• Lmaydev@programming.dev
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    11 months ago

    They’ve actually found that trans individuals have brain structures that match their identity rather than their sex at birth.

    So while the way genders are supposed to act is a social construct, gender is very much biological as well.

    The truth is at this stage we don’t fully understand it.

    • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      Before people start thinking there is an innately male or female brain, please remember that environmental conditions including social ones influence the way the brain is structured due to neuroplasticity.

      And think about how boys are encouraged to eat and girls are encouraged to watch their weight, and how child body growth relies on building up periodic fat reserves in order to happen, and you need to eat a lot of protein when building muscle mass, and what the physical implications for that are and how it contributes to our social definition of sex. And how that contributes to cis women being more vulnerable to physical violence.

  • AbsurdityAccelerator@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    I know this is a joke, but these kinds of topics are showing up in children’s media these days. Which i think is great. Simple representation matters.

  • alvvayson@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Me neither. Apparently, some schools teach this, but most only learn this in college.

    Which is why the culture war so often involves College educated van non-College educated.

    I’m on the College side of the culture war, but we must kind of acknowledge the truth that we had extra education that the other side did not.

    Some of them might resent us for it, some of us might be snobby about it.

    But at root, that’s where the culture disparity stems from.

    • killeronthecorner@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      You’re being too kind. Many of them are anti-education. That’s why they’re spending huge amount of time burning books about gay people and banning abortion, and far less time trying to reduce school shootings or paedophilia in mainstream churches.

      To paraphrase the old adage: you can’t educate someone out of a position that they didn’t educate themselves into.

      • WaxedWookie@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        The number of times people that have denied the literal dictionary definition of gender when I place it in front of them… with linked sources… from multiple dictionaries… often ones those people chose themselves…

        Education about the definition of these words is important, but it does nothing to combat the mainstream conservative position that “the dictionary is wrong and woke because… idk - the Jews want them transes to rape babies or something.” The only way to combat that entrenched, willful ignorance is with a big rock.

    • fosforus@sopuli.xyz
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      11 months ago

      More like a combinatorics table, with 99% of individuals having one of the two largest combinations.

    • Clav64@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      Please can you explain this in genetic terms?

      As I understood it, sex is determined by the presence, or absence, of a Y chromosome, at the 23rd pair.

      While exceptions exist, they’re incredibly rare genetic observations and I have never heard or read it referred to as a “spectrum”.

      • Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca
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        11 months ago

        Yeah it’s the first time I’ve heard of it referred to as a spectrum. Although the term is insensitive it’s more like two sides with a few outliers.

        You have your XX females and your XY males making up 99.9% of the population and then some individuals who are XXY, XYY, or XXX. You can even have some who are XXXY, XXYY, or XXXX.

        In terms of how that affects biological sexual development and associated gender identity i can’t say offhand and it would likely be a rabbit hole that one can spend hours looking into.

      • quantenzitrone@feddit.de
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        11 months ago

        It’s not really about the genotype. Every context that uses sex to divide people into groups has its own definition of sex. Sometimes with a spectrum sometimes not.

        Example car crash testing: When testing safety features of cars, you’re not gonna care about whether the person has a vagina or not, but features like height, neck strength and other stuff will matter.
        Since women are on average smaller and less muscular than men, small people with weak necks will be categorized as female. Tall people with strong necks will be categorized as male.

        Example Condoms:
        Two categories: has penis (male, can use) and has no penis (not male, cannot use [for inteded purpose]). So if you are XY genotype, but without a penis (idk cut off?), you’re not a male in that context.

        As you see both examples correlate with the gonosomes, but are not defined by it.

      • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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        11 months ago

        Some figures claim that 1.7 percent of the population is some form of intersex, which is more common than having red hair I believe.

  • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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    11 months ago

    Biological sex is also a social construct lmao, this is a very conservative framing of gender

    Read Judith Butler

    • fosforus@sopuli.xyz
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      11 months ago

      Biological sex is also a social construct lmao

      What? No.

      This is the kind of shit that makes trans activism completely ridiculous.

      • Gladaed@feddit.de
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        11 months ago

        Only for they gave inadequate context. Biological sex and genome expression is much more complicated than m/f but that discussion is not really in the scope of the thread.

        • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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          11 months ago

          I would suggest reading “Bodies that matter, on the discursive limits of Sex” from Judith Butler.

          Pointing out how intersex people don’t fit into the constructed binary is easy to dismiss, sex essentialists just call those people defective men and women.

          (Which gets into how if you can’t have kids or you can but you don’t look a certain way you’re “defective”, which is a value judgement and doesn’t have some universal or biological basis)

          • Gladaed@feddit.de
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            11 months ago

            I would disagree on them calling them defective. This is unnecessarily confrontational.

            I would rather say the neglige their existence while using the simplest useful model. They should consider if a better model might be more appropriate.

            • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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              11 months ago

              I would disagree on them calling them defective. This is unnecessarily confrontational.

              That is only one or the reasons it is wrong to call them defective. They arent defective.

      • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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        11 months ago

        Actually the idea comes from feminism from literally the 1980s-1990s, from well respected feminist theorists. But thank you for illustrating how tied together the rights and oppression of cis women and trans people are.

        Read “Bodies that matter, on the discursive limits of Sex” from Judith Butler.

        Also understand the definition of a social construct. Social construct doesn’t mean fake, it means falling into a classification scheme that is socially manufactured. Something that is 12 inches long isn’t “fake” in its 12 inch longness because measuremenr systems are socially constructed, it just means that it can become 10 inches long or 14 inches long if the length of an inch is redefined. And you would be wrong if you told someone that no, it is incorrect to call it 30.48 centimeters long. People can apply different classification schemes/social constructs to the same physical object and still be correct. They could also call it ten blagards long and be internally consistent within their classification scheme, but that wouldn’t have utility within a social context because the meaning of blagard hasn’t been socially constructed.

        An inch isn’t some innate objective truth, it is a common standard.

        The sex binary is a commonly applied standard, but it is arbitrary and harmful (see how women are treated rooted in myths around sex, the prolific mutilation of intersex infants, and the “trans panic defense”). If inches being the length they were started resulting in engineering failures that killed people we would change how we measure things.

        Well, it does and we don’t, but you get the point.

        • fosforus@sopuli.xyz
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          11 months ago

          An inch isn’t some innate objective truth, it is a common standard.

          Do you mean that just like we have defined inch the length that is exactly 25.4mm (where mm is the length light travels in 1/299792458 seconds in a vacuum, seconds being whatever the fuck they are), we have also defined animals with XX chromosome females, and if they’re human, women, while recognizing that there are rare exceptions?

          • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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            11 months ago

            Do you mean that just like we have defined inch the length that is exactly 25.4mm (where mm is the length light travels in 1/299792458 seconds in a vacuum, seconds being whatever the fuck they are), we have also defined animals with XX chromosome females, and if they’re human, women, while recognizing that there are rare exceptions?

            Two things:

            A) you’re not thinking procedurally. Doctors do not generally check chromosomes when they determining sex generally. So it would be more accurate to say “in infants, doctors define sex by looking at genitals, in adults, by looking at a variety of characteristics. We use chromosomes in medical circumstances to look for potential conditions that may explain symptoms, and sometimes we can use that as a category in determining sex” The definition you are using is really most applicable in people who are doing research, not clinical work, or interacting with human beings in a social context.

            B) cool, so we’ve established that is what you think sex is. Other communities define sex differently. You can’t claim inches are some universal innate biological truth and those heathens over there using centimeters are wrong and need to accept the wisdom of inches. And while inches might be more useful to you, centimeters may be more useful to them.

            I would really suggest that you read “Bodies that matter, on the discursive limits of Sex” from Judith Butler. She literally has a PhD in philosophy and has devoted her life to analysis of the way we as a society conceptualize sex.

      • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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        11 months ago

        Did the doctor check your chromosomes when you came out of the womb?

        Lol imagine being a nerd, but it is for 6th grade biology. At least be a nerd about college biology.