation, and I think doing that based on the evidence we do have, even if early, is a good idea.
It’s exactly why the brain sex arguments are often generally considered transmedicalist pseudoscience.
Exactly, honestly the idea that it can’t doesn’t seem to add up, our brains are constantly changing. I wasn’t the same person 5 years ago, 10 years ago I was also completely different, and 15 years I was also different. If our personalities can shift and change throughout our lives who’s to say gender can’t either.
Keep in mind that traumatic brain injuries which completely reshape a person’s brain and mind are much rarer than one would believe reading neuroscience papers. Most people who suffer critical brain injuries like a bullet to the brain, a knife through the head, or even a steel rod through their skull succumb to them. They never live to tell the tale. Those like Phineas Gage are the lucky ones, they don’t say they cheated death for nothing. It’s very possible that specific brain damage could cause a change or diminishment of gender identity, or gender feelings, but we’ve never seen someone with that injury, or they had more than just that injury and died.
Brain injuries can change large parts of a personality, they can completely change a person. I think it’s naive to say that it couldn’t alter one’s gender perception. Especially when we just don’t know, there’s so much about the brain we don’t know.