fuzzy post-it

(posting separately because tumblr will fuck up my quoting otherwise, and also i can’t delete the original ask)

velartrill:

except “biological sex” is still a social construct

well hang on

“In real life literally millions of people have bodies that are in some way contrary to the biological concept of the two sex system. Millions.”

i object to this deliberate toying with numbers; millions of people could still very well be less than a tenth of a percent of humanity. it almost certainly is, else the author would’ve jumped at the chance to say “tens of millions” instead.

we have labels to describe things. the overwhelming majority of human beings are one of XX or XY, with nothing interfering with expression. so we came up with labels for those two things.

it turns out that people get really accustomed to labels and direly want to jam everything they come across into an existing label, yes. we also want to make lots of secondary assumptions about labels. that sucks and is a general problem, but it’s how we deal with information overload. the solution is not to destroy the labels; we’ll just come up with new ones and do the same thing all over again.

, and there are confirmed neurological differences between trans women and cis men

this doesn’t explain anything, it just moves the goalposts. our understanding of the brain is so primitive as to be laughable; “neurological differences” might as well be “we jammed some electrodes in it and different parts lit up”.

what if those parts of the brain are just the parts that think about your own concept of gender and/or self? then this result would be tautological. (reading further, i see one researcher doesn’t think these parts of the brain relate to gender at all; another suspects one of them might relate to self-perception.)

and remember, the brain changes as it learns and adapts. which is why everyone was rejecting that study a few months ago showing “clear differences” between the brains of men and women.

i seem to recall brain scans showing similarities between gay men and straight women, as well. what does that mean? anything? nothing?

and I’ve seen transethnicity used to describe people of one ethnicity who were raised as children by another and were socialized differently as a result, though I can’t find any links because all the search results I come across are people using the concept to mock transgender people

do these people grow up feeling they’ve missed out on their “original” culture, or feeling physically uncomfortable around other people in their adopted culture who are all of a different ethnicity?

i’m not sure what the implications are either way haha

and ultimately so many people have put so much time and effort into trying to “cure” being transgender that their manifest lack of success would seem to indicate there’s something more going on than something purely cultural

i’m not sure. i keep running into studies involving giving really subtle cultural cues to a group of kids once, and the kids act significantly differently. and then i imagine that multiplied by hundreds of people and millions of cues while those kids are growing up.

imagine sending a religious person to a therapist to get the religion “cured”, because friends don’t like it or whatever outside influence might make it unfortunate to have. do you expect that would ever have the slightest chance of working?

we have the trope of the racist grandparent, and we all laugh about it. no one tries to argue with such a person. why not? well, they “grew up in a different time”.

these are things that tend to be entirely due to upbringing, and thus culture. we sort of take for granted that these are practically etched in stone, then we question how much influence culture can really have on us. we’re kind of ridiculous.