Your reading for today
I suggest you drop everything and read Rebecca Reilly-Cooper’s latest: “GENDER IS NOT A BINARY, IT’S A SPECTRUM”: SOME PROBLEMS.
Fans of gender identity think that gender is not a system of arbitrary rules imposed on all of us but “an internal, essential facet of our identity” that is much bigger and richer than any stinkin’ binary.
That idea is full of holes, and politically it’s a disaster.
First, if gender is a spectrum, then we’re all non-binary.
I would be happy with this implication, because despite knowing that I am female and calling myself a woman, I do not consider myself a one-dimensional gender stereotype. I am not some ideal manifestation of femininity, and so I am non-binary, just like everybody else is. Those who identify as non-binary are unlikely to be happy with this conclusion, however, as their identity as a non-binary person depends upon the existence of a much larger group of binary cisgender people, against whom they can define themselves as more interesting and complex, and by whom they can claim to be misunderstood and politically oppressed.
I gotta go, so that’s all for now, but you can see why you have to read every word of it yourself.
Where do I sign up?
I don’t think gender can be a single spectrum. There are at least two aspects of gender, physical and psychological, so a person’s total gender should be represented at least as a point on a plane (if not in higher dimensions). A point on a line just doesn’t do justice to the complexity of human nature.
To draw an analogy with orientation, the fact that the Kinsey scale is a concept that exists and that people might find themselves in various positions on it does not destroy the concept of ‘straight’ or ‘gay’. You can have a spectrum with most individuals aggregating close to small number of positions along it. You can have (in principle) a spectrum of gender with the majority of people figuring out they are very male/masculine or female/feminine and a minority somewhere in between, far enough from the two major clusters to not belong to either. You can also have a spectrum of gender where people are all over the place with no obvious clustering. Or there may be clusters that aren’t very well defined, fading into a large intermediate population. We haven’t run the experiment of letting everyone find their comfort zone to know which picture is closer to reality.
David Evans, at my kid’s GSA meetings they tend to describe gender identity as a 2-dimentional space with one axis being the male/female one and the other being something akin to ‘strength’ of identity, running from neither to both. (Still doesn’t say anything about how the population at large is expected to be distributed on that space.)
Perhaps we could think of gender as a bimodal distribution across a spectrum? Male/Female is just too useful and distinctive to give up as a categories, but we could include an ‘other’ option for those who prefer to buck the system than bow to it.
Male/Female refer to sex, not gender.
“Sex” refers to biological reality. “Gender” refers to personality and social role, as determined by sex.
I’m disappointed that, after reading that article which is as crystal clear as can be, people are commenting here as if it had never occurred to them that sex and gender are two different things. Or that gender isn’t even a real thing the way we talk about it.
Please hear this in a voice of bewilderment, but not nastiness or scolding: Did you truly read the article? If so, how was it possible for you not to grasp that basic distinction—-the very heart of the author’s argument?
Whatever names we designate for the categories, I agree that a bimodal distribution across a spectrum is a likely description of what we observe in the population, at least if we use a single axis. The problem is finding names for the major clusters that will be both acceptable to the general population and to the various activists so we don’t end up with a treadmill of ever-changing nomenclature.
Bimodal distribution measuring what? Specifically, without using the word “gender”. What putative value, described in plain terms, would that measure?
“I am not some ideal manifestation of femininity, and so I am non-binary, just like everybody else is.”
But that’s… that’s part of the analogy. Going from blue to green one sees increasingly greener shades of blue, crosses the (aptly-named) blue-green midpoint, then sees decreasingly bluer shades of green. Would the author call bullshit on “the sky is blue” on these grounds?
“No it’s not. The color spectrum is not a set of discrete, fixed points. There is no binary of, say, blue vs green. Since the sky is not an ideal manifestation of blueness, it is not a discrete color… it’s just “colorful” like everything else”.
It’s the same logical error as “If you can’t state the exact moment that a fertilized egg becomes a person, then it can only be said that no distinction exists and a fertilized egg is a person.”
Or the creationist version:
“Evilution says that two monkeys had sex and had a human baby”
Kevin K, different forms of the Sorites Paradox.
Josh, the author’s insistence that gender identity does not exists and that we are all agender (or non-binary) does not match the claimed experience of those people, both cis and trans, that claim a strong gender identity (whether with their assigned gender or a different one). I wouldn’t be surprised if the problem is the difficulty of communicating one’s internal mental state(s) using language when we don’t know what other people mean when they use verbal descriptions of their respective internal states – or in other words, the problem that each person can only read their own mind and nobody else’s, and perhaps what some people describe as gender identity overlaps with what the author describes as how comfortable one feels with conforming to our society’s gender norms (whether the gender one comfortably conforms with is the same one was assigned at birth or a different one), but anecdotally this does not seem to be the entire picture. There are people who are unhappy with gender norms (in particular those they are expected to adhere to) yet are comfortable enough with their bodies and do not seek to modify their sex-specific aspects, there are those who are miserable with their bodies’ sex-specific aspects to the point they want the entire set of alternate sex-specific body structures – and have varying degrees of preference to changing gender roles, others only want to change some of their sex-specific body traits and so forth. I’m not sure what to make of this diversity. I don’t think we will know until we let kids experiment from a young age with all manners of expression without pigeon-holing them, their bodies, or their activities.
But people can be claiming to have “a strong gender identity” on the basis of a particular (mistaken) understanding of what gender is, in which case there actually is no mismatch. If gender is “an externally imposed set of norms prescribing and proscribing behaviour to individuals in accordance with morally arbitrary biological characteristics” then what is there to identify with? Who “identifies with” a list of rules?
It’s the difference between description and prescription. The mistake is to think that “gender” describes people, when all it does is tell them what to do according to what sex they are.
Josh, I am used to states being described as arrays of many numbers. In this case I expect the numbers in the array to represent responses to psychological questionnaires (Do you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, strongly disagree etc with each of the following statements) where the questions try to assess how much the person is happy with aspects of their biological sex (and one needs questions that will allow to distinguish between someone who, for instance, is unhappy because they find menstruation painful vs someone who is unhappy because they find menstruation psychologically disturbing), being considered part of the group ‘men’/’women’, being expected to conform to a the roles associated with these groups (whether they prefer one group, neither, both) etc.
I have no idea what that comment is about or what it’s responding to.
Ophelia, how does dysphoria as related to one’s body figure in? There are people who desperately want to change their bodies and how they are perceived by others but are comfortable with whatever set of behaviors they got socialized into in their current bodies.
My #13 was in response to Josh’s #7, my #15 was in response to his #9, my #17 was in response to Ophelia’s #14, and this one is in response to Ophelia’s #16. Sorry for the confusion.
So many personality traits are associated with gender, most people can’t just be masculine or feminine.
What is a person who is highly competitive (masculine), in a nurturing profession (feminine), who likes bright colors (feminine), no frills (masculine), is skilled at math (masculine) but has artistic hobbies (feminine)? Where do they fit on a supposed gender spectrum? And that’s just a *few* gendered characteristic. We could go on and on forever.
If anything, the spectrum of gender is more complicated than the spectrum of autism which actually has “sliders” on each of the autism traits because since it has to do with neural function as well as neural structure comes with good fucking days and bad fucking days.
What does a socially-gendered activity like “loves to cook” mean on a day when the person just feels like take out and paper plates?
Other than “I’d really like a new, different-sexed body, please”. I’m not sure that different genders can mean anything, in which case, we’re really talking about sex, not gender.
“Male/Female refer to sex, not gender.
“Sex” refers to biological reality. “Gender” refers to personality and social role, as determined by sex.”
But that’s a sticking point now too, isn’t it? Sex no longer refers to biological reality either and is instead a matter of self determination. /sarcasm
I’m hoping my cat tells me when I can stop checking F at her vet visits.
By the way, I’d like a new body, please. But it’s not going to happen, so I would rather just live with the body the roll of the spermatazoa gave me, and fix society so that people don’t expect me to be bad with math, love cooking, read romance novels, and tailor my looks to their aesthetic preferences. You know, ending sexism, so that it matters to no one but myself what body I’ve got.
Anyone who thinks that Reilly-Cooper is arguing that “we are all agender” (Anat) or “there is no gender binary” (Kevin) *really* needs to go back and read the piece again.
I think Anat is barking up the right tree in talking about categories as subjective delineations among clusters of observable features. Following that thought further…
Across the color spectrum, how many colors should have distinct labels; how many clusters should colors be categorized into? Americans say “there are 7 colors in the rainbow”, but the Chinese generally contend that there are 5. Who is right? What is the actual, “true” number of labels with which colors should be categorized, and which culture is closer to the “true” value?
These questions can only be answered with the realization that the questions themselves are meaningless. To most people, this is obvious when speaking of colors; but many people seem not to have the deeper insight that the same is true of all forms of categorization.
“What is the correct way to differentiate these things?” and “What are the actual boundaries between clusters?” are the wrong questions; they function under the illusion that categories are actual, objective things in the real world, when in reality they’re just language elements. Very handy, of course, but non-existent outside of human conception. The question that should be asked is, “What is the best way to categorize these things?”
We recognize the absurdity of “bariminology” as lying not in how they group animals into “kinds”, but their assume that there’s a right way to do it at all. Biologists use “species” very differently – arguing not over the “right” way to categorize organisms into species; but over the *best* way to categorize organisms into species.
So too goes gender: the question isn’t, “What is the actual number of genders, and what’s the right way to differentiate men from women?”. Those questions are as meaningless as “How many colors are actually in the rainbow, 5 or 7; is orange it’s own color, or is it just the midpoint between red and yellow?” or “How many kinds of animals are there; are wolves the same kind of animal as foxes”?. For gender, the question we should be asking is, “What is the *best* way to categorize people into genders?”
[A side note – one might ask, “Why categorize in the first place?”. My response: this might be possible in a culture that has adopted a gender-free language. But in all other cultures, the need to assign gender category is a given. I see no difference between “I think it’s wrong to label people with a gender at all” and a “post-racial” white person claiming “I’m not racist, I’m color-blind. I look past the color of everyone I meet.”]
[Side note 2 – recognizing the inescap-ability of classifying others by race or gender does not entail acceptance of giving people preferential treatment based on the label they thusly assigned]
Determining the “best” approach (or at least, choosing the better of two approaches) can be fairly straightforward. The whole purpose of using clustering/labeling in language is to convey information about things while constrained by a finite vocabulary and a finite amount of time to communicate. As such, though there’s no such thing as a “right” and “wrong” way to group things into categories according to clusters of common characteristics, we can differentiate “good” clustering from “bad” clustering.
“Good” clustering is that which groups things and assigns them labels which convey
* accurate/factual information
* useful information
using a relatively compact set of categories.
Some feel we should assign gender category based on “one’s preferred gender category”; others feel it should be assigned based on “one’s sexual anatomy”. Using the criteria above, which is better? To help think that through, I’ll imagine a person was describing a child I was about to meet, but was disallowed from using gender labels in describing the child. Instead they could only directly communicate one of the two sets of information below. What set of information would be of most use to me, in place of the label “boy”?
1) The child describes himself as a “boy”. He prefers being referred to with masculine pronouns such as “he” and “him”, and masculine familial roles such as “son” and “brother; and may become quite upset if referred to as “a girl”, “a sister”, or “a daughter”.
2) The child has a penis. Slightly below the penis, the child has a scrotum. It cannot be said whether the child would prefer masculine, feminine, or neutral pronouns; though the child may become quite upset if referred to as a “girl” or a “boy”, a “brother” or a “sister”, or a “son” or a “daughter”.
I think the first set of information would come in far more handy than the second. In fact, unless I were a pediatrician, I honestly can’t think of a single useful application of the second set of information (though I’m certainly open to hearing why someone might feel otherwise).
Revisiting this thread a few hours later and am disappointed no one has engaged with Josh #9. It’s an excellent question.
Yes.This. The sheer incoherence of some of the post-modernist theories about gender is mind-boggling. Not to mention theories about physical sex! I actually read a comment on a popular geek blog (in response to a pretty incoherent article by a trans woman) that humans were not actually sexually dimorphic because the two sexes were too similar. Which falls into a “not even wrong…” understanding of biology.
Sex dysphoria certainly exists – it’s *not* gender dysphoria because the discomfort and sense of wrongness is with the physical body – and is a debilitating condition causing severe psychological pain. It’s probably a form of Body Identity Integrity Disorder where the part of the brain that “maps” the physical body gets screwed up causing the body to feel wrong. In some cases people believe they should be amputees or even paraplegics (though at that extreme there’s probably something else going on too). People with sex dysphoria deserve every ounce of empathy and support we can give them.
Equally anyone who feels they cannot live even vaguely within their societally imposed gender role needs support. Gender policing can be severe and punishing so it’s understandable for some people performing that role is psychologically damaging and the best thing they feel they can do is reject that gender role entirely. I have a great sympathy for people that hurt by our system of gender. However that crossover to another gender role is just changing role playing, however essential or healing it feels for that individual. It is in itself a criticism of gender and gender policing. It changes no physical reality and doesn’t challenge the gender hierarchy.
It is an excellent piece, worth considering, but the best paragraph of all the great paragraphs is the last one:
‘And if you really want to play with gender, particularly if you’re male, then the best way to do that – the most radical, revolutionary, genuinely non-masculine conforming thing you can do – has nothing to do with your dress or your hair or your makeup or your choice of pronouns. As a male person, the most gender non-conforming thing you can do is to stop making demands of women – of their time, of their resources, of their domestic, emotional and sexual labour. You can stop calling your mother cis scum, and start helping her with the domestic chores. You can stop asking what feminism can do for you, and start asking what you can do to make the world a little more amenable to women.’
I wish we could see more of that. And I’d possibly add to it, or stress, not just respect and support ‘womanity’ or ‘femmeness’, but actual real women. And that this goes for women (e.g. me) as well as men.
Kevin #23, I don’t think you understand how sex oppression happens. You are aware, no doubt, that human history has been dominated and controlled by people with penises. Do you think this is a millennia-length coincidence, or do you REALLY think penises convey no “useful application of information”?
#27 above, rhetorical fail. The two clauses of the last sentence don’t in fact contradict each other. I hope my point is nonetheless clear.
@Cressida 22
If you think I think Reilly-Cooper was arguing “there is no gender binary”, you need to reread my post. If you do, and still think that, let me know (not the first time I’ve made a point more opaquely than intended).
This one?
Not sure if it matches up with the original reference, but I’d expect a bimodal distribution to show up in the strength of people’s sense/conviction of being male or female.
@ 24 Kevin
The problem with your argument about how to describe the child is that you’re contradicting yourself. You ask how to describe a child without using gender labels but then go on to give the example of “the child prefers to be called a boy”. Boy *is* a gender label and in over c. 98% of cases does mean “the child has a penis and scrotum”. Something that is true in 98% of cases is true enough to be used on a daily basis as true. So,on a day to day basis, your two sets of information overlap with a high enough frequency that socially they mean the same thing.
The part where you refer to the child becoming upset at pronoun/noun use represents a modifier suggesting that child has already been or will be identified as “a boy” but is unhappy about it so extra information is required for an observer. Absent gender policing, a prepubescent child can present as either male or female. In fact when I grew up in the 1970s (in the UK) prepubescent children regularly wore the same clothes (often gender neutral styles or colours as hand me downs were a fact of life. Pinks and pale “feminine” colours were not given to girls on a daily basis as they were too likely to get soiled and were harder to wash than the navy, bottle green, gray, brown or black that we wore – that older brothers/sisters wore before us and younger sisters/brothers would wear after us. Equally “girly” clothes were special occasion only because they didn’t stand up to a day spent playing out of doors with bikes and climbing frames and mud and grass stains. Generally the only way that you could physically tell boys from girls at that point was by hair length and, yes, most (but not all) girls had long hair. We police children’s gender *so much* more strongly for today’s indoor kids that I wonder if that very policing may be a factor in the number of children we see uncomfortable with their prescribed gender roles (NB, this does not refer to children who experience a physical dysphoria). It also explains why 90% of children who express problems with their gender roles go on to find a way to modify that role in a way they can comfortably live with.
As regards the category information – it would be far more useful for a prepubescent child to say “their name is X, they like X, Y, Z”. If the child is presenting as female (but has male genitalia) this is not something anyone needs to know because a prepubescent male child presenting as a girl will be physically indistinguishable from a female child presenting as a girl. The contents of that child’s knickers is no business of anyone who needs to be told *unless* they need to know *because* that child is presenting differently to their biological genitalia. Schools for instance, or medical staff. In that case, yes the “disturbed by references to biological sex” is relevant – and important – but that’s a different discussion to just describing the child.
I really enjoyed reading that article.
Very well written, clear and concise.
And, as far as I am concerned, accurate; particularly with regards to people using labels as a way of getting into something they regard as a socially-superior grouping within their wider culture.
Feeling that your brain’s body-map does not match your body’s sex is not the same as feeling that the social gender-role assigned to people of your body-sex is inappropriate for you*. I would suggest that the former state is occupied by a very tiny minority, (many of whom will seek solutions other than complete sex-reassignment), whereas the latter state is possibly almost universal.
Can we please go back to the old days, before transsexual people who were ‘pre-op’ (or pre-any other treatment) got kicked out of the ‘label’ for not being really, truly, true transsexual men and women, and were forced to search for another term? Really, opting for ‘transgender’ was only a bad choice in hindsight – and pretty long hindsight at that, because it sort-of worked for decades as a sop to those who had completed their transition – only becoming a problem in the last couple of years when certain young social justice cosplayers decided to use ‘gender’ as a word with which to beat their elders in movement feminism, apparently as a way to avoid confronting the intransigence of the people with actual power whilst still feeling good about themselves. Despite having a great deal of sympathy (of course) for people who went through medical and surgical transition in the days when that process was beset with obstacles – and for those who are in countries where that is still the case – I believe that it was unfair to let what was probably a small vocal minority decide that theirs was an exclusive club and no-one else could use the transsexual label.
I vote with Rebecca Reilly-Cooper that we drop the term ‘trans gender’ (with or without the space) as it is basically meaningless, and muddies the waters with regard to the more important use of the word to describe the social categories of the two sexes (yes, I am aware that there are intersex and other conditions; the existence of people who are biologically neither male nor female – or are both – does not negate the fact that most societies (if not all) are more-or-less strictly divided into different roles for male people and female people); retain the ‘socially-enforced roles’ meaning of gender; and instead expand the word ‘transsexual’ to include all those whose brain body-maps have a different sex to their actual body’s sex, regardless of their stage of social, medical and/or surgical transition, if any.
Then we would have clear categories:
• cis-men and cis-women would be those whose brain body-maps match the body sex they were born with;
• trans-men and trans-women would be those whose brain body-maps do not;
and
• gender as a social construct could be criticised by all and (eventually) dismantled without anyone being accused of insensitivity to a vulnerable minority.
____________________________________________________
*In my own case, simply ignoring or bucking the gender norms for my body’s female sex was not enough to make me feel more comfortable (whereas it seems to have worked for my sister); only acknowledging that having a male body would feel right enabled me not only to know, but to accept, who I am. In truth, I can’t fit into the masculine stereotype either (nor do any of my cis-male friends and relations, to be honest; feeling ‘male’ does not seem to correlate with feeling happy to fit into your society’s expected ‘masculine’ role for your sex).
Note:
I don’t know who it was who decided that only one category of transsexual men and women would be allowed to keep the label; it may well have not been any transsexual people at all, but whoever was the equivalent-at-the-time of today’s ‘trans activists’, most of whom don’t seem to be trans themselves, and many of whom shout over the voices of gender-critical trans people.
To Cressida @24, see me at 15.
Anat #15:
” I expect the numbers in the array to represent (…)
how much the person is happy with aspects of their biological sex (…),
being considered part of the group ‘men’/’women’,
being expected to conform to a the roles associated with these groups”
1. That’s not a single “state”.
2. You are talking about how happy people are with their gender, but you haven’t said a word about what it (“gender”) is. Bimodal distribution of what?
I keep asking.
To amrie @34:
1) Yes it is. When I study behaviors of individual cells or populations of cells, the state of the cell or population is defined as an array of potentially thousands of numbers, each one representing things like the level of expression of a particular gene or some other measurable trait. You can think of it as the coordinates of a point in a thousands-dimensional space. That the position is influenced by thousands of numbers does not mean it is not a single position or single point. (And to continue the analogy – while potentially cells might occupy any of the infinite number of points in the space, they actually tend to cluster in specific areas, representing cell types. This is why I object to the claim that if gender is a spectrum then we are all non-binary. We haven’t done the measurements yet, so we don’t know where people will fall, but I expect to see clustering, not an even continuous spread. The number of clusters will be the number of genders. And a minority of people will be far enough from any major cluster to be considered not members of any of them.
2) I think my response to #1 includes my response to #2. Each gender will be then an empirical category of people that respond in ways that are over-all similar-enough to the set of questions. I expect to find 2 major genders and multiple minority ones, but who knows, I might be surprised.
Anat, I agree: gender (and also sex) are not linear functions but complex multidimensional constructs. The clusters exist. The functions are bimodal – but bimodal is NOT the same as binary. If you want binaries you need Heaviside functions, not Gaussians. If you imagine for simplicity that all the components fit a pair of normal distributions, then you end up with a multidimensional generalisation of two neighbouring hills, not of two columns.
This is getting comical. Anat: Respond in WHAT ways to WHAT set of questions? Give me one question you would ask to determine someone’s gender.
Cressida, I would star with tons of questions, though eventually someone might be able to extract those that end up being the most informative classifiers. An example for some questions would be:
‘If someone were to call me a woman I would feel the need to object’ (Strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, strongly disagree)
‘Not having breasts feels/would feel odd’ (Strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, strongly disagree)
“Hey, what gender are you?”
Q+A
Q1: If someone were to call me a woman I would feel the need to object’ (Strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, strongly disagree)
A1: That would completely depend on the circumstance. If I am getting medical treatment, it is important to know that I have female organs. If I were looking for a romantic relationship, it would important for my potential partner to know if I am the appropriate sex. For many other situations, I would consider my gender to be utterly irrelevant, and to point it out could be distracting in which case I might very well feel the need to object.
Q2: Not having breasts feels/would feel odd’ (Strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, strongly disagree)
A2: Any body modification feels odd. But aside from the nuisance of needing to replace all my shirts with a smaller size, I would not particularly mind not having breasts.
Q3: Hey, what gender are you?
A3: Why do you care? Why do you need to know? What will you do with the information if I provide it to you?
Hm. So, so far, gender = (1) tautology and (2) sexed body. Fascinating.
It is frequently said that gender is a social construct. This to me already says that it is a nonextant property, but these ‘questions to determine what geender you are’ only emphasise that further. It is apparent that gender is simply a special question to which an individual can answer anything, and that answer must never be questioned despite it conveying no information about anything. Gender is becoming so vague as to be ineffable.
Stop it. You know full well the context in which that question is asked. That snotty response is a provocation meant to signal that you believe other people in this conversation don’t “respect” other people’s “gender.” Why are you doing this? We’re trying so hard to have a clear, good-faith conversation. Can you please let us?
Cressida (#42), the first is not a tautology, neither is the second a question about the respondent’s sexed body. The first is a question about the respondent’s attitude to being classified into a gender-related category by others – whether their immediate response is to accept the category or reject it, and how strong said response is. The second is about their attitude to a real or hypothetical sexed body – do they feel said sexed body is right for them or wrong for them, and how strongly they feel so.
I’m not talking about your respondent’s gender. I’m talking about gender as a concept and what it means.
Why are people still conflating ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ in these comments?
Josh @ #9:
I was thinking that perhaps they would measure how well someone performed their society’s versions of masculinity and femininity, but then sample questions were posed using secondary sexual characteristics, so there is still that conflating of gender and sex. I’m not sure they read the same article.
Josh @ 44 – eh? I think you must have misunderstood.
I was referring to Beth Clarkson’s first, then Anat’s response, talking about a “bimodal distribution.” It was not clear to me what, specifically, that would be measuring. Did I misunderstand even more than I thought I did?
Ohhh, sorry – I thought you were quoting Theo Bromine.
That was the nearest “Hey, what gender are you?” I saw, so I stopped looking.
Since when has ‘woman’ been simply a gender category? Yes, the gender category ‘feminine’ is imposed exclusively on female people, but ‘woman’ is a word that indicates that someone is female and adult – as opposed to ‘girl’, which applies to those who are female and not yet adult – and there is nothing wrong with that word, as a word.
Those are exceedingly strange questions, and both apply to the sex of the person, or their secondary sexual characteristics, and not at all to the societally-imposed gender norms applied to women (with or without breasts).
OH! You mean my response at number 44 to A Masked Avenger.
Right, that was the “@ 44” lol. But I totally missed Masked Avenger’s, because it was farther up, you see. D’oy.
Cressida @46 – first and foremost – a system to allow us to determine what pronouns to use for whom.
To tiggerthewing – actually the questions are about people’s response to their categorization or their secondary sexual traits. And yes, there can be additional questions applied to other gendered terms, including girl/boy.
If that’s all gender is, it is not very much.
Anat, how does that relate to gender? Categorisation according to sex does not imply anything about how they are gendered by society – it is possible to envisage a society where gendering doesn’t happen, and that is pretty much what feminists have been fighting for all this time.
To Holms @57: That’s the only legitimate application of gender I can think of. And to some people that is a lot. Any other application of gender I can recall is an injustice of one kind or another.
OK then, still no answer to Josh’s question. Anyone else?
I’m still very curious about what we’d be measuring. What, specifically? What is this “gender” we speak of?
Sigh.