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TimS comments on Can the Chain Still Hold You? - Less Wrong
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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.
I don't think I understand.
A new technology is useful if it is serves a specific purpose for human manipulation of territory. The more unknown the technology the more dangerous it is to human survival, and thus can no longer be seen as progressive. Furthermore the introduction of new technology reshapes the social topography of a territory. If erosion/alteration of social topography happens at too fast a rate it becomes impossible to navigate based off the experiences of others. Just as if all the currents and depths of a channel suddenly changed the built up knowledge of generations of fishers would become irrelevant.
Whether technological/scientific advancement is progress or just impact depends on these two factors
1.) The degree of unknowns involved with the technology 2.) The extent to which social topography is eroded/altered.
If we look at cell phones and other types of information-technologies they have completely reconstructed the social topography of the world, and they continue to develop at an astonishing rate. As to the degree of unknowns, cell phones have already been completely integrated into everyday life, despite their relatively short lifespan. What happens when a person lives 70 years with a cellphone in their pocket, or an i-pad? We have no idea because they have not been around long enough to have any cases. There is still a huge degree of unknowns with these new technologies, yet we are already completely dependent on them.
I am not saying that this is not progress, it is not possible to say at this point; but I will say that we are walking a fine line between true progress and unrestrained impact.