>biological factors don’t necessarily affect people’s genders
then what gender is if not biology? Does it mean it is nurture instead of or as a significant addition to nature?
then what gender is if not biology? Does it mean it is nurture instead of or as a significant addition to nature?
It's likely not possible to find widespread agreement on this, but I think the modern concept of gender is more or less about how you align with the traditional male and female roles in society (doesn't have to be in the binary sense). I don't think there's a known right answer for how much of this alignment comes down to "nature", and how much to "nurture". What's clear is that some people do not mentally identify with the sex and/or gender labels and/or roles that their chromosomes would traditionally assign to them.
The "biology doesn't care about your feelings" arguments are stupid because they don't amount to any more than excuses for ignorance—biology obviously can't fully explain gender as in gender roles. In fact, pretty much all the arguments I've seen against accepting transgender folks' identities rely on being obtuse about definitions to some degree.
that is the issue of social policy (i'm for accepting of whatever identities people have, whether it has scientific basis or not) while the article is supposedly about scientific findings
>obtuse about definitions to some degree
that is my point. It is an science related article and thus it is the context where significant degree of precision and obtuseness with definitions is kind of expected. Slipping in such a blanket imprecise statement is what i tried to point to.
That's why science on gender always has small degrees of precision and is obtuse. It's moreso a question of soft science than hard science.
On one hand, an argument can be made that the freedom to identify with a gender different from one’s biological sex enables individuals to live more fulfilled lives that are not defined by gender stereotypes they’d otherwise be forced to live within.
On the other hand, an argument can be made that the distinction between gender identity and biological sex actually strengthens gender stereotypes and potentially hurts equality (e.g., women were historically supposed to be soft and pretty and under-achieving, so a female who doesn’t want to fit that stereotype would feel pressured to identify as a male rather than be her own unique person), and that there’s no clear consensus regarding a self-sufficient definition of what a gender is that doesn’t recursively involve biological sex.
What we know for sure is that it's at least significantly decoupled, and almost certainly not completely decoupled.
At best, it's ambiguous. You can't really know what someone means by "gender" without context, such as the mentioning of the sex/gender distinction. "Gender" has become somewhat of an auto-acronym.