Ideological Bias in the Psychology of Sex and Gender [pdf]
researchgate.net
researchgate.net
Perhaps for the entire species we would need something else, such as Homo Ipsum Lorem?
Yup, I find in many otherwise rational people all reasoning faculties seem to evaporate when trying to have an unbiased conversation about this area today, kind of like a religion almost. The following paragraph from the paper pretty much sums up my experience. I just don't bother discussing any of it with anyone in person any more, it's tainted.
> one should note that, from an egalitarian perspective, differences are better tolerated if they reflect positively on a group that is perceived as underprivileged or oppressed (e.g., findings of higher verbal ability in females tend to be less controversial than findings of higher spatial and mathematical ability in males).
It's a shame because I think we would move forward faster as a society if it was easier to talk about these things openly without worrying about offending people... how can we overcome unfair biases in society if we do not investigate and understand them properly.
I'm quoting myself from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31595298:
> People see that "men and women are different" is used as justification for prejudice (like a person not getting a chance because people of the same sex did rarely have success previously). Which sucks and people feel its unfair. And when trying to conceptualize that unfairness into words, their contra opinion sometimes ends up being "so man and women must be equal" instead of "a persons sex does not justify prejudice".
Christianity, Catholicism in particular - perversion of human sexuality is one of its pillars. You can see this in their fight against reproductive rights and sexual minorities.
> the frequency of intersex is almost certainly less than 0.02%
is the quote in the paper.
( More broadly, the 'restricted' definition falls just under that percentage:
> "conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female", the prevalence of intersex is about 0.018% )
However on a societal scale it is sufficient number of people to present issues that need addressing.
1 in 2,000 is 10 in 20,000 is 100 in 200,000 is 1,000 in 2 million (the ~ pop. of my state capital city) is 10,000 at least in Australia (now well past 20 million).
This is more than enough to justify the changes to the Australian passport system made decades ago, expanding what was previously a forced binary choice to better represent actual reality.
And yet, our author of the linked paper still moves to claim:
> This has not stopped the misconception that “sex is not binary” from spreading, ...
mere paragraphs after agreeing on the frequency of the clearly non binary people.
ie. Not binary - and can't be accurately represented as such on medical forms and other places with things matter.
You might also say these cases are much more frequent than gold in the crust.
I've seen this one before. It was called the something something solution and was very popular in Germany a while back.
.018% of 2000 is about 1/3 (.36). So, its 1 in 6k and 3600 in Australia.
The numbers are miniscule and I believe arguments made using this group and trying to apply it to society as a whole is likely not made in good faith.
I would be willing to bet that most people who bring up intersex individuals when talking about a 'sex binary' would be unwilling to agree to: "We have male, female, and medically-intersex as the sex."
The key thing is that is lower bound as 0.18% comes from a fairly well accepted restrive definition of intersex, there's a larger pool of "commonly accepted as intersex".
So, we can at least agree that these people exist.
> I believe arguments made using this group and trying to apply it to society as a whole is likely not made in good faith.
That's your belief of what others are trying to do and I believe you may be misrepresenting and casting as homogeneous these "others".
Your in good comapny here, the author of the paper does the same in his initial paragraphs when casts "feminists" as a near monolith with a predominant belief. Clearly he hasn't gotten out much.
Fo my part I'm a pragmatic data science, mainly geophyics with a dash of consulting.
I take issue with livestock tracking software that cannot accept by design in breeding patterns - this is something that happens in reality.
I also take issue with older versions of religuos genealogy programs that cannot deal with cycles in a graph representation of a family "tree" - as abhorent as fathers having offsring with daughters may be it's a reality that must be dealt with in order to correctly document Pharohs, Royalty, and various families from the backwoods.
In the same manner it's just poor software practice to restrict fields for Sex: to a simplistic two value entry when clearly the real world is different to that imained or desired.
> That's your belief of what others are trying to do and I believe you may be misrepresenting and casting as homogeneous these "others".
Correct, it is my belief of those using this group in arguments, but I do not believe a boogey man "others" as I think this group is disparate enough that over time it will eat itself. The problem with purity tests is that eventually everyone fails it.
Regarding my opinion that you cast doubt on - maybe we can prove me wrong right now. Do you believe a persons biologic sex is male, female, and medically-intersex-from-birth?
Q: How do we know that the people who want more than 2 options for sex are, in fact, these same 0.018% of the population who have DSDs?
In my limited experience, they are not the same people at all. Clair [https://differently-normal.com/author/clarecais/] has CAIS, and has "F" on her passport. Statistically, non-binary people have no DSD, and are unambiguously either M or F but wish to identify as something else. Therefore making an arguing for additional options in the passport sex field using an intersex stat is precisely what Clair complains about in her blog: ie, she's pulled into a fairly toxic social/political debate by a group that wants to use her condition for its own gains.
Clare is one data point of course, but her slant tallies with the assertion that "arguments made using this group and trying to apply it to society as a whole is likely not made in good faith".
Clare talks about living with DSD, including the serious medical complications that can go hand-in-hand with them. It's a very interesting blog, particularly the top two posts:
There are some plants and animals that can change sex if the environment forces them to, but humans don't have such mechanisms. Guppies and weed come to mind, perhaps there is an ancestor of humans that could do that as well.
We're struggling with the decision of letting a one handed man identify as two handed and vice versa.
The utter most ridiculousness of this mental gymnastics is calling women "womb carriers", that the sex treated as a baby incubator would have a problem with this is beyond some people apparently.
Sometimes exceptions are just that, exceptions.
I don't know if you observe that too, but when i ride in the tram, i see individuals who neither pass as male or female. Not due to queerness, its because they have ambiguous bodies and don't perform their gender via their clothes or makeup or something like that. I'd argue that gender nonconformity was always there.
It describes the frequency of chromosomal sex appearing inconsistent with phenotypic sex or where phenotypic sex is indeterminate on observation due to rare pathologies.
It's biology not ideology.
Then there are observations of specific theories being used as obedience building exercises by various bureaucrats (and wannabe bureaucrats), which seems to be widespread, and is bad, but doesn't actually say anything about the theories themselves. Sacred oaths can be anything, they don't even need to have any meaning.
> The dialectic can remain healthy as long as multiple viewpoints are allowed and ideas are evaluated on their own merits.
The main point of the paper is to discuss what the author describes as a feminist bias in academic psychology, which he says systematically distorts certain domains of research.
The paper then attacks this "bias" from multiple angles, which makes the paper quite hard to follow. The first angle is that feminism fundamentally misunderstands the nature of sex:
> The flaws of the sex-gender distinction have led some feminist > scholars to adopt the hybrid term “sex/gender” (sometimes > “gender/sex”) as a way to recognize that biological and social > factors are inseparable [...] Unfortunately, this terminological > fusion may end up deepening the conceptual confusion. [...] On this > view, the “sex binary” is a socially constructed fiction; the old > idea that there are two sexes is simplistic and inaccurate, and does > not stand up to sophisticated analysis [...] This argument can be > seductive but has one problem—it fundamentally misunderstands the > nature of sex.
He goes on to explain why "the biological definition of sex is not just one option among many equally valid alternatives", but in fact the only valid definition. "The sex binary, then, is not a fiction but a basic biological fact".
Here's the definition from the paper:
"From a biological standpoint, what distinguishes the males and females of a species is the size of their gametes: males produce small gametes (e.g., sperm), females produce large gametes."
Stating this definition as a fact is very strange. Clearly we used these terms long before this definition existed, for example.
The section that reviews introductory textbooks is simply confusing. It states that this "quick survey illustrates many of the trends I discussed earlier" and complains that some of them are completely silent on the issue of sex differences, but also acknowledges that there "there is quite a bit of variation in coverage, and a few outliers that deviate from the general". To summarize: out of 14 textbooks that the author looked at, some didn't mention the issue at all, some did but not enough, but some did. I don't find this to be a clear illustration of the author's points.
The review of journal papers is equally confusing. 19 papers were selected based on publication year, journal, title and abstract. In the authors words, the selected papers "reveals a fair amount of theoretical diversity, but also a pervasive tendency to emphasize socialization over biology and downplay robust empirical findings as “stereotypes”. The methodology is extremely unclear. If I got it right, 19 papers where chosen by the author - some where emphasizing socializing over biology, and some took an "explicitly evolutionary approach". Again, not a very convincing way to demonstrate bias - except perhaps in your own selection.
It goes on. I'd like to write more but I think these issues speak for themselves.
It reminded me of this YouTube video: https://youtu.be/vtIzMaLkCaM
The instructor in the video covers why academics struggle getting published because they're used to writing for individuals who are paid(E.g TAs & Profs) to read what they wrote.
Good "unstructured" (section-less) abstracts are about three paragraphs long and follow the structucture "what is the problem?" - "What is the state of the art regarding solution proposals?" - "Shortcomings of these that motivated this paper" - "What is proposed here as an alternative?" - [What are the key results?].
People are divided as to whether results should go into the abstract: some say the abstract should be a teaser that entices people to read the paper, others say the abstract should be a self-contained distillation of the paper itself.
Structured abstracts are often nearly a page (common in the life sciences): they have explicit section headings like "Method", "Data", "Findings" etc., which is a great idea and should be embraced in all empirical disciplines at least, IMHO.
My take for this video at the time I watched it was that as students we are used to write for teachers who are paid to grade us, and may take bad habits we can get away with as a consequence, but that will not be enough the day we write for people who are not forced to read what we write. But again, teachers won't expect a journal article written with suspense and stuff when they read your dissertation.
Academic writing is simply not at all the same exercise as journalism. Expectations are different, sometimes opposite.
There's no reason a scientist who write good papers will write good articles, and vice versa. Writing well will help a lot in both cases but that's not sufficient.
Many researchers don't write that well, but if your paper is not comprehensible, it will be rejected. As a researcher, you also want your research to be worthwhile usually, that's a motivation to write better. Also, the point of a paper is to report some discovery. People reading your papers are your reviewers (who are not paid for this, it's just extra work for them usually!), and people who need to understand your work. They probably won't read your paper linearly, they will mine it for information. Because of this, your paper should have a boring structure. To allow fast information seeking. In any case, they are not there to entertain themselves, though a well written paper can be entertaining and that's way better in my opinion, but it's not the point.
Your mainstream journal article should, however, be as enjoyable and entertaining as possible to read otherwise it won't be read by many people (especially if they are only vaguely interested in the topic of your article), or worse, the journal will not be bought at all if all the articles are dull. At least, that's what the lecturer in this video is saying.
Well, I don't believe that evolution has anything to do with psychology, except being a huge random factor. While evolution had impact on human psychology, it is not something that can be explored with science, there are no reasons (or: too many), no concepts (or: all of them too blurry to be useful), no laws, and no way to verify anything.
It's a bunch of postdictions and unfalsifiable just-so stories. It also seems to hate women.
The idea is even not that controversial: “The need to survive might have affected human psychology - especially the learned part”.
Who's we?
I'm sick and tired of people saying this. It sounds like this: "This is a map of Middle Earth, not Stalingrad." "But at least we have a map! What's your alternative, you complainer?" "But it's not a map of a real place!" "We'll use this map - flawed as it is - to plan our invasion of Stalingrad."
I want my science rigorous. Or else it isn't science.
The problem is not that we have a faulty map. It’s that you pretend it’s irreversibly faulty.
We’ve successfully navigated quite a bit of trouble and chances are that we’ll be able to do so in the future.
What you are suggesting sounds a lot like: let’s do nothing.
E.g. eventually they will be able to determine the result of the Milgram experiment, and it will become a fact, a building block in our view of the world, and it will affect our decisions mostly positively. They just need to make enough experiments.