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HungryTurtle comments on Can the Chain Still Hold You? - Less Wrong
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That is a lot to respond to. Yes, I'm mostly second-wave feminist. But I don't think that commits me to ignoring things like how feminism is a different issue for blacks and whites, or accepting any idiocy from Mary Daly. Nor does it require me to support doctors who pressure parents into unnecessary "sex correction" surgery.
I accept that science is socially constructed. That doesn't commit me to believing that there are no physical facts. I suspect that the five categories you listed will turn out to be misleading simplifications, and the truth will turn out to be closer to a continuum (cf. Kinsey). More generally, I think it is useful to distinguish between social constructions that are strongly tied to the physical world (sex) and social constructions that have low or no ties to the physical facts (gender roles).
More broadly, I think that the suffering caused by the social constructions of gender are much greater than the suffering caused by social constructions of sex. Further, I think improving the construction of gender will have the effect of improving the experience of people who have problems from the social construction of sex. For example, once gender role construction is improved, I think that people who desire sex-change surgeries will have a better life, even if nothing about the social construction of sex changes.
Finally, I like post-modernism - to the extent it is grounded in fact. Foucault is interesting because he was an excellent historian. By contrast, I once read a feminist paper on mutually assured destruction that was profoundly misguided. It attacked speakers at a conference on MAD for failing to explicitly note that megadeathes were a bad thing (as if everyone there didn't know that and assume it implicitly in the conversation). Can't find it online, or I'd give the cite.
Sure. Accepting feminism is a different issue for black women and white women is the major distinction between first and second wave feminists. I don't think there is anything wrong if you have a stronger affinity to 2nd wave rather than 3rd. I mean, personally, I do think 3rd wave feminism is a more sophisticated level of analysis, but just as quantum mechanics does not necessarily make classical mechanics obsolete , I don't think aligning yourself with the second wave is particularly detrimental. I do think aligning with the first-wave is detrimental, which is where a lot discussed above decreasing the population of men come from.
I don't know if I would agree that the suffering caused by social constructions of gender is more damaging than that caused by social constructions of sex, let me think about it. I tend to think gender originates only after a construction of sex is created. For example, the NuGuo people in china accept hermaphrodites. Since they except them the develop gender roles for hermaphrodites.
Foucault is interesting.
I'd like to try to convince you that gender construction causes more harm than sex construction. Basically, gender construction affects everyone that doesn't fit well within ordinary gender expectations: nerdish boys who don't do sports, girls who are discouraged from various careers or women prevented from advancing, women suffering from body image issues. (I'm omitting more contentious examples and historical problems for which substantial progress has been made). Even if you think that these harms are much smaller than the harms from sex construction, there are overwhelmingly more people who suffer from them. This justified a focus on those issues over sex issues.
Also, there is value in highlighting which social constructions are based on physical facts of some kind and those that are not. I think gender falls entirely in that later - if it turns out that something I'd been calling gender had a physical basis, I would acknowledge error in my classification.
Finally, I think that fixing gender constructs would be beneficial to transgendered and other sex-construct sufferers. For example, the social rules about men using women's restrooms (and vice versa) are gendered, not sex constructed. But if we removed those social rules, transgender men using the "wrong" restroom would also suffer much less stigma (ideally, no stigma at all). Although this isn't a point about relative harms, I think it is useful in deciding the tactics of advocacy.
Huh? I remember an Italian female senator making a big fuss when a male-to-female transsexual senator (who hadn't undergone SRS yet at that time, IIRC) used the women's toilet in the senate.
Lots of gendered rules differentiate based on sex. Once upon a time, there was the rule "No women lawyers." I think it's pretty clear that there is no physical basis for this rule.
Or consider the Old Testament rules on cleanliness and menstruation. Cleanliness didn't mean anything in relation to decreased frequency of disease - it was a requirement of social isolation of women from men at certain times of the month. Although menstruation is a physical thing, I would assert that these rules were gender constructs, not sex constructs.
Likewise, I assert that the rules about which gender can use which bathroom are gender constructs that use sex to differentiate. If the male and female genders were constructed differently, the Italian senator you mentioned wouldn't have felt justified in making the complaint she made.
Sorry for the late response, I have been really busy with work.
The variety of gender constructions in our society is the result of a societal objective to perserve a strict dichtomy of sex. Therefore while I would agree that more people are directly assualted with gender constructions, I would add that it is in protection of cultural beliefs about the construction of sex that a wide range of gender constructions are created and implemented. Or in other words, Gender constructions are the means by which constructions of sex are legitimized. Without importance on the later, the former would diminish into obscurity.
To illustrate this I would ask you to think about constructions of age in American society. As of late, there is not nearly as strict a dichotomy between "old" and "young" in American society as there is between "male" and "female." Of course there is still a clearly defined dichotomy (one set by law). But America does not have a multitude of age related norms and customs that would equal the concept of gender for sex. We are not trained to strictly categorize the way old or young people dress. Perhaps 30 years ago there were many hobbies and professions that were normatively bracketed to either old or young (A young person might be ridiculed for drinking prune juice? An old person might be looked down on for being too adamant about video games). However, I feel current American society has become even more accepting of occupational and recreational deviations from these normative age construction. It is generally acceptable for a man in his 40s to like video games, and while a child may be labeled "weird" for drinking prune juice, they are by no means subject to persecution because of it.
I don't think we have significant theoretical disagreement. I endorse the view that one of the social functions of gender constructions is to act as a firebreak for attempts to changes to sex constructions. That is, a strategy for improving the public's opinions of sex reassignment surgery (both consensual and non-consensual) that doesn't address boy-in-the-girl's-bathroom or marriage equality issues is doomed to failure.
I'm making an assertion about tactics - that gender constructions are the low hanging fruit to target. I expect them to be easier to change because they are not as entangled with the biological facts (and history suggests that they are slightly easier to change). More broadly, I don't think that the only purpose of gender constructions is to preserve sex constructions. For example, the guy-as-jock meme is independent of any modern biological facts about men, as far as I can tell.
No worries, mon :)
I think our disagreement is primarily a methodological one. You are aiming at the low hanging fruit, but I feel like if we don't dig up the roots of the problem similar fruit will eventually grow again. I want a new tree.
I want a new tree, too. I think uprooting the current tree doesn't guarantee that a better tree will grow in its place. In fact, I worry that the backlash from uprooting the tree will help plant the seeds for a worse tree.
Yeah that is a valid worry. I concede my point. The potential impact from uprooting the tree combined with the multitude of potential unknowns make strategic clipping of the fruit seem the better option. I never imagined that I would find an argument for moderate change in such a progress oriented community.
Yeah, this community's meaning of progress doesn't align well with a politically active feminist's meaning of progress. For the most part, the majority of members of this community hope for scientific advances that make our questions moot. That's not a totally unreasonable hope, in the abstract: many advances in female empowerment follow from the invention of The Pill - a reliable method for separating sex from procreation. Once that separation occurred, it became much more obvious how disconnected from physical fact many gender constructs really were.
That said, I think that the LessWrong community as a whole underestimates the impact of constructed social meaning. Part of that is unexamined traditionalism and part of it is the community's well settled aversion to discussing practical social engineering.
I am not completely against change. I just think progress ceases to be progress if it accelerates to the point where humans are unable to acclimate to it.