fuzzy post-it

velartrill:

lexyeevee:

i must point out that we don’t tend to think of “brunette” and “blonde” as social constructs, even though those aren’t perfect labels either

in which case we’re just wrong. in American culture redheads have an entire mythology dedicated to them (“soulless gingers” etc.; I have one friend who dyed her hair just because she couldn’t put up with the endless tirade of ginger jokes and people fetishizing her hair); the “blonde as airhead” trope is a pretty clear indication that it’s a distinct social category as well. if you’re trying to say that these groups aren’t a construct because colors are some sort of “objective” measure, well, colors are a construct too. different people even within a culture will disagree about what etic expression of color falls into which emic category, and between cultures and languages there’s massive variation in how things are categorized. some cultures (ostensibly including the Pirahã though that depends on how much you trust Daniel Everett) even have a binary color distinction between “light” and “dark”. making it actually quite a good analogy for gender :p

ah, but this is conflating several things again, as we are wont to do

“brunette” and “blonde” still (try to) refer to objective measurements, even if our choice of how to segregate the spectrum is entirely cultural.

though i doubt cultural differences in color vernacular come into play too strongly here. all the ones i’m familiar with are about where to draw the line between blue/cyan/green, pink/red/orange/yellow, and the like; much hair color is split between the pretty distinct categories of light, dark, and redhead. (i observe that even english doesn’t have separate words to distinguish between dark brown versus medium-light brown hair, or to describe black hair.)

we do have the separate and entirely bogus concepts of the soulless ginger and blonde airhead, yes. (where the hell did the ginger thing even come from?) but that’s pattern recognition and reuse of known categories gone awry. it’s a general habit we should be breaking ourselves of. it doesn’t mean hair color doesn’t exist or isn’t a useful qualifier; hairstyle is one of the most obvious ways to find or describe a person. (another being apparent ethnicity, something else we’ve gone and cocked up.)

so we have descriptive labels and then we build stereotypes on them and then we start to enshrine those stereotypes in the culture. we should really stop doing that.

it seems like the blonde airhead trope has lost a lot of its appeal in recent years, at least

specifically it was the agrarian stage of “development” where social stratification showed up. unsettled hunter-gatherer cultures were/are mostly egalitarian, so any understanding of gender they had would be completely alien to a modern western perspective, and they certainly had no knowledge of genetics so they’d have classified an “XX-male” (quotes because it’s an unfortunate cissexist and binaristic term but a technical one) with the rest of the people who had the right bodies for tiger-punching without a second thought, even though you or I would probably call that person intersex.

you can be egalitarian and still notice that human beings tend to come in two general shapes. especially when most of the species is only interested in having sex with one of those shapes. first we notice the categories, then we start to invent conclusions

hm. even with our knowledge of genetics it’s not like we karyotype every newborn. i do wonder, are we even aware now when a baby expressing male physiology is an androgen-insensitive XX? i used to know someone who only found out she was XXY when she was 17 or so, and iirc it basically had to be self-diagnosed.

i have no idea what this says about our labeling. what were we even talking about here.

well, yeah, it was written by western authors for a western audience. not sure how you’d talk about gender without using the terms “male” and “female.” it’d be like trying to explain verb tense to someone who only speaks Mandarin without using words like “yesterday” or “soon” or “tomorrow.” it’s certainly not the right conclusion to draw that this means all cultures have a male/female distinction at least; what you can say is that all cultures have at least two genders (just like all cultures have at least two terms for color.)

it’s certainly possible that a culture could, say, never develop the idea of referring to people by apparent sex at all. i just expect that this would be pretty rare, especially if the society grew to have settlements larger than a small tribe, because it’s one of the most obvious ways to narrow down a description of another person. we seem to be pretty well-wired to guess from a glance whether another human is someone we could perhaps make babies with.

likewise it’s rare for a culture to not have words for colors, just because they make for such clear distinctions. but there is at least one!: the Pirahã, who i believe are the same people that have no words for individual numbers, and no interest in developing any.

trying to define one as male and one as female doesn’t really make sense because traits that are assigned to one gender in one two-gender culture are almost guaranteed to be split up among both in another culture. there’s some general trends in terms of “people capable of reproducing generally wind up getting fucked over and land on the bottom of the social ladder” but even that’s not universal.

hmm. some cultures have genders that are either subsets of the binary genders, or include people who don’t really fit the binary genders.

but are there any cultures where gender is radically and completely unlike our notion of gender and can’t be mapped to ours at all? and if so, would it even make sense to call those distinctions “gender”?

like, sure, cultures with binary distinctions generally divide people up among the same lines, but asking which one of them is male and which one is female is like asking for an exact literal equivalent of a word in an unrelated language.

the words aren’t the ideas; if they’re divided along the same lines, we’d still use “female” to refer to the group that carries the babies, because that’s what the word means to us.

in the story in your linked post, the student goes wrong by asking how to say a word rather than how to express an idea. in japanese you don’t really say “i wonder X”; you express it with a sentence suffix that changes the mood of the sentence. “male” and “female” are words we can say, but as long as another culture has groupings that express the same concepts, we can still reuse the words.

you made the claim that intersex people’s bodies were “trying” to be one sex or another and failing, and that’s what I’m taking issue with. I’m not saying intersex people are super common, but I am saying that defining them in terms of their noncomformity with a male/female sex binary is privileging that binary purely because most people can be sorted into one category or another without a lot of difficulty. there’s no intellect driving human development, and if something suddenly killed off all the non-intersex people on the planet, a lot of traits that we see as intersex would be established as the new normal; it’s not like we’d necessarily gravitate back to a notional male/female sex binary over the generations as things got back into order or something. tl;dr making gigantic ontological claims is completely pointless; as a linguist my field is very full of those and I’ve never once seen them be useful *cough*CHOMSKY*cough*

i apologize for anthropomorphizing human development; it’s a very tempting habit :)

the semantics are wacky here since everything we’ve got resulted from natural processes, which don’t have any deliberate goal in mind, or even a mind in which to store one.

and it’s even worse because of all the moral baggage we tack onto words like “wrong”. and american culture, with its competitiveness and its worship of winning, thinks pretty poorly of “fail”.

i don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that intersex results when something interferes with the usual process — the process human biology is most accustomed to experiencing and has evolved alongside. we even say intersex, literally between the sexes.

but certainly that’s not bad. it says nothing about the resulting person. it may be unfortunate if it results in infertility or other practical problems. but i cannot even wrap my head around the idea of judging a person, morally or naturalistically, on the grounds that biology is not a perfect machine that produces identical “perfect” individuals every time. we wouldn’t be here if that were the case; our very existence resulted from an ongoing comedy of errors.

eh. from what I saw it had more to do with the creation of a distinct social category that gay people could be slotted into to preserve gender norms, which is very visible in terms of the gay/straight binary it established (it’s instructive that biphobia is still all over the place, and even gay people are very likely to be biphobic.) which isn’t to say that those factors weren’t what drove that reconfiguration, just that it’s important to look at the structural shifts themselves. simplifying things down to “acceptance/prejudice” is kinda not very useful? I digress, though

most of the vocal arguments were moral or naturalist. granted most people probably aren’t even aware of how perceptions of gender affect them, but we’ve gone from “it’s gross” and “it’s just wrong” and “this book says it’s evil” to a surprising amount of acceptance and support in relatively little time.

it is a shame that half the letters in LGBT have been left in the dust. but i feel the goalposts have moved, that something fundamental has shifted ever so slightly. i’m optimistic.

well, also their social environment and the constructs that define it weren’t challenged the way that happened to people who moved to urban areas, which was an alien environment and called for a lot of new structures to be established.

yeah. i think that’s ultimately the same idea. in an urban area, the very concept of encountering the unfamiliar itself becomes familiar.

that’s definitely how I tend to assume dysphoria works; ever since I learned from body-modders that cis people can experience (non-gender-related) dysphoria too I figured it was probably the exact same mechanism. certainly my own experiences suggest my brain hadn’t been getting the signals it developed to expect and was trying to cope with crappy generic drivers :p

you should upgrade to linux 3.11 for workgroups i hear it’s got drivers for everything

also wow what an asshole of a doctor

on top of that I was seeing her specifically for an HRT consultation, like my trans-ness was exactly why I was there. I’m really sorry for the other people who wound up working with her. :/

lol what? how did she even get into this position. like why would she want to work with trans people and then condescend

…yes? labels are the most visible outward manifestation of a construct. much as I’d love to you can’t just drive your Gayroller 9000 over an abstract concept that lives in people’s heads, you have to do something to make them dismantle that construct and attacking the labels they use is one of many ways to do it. basically I think we’re in agreement on this and are just kinda talking past each other

it has been known to happen

i feel like attacking labels is just attacking symptoms and if successful would lose us words that really are useful sometimes, but i’ve been wrong about how people act before haha

oh i know. i was trying to paint a picture of a person who didn’t want to switch religions, but who was being pressured to do so purely by outside forces. i imagine someone who feels very strongly about religion would be far more likely to see the problem as being with everyone else.

not in my experience. even the strongest beliefs need support and external validation from time to time, and if you’re not getting any of that, but you are getting massive negative feedback, it’s almost impossible for most people to keep them from diminishing. otherwise religions wouldn’t need temples and rituals. and people very rarely deconvert all on their own without any external factor pushing them. on the other hand trans people tend to know something is wrong even in horribly cissexist societies where being trans isn’t even culturally a thing, let alone something looked kindly upon.

hmm that’s interesting. i’ve always thought it funny that christianity has grown to be so focused on its churches, when to my understanding it caught on in the first place because its focus on the individual was so different from ritual-oriented paganisms, or something

catholicism, bringing you zero sense of irony since the year of our lord 300

this isn’t news, but still genuinely surprises me. not that i remotely believe anyone decides to be trans, but the brain is a very flexible organ, and i would expect that at least occasionally it would notice it’s really bumming its owner out and adjust itself accordingly.

I mean, if we had the mechanisms to do that, depression wouldn’t even be a thing.

which would be nice.

or maybe some people really do “just get over it”, but those are the people for whom it never blossoms into a serious problem in the first place

but it would also probably make things really easy for totalitarian dictators and abusers in general. which might explain why we don’t have that kind of mechanism; it’s not necessarily pro-survival. but that’s just idle evo-psych speculation and I don’t think anything good has ever come of that.

i love evo psych it tells me that i’m great because nature wanted it to be so, something something hunter-gatherers