= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
lucidfox comments on Gender Identity and Rationality - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (111)
I have long thought along the same vein simply because this is what everyone asserts, and in fact it could be the conflict between that belief and my rationalist principles that caused me mental discomfort - way before I discovered Less Wrong.
The problem, as it often is, in the matter of definitions. How do we define this "inherent gender"? Can it change later in life? If someone discovered their gender identity at a later age, does that mean that previously to that they behaved according to a "non-inherent gender" but were somehow consciously unaware of this? Can we build a brain scanner that detects it in a quantifiable way, and can we be sure that it will always match self-reporting? And most importantly, if we do that, can we be sure of 100% correlation between that characteristic and the expected utility of various options of gender presentation?
I'm not sure the right approach involves trying to clarify this idea of "inherent gender". I think I'd rather treat it the way Yvain treats "disease" here: look for the various characteristics people track using gender terms and address them separately.
Indeed.
It might help to taboo the words "gender", "male" and "female" and instead speak separately of the different (and numerous) aspects that compose the complex biological and social phenomena behind them.