From this I took that he meant gender binary expectations were stronger in the US — TheWillowOfDarkness

Stronger in the US than where?

Sounds pretty political to me: "We must ensure that our schools and community reproduces/doesn't change present understandings and expectations of gender."

From this I took that he meant gender binary expectations were stronger in the US

Sweden, I assume. Or anywhere that takes an active role in downplaying or rejecting gender stereotypes as a social outcome.

I don't know who said that.

The point has already been made earlier in the thread that the teacher is a social engineer one way or the other. Getting kids to say the pledge of allegiance (or whatever) is social engineering. Reinforcing current gender stereotypes is social engineering. Whatever you think about the language used in the quote, education just is social engineering. You can embrace it or deny it. And whether you embrace it or not should depend on the outcome you want. So, for example, if you want less racial discrimination, you actively counteract racial stereotypes, which has been being done for the last few generations. If you want less sexism then you may need to actively counteract sexual stereotypes.

Or I should say, over my dead body it will. — frank

Knee jerk reaction. Why? What do you fear from the counteraction of traditional gender roles? What exactly do you think the negative outcome is?

You did, in the last post before my response. This part:

That's not going to happen in American public schools. Or I should say, over my dead body it will. That is not the role of public education. Even a small step in that direction would be extremely dangerous. The more benevolent the intention, the greater the danger due to the naivete and hubris of it.

You are outright saying that schools (as in the examples of Sweden un was talking out) teaching children not to gender stereotype is one of the greatest threats we could ever face.

If you want less sexism then you may need to actively counteract sexual stereotypes. — Baden

What specific measures should be taken to accomplish that?

Knee jerk reaction. Why? What do you fear from the counteraction of traditional gender roles? What exactly do you think the negative outcome is? — Baden

I guess you're less interested in someone else's experiences and views than in finding someone to bitch at. Try Hanover. I'm not interested.

I guess you're less interested in someone else's experiences and views than in finding someone to bitch at. Try Hanover. I'm not interested. — frank

I didn't bitch at you. I said it's a knee jerk reaction, and that's what strong language like "over my dead body" sounds like. Fair or no? The rest was just a few questions.

I very clearly explained that my opposition is the use of public school for social engineering. That there may already be such engineering taking place certainly does not persuade me that more would be a good thing. American public school students should be protected as much as possible from the myriad idiots who want to make use of schools to further their ends. Opening the door to any one group would set a precedent.

Equality and equal opportunity are very important. Social engineering in the public schools is not the way to advancement in those areas. And there is no war going on in the US over this issue.

What you tried to suggest is that my concern for protecting students is actually some sort of facade behind which I hide my fear of gender neutrality. Like un, you seem to have x-ray vision into a world you've never visited.

In that case what you're telling me is that you don't understand what social engineering is. As I already explained and as I wouldn't need to explain if you'd read the actual discussion, public education is inseparable from social engineering. It's not some neutral space where nothing ideological happens. If you're against all forms of social engineering then you're against public education, period.

protecting students — frank

From what?

Is there even one opponent of gender-neutral education that is not so overcome by their own ideological context that they realize they actually operate in one? That is not so socially engineered that they are able to realize that social engineering is happening all around them all the time?

Maybe it's just the word "social" that's making you all break out in hives. How about we call it public policy application? Because it's essentially the same thing in this context.

LOL. I wrote out this long thing to try to explain further about social engineering. Then I saw your next post.

Yeah. Peace out.

Sorry frank, but you don't get any brownie points here for fronting that you know stuff.

Here's a basic overview from wiki:

"Social engineering is a discipline in social science that refers to efforts to influence particular attitudes and social behaviors on a large scale, whether by governments, media or private groups in order to produce desired characteristics in a target population. Social engineering can also be understood philosophically as a deterministic phenomenon where the intentions and goals of the architects of the new social construct are realized...

As a result of abuse by authoritarian regimes and other non-inclusive attempts at social engineering, the term has in cases been imbued with a negative connotation. In British and Canadian jurisprudence, changing public attitudes about a behaviour is accepted as one of the key functions of laws prohibiting the behaviour. Governments also influence behavior more subtly through incentives and disincentives built into economic policy and tax policy, for instance, and have done so for centuries."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_engineering_(political_science)

There's a lot more to it than that, but instead of running away, maybe start by telling me what part you think is not going on all the time in the public sphere.

That's not a politicized gender war, though. So un must have been talking about something else. — frank

It's a general impression, somewhat supported by some of the reactions on this thread. But what was specifically in my mind was a clip I saw from the secret life of five year olds, in which Harlo from LA expresses some rather rampant sexist views and refuses to play with girls. You may not have access to this and it's not anyway a format I really like - a bit big brother - but it was jarringly out of what I generally expect at that age, and also apparently out of what the other children expect. It looked a bit mad.

Here's a description.

fronting — Baden

I'm going to have to ask you to place the outdated Black Americana on the floor and slowly back your white ass up away from it. :blush: Just kidding.


I see. :up:

The WHO definition of gender seems too objective to me. You could unfailingly deduce someone's gender identity from their behaviour according to that. But that ignores the phenomenology. It is logically possible for a biological woman to strongly feel that she is most essentially male, that she has the wrong type of body, but because she doesn't want to deal with all the bullshit she marries a man and lives the life of a perfect stereotypical 50s housewife. Yet she would surely identify as male, at least in her own head. The WHO definition does not capture her. Does it?

Also some examples of gender identities would be awfully useful in the WHO definition.

Just sounded fly to me... :grimace:

That’s ok. I know you went to one of those race-neutral schools where they made you walk down the street in a black hoodie and the police showed up and shot you seven times for no apparent reason. Meanwhile the black students were made to attend a neo-nazi rally where they burned Nelson Mandela in effigy while marching around the fire screaming “Make Ireland Great Again!”

:clap:

Meanwhile the black students were made to attend a neo-nazi rally where they burned Nelson Mandela in effigy while marching around the fire screaming “Make Ireland Great Again!” — frank

You think you are joking?

https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2018/oct/26/black-sheep-the-black-teenager-who-made-friends-with-racists-video

Watch this, folks, and get some idea of how social pressure works, how identification works, how stereotypes work, and how they are different from biology.

I do think the WHO definition, and the dictionary definition linked to, do not reflect the usage of the word in the circles I mix in. Many autistic people experience gender disphoria, and I think it is genuine (at least in all the cases I have met), and the identity they claim is rooted in how they feel, not in what roles and behaviour they adopt or are expected to adopt.

The NHS has a much better definition that refers to experience and how a person feels:

Gender dysphoria is a condition where a person experiences discomfort or distress because there's a mismatch between their biological sex and gender identity. It's sometimes known as gender incongruence.

Biological sex is assigned at birth, depending on the appearance of the genitals. Gender identity is the gender that a person "identifies" with or feels themselves to be.

While biological sex and gender identity are the same for most people, this isn't the case for everyone. For example, some people may have the anatomy of a man, but identify themselves as a woman, while others may not feel they're definitively either male or female. — NHS

Consider this video if you are interested in gender in autism:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bVg855hZOk

That's a reasonable and nuanced criticism.

Thanks Baden, but it's one that Harry made I think. It's odd that the WHO didn't come up with something as simple and easy to understand as the NHS definition.

Harry insists gender is no more than biological sex. The NHS definition is within the general boundaries of the other definitions in recognizing it's more than that. Whether you use the NHS definition or the WHO one or Oxford, you recognize that:

While biological sex and gender identity are the same for most people, this isn't the case for everyone. — NHS

Harry doesn't and so is wasting time here. And that's the end of the definition discussion now as it really is too much of a tangent.

Sure. There are tensions within Harry's position.

While biological sex and gender identity are the same for most people, this isn't the case for everyone. For example, some people may have the anatomy of a man, but identify themselves as a woman, while others may not feel they're definitively either male or female. — NHS

I'm a bit confused by how this isn't obvious for everyone. Gender identity science is a real thing, there are tons to read about it, but I think people just ignore it because of their emotional response to the science. In essence; even at a philosophical forum people can't seem to separate their preprogrammed culture and lash out with every bias and fallacy there is.

What I find more interesting, as I don't see how the definitions can be disputed really, is why? Why does some children go through this? Is it nature or nurture? Is it a combination, like most things in psychology? More importantly, how does gender stereotypes in society and also, the active force against those stereotypes play into the nurture of kids? Where is the balance between upholding differences between genders and fighting stereotypes that influence destructive behavior on both the sense of identity and social interactions later in life?

Biological sex is assigned at birth, depending on the appearance of the genitals. Gender identity is the gender that a person "identifies" with or feels themselves to be. — NHS

Note the 3 terms.
1. sex - biological.
2. gender - undefined.
3. gender identity. A feeling/identification.

Compare:

Gender refers to the socially constructed characteristics of women and men – such as norms, roles and relationships of and between groups of women and men. — WHO

This fills in the gap and gives us definitive completion of physical, phenomenological, and social. It seems a pretty consistent terminology to me.

Given the distinction between sex as a physical phenomenon, and gender as a social construct ( and one might for clarity compare the physical phenomenon of money, as bits of paper and metal and the social construct of currency as its function as a value in social exchange ), it is worth pointing out, since the topic has come up once or twice, that there is a big difference between transgender, and transsexual. Someone who decides to present themselves as 'the opposite sex' by purely superficial means - hair, make-up, clothes, mannerisms, a transvestite, is concerned with gender, and is a very different sort of person to one who seeks to take hormones and have surgery and is concerned to change their own sex, as far as they can.

Some people have a revulsion for either that makes them effectively indistinguishable...

Perhaps consideration of currency as a social construct will also illustrate that a social construct is not something one can, as an individual, do anything much about. You want a tin of beans, you need 50 pence. You can say 'I don't believe in money', but the nice man at ASDA won't just let you have a tin of beans for nothing. And when hyperinflation sets in, and the price goes up to £50, it won't do you any good to say 'I don't believe in inflation and offer 50 p for the beans. Social constructs are 'made-up' but they are not voluntary.

It has to be admitted that the distinction between the physical, social, and psychological cannot be maintained absolutely. The transvestite might shave his legs, or bind her breasts in a temporary body modification. And things become very knotty when one considers sanity and madness.

1. Madness is physical; a disease/malfunction of the brain.
2. Madness is a social construct: a formal status like criminality, conferred on the individual by society.
3. Madness is subjective, a feeling and an identification.

All three are obviously true in some ways and in some cases, and extremely controversial in others. But perhaps all this is for another time, and another thread.

I shouldn't be shocked at the weird reflexiveness in a lot of responses here. Being a reactionary doesn't seem very sensible for anyone. The notion that education does not inherently involve social engineering is so ludicrous a thing to say - especially from an American - that I have extreme doubts that anyone coming here regularly could believe it. The whole point of education it purportedly to prepare you for adult life in the society you are in. Namely, for participating in the economy, in social interactions and in the political system in the appropriate ways.

And of course, what "appropriate" means here is going to be defined in a rather top down manner and schools play a large role in creating a general idea in people's heads about how they she be and what to believe. Pledges of allegiance, emphasis on the ills of national enemies, correct codes of conduct in various settings, gender norms, etc. There's a reason the aforementioned reactionaries in this thread almost immediately jumped to complaining about socialism. That's a product of American social engineering in education and the media. For the latter, there's a reason you see people in the media, government and in the general populace call social Democrats "socialists". They've no conception of the actual range of political views (certainly not any further left than the center-right democrats in America), and so everything becomes socialism to them, just like the current structures tell them to think.

And if the claim is, as a user said earlier on this page, that they don't want any added social engineering to fix (what I take to be) the absurdities produced by American social engineering, then you don't actually care about social engineering in principle. What you actually care about is whether or not that engineering is done in such a way that it protects your ideological views. You don't care if kids are "protected" in this case because you're not suggesting we remove the obvious attempts to mold them into believing and assuming things you agree with.

It's a very convenient hypocrisy to have, I grudgingly admit. Rules for thee, not for me. Bad for you but good for we.