Where do our sexual preferences come from and how flexible are they?
npr.org
npr.org
People talk a lot about "white male privilege" and I think this is probably the biggest example. As a white guy, I feel bad for my Asian male friends. Some of the most racist things I've ever heard in my life came from Asian women talking about Asian men. It must feel so shitty for those guys.
If you see https://theblog.okcupid.com/race-and-attraction-2009-2014-10...
In 2014 :
---------
Asian women preferred Asian men
White women preferred White men
Black Women preferred Black men
and Latino preferred Latino men
Where as in 2009
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Asian women were preferring White men
but its interesting to see that Asian men almost always preferred Asian women
I would date black women if I could relate to them on as much as I could from other women of other backgrounds. I've known enough black women where I know that I don't "click" with most of them, even if we get along on a platonic basis. It goes to show how culturally segregated we can still be in America. (not that it isn't as bad or worse elsewhere)
I've found that I can be attracted to all sorts of women. Different "races", sizes, shapes, ages, etc. But I'm primarily attracted to white and south-east Asian women. Why? The first one is kind of obvious since people consider me white, but I really don't know about the second other than that I seem to get along really well with them.
If someone genuinely wants to open themselves up to other sorts of people, I think that's great. The part where it would get weird for me is if someone was purposely dating people they aren't normally attracted to in order to make themselves feel good about being less racist. Everyone's talking about "fetishization" these days, but purposely dating black guys can be fetishizing even if it's well-intentioned.
Um, no. Reality dictates that everything is based on relativity and probability, but the logic that everything technically falls into a grey area doesn't mean that abstractions like male and female, man and woman (silos that the vast vast majority of people fall into) aren't useful, practical, or real.
If one believes that binary is bullshit, then be consistent and accept metaphysical nihilism. Accept that binary in computers is "bullshit" because a 1 can be represented by an infinite number of voltages, and sometimes 0 is represented by a really low voltage. Ignorant binary-normative CPUs!
I don't care how people identify, how they have sex, how they love, etc. People should be able to express their true selves, but I'm getting tired of the constant disdain against normalcy. I've never quite fit in anywhere I go so I think I can understand what it's like to want society to conform to one's vision. Part of being a part of society is some level of conformity and accepting that other people aren't like you.
If binary-non-conforming people want acceptance, then they ought to quit acting like my sex and my gender are bullshit. Gay people didn't achieve their current status in society, as better as it could be, by telling gay people that there's no such thing as "straight" sex.
> Gender is about your identity, your expression, and it's often based on your idea of sex.
If gender isn't related to the perception or expression of biological sex, then what is it? If sex is optional for gender, then how is gender different from fashion?
I could go on point by point, but those two things really address most of the video.
EDIT: For clarity, I'm not saying that I don't think that gender isn't a form of fashion. I'm saying that, if the variable of sex is removed, then it's a totally useless word that can be substituted with the word fashion. (in which case it's bizarre that people are trying to make other people like their sense of fashion)
Intersex means that you have mix of male and female organs/hormons. Or you look like women, but don't have fitting chromosomes. Operation is done on theory that it will be easier for you this way.
> If gender isn't related to the perception or expression of biological sex, then what is it? If sex is optional for gender, then how is gender different from fashion?
Gender afaik is not all that different for fashion. Writing in general and especially poetry was considered male thing. It was weird for girl to do it. Now it is considered girl thing (at least where I live).
Consciously and subconsciously, people do and don't do things based on what makes them look weird vs normal or popular or fitting in. Or they just follow cues (every boy in class got star wars sticker and every girl barbie one so they just follow that). My understanding of gender is that it is what you do cause of these things.
> Gender afaik is not all that different for fashion. Writing in general and especially poetry was considered male thing. It was weird for girl to do it. Now it is considered girl thing (at least where I live).
Yeah, it's not that different from fashion because it is a form of fashion. My point is that if gender is sex-optional, then it's a totally useless term that's superseded by the word fashion.
> Consciously and subconsciously, people do and don't do things based on what makes them look weird vs normal or popular or fitting in. Or they just follow cues
That's true. And it's also true that people have certain behaviors because of biological conditions acting upon them. For instance, do you think that most females are statistically attracted to males just because it's normal, or that females can be conditioned to be homosexual if society worked differently? If not, then why not also apply the steps you use to reach that conclusion to gender expression?
> For instance, do you think that most females are statistically attracted to males just because it's normal, or that females can be conditioned to be homosexual if society worked differently?
Homosexual acts are more common in single sex groups like prisons. So yeah, humans have certain flexibility. Bisexual people would be more likely to choose opposite sex partner in homosexuality tolerant society then in the one where it is frowned upon and illegal.
> If not, then why not also apply the steps you use to reach that conclusion to gender expression?
Cause there is this neat trick where some or unknown amount of hormonal impact is extrapolated to all of gender differences as you are trying to do here. Or something completely unrelated being extrapolated at gender as you also do here. There was no biological change that would influence writing affinity, just social one. When women were all expected to be stay at home, some of their behavior was influenced by the lonely-whole-day stay at home person experience - that would lead to different gender expression too compared to males who went to work with other people.
That is why.
In a lot of ways it isn't. Gender is often performative in nature. The idea that gender is binary is fairly reductive, and as most people know isn't a very descriptive way to view the world. You're more likely to be a mix of masculine and feminine traits than a binary one-or-the-other.
Viewing the world via binary genders puts people into categories that can be negative. This is why gender bias exists, because we view men with certain traits and women with certain traits. If society was less binary in its approach to gender we might have to make less assumptions about people.
This is similar to the old way of approaching race science. X people are good at Y, and A people are good at B. We've pushed back on categorizing people by race and it's been beneficial.
Life is often performative in nature. We need to think about this when it comes to culture and society. If we want ourselves and our community to become wealthy, then we need to model our behavior to people who are well off. Likewise, we need to avoid acting like people who are failing.
In this, human beings inevitably reinterpret and change things. In part, it's a matter of figuring out the essentials. (The opposite of cargo cult behavior.)
Yes, that actually is the idea about having a binary. It's reductive. At the end of the day, a sperm and an egg have to meet for a population to propagate, and seeing as how the vast majority in a population that sexually reproduces have either set of organs that make sperm or eggs, it becomes naturally efficient to rule out who is mating material and who isn't.
For instance, a mostly heterosexual person is going to almost always be interested in copulating with the opposite sex, and it's convenient that most people of the opposite sex display gender that is mostly in line with the opposite sex. It's just that most of us really don't find it mostly useful to be using the word "most" when we're talking about things most of the time to acknowledge that mostly nothing is binary, so we decide to fit everything in to categories so we can assess them. If someone falls within a certain circle of a Venn diagram, then pragmatically they are considered within that category even if they don't perfectly match it.
> This is similar to the old way of approaching race science. X people are good at Y, and A people are good at B. We've pushed back on categorizing people by race and it's been beneficial.
We pushed back on "race science" because it's not scientific.
The problem is that it is not normally pragmatic. It's not pragmatic for a woman in the workforce to be associated with feminine characteristics whether she displays them or not. It's not pragmatic for a more feminine boy to be told by his parents that he needs to act more masculine. A lot of these things are purely social constructs.
No one is arguing that sex isn't a thing, or that you don't need a male and female to create life. No one is even saying that your biological sex has zero bearing on your gender identity. The point I am making is that categorization based on a binary spectrum of gender is not pragmatic and is not scientific.
It is a good point IMO, and from the perspective of the theory of embodied cognition, to which I highly subscribe, I've always had a hard time thinking that male and female minds (intersex set aside) can just interchangeable. There are physical and physiological differences, such as hormones, that must make a difference in cognition and somehow must extend to behaviour/tastes.
It's an inference given a theory, which questions me. Not trying to be affirmative here.
But many people fall outside of the bimodal peaks and are actively discriminated against by people who do not believe there is a distribution in the first place, or who believe that if you are not sufficiently close to one of the peaks that you are an unfit human being.
This is why I think you're taking it out of context. You are clearly not the target audience of that statement. You understand that the two mainstream gender labels are, as you say, 'useful' and 'practical'. You understand that '1' can represent many voltages. Labels are useful, as long as you understand the level of certainty they represent. The target audience of that statement believes they are the only thing, period (taking a simplistic view), or who make a value judgement based on how close one is to one of the bimodal peaks (taking a normative view).
Certainly I don't represent everything you'll read that's said or written by advocates for people with different genders, but there is illogic on both 'sides' of the arguments on gender and sexuality. Here's how I look at it. Regardless of the illogic, which side is more harmful? The side that is making value judgements based on faulty evidence and using those to propose and enforce sometimes tremendously painful rules on others, or the side that is sometimes making illogical arguments in an attempt to be accepted by society?
"A trans woman's biology is a female biology" is just a statement I cannot agree with at all. One of my best friends growing up was a guy I'll call Adam. In high school Adam was an incredible athlete (he was a runner and swimmer) and held a lot of county records and was the third fastest at the 400m hurdles in the state. Adam came out as trans around his 21st birthday and now lives a woman I'll call Alice. Alice is a trans woman. The idea that her biology is that of a person born with two X chromosomes and a vagina is a little ridiculous to me. I see Alice as a woman today because that's what she wants and it doesn't make a difference to our friendship however I know Alice has a penis and spent 90% of her life living as a boy/man. FWIW, she and I have talked a lot about this and shares my views. In fact my views on the matter are largely influenced by her perspective on it.
I often wonder if the trans-rights movement is stuck in this kind of rhetorical cul-de-sac because the gay rights movement leaned so hard on "born this way" to make its case. That made sense because it moved the discussion away from sexual morality toward fairness. No doubt necessary to win the concessions and public opinion change of the 00s-10s.
In reality it shouldn't matter how innate sexual preference or gender identity are. People should be free to identify and fuck as they please. Unfortunately some on the ultra-woke side of the trans rights movement have continued to paint themselves into the corner of "born this way" but then have to backfill their biological epistemology to fit their rhetoric.
Both formulations are wrong, but people tend to go all in arguing one or the other. The problem is now we have the same crew that was 100% social construct arguing for 100% biological determinism and the inconsistency of worldview makes them sound ridiculous.
Funny thing, but back in the 80's, there was a kerfuffle in the LGBT community on campus where I was going to school. (I lived in a house with some prominent people in the group, including the campus president. We also deliberately chose a gay man as our house adviser.) Many militant LGBT people were basically bashing the bisexuals, calling them "fence sitters." Even going to the level of yelling at them and coming up with an ideology of denying the existence of bisexuals.
There were also a number of couples who got effectively harassed because the man was declared by the crowd to be a "self denying" gay man and the woman was similarly declared to be a "baby dyke." There was this ideology that this form of attraction wasn't "real." Isn't society butting its nose into people's love lives the problem in the first place? I say we just leave people alone and let them work it out. Everyone should be "live and let live" as much as possible. From what I've seen, this is by far the best policy.
Looking back on it all, those events were just another instance of angry teens and 20-somethings running around acting as if they knew everything there is to know about a big, complex subject. It's a big, complex subject we're all too close to and therefore biased about.
(The problem in 2019, is that the hot blazing centers of our culture create incentives for the exact opposite of the "live and let live" mentality.)
The reason "society" -- aka other people -- does that is because our sexual choices often have impacts on other people. If you sleep around casually, wind up pregnant out of wedlock and/or with a terrible, incurable STD, this will impact other people quite substantially. If you continue to sleep around casually afterwards and don't tell your lovers of your diagnosis, you are spreading disease in an outright malicious and incredibly selfish fashion.
Etc.
Most people who want society to butt out of their sex lives also want society to rescue them when something terrible happens. If people were all "It's all good. I'll just sleep in a ditch and wait to die of AIDS. I don't need nothing, thanks! I did this to myself." you might see less pushback from society concerning what people choose to do behind closed doors.
Or, you know, if someone just wants to masturbate and not involve anyone in how they get their sexual needs met, cool. But that isn't how most people operate.
Unfortunately, most people have a fairly poor track record of thinking in earnest about how their sexual preferences, predilections and choices impact other people. In many cases, they do a poor job of thinking about how this will impact the people they are actually having sex with. They often don't think at all about others beyond that who may be impacted as well.
I am not justifying homophobia, etc. But a policy of "live and let live" is not as simple as most people perhaps wish it were.
I agree so much with this and it's always how i've tried to be. I've never really understood why people choose to make this their business. They don't have to. They really don't. It's just never made sense to me why what two other people choose to do together would be anything to do with me or why people would expend so much energy worrying about it.
There's just never seemed like a good reason to waste time and energy, judging, worrying, or even really thinking about what kind of people other people are attracted to.
> The idea that her biology is that of a person born with two X chromosomes and a vagina is a little ridiculous to me
Well, there's a logical resolution here. The biology of women contains cis female biology as well as trans female biology. No contradiction between these two points.
The point of making distinctions is because those distinctions are useful to us. Which distinctions we make are up to our discretion. Not only does our understanding inform the distinctions we make, the distinctions we make inform our understanding.
Here's an example. Our culture is obsessed with elaborate social structures based on genitals, isn't that weird? If those cultural practices are rooted in biology, and we want cultural recognition of trans women, then we are saying that trans women have the biology of women. No logical problem here.
Medically, it is arguable that trans women have female biology. That's not saying trans women have the same biology as cis women. Indeed, some trans women need to see a gynecologist, even. Both cis and trans women can take drugs to correct hormonal imbalances. I know a cis women who needs to take spironolactone for high testosterone just like many trans women need to; a family friend was on HRT for menopausal symptoms, estradiol, which many trans women take too. I would not be _at all_ surprised if there were a trans woman and a cis woman on the same exact hormone therapy. So not only can we make the category of "female biology" wider in a medical setting without making a logical mistake (subcategories: trans female biology, cis female biology), there really is overlap between the medical needs of trans women and cis women.
This is not frivolous. Trans women get a serious amount of discrimination and contempt from many medical providers because of this cultural and medical intransigence against them. This change of distinctions has an important consequence to the quality of life of many women, and, in the long term, all of us.
From this statement, I think you'd agree that gender is a far more important aspect of personal identity than sex is.
If I'm completely honest I am quite happy for people to identify however they like. I have no preference or agenda whatsoever. It's not something I give a huge amount of thought to really.
It creates real problems and exacerbates existing ones. In finance, you need to predict a person's likely spending, longevity, income, etc. to plan investments, insurance, etc.
The best data is from longitudinal (tracking individuals over time) post-retirement surveys. These take decades to run, and you need a large body of people committed to consistently doing lengthy surveys each year. Hopefully we'll get additional research to show where we can safely match trans persons into the larger surveys.
The issue is, if you dogmatically make claims about someone's biology, you could be right by chance, but everyone providing these services is ethically (fiduciarily) bound to have a justifiable reason for the advice they give to customers.
Some predictions don't seem like they'd be wrong; a trans person is likely to behave the way you'd expect for, e.g., spending on clothing and similar consumer goods. (Though that's pure conjecture.)
But there are critical numbers like lifespan that have big effects on your investment strategy, and men and women differ by 7 years. (Err that a person lives longer and they lose out on growth. Err the other way, and they're overly exposed to risk.)
I suspect many firms will just say, "you have very specific health needs and need to consult a doctor." But that's the industry standard, "our advice is to figure it out yourself," cop out, technically ethical but useless.
Unless this is for investments made by your parents at birth, the difference is smaller; life expectancy at birth differs a lot by gender, but by early adulthood it's narrowed a lot because very early death is more common in males. I think it's about 3 years for current 20 year olds.
There's a number of ways that transgender individuals tend to have an number of biological features more typical of cisgender members of the gender of their identity than of cisgender members of their assigned-at-birth gender; there's other ways that they don't.
It's perfectly valid—and deeply accurate—to say a transwoman’s biology is a female biology, which implicitly not only rejects the idea that it is the singular female biology but also rejects the idea of such a biology. It also doesn't reject that it has aspects in common with some male biologies that might be unlike some other female biologies.
I'm fully supportive of equal rights for intersex people, among other disenfranchised groups, but this is ridiculous.
They aren't going to get anywhere by saying "bodies are not male or female" or any of the other bullshit arguments in this video.
Intersex is a real thing, apparently it's not just one specific thing[1] and it can manifest in different variations to the sex hormones.
Intersex people should be treated fairly and equally. I don't know any intersex personally, but if I did, I hope that I could be an honest friend and treat them with compassion.
All of that said, it isn't going to change my viewpoint that most people are either female or male; for the most part, there are only two genders. Are they asking us to consider that a third, unassigned gender is a normality and the world should be divided into more than two genders?
You can identify as a robot, for all I care; but if you are born XX-chromosomal with a vagina, you're a woman, if you're born XY with a penis, you are a male. If you are born with some odd mixture of chromosome or sexual organs, then it's up to you to decide and I guess that's what the video is trying to say, after all. I'm not going to judge anyone for it.
Gender is how society expects a person to express themselves and how an individual identifies. Sex is the genetic component behind it.
You also ignore the hormone component of gender expression. Someone could be born male, yet look feminine as a result of other factors and how they choose to express themselves. The reverse is true for women.
My mistake. I think I have heard this before.
HN has a very strict commenting policy, with arguments needing to be substantiated, etc. Especially in light of that, the tolerance of posts that are not only unsubstantiated and unscientific, but also discriminatory, is bizarre.
Yeah, umm... plenty of "racial realists" and ethno-nationalists here too, and incels, and anti-semites. Unfortunately, alt-right, anti-progressive and and neoreactionary politics seem to have taken root in the tech community, and that's becoming as much a part of tech culture as anarchism was for a previous generation of hackers.
That said, I think this was actually one of the better threads HN has had on this subject in a while.
>HN has a very strict commenting policy, with arguments needing to be substantiated, etc.
It doesn't. All HN requires is that comments be civil, and not assume bad faith. It's up to the community to call people out on their BS, but it's not policy.
I'm sure you're right, but I haven't read. Generally, bigots go for the whole meal deal. Still, I notice that blatantly transphobia is tolerated to a far greater degree than racism or homophobia. One at least has to put a bit of effort into dog-whistling in those cases.
>It doesn't. All HN requires is that comments be civil, and not assume bad faith. It's up to the community to call people out on their BS, but it's not policy.
The "not assuming bad faith" thing, which applies broadly in our society, is what allows this kind of barely-concealed dog-whistling to go on. Assuming good faith is the proper default, but common sense should be applied.
Who I am attracted to is about what I personally like. It has nothing to do with what other people think is right or not.
that's thought policing and fuck anyone who thinks that shit is OK.
Nope. People still believe that.
People still believe that God sends hurricanes and terrorist attacks to punish societies that tolerate LGBT people.
People still believe that LGBT people are just closet pedophiles, and equate accepting them with accepting bestiality.
The LGBT community itself has people (TERFs) in it who believe transgender people are just men pretending to be women for sexual gratification.
We haven't really moved past any of that.
Many TERFs are effectively identitarians. The unfortunate reality, is that every widespread system which can be exploited, will eventually be exploited. So society needs to be designed with this in mind. Otherwise, one is just providing ammunition to people like TERFs. (Ideological slogans like, "Listen and believe," have probably meant with good intentions, but are epistemologically bankrupt. The same goes for all erosions of due process and innocent until proven guilty.)
"People still believe" isn't a meaningful or impactful argument. You can find at least 100 people who believe virtually anything, because there are over seven billion people and the human mind has much more than a 1 in 70 million chance of believing something dumb.