Told reading tests are a game, boys score higher
wsj.com
wsj.com
Then I came to Canada and this notion was completely absent. It was one of the many culture shocks. Your grades don't seem to matter that much.
The fact that in the media, at least American disney shows, "nerd" is used a pejorative against people who do well academically, was completely puzzling to me (and actually it still is).
Also there was almost no "jocks" (there were some sport competitions but no cheerleaders, and nothing as important culturally as it is in USA, also teams weren't persistent between classes and there were almost none inter-school sport events).
Grades were public as well (or at least - nobody tried to hide them so teachers would just pin a list with results from an exam on the board). Competition was seen as sth natural (at the time unemployment was 20% and kids were told that you have to be good or you will essentially be a hobo).
On the other hand you were supposed to pretend you didn't had to study a lot, because kids that study instead of playing were "kujon"s = boring, lame bookworms. It was cool to be smart without working for it.
Also cheating had no stigma attached, but telling any authority about any misbehaving was the ultimate social suicide. This obviously included telling teachers that other kids were cheating.
This was probably because 50 years of paid spying of citizens on each other by abusive government. Even now whistleblowing in general is hard because of that social stigma.
Nerd and geek concept was introduced later through movies and internet and in mid 00s it was already established, but still not a negative stereotype (but that may be because I changed environment to CS-related in the meantime and ~ everybody was a nerd/geek/whatever).
Yea, where I grew up there was also a term like "bookworm" which was used pejoratively, but it wasn't cause for social rejection, it was merely one of the myriad of ways that kids tease each other. It's not as though the "bookworm" was humiliated or bullied for being so. At least, that's how I remember it.
The "nerd" pejorative isn't about doing well academically, it's more about bragging and obsessing. It's about making academic performance part of your identity. That's what people think is uncool. It's not like the quarterback loses points if he happens to be smart. He just shouldn't flaunt it or obsess about it.
I went through many schools as a child. I never bragged about my grades. Everyone always picked up on me being a straight-A student very quickly.
"Hey Teacher, how much is the curve on this test gonna be?"
"Well, it won't be anything because John got a 100."
[Angry glares at John]
This isn't unique to the Middle East. Its often no secret who the valedictorian of your class will be in my experience (American school)... even if the grades weren't revealed.
In any case, "Nerd" in my experience means something closer to the hobbies you persue. "Geeks" play video games and academically do good in "computer stuff" and music. "Nerds" pursue theater, LARP, and table-top RPGs (Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, World of Darkness, etc.)
The intersection of "Nerds" and "Geeks" is anime, comic book heroes, and sci-fi.
Don't forget diminished desirability by those in whom one has a romantic interest (at least until well after adolescence). :)
> Everyone knew everyone else's scores and they were often announced out loud as the results are handed back. Students who consistently get high scores are looked up to and respected. Your academic performance contributed significantly to your social standing in the classroom.
All of which, we know from empirical evidence, replace intrinsic motivations of play.
Ah like the NBA or NFL? Those big multi-million dollar contracts and random drug tests are just part of the game.
If I'm literally competing to earn a living, or if it ends up in praising winners and blaming losers, it won't be enjoyable, and I'd rather not play at all. Having humility also means that when you win, you also congratulate losers for playing.
I agree that we need to compete on some aspects, like technology, science, construction methods, and business in general. But competing between individuals brings out the worst in people. And that's where exclusion starts: if you keep slapping people's self esteem by telling them that life and society is a game of winners and losers, you'll end up with less and less people ready to take part in it.
Overall, I sense that men avoid competition much more than women do. Or maybe it's the political climate that does. I don't really know.
I think it is important to have competition early and often in life because learning how to win and lose is an important life lesson. Getting lazy because of a win or quitting because of a loss will severely impact someone for their entire life.
The idea of winners and losers comes from social darwinism, which is just another justification for people to keep wealth to themselves and not pay taxes "because it helps the weak".
The reality is that we truly don't know what motivates people to work or to innovate. That's why equality (not egalitarianism) is important.
> Getting lazy because of a win or quitting because of a loss will severely impact someone for their entire life.
Well if you look into society, that happens all the time. And even when it doesn't happen, people still put social filters on each others because of that belief. It's becoming a club of people which believe in "strong motivation".
> I think it is important to have competition early and often in life because learning how to win and lose is an important life lesson.
What kind of life lesson is that ? On what sort philosophy does it stand on? That sounds like a motivational religion.
The life lesson I got from it was that winning leads to social exclusion, from both peers and teachers. So yes, I learned to not (openly) compete any more.
This may get downvoted but don't shoot the messenger. You can't "hate" something that just "is".
You can, and you should. Civilization itself is based on the idea that what "just is" can be utterly fucked up and should be fixed.
Malaria just is. And luckily, some people will not settle.
Because I'm an unemployed man on welfare.
I think that at some point, if there is more competition than cooperation, a lot of people will get alienated, and that won't always be a good thing. I mean trade in general feels more like competition than cooperation.
I agree that competition yields benefits thanks since the economy manages itself, but it also has huge costs. I mean I don't like society for its competition, I like it for its cooperation. If I'd really like competition, I'd live as a hermit. And to be honest, if society become less and less cooperative as a whole, what's the point of it ?
I agree partially here. People who show greatest reluctance also sometimes compete crazy for the right kind of reward or circumstance.
Humans or for that part, animals that are social, have a very interesting compete-cooperate dynamic. The compete part also is how we choose our leaders, in cooperate team/group.
Seriously? The inherent drive in men to compete/take risks is why people advocate for "leveling the playing field" when it comes to pay, promotions, etc.
That's interesting, and seems a bit contrarian. If you felt like elaborating, I'd feel like listening.
See: any competitive activity. Which gender generally dominates a competition?
Recognize the quote?
Girls performed worse in the non-competitive setting.
That said: I disagree that individual competition brings out the worst in people. It can certainly do that - but applied properly, it can also improve attention, creativity, and other indicators of task-based performance.
Also, life/society as we currently understand it does contain aspects of competition, often in subtle ways. A person might decide between multiple potential mates; a prospective employee might negotiate their starting offer; a student might organize a club to help distinguish themselves from thousands of other graduates. Whenever I buy food or clothes or whatever, I need to buy it from someone (not being a diehard homesteader), so there are multiple vendors competing for my attention and custom. We might be able to do without some of this, but a lot of it is driven by limits on resources (material, population, etc.)
(You might also be interested in the New Games Movement, one of the many weird outcroppings of hippie-era counterculture: they sought to build a corpus of games that highlighted cooperation over competition. The movement died a somewhat predictable death, but its games live on - if you've ever played any of the circle games popular with camps, youth groups, and teachers, you've probably played something that has its roots in the New Games Movement.)
(Last diversion: game-theoretic dilemmas are also really interesting, since most of them revolve around cases in which individual optimal strategies lead to worse overall strategies. See also: bystander effect / volunteer dilemma, tragedy of the commons.)
Actually I come from a family of people who either hide during the war (jewish/polish origins), or suffered from it. Maybe you'd also label it as "didn't have to struggle too much at life".
Eitherway, I don't think society was built to reflect the state of nature and competition. If you think struggle is good, I think you have some skewed belief of "life" in general. I don't have such belief.
Also comparing people and rabbits is really ridiculous. Even behavior psychologist and sociologists don't go that far.
So left vs right is a war between heritable different gene expression proteins on the most basic level. Different ideas and perceptions are only a byproduct of the effect these proteins cause.
And there's nothing inherently wrong with this expression. I'm just acknowledging that we are fundamentally different on the cell level and nothing can make us agree. Doesn't mean my expression is better than yours. These are just different evolutionary adaptations in animals that humans are part of. I have example of rabbits because they have furthered your type of "lifestyle" to more discernable level.
Also your eugenics argument is completely strawman, as is expected from you.
When will your book come out ?
I'll add a warning about not overdoing this, as someone who has previously burned out before I am careful not to trick myself too often.
Edit: at least -> out
About the only time I was able to "convince myself" something is a game was when I was going through such a hard time that I was automatically turning everything into silly games as a coping mechanism. For better or worse, I'm unable to do that anymore.
Sooner or later they need to work together anyway.
I'd rather suggest being honest about the fact that statistically speaking boys and girls are different and both have to respect each other.
Anway, competition is normal in the working world (at least in America). So there's a problem regardless of school effects.
Similar 'good' numbers for both, much worse 'bad' numbers for boys.
This mindset seems harmful to me as I see it playing out with my kids "teacher X set this homework and will tell me off if I don't do it" rather than "teacher X set this homework and I'll not understand the subject as well if I don't do it". The kids think the homework is "for the teacher" rather than for them.
Education is supposed to be an opportunity not a sentence or conflict, isn't it?
Unfortunately, this mindset continues far longer than it should. Highschool students, unlike their elementary counterparts, are more than capable of understanding what education is, but still continue to view it as something forced upon them, rather than for their benefit. I've seen more than a few college students with this mindset as well. The cheer that goes up when the college gives them a day off is a bit disheartening.
It's not about what education is or is not, it's that the male brain, for whatever reason, is highly motivated by competition.
What do i win for spotting errors?
Journal article just specifies 80 children, of which 48 were boys, so that would be an arithmetic problem at the WSJ. Lucky they don't deal with numbers on a regular basis :-/ Corrections email address: wsjcontact@wsj.com
They are so certain of this conclusion that they put it in the title of the paper. It's amazing how much they could infer from test scores alone. I'm curious to read the paper to determine how they were able to rule out competitiveness, confidence, and every other explanation of the results.
http://www.sciencedirect.com.sci-hub.cc/science/article/pii/...
After all, if you can get Asian women in the US to score significantly better and then significantly worse on a math test by first reminding them "Asians are good at math" and then "girls are bad at math", do you think they're going to be able to report on that "rationale"? And if they're aware of it, won't they subvert the whole experiment by using other sophisticated techniques like
(1) externalizing difficulty ("that researcher is just a jerk who doesn't know anything!"),
(2) reminding themselves of their complex self-identities and membership in several groups ("I'm a complex person; gender stereotypes are societal constructs; and remember, I'm Asian and I'm good at math -- let's use this stereotype for personal good!"), and
(3) using previous teachers' communication of high standards and assurance of capability, along with some role models,
to blow that test out of the water and confound all the study results?
(All of the above are techniques to combat stereotype threat that have been studied and found somewhat to very effective.)
Psychology is so full of lies. Both the content of the 'studies' and the studies themselves (all testing and no theory). Also the motivations for the studies seem to be quite often political. (Presumably this helps for obtaining public money.)
Here's a little study I propose. Have children, don't send them to school and notice how they learn to read without teaching or testing. And how much better adults report they feel when they aren't trying to do these things to children.
Perhaps you mean an experiment where a child is raised by a blind caregiver who never talks about reading. Given full access to children's books and other media but no one to tell them about reading, will they pick it up?
Quite apart from the moral aspect, which is usually ignored, this negates the standard argument that "reading is extremely useful for all sorts of activities, therefore it must be taught".
Of course, adults may help and answer questions when needed.
I mean, I agree that it's much simpler than English in terms of going from written letterforms to pronounced word, but there's still a bunch of weirdness floating around.
Women of course competed with each other for the attention of the most powerful men, but when you think about it from an evolutionary perspective, ultimately all that mattered was that they and their children were cared for and protected. Even in the absolute worst case scenario, your tribe being conquered and all of your men slaughtered, you would most likely be taken as a wife or concubine by the conquerors and life would for the most part continue on as usual after some time. So it isn't surprising that women would be predisposed towards cooperation. Raising children means that you get far more from being able to get along with your tribe and integrate peacefully into a new one if need be, than "winning" any single small victory. And in turn, women that were obsessed with small victories were more likely to piss their tribe off and find themselves ostracized or exiled.
This explains the difference in male and female bullying behaviors as well. Boys publicly display dominance because it confers status. Girls do it far more subtly, in private, so that they can put other girls down without breaking the veneer of social harmony or changing the way others perceive them.
That's what intuitively thought about tests. They show a bit of how much you can but also whole lot of how much you care.
"I want to win at the game" vs "tests = boring" / "I'd better do well on the test as it sounds important and people might think I'm stupid" vs "it's only a silly game"
Perhaps one leans towards being competitive about what your peers think of you, and one towards being competitive about what teachers/adults think? Not sure.
We have spent many years trying to present gender-neutral environments to our children. Yet at age 3 my son completely ignored the giraffe we were trying to point out at the zoo, and would only focus on the irrigation pump. That kind of experience was repeated often with him and my daughters.
One daughter would only build babies out of the meccanno I taught her to use. OK, they were robot babies and that's awesome, but still. This was before school, none of them had daycare, and we never had a TV.
These sorts of stories are repeated ad infinitum among parents, usually in the context of "I can't believe what I used to think..."
[...]
> This was before school
My son's favourite colour before he started daycare was pink. That rapidly got policed out of him by other children and disappointingly by staff in day care.
We persevered - "anyone can like any colour; boys can have pink as their favourite colour, girls can have blue as their favourite colour" and it sort of worked, but he's now in his first year at school and the policing from other children is pretty fierce (although the teachers are much better).
If not, why not?
For example, red-green color blindness affects about 7% of males, and < 0.5% females. IOW on the whole males are more likely to be able to see and respond to blue than red or pink.
There's also intriguing if incomplete evidence that among humans with normal color vision, females are more likely to have finer color discrimination ability in the yellow-orange-red end of the spectrum compared to their male counterparts.
Of course, there are going to be a few males "outliers" who have superior color discrimination ability, so a boy could very well appreciate pink even if it's not as likely as it would be among girls.
That makes no sense to me. I'm Greek and in my neck of the woods boys and girls are not expected to wear specific colours, at least not when I was growing up.
If you do a search for Greek traditional dress you'll notice that the colours that dominate are white, black, red and some shade of brown, but they are both pretty much equally distributed between men and women.
That's empirical and maybe someone somewhere has a proper data'd study that contradicts me but you really won't find anyone who can point to examples of pink dominating women's traditional dress in Greece.
I believe the same goes for other cultures. Every time I see the traditional ornamentation of people from the Amazon, or sub-Saharan Africa for instance, vivid bright colours seem to dominate for both sexes. If I think of South-East Asian traditional dress, I get an impression of oranges, yellows, and reds for the women (who do tend to wear the most colourful stuff).
And there's nowhere a shade of pink to be found.
So I think this blue vs pink thing is definitely a cultural phenomenon and that it's really just affecting specific parts of the world.
Thanks for that info, I wasn't aware of those traditions. Indeed yellow to red is the range of hues that some human females might be able to discriminate better than males. That is, the idea is females see these colors more distinctly or are more visually "sensitive" to these colors.
"Pink" is relevant because it's merely red "diluted" with white, that is, lower saturation of a red hue.
No doubt cultural influences are enormously important re: attributing colors as symbols of gender identity. I was only writing about the possible genetic/biological factors contributing to selecting which colors are assigned to males vs. females, and such factors could certainly be quite secondary.
OTOH the info you contributed is intriguing because it appears to support the hypothesis I was referring to.
That's interesting indeed, because I was wrong about the male/female dichotomy in Indian traditional dress: yellows and reds (and also fuschias, turquoises and so on) are worn equally by males and females. Blues and purples are also very commonly worn by women. The difference is in the patterns and the shape of the dress, but not in the colours. Apologies for that- like I said I'm Greek, not Indian.
Additionally, the other cultures I mention have an equal spread of reds, yellows, and what have you among men and women, so again I don't see how any genetic thing is at play here.
Finally- All this doesn't say anything about why pink is "girly" only in specific parts of the world. If pink in particular was a genetic thing then it would be all over the place, not just in a few countries.
Liking animals and people vs. liking things is very much a natural preference.
Pink used to be considered a masculine color in England (a boy color) in the 1800's.
Perhaps the parents you're referring to are failing to realize just how strongly gendered their lives are.
But same sex parents report similar things happening. And many parents try really pretty to fight aspects of this - talking about movies and tv shows; not conforming to the roles; etc.
Yes, that's a large part of it. I think people also underestimate how much children pick up from society in general. Beyond what they get from their parents, they're still going to be meeting friends and family members, going outside and seeing other humans interact, other people are probably going to be buying them gifts (even if you try to avoid this, there will be times when people spring them on you), etc. There are a lot of influences we've stopped noticing because they're so pervasive.
She brings up one such anecdote from another book, where parents really tried to give their daughter firetrucks AND dolls, jeans AND dresses, but at the end of the day, the girl was tucking the firetruck to bed like a good mom and wanted to wear dresses. That book was all about how girls have innate nurturing tendencies and so on.
Of course, the mom was the one tucking the girl to bed almost every night. It was funny that parents failed at giving their daughter fire-trucks, but it's even funnier that someone would ignore the massive impact their own behavior had imprinted on their kids. Same with dresses- mom may wear jeans frequently, but dad absolutely never wears a dress. How are you going to ignore this, even if your kid is only three years old? They learn to speak like you in such a short period of time, and you're going to chalk up zoos vs. irrigation pumps to biology? You say you're a proud machinist and woodworker in your profile. Does your wife spend equal amounts of time in the shop? Do you think your kids are not already making choices about whether they're more like you or your wife?
She also brings up some interesting research by Castelli et al [0], where parents are interviewed about their opinions about racism (ie: I am NOT racist, and I teach my kid to NOT be racist), but then evaluates them on their implicit attitudes towards race (everyone's somewhat racist, I hope you'd agree), and kids match their parents really well not compared to their explicit attitudes, but more in the implicit ones.
The truth is that if you tried to raise your kids in a gender-neutral environment, you completely failed, because we make it absolutely impossible, unless you control absolutely all media and social influence and tune your own behavior accordingly, which would be creepy and Stalinesque.
It doesn't mean that there are no innate gender differences, or that they undesirable, but it definitely means that parents who get together to talk about how they "can't believe what [they] used to think" because they've been awokened to gender differences have just swapped one unfounded source of condescension for another.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19271841 > Previous literature based on self-report measures has not found a clear relationship between the ethnic attitudes of White parents and those of their children. In particular, no study has evidenced such a relationship in the case of preschool children. In the present study, the authors measured parents' implicit and explicit racial attitudes as well as the racial attitudes of their 3- to 6-year-old children. They found that parents' explicit attitudes were not related to children's responses. In contrast, mothers' implicit attitudes (but not fathers' implicit attitudes) were significant predictors of children's attitudes. Results demonstrate that early racial attitudes might develop within the family.
So why did the daughter, given fire trucks and dolls, tuck in the fire trucks instead of the dolls?
(not a parent, but I've seen little kids do some pretty goofy things)
On reddit’s /r/science several people with degrees in the relevant fields have also speculated that this might be the case.
From personal anecdote, I can confirm that guys usually care less about what an authority thinks, and more about how they are in relation to their peers, while girls consider competition less relevant.
So we're looking at a minimum of 4 (test moments across 25 years) * 4 (societies) * 5 (schools across socio-economic areas) * 2 (classes per school) * 2 (test + control group) * 30 (pupils per class) =~ 10000 test subjects.
Decent discussion at reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/4i75i0/study_shows...
"Caveat: The study was relatively small and involved children who were still learning how to read."
Your only take-away isn't supposed to be some editor's choice for the title.
Added after original post:
This is why I don't like the "tl;dr" meme. If people would take more time to absorb the information related to topics we care about, there wouldn't be this desire to have a random person on the net distill that knowledge into something you can consume in 20 seconds or less. It's like getting all of your political opinions from Comedy Central. You're willingly getting your information through yet-another filter, but this filter is presented as unbiased.
Edit: parent comment ninja'd what I was responding to, now this looks super off topic.
This is a distracting tangent. Just so it's clear, I wasn't responding negatively to you. You didn't invent what I'm railing against and as far as I was concerned you were only the messenger of another community's discussion. I don't think you said anything that needed to be edited down.
This kind of articles makes me cringe. The fact that the journalist is obviously aware of the limited scope in the research by stating the caveats makes it unresponsible publishing.
I haven't read the article, but isn't it the opposite? Isn't it being responsible to state the caveats?
1. Sample size n=80. You would need a pretty incredible result for a sample size this small to be significant.
2. All students from the same region of France. Will this result carry over to other countries? Other cultures?
3. The treatment groups were chosen from pre-existing classes. Classes whose composition may not be random.
It's a cool result, and it should definitely be tried again elsewhere but pop science articles shouldn't be saying this is anything worth talking any yet.
No, two particular classes of students had their boys do 34%. In reality, the sample size was 4, not 80. They choose 4 classrooms, and saw these results.
If the researchers switched the classroom treatment selections, are you certain we would have seen the same result? Or did we really just find out that boys in those two classrooms happen to be 34% better at reading?
Those classrooms where boys did worse might have done worse for a large number of other reasons: those schools might be on the 'bad' side of town where less affluent students tend to go (happens all the time in small towns); that classroom might have been the one where the school has put all the trouble-maker kids because they know this particular teacher has the ability to teach those kinds of kids (or, conversely, that class might be the one that saw the huge boost when it was a game); the classes who did worse might have had a classmate dying in hospital that week, and the boys just didn't do very well under those conditions.
There are too many other completely reasonable answers that aren't related to the test itself, given the methods used in this study.
How I'd repeat the experiment: pool all the children before randomly selecting them for treatment groups to avoid bias from their origin classroom.
Edit: And to be clear, I'm not saying the results are incorrect. They might be onto something amazing here. They just happen to be bad at statistics. Maybe they should frame it as a game.
The problem with saying that n=80 is that it presumes each 'test' (student evaluated) was chosen for their treatment independently of each other. This is clearly not true, as entire classes were chosen together. So any variable like 'actually this happens to be the gifted class' can throw the whole study up or down because that variable was not independent between the students tested.
For example, let's say we did this same test in America, but two classes happened to be from the wealthiest part of Boston, and two classes were from the poorest part of Detroit. If, as we randomly selected which class was assigned each treatment, we happened to hit the 1 in 4 chance that both wealthy classes were given the 'this is a game' treatment, would we be ready to say 'the game was the cause of the better test results'? I don't believe so.
That is why I find this study flawed, and why I disagree with the idea that n=80. They may be onto something, but they do not have strong statistical evidence supporting their hypothesis.
That's the crazy thing about stereotype threat and related psychological phenomena: you can manipulate the same people to perform better or worse simply by manipulating their perception of the situation. Thus the effect really can't be about biological sex. Check out reducingstereotypethreat.org for a comprehensive rundown of studies.
The idea that gender is separate from biological sex is very recent. When you examine its origin you find that it comes from Foucault and Judith Butler. Both were gay. It's unsurprising to me that that idea would come from that lineage. If you are gay you are confronted with a difference between what you feel and what society tells you from a very early age. In general straight people do not have that issue and would never consider drawing that distinction unless the concept is introduced to them.
This seems both unjust and irrational.
Foucault is intersting. In contrast, Butler's work is weak. She really doesn't have a meaningful handle on the relationship between sex and gender.
That's not how I read it. I read it as, Foucault and Butler's idea is unproven because it's based off of their anecdotal experience rather than based off of any scientific evidence.
Perhaps near-future advances in genetics and neurology will expand our definition of biological sex to explain gender identity. In that case, our current sex vs. gender distinction would simply be another way of saying "we don't understand how this works yet". There's a lot of this "transitional stuff" in science history, where we have credible anecdotal evidence that our previous understanding is wrong but don't yet know how to coherently explain it. (See: Greek attempts to explain the nature of matter; the infamous cholera map by John Snow; etc.)
That doesn't make the "transitional stuff" wrong: an idea doesn't have to have solid theoretical underpinnings to have merit. It does, however, mean we should continue searching for an explanation.
gender is more relevant than sex
The underlying biological reality is that humans reproduce sexually. All gender roles are social elaborations and heuristics that evolve(d) to regulate and structure the biological reproduction of humans. All gender roles directly or indirectly refer to the sexual binary between males (= can father children) and females (= can give birth to children). E.g. the concept of Kathoey doesn't make sense except as an inversion of the biology-based distinction between males and females. After all, a substantial part of the Kathoey lifestyle is to look and act exactly like a biological female (including permanent genital modification), and have sex with a biological male. Clearly that's an extreme identification with the biological binary, except from an unusual angle. By imitating biological females and their conventional gender roles, by trying to look exactly like somebody who can give birth to children, the Kathoey reinforces the binary between male and female.
stereotype threat
intersex is considered a very normal
Sexual reproduction so as to perpetuate humanity is the single most important function a society executes. All human culture directly or indirectly relates to this task. One of the key tasks in this context is the choice of partner(s) whom to reproduce with. Alas, not any two humans can reproduce together. Indeed, an exact determination who can successfully reproduce with whom is still not possible in 2016, although we are much better at this task than say 1000 years ago.
Given that we can't predict mate compatibility perfectly, humanity needs heuristics to make this decision efficiently. The following heuristics are being used in practise:
- Divide humans into two, male and female, based on the shape of their genitalia.
- Have sex with members of the opposite group.
Humans use additional heuristics for deciding with whom to mate, e.g. social status, age, but the male/female binary is by a large margin the most important.
As you correctly point out, not all humans neatly fall into the genital-shape based classification between. But it doesn't matter, because the heuristic works so well that humans can reproduce successfully by ignoring those outliers. That means outliers must be infrequent enough (say > 99% fit the binary).
I can't overemphasise this: the heuristic has been extremely successful.
The very concept intersex makes sense only in contradistinction from binary normalcy. To see this, consider the fact that most humans have 10 fingers, but not all. Yet, there is no socially relevant concept of 'interhanded' people, no pressure groups, nobody claims to have been born with the wrong number of fingers, no finger reassignment surgery etc. That's because the number of fingers is not all that important.
In the future we might have a refined classification, as our understanding of human reproduction has improved immeasurably in the last century. But note that a finer classification still relates to biological facts about human bodies. It would probably be something along the lines of
- Can give birth to children, i.e. falls in the category woman, despite non-standard genitalia.
- Can father children, i.e. falls in the category man, despite non-standard genitalia.
- Can neither father children, nor give birth to children.
In other words, it would be a refinement of the male/female binary.
This is a very broad statement which is trivial to prove false. Look at powerlifting: men perform better than women, and testosterone plays a well-understood role in this performance. This is a function of sex, not gender. And while it's most numerically provable and obvious in powerlifting, this is true for a lot of sports.
At a more fundamental level, I question whether the gender/sex divide is scientifically valid. One can point to the example of a transman and say, "Their female sex didn't align with their male gender at birth" but that seems like a very surface assessment; it's also possible that chemicals released by (for example) their brain or pituitary, are causing the dysphoria they experienced. Are we to claim that ovaries and testicles are sex, and the brain and pituitary is gender? Or might it make more sense to broaden our understanding of sex to realize that genitalia aren't the only organs regulating sex, and instead say that the transperson wasn't born female, but was instead born with a mixture of sex characteristics, and only the most obvious sex characteristics were female, while the characteristics which more fundamentally defined their identity were male.
In a larger sense, this seems related to the categorization error of separating mind and body as if they are two different things, a separation which seems more clearly false.
NOTE: Please don't construe anything I say as negative toward transpeople. I think humans have an inherent, fundamental right to define their identities and modify their bodies in any way they choose. People don't need excuses or justification to exercise that right. Certainly we don't need an abstract distinction between sex and gender to let people dress and socialize with people the way they want or change their bodies.
Take a look at this chart: http://www.exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/DeadliftStandards....
Your deadlift of 220lbs puts you in the "Advanced" category assuming your body weight is somewhere in the middle. By comparison, I'm deadlifting 360lbs at 185lbs, and that's not even close to "Advanced", I'm well within the "Intermediate" category. For me to be considered advanced, I would have to lift 440lbs, literally twice what you're lifting. That's not a difference explained by psychology.
Besides, we can easily remove the factor you're talking about: there are plenty of sports which don't have the social factors you're describing. There are tons of women who run, for example. In the 60 meter dash, the top male performer, Maurice Greene, finished in 6.39s, more than half a second faster than the top female performer, Irina Privalova, at 6.92s. A half second might not seem like a lot, but consider that Privalova's time wouldn't place her even in the top 25 of male atheletes. [1] Similarly, Paula Radcliffe's 2:15:25 marathon record doesn't wouldn't put her even in the top 10 (I suspect there are hundreds of men whose personal record beats her time, but Wikipedia only shows the top 10).[2]
Do you really think Irina Privalova or Paula Radcliffe is just being actively helpless?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_metres#Top_25_performers [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon#All-time_top_ten_athl...
That about sums up the usual definitions, yes.
The problem with that is that most of the time the group you're perceived to belong to and what groups you identify with do have everything to do with your "equipment".
That's only a very recent distinction, and still a contentious one. According to Merriam-Webster (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender) and the OED (http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/english/gend...), it's far from clear.
Really? I'm pretty sure a large part of any discrimination against women is due to their physical sex, not the way they identify.
What evidence do you have that identity doesn't originate in biology?
I'm well-aware of the existence of transpeople, but I'm not ready to conclude that gender dysphoria doesn't originate in biology. There's more to a person's biology than their genitalia.