So you're saying that sex and gender are the same thing and they are both social constructions? — Harry Hindu

No. Sex is anatomical. Gender is social. Sex and gender correlate. The processes that give someone a gender are not the same as the ones that give them a sex. We agree that sex is anatomical, I think. We do not agree that gender is social. If you think that 'women wear dresses' as a norm is governed by anatomical or developmental characteristics, I don't know what to tell you; sperm meets egg => wear pink?

Samantha is born a girl (sex) with girl bits. Her birth sex is female (see sentence 1). Samantha is gender non-conforming. Eventually Samantha identifies as a man (gender identity) and changes her gender expression and gender identity to male (see previous bracket). He (zomg, respecting the pronoun change of a fictional character!) changes his (see previous bracket) name to Sam to reflect this. As an adult, Sam has gender identity of male (see previous sentence), gender expression of male (see previous sentence), but Sam's birth sex was female (see sentence 1), Sam's anatomy might still be female (see sentence 1); that of Sam's birth sex (further reference to sentence 1); and even if Sam did take gender transition surgery or hormone therapy, nothing about that would change that Sam's birth sex was female — fdrake

Here you go.

Just so you know, I'm very open to the possibility of your proposed structure of the feeling, but I don't think I can take any views/sensations of disaccord with one's sexual characteristics as causally independent or conceptually non-implicated of social constructions without seeing a good account of why this would be. You seem to acknowledge the co-mediation/reciprocal dependence of felt disaccord with one's sexual characteristics with gendered social constructions, and I do too, and precisely because of that co-mediation/reciprocal dependence I'm skeptical that aetiologies of such felt disaccord exist without that co-mediation. I tried to express that by articulating the difficulties in even studying such a thing.

Though I do think it is useful to have a word which brackets the aetiology, like bearing.

By listening to people talk about it? — Pfhorrest

So, I hope you believe that I understand what you mean by bearing. I am trying to.

I'm perfectly able to imagine that being trans or gender non-conforming can result from feelings of disaccord with one's sexual characteristics, but it isn't obvious to me at all that being trans/gender non-conforming isn't a less intense expression of accord with the opposite M/F sociological gender identity. Or more precisely, whether any articulation of why someone is in that group was generated by a feeling of inner conflict with their sexual characteristics or not. I care about the aetiology here because expressly, you don't want to bracket it and render the thing merely phenomenological. So when you say:

All I'm saying is that you can have feelings about the sex of your body, and at the same time, not necessarily have any particular feeling or another about social stuff; that those two things can in concept vary independently, and saying something about one doesn't have to say something about the other. I'm saying nothing at all about what does or does not cause the feelings about the sex of your body.

For some background on mediation click here.

The relevant distinction to me seems to be:
(1) You can have feelings of disaccord about your body's sexual characteristics that do not concern sociological aspects of gender identity associated with the body.
(2) You can have feelings of disaccord about your body's sexual characteristics that were at some point causally independent of the sociological aspects of gender identity associated with the body.

(1) is bearing as I understand it. I believe you also have something like (2) in mind when you consider (1). (1) is phenomenological and can bracket the aetiology of the feeling, (2) cannot bracket aetiology as it depends on the causal isolation of feelings of disaccord from social constructions. If there was a Robinson Crusoe kid, they might feel some inner ache about their body being wrong, and that's a case of (1) and (2), but out in the wild, we can't readily distinguish (1) and (2).

So say someone is trans. This is influenced by biological characteristics. They're a girl in terms of sex, some body features (hormonal environment of the foetus, say) influence their later gender non-conformity and the presence of Bearing1 sensations. How can I tell if this influence is not socially mediated? I can't just read off an aetiology from their self reports, attributions of causal structure are always interpretations. So:

Let's say I'm designing a study about trans people and feelings of inner conflict about their biological sex. I'll take a big cohort of people from various backgrounds, and I'll filter for ones whose sociological gender non-conformity persists through adolescence, and include them in the group. These are people I want to assess to see if there are felt mismatches between their biological/natal sex and their body which are not mediated by social factors. So I have to construct exclusion/inclusion criteria for the group. What indicators can I possibly use to form these inclusion/exclusion criteria? They're all behavioural. Like here, about an Andrew in an APA study about treatment and developmental support strategies for gender non-conforming people, and diagnostic approaches for resultant medical issues like gender dysphoria (and how that's even a thing):

Mom reports from his earliest years Andrew preferred dresses, playing with make-up and dolls – At 3yo Andrew asked his parents to buy him feminine clothing, a wig – On a number of occasions, he tells his parents “I’m a girl” – At 4yo he tells his mother “I can’t wait to get to heaven to be a girl” – – Visited their pediatrician – “it’s just a phase” – A year ago, parents allow him to wear dresses/skirts inside the home (they note that he’s so much happier during these times) – Mom, tearfully explains “He’s so insistent - it’s beginning to feel oppressive - not allowing him to be who he is” – Notice he’s becoming more withdrawn, starting to avoid school

What I can tell from this is that 'from an extremely early age, Andrew's (sociological) gender expression is non-conforming', but that's unfortunate for trying to establish the presence of (2) in Andrew using this data, because we already have a case of sociological gender non-conformity perhaps in addition to feelings of disaccord with Andrew's body's sexual characteristics which were not influenced by any social dynamics.

The study also notes:

Without pressure to conform, children may not be dysphoric

So if we take someone with extreme dysphoria as a young kid, a good candidate for having feelings of disaccord with their body's sexual characteristics which are causally isolated from their sociological gender identity, these high intensity states of disaccord with their sexual characteristics may also derive from high pressure to conform to sociological gender roles! So instead of it being a case of (2), it'd be a case of (1).

Edit: If the diagrams helped you, I'm thinking of this like:

(A) Chains like Body->Body->Gender->Social Context->Body are candidates for felt disaccord with one's sex which are not preceded by or mediated through the other stuff.
(B) Chains like Body->Gender->Social Context->Body->Body are not, there's a Body->Body path there, but it was preceded by a path from Body to Gender to Social Context to Body, thinking of this as an internalisation of social norms mediating one's self interpretations and sensations of disaccord.

I take it on trust that someone can have feelings of discomfort with their body's sexual characteristics which do not concern their sociological gender identity, but I can't take it on trust that these feelings would occur without exposure to any social mediators. In terms of my diagram, that feelings of disaccord with one's sexual characteristics occur in the path B->B without having some path which did not contain something other than B at a previous point in time. Or more prosaically, "I feel discomfort with the sexual characteristics of my body and did so without any social influence" vs "I feel discomfort with the sexual characteristics of my body and did so with some social influence". The distinction's important, as it's very similar to "Immediately after I lost my job, I had states of sadness which did not concern my job, life sucks" and being sad in general "Immediately after I lost my job, I had low mood which was not influenced by losing my job". I mean... someone's just lost their job and they're fucking sad, they tell you that this has nothing to do with their job, but all that says is that their states of sadness do not concern their job, not that their states of sadness were causally isolated from losing their job.

How would you go about establishing that there are non-(socially mediated) self relationships of disaccord with one's sexual characteristics, then?

This makes sense. I think if you're comfortable bracketing the aetiology of accord/disaccord sensations, it makes the presentation a lot easier initially. If you're going to start talking about bodily sensations which lots of cis people won't have, you'll probably get mired in the bog like you did with me. A discussion of the aetiology of felt disaccord with one's body's sex characteristics is something you can present independently of the intensity of felt disaccord. Or in the terms I used earlier, you can save the distinction between Bearing1 and Bearing2 (immediate vs mediate feelings of disaccord with one's sexual characteristics) until after you've established the relevant vocabulary to describe positions in the abstract space.

But I guess maybe you want to emphasise the 'purely bodily' or 'purely mental' nature of the felt disaccord with bearing (which deals with its aetiology) rather than the raw intensity?

Regardless, they look to require different accounts to me. One looks at the intensity independent of the aetiology, one looks at the aetiology, as usual you can use the dependent variable (intensity) to study how it varies with the independent variable (aetiology).

Things are starting to make more sense to me now.

So what I find interesting about putting 'sensations of dis/accord with your body's sexual characteristics' = bearing right now is that you can discuss it in terms of intensity of accord/disaccord. You can leverage self reports and phenomenology to set up a scale. Perhaps you have people like me who feel very little about it clustered near the centre of the scale. Clustered on high disaccord you have people with severe dysphoria and mutilators, clustered on high accord you have your 'phorics'; people who feel in accord with their bodies.

I've been proposing for a while now that that last property should get a new name different from "gender", and I propose "bearing". Part of that is because gender dysphoria and euphoria are all about this property, the psychological feeling of (dis)comfort in a particular kind of body, and the root "-phor" means "to bear". (And similarly, rather than "transgender", "cisgender", etc, as values for this property, we could use "transphoric", "cisphoric", etc: "bearing across", "bearing to the same side", etc.) Also because "bearing" makes a nice navigational metaphor with "orientation": if you imagine an abstract space of sex characteristics, and a person moving about in that space, their orientation is where in that space they're facing (the type of sex they're looking at), while their bearing is where in that space they're heading (the type of sex they're aiming to be). But also, perhaps as a transitional compromise, we could just disambiguate the word "gender" between all three of these things with qualifiers: "psychological gender" for bearing, "sociological gender" for the original sense of the word, and if we really have to, "physical gender" for sex. The important part, though, is just that we keep these three different things separate: enough people already are getting out the message that the physical and sociological are separate, but I think it would do a lot of good for everyone is we could also keep the sociological and psychological separate. — Pfhorrest

You bracket the aetiology of the felt intensity, it's completely ephemeral to the idea, then you can start talking about trajectories in this abstract space. Most people rarely move about at all, there's no need to transition and no conflict, we remain unperturbed from a point of no felt disaccord with our sex or mild positive accord with our sex. This is suggestive.

(1) If someone feels no disaccord, they seem likely not to change.
(2) If someone feels disaccord, they seem more likely to change.

(1) seems pretty easy to verify by looking at frequency/intensity of gender non-conforming behaviour of kids in suitable longitudinal case studies (after some operationalisation of gender non-conforming frequency/intensity, sure this has been done, at least case reports).

(2) is where it gets really interesting, if you coupled it with an account of gendered socialisation, would the changes in felt disaccord intensity track awareness of gender norms? Another way of putting it, does Bearing 1 become a proxy variable for Bearing 2? It seems likely to me that feeling large disaccord when very young would lead to feeling larger disaccord later, differences in felt disaccord intensity are amplified through gender normativity over time.

As for the phorics, I have no idea how you'd study that.

That is because he is talking about dysphoria; and viewing everything through a dsyphoric lens, and seeing what is in this lens to be consistent among vast amounts of people (we are 'dysphoric' or 'mistyped'), and this is the case. It is not the case. And it is nonsense. Empty tags with no shag. — Swan

There isn't necessarily a medical dimension to the OP's ideas. Regardless, if what you're saying is true, your needlessly aggressive style in the thread has wasted your time; it's frustrated the progress of your discussion with the OP.

So I understand that people who feel no particular discomfort with the bodies they were born with -- and to clarify, I am okay with the body I was born with, and wouldn't call myself dysphoric, which is why I don't call myself trans -- who wouldn't mind if their bodies were different might think, like I did for a while, that everybody who isn't trans is like that. But there are other people who are much more strongly "un-trans" than that, and I'm pretty sure that those people are supposed to be the referents of "cis", with people in between being something in between. And, just like the Kinsey scale results show that a lot more people are more bisexual/pansexual/etc than we think, I suspect that a lot more people are somewhere more toward the middle of the spectrum than strictly cis, even if they still lean toward the cis side of things. — Pfhorrest

What seems intuitive to me is that cisgender people are so identified (enfleshed?) with their sex that it becomes transparent to them, there are no distinctions and sites of tension that would furnish any Bearing1 sensations. I do sometimes have critical thoughts about gendered social styles, but that's not coupled with my body at all in my intuitions.

Maybe if I actually was transported to a woman's body I'd feel revulsed, I dunno. I'm sure that some cis people do feel revulsed or yucked out by body-switching thoughts. But it's not a necessity.

I'm also sure that people have different intensities of attachment to the sex of their body, but it'd be extremely difficult to pin down the aetiology of the intensity differences through observational studies or anecdotes (see the stuff on Bearing 1 vs Bearing 2).

↪fdrake I don't want to tell someone that they're "identifying wrongly" or anything, but your description of your feelings sound like textbook "agender". I think a lot of people think of themselves as "cis" just because they're not "trans", but there's a whole spectrum in between. — Pfhorrest

Errr... I do feel some amount of revulsion in thinking that I'd be agender? I mean... Yeah. I'm pretty happy as a bloke, I'm not indifferent to having my bits in the configuration that they're in, it's just not something I think about. I don't have sensations of disaccord or accord with my own sex! They're just bits! But they're my bits. In my book this is completely consistent with being cis, though you can absolutely call me agender if this is accurate.

I think my imagination of what it's like to be in a woman's body remains an intellectual exercise, I don't think of it as something I want or need, I don't feel like 'in an ideal world I'd have tits', my... orientation... is squarely towards my own sex. So's my bearing, there's no desire there except for curiosity, no conflict.

I think this is a case of a one sided distinction, it only feels like a distinction from one side. Like native Gallic speakers and the rest of the Scots.

I really don't think it's easy to imagine what it is like to inhabit a trans person's body for a cis person. — fdrake

If it was, I'd guess there'd be no need for a philosophical account of 'bearing', no? It'd be pretty easy for cis people to grok the disaccord.

The difference with bearing, I think, is that it should be easy for a cis person to imagine how they would feel if they had bodily features of the opposite sex, and so get a comparable mental picture of how someone who feels discomfort with their body feels. (If said person does not find themselves imagining discomfort at that scenario, then I would say by definition that makes them not cis. Maybe not trans either, but some kind of nonbinary.) — Pfhorrest

I don't think this is right. I'm cis, I can quite happily imagine body-swapping with a woman friend, and would rather enjoy what it felt like to have a body with tits, but the matter is mostly indifferent to me. Give it or take it, it's not a need I have based on internal conflict. I really don't think it's easy to imagine what it is like to inhabit a trans person's body for a cis person.

As the originator of the idea (of bearing): no, not really. It's meant to be about "sensations or senses of accord with one's body as it regards" sex, the physical stuff, not gender the social stuff. If you're stranded alone on a deserted island with no clothes and no other people and no job but to eat from the plentiful tropical fruits as desired, how do you feel when you look down your body and see your chest and crotch and so on? Nothing in particular because it's fine and normal? Revulsion and discomfort because it's wrong wrong wrong? "Okay I guess" but you'd rather some things be different? That's the thing I'm calling "bearing", and it is definitionally independent of social factors. (But, as elaborated before, social factors may be partially dependent on it). — Pfhorrest

Thank you for the clarification. I'm imagining it like:



A body has a relationship with their own body (B), that's the red arrow.
A body has a relationship with its social context, (B<->S).
A body has a relationship with its sociological gender (B<->G)
Sociological gender has a relationship with social context (S<->G).

Bearing is part of the relationship of a body with itself. It's on the same level as sensations, it's a felt disaccord with the body's sex. This sound about right?

I think the confusions and doubt come from questions like:

Is it possible to have any type of disaccord with one's body's sex without that disaccord being mediated through relationships of that body to social context and gender? In terms of the diagram, does 'a feeling of disaccord with one's body's sex' consist in travelling from B->B, or must it consist in some path like B->G->B or B->S->G->B. The intermediary steps are the origin of such mediation. An instance of B->G->B would look something like 'the pitch of my voice generates feelings of disaccord with my body because it impinges upon the expectations I have for it'. If this characterisation seems right to you, I'd like to call the immediate connection (the red loop) 'Bearing1', which I think is your conception of bearing, and the mediated connection 'Bearing2'.

In terms of denying such a thing exists, I can perhaps see why this is such a strong intuition, and something that was part of my misunderstanding. You touched on this here:

People can have feelings about the shape of their bodies independent of social factors, and vice versa. I have first and third hand experience of this (recall the "transwomen tomboys" I mentioned earlier), and it such an obvious thing I cannot believe it generates any controversy. All I'm proposing is that we use different words for the different things so that we can talk about that without confusion. — Pfhorrest

I think people who do not feel such disaccord are likely to doubt it exists except in the mediated form. Because we've not felt it, we will interpret instances of Bearing1 as instances of Bearing2 because Bearing2 is more consistent with our phenomenological intuitions about our self relationship with our bodies. Incorporating the possibility of Bearing1 for us is like trying to see the missing shade of blue. It's not a part of our sensations and thus will not be incorporated into our phenomenological understanding of our bodies except conceptually. We who do not feel disaccord will probably only grasp such a thing through analogy.

A difficulty here is describing what Bearing1 feels like in a manner which does not also suggest Bearing2. It seems to me you have acknowledged the reciprocity of the relationship between sensations (one mode of self relationship to one's body) and social context. I believe @StreetlightX highlighted this in their response:

For it makes it seem like as though bearing - feeling - arises ex nihilo, in a vacuum, or at least in the mode of a kind of natural spontaneity uninfluenced or uninflected by environment. But to want to feel like a woman (say), is at least in part to want to be treated like a woman, or aspire to ‘womanly’ things (dress, affection, sensibility), to be able partake in the gendering process which exists only at the level of the social and not at all wholly at the level of the psychological. — StreetlightX

The task of articulating Bearing1, giving us folks who do not feel such a disaccord an opportunity to conceptualise it without having to feel it, in a way that does not also implicate Bearing2, seems extremely difficult. Especially when we have already granted the influence of social constructions upon our sensations. It's a very tightly wound knot to cleave apart.

Though perhaps you imagine Bearing1 generating feelings of disaccord with the performative aspect of sociological gender and disaccord with social norms, so there's never any mediation of our sensations through the social contexts learned in the experiential history of our bodies. Or rather, such mediation comes later, and is dependent upon the presence of Bearing1.

Especially when such a feeling is so basic for you:

People can have feelings about the shape of their bodies independent of social factors, and vice versa. I have first and second hand experience of this (recall the transwomen tomboys I mentioned earlier), and it such an obvious thing I cannot believe it generates any controversy

As a side note, even stipulating Robinson Crusoe scenarios removes the social mediating factors, so it is not a particularly good contrast case for Bearing 1 and Bearing 2, it is unlikely to provide people who do not have Bearing1 sensations already with an intuition they could not reduce to Bearing2.

Something I was thinking about on the way home was if we imagine a scenario of a baby growing up in a cell with no human contact, it's fed by an automatic feeding tube. Trying to convey to the adult produced by this what affection felt like would probably require describing it in terms of the feeding tube and hunger; and to those of us who have felt affection, we know this could never suffice.

Thank you.

@TheWillowOfDarkness

I think the thrust of the idea is to place the onus on sensations or senses of accord with one's body as it regards gender, like 'how does my immersion in social constructions impact my relationship with my body?'. Whether that relationship is socially mediated or cashed out/expressed in gendered social archetypes/gendered signifiers is ephemeral.

I don't think it being 'cashed out in social archetypes or gendered signifiers' is quite the same thing as reinforcing gendered stereotypes? Structurally maybe quite similar? Guess it depends on how norms and expectation entangle.

So again, you are confusing biological realities with social constructions. — Harry Hindu

I dunno, saying you're unable to follow:

Samantha is born a girl with girl bits. Her birth sex is female. Samantha is gender non-conforming. Eventually Samantha identifies as a man and changes her gender expression and gender identity to male. He changes his name to Sam to reflect this. As an adult, Sam has gender identity of male, gender expression of male, but Sam's birth sex was female, Sam's anatomy might still be female; that of Sam's birth sex; and even if Sam did take gender transition surgery or hormone therapy, nothing about that would change that Sam's birth sex was female

while simultaneously being aware of which bits are social construction and which aren't to the extent where you're pointing them out as a contradiction? Yeah. I don't think you're confused either, you're just pretending to be.

Gender, as defined by your source, is a shared assumption. She identifies with an shared assumption, but her assumption isn't shared by others.. — Harry Hindu

I dunno, I'm going to use my fiat powers to remove you from the collective and now what I'm saying has to be true.

So are you and Google being sexist and claiming that to be a woman, you must wear a dress, makeup and have long-hair? — Harry Hindu

No. Quote me where I said that.

it's just about wanting to have a body shaped like a woman's body. — Pfhorrest

That clears it up to me. It's about how it feels to be in a body, and the desire to be in a body shaped like another's. What utility does the concept have? Are you trying to highlight body feelings in a discourse where performativity and social construction reigns?

↪fdrake I'm glad you enjoyed it, and thank you for drawing attention to the connections between this and the topics of phenomenology and embodiment. I don't have any disagreement with anything you've said. — Pfhorrest

I'm glad that it seems I understood. Given that bearing is psychological, and not reducible to feeling at home in the social role of a gender, what are the features of bearing that distinguish it from feeling at home in a social role? What additional information does bearing provide over and above dis/identification with a sociological idea of gender?

I've been proposing for a while now that that last property should get a new name different from "gender", and I propose "bearing". Part of that is because gender dysphoria and euphoria are all about this property, the psychological feeling of (dis)comfort in a particular kind of body, and the root "-phor" means "to bear". (And similarly, rather than "transgender", "cisgender", etc, as values for this property, we could use "transphoric", "cisphoric", etc: "bearing across", "bearing to the same side", etc.) Also because "bearing" makes a nice navigational metaphor with "orientation": if you imagine an abstract space of sex characteristics, and a person moving about in that space, their orientation is where in that space they're facing (the type of sex they're looking at), while their bearing is where in that space they're heading (the type of sex they're aiming to be). But also, perhaps as a transitional compromise, we could just disambiguate the word "gender" between all three of these things with qualifiers: "psychological gender" for bearing, "sociological gender" for the original sense of the word, and if we really have to, "physical gender" for sex. The important part, though, is just that we keep these three different things separate: enough people already are getting out the message that the physical and sociological are separate, but I think it would do a lot of good for everyone is we could also keep the sociological and psychological separate. — Pfhorrest

I enjoyed this, I like the phenomenological angle you're taking with 'bearing'.

The discipline of phenomenology may be defined initially as the study of structures of experience, or consciousness. Literally, phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view. — SEP on Phenmenology

To my understanding, what you're trying to highlight is the necessary role that one's embodiment plays in being trans, specifically a sense of conflict (or being ill-at-ease) with the (sex/gender) characteristics of one's body, and the necessary motion/change that must be done to resolve this conflict.

1. Your physical sex
2. Your mental feelings about your physical sex
3. Social stuff about role and presentation that is associated with sex — Pfhorrest

When explaining your list, you emphasised 2 as the thing you want to draw attention to. And 'bearing' is the concept you're using to spark discussion about it. It seems to me that part of being trans, as you put it, is a conflict internal to embodiment. Thinking about embodiment means trying to think about cognition and other mental processes as expressed in body movements and other processes. For example, people gesture when they talk to convey ideas, point when emphasis is needed; more examples might be that somatization happens and that psychomotor symptoms occur with depression. SEP characterises embodiment's theoretical thrust as:

Traditional accounts (of cognition) basically state that there are no computations without representations, and view cognition as successfully functioning when any device can support and manipulate symbols to solve the problem given to the system. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch introduced the concept of enaction to present and develop a framework that places strong emphasis on the idea that the experienced world is portrayed and determined by mutual interactions between the physiology of the organism, its sensorimotor circuit and the environment. Their emphasis on the structural coupling of brain-body-world constitutes the kernel of their program of embodied cognition, building on the classical phenomenological idea that cognitive agents bring forth a world by means of the activity of their situated living bodies. As the metaphor of “bringing forth a world” of meaningful experience implies, on this view knowledge emerges through the primary agent's bodily engagement with the environment, rather than being simply determined by and dependent upon either pre-existent situations or personal construals. — SEP

To my mind, your idea of 'bearing' seeks to draw emphasis to sensations of disaccord and accord with one's embodiment with regard to gender characteristics. Whether one finds one's groove in the comportments expected of their body is felt by their body. When one's bearing is different from one's 'orientation', as you've put it.

Using your own example of a person disowning their socially constructed family, a man can't disown his mother and father and then start calling himself a daughter. It makes no sense, but according to you it does. How? — Harry Hindu

I find it hard to understand that you don't understand. Samantha is born a girl with girl bits. Her birth sex is female. Samantha is gender non-conforming. Eventually Samantha identifies as a man and changes her gender expression and gender identity to male. He changes his name to Sam to reflect this. As an adult, Sam has gender identity of male, gender expression of male, but Sam's birth sex was female, Sam's anatomy might still be female; that of Sam's birth sex; and even if Sam did take gender transition surgery or hormone therapy, nothing about that would change that Sam's birth sex was female.

This is pretty simple, no? It looks to me like you're being wilfully ignorant of the distinction between birth sex and gender identity, then reading everything I've written as if that distinction made no sense. The only thing this reveals is that you either don't understand it, or don't want to understand it.

Using your own source of Google for definitions, "man" and "woman" are biological entities, not social constructions. So it makes no sense to say "man" and "woman" are genders if genders are social constructions and not biological entities. — Harry Hindu

I mean the Google definition of gender also says:

either of the two sexes (male and female), especially when considered with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones. The term is also used more broadly to denote a range of identities that do not correspond to established ideas of male and female.

Why is this so hard for you?

Using your own source "social constructions" are shared assumptions about reality. If gender were a social construction, then gender isn't "man" or "woman". Those would be the biological realities. The assumptions (and therefore gender) would be "women wear dresses and makeup and have long hair". You are confusing biological realities with shared assumptions about those realities. — Harry Hindu

This is just nonsense. Gender expression, gender identity and sex are distinct, but correlated. The UN characterisation says that, the definitions I presented are consistent with this.

I think you've both got the wrong impression of what I'm arguing. I'm not saying that the trans position is to make some kind of private language. I'm saying that the position it claims in response to accusations of gender stereotyping would do if it were true. I'm claiming that the trans agenda is very much at risk of gender stereotyping and its claims to the contrary are incoherent. — Isaac

I dunno, I can be sympathetic to the idea that removal of all gender archetypes is pretty good, but to me it seems like "I don't want immigrant rights and acceptance because I don't believe in borders", I mean maybe politically it's a different thing for you.

The second part of your sentence seems to contradict the first. It reads to me as - they would not do so because of feeling, they would do so because of some way they feel. Which is the same thing. — Isaac

I'm sorry I have no idea what you're saying because the reasons are just in your head.

The rub is that private languages don't occur at all. They're not possible.

The conclusion is that a language in principle unintelligible to anyone but its originating user is impossible. The reason for this is that such a so-called language would, necessarily, be unintelligible to its supposed originator too, for he would be unable to establish meanings for its putative signs. — SEP, on the Private Language Argument

So it would be extremely surprising to find one 'out in the wild', no? Especially when people are talking about it. This is why I've focussed on how you're imagining gender rather than on the specifics of the PLA, because you seem to be imagining a world where trans people are... somehow... behaving in a way where they'd like a private language to exist? But yeah, they're really not.

gender becomes one thing and one thing only and that is the expression of the private feeling of an individual.

I think you're completely over-estimating the role that "I am a woman" or whatever plays in the social process of identifying as any gender. No one would sincerely say "I am a woman" as a statement of their identity solely because of 'private feelings', they would feel a certain way about social relations and social roles which leads them to reject (or embody) the social branding and expectations. Whether they are motivated by personal feelings is much different from whether they are somehow imagining an impossible language whereby feelings alone can vouchsafe the meaning of words.

Really, the error in imagining you're having is that you're thinking of these things as 'feelings alone' or 'private feelings'. As if they're not also reactions to public phenomena.

If you lose your job and feel sad at the resultant effects on your life, you don't suddenly invent a language whereby 'I'm sad' = 'I lost my job' do you? Nah, these things interpenetrate each other, they correlate without conceptual reduction. There are manifest commonalities between trans experience, woman's experience, man's experience, points of overlap, effects of norms. We're in the same social world playing the same language games.

Except, perhaps, those who would consign the discourse of gender identity to meaninglessness. But that's not a game I'm gonna play.

So unless you can think of a fourth response, I think 3 is the better. Which means "man gives birth" (and other attempts to solidify identity choices) is a stupid headline because the only reason it would be newsworthy is in the biological context which is the one context in which its incorrect to label the person concerned a 'man' — Isaac

You can keep the old notion of sex, bodily sex, birth sex, what reproductive organs people are born with and so on. No one is thinking that these will change (without transitioning surgery) due to some shamanic utterance (which never actually happens) of "I am a woman" decreeing for now and always in the stone tablets that make up social reality (apparently) that its utterer is indeed a woman since their speech act was sincere.

If you're analysing gender in terms of speech acts, this is all well and good, but gender identity itself is not determined by a self-branding speech act; "I'm a man" is something someone might say for a lot of reasons. I vaguely remember @Harry Hindu claiming to be an oppressed trans woman last time we spoke about this issue, so there are really a lot of reasons someone might identify as trans, or a man, or a woman, no? Gender isn't just talk about gender, it's bodies and performances too.

If you wanna Wittgensteinian gloss on it, start thinking of gender as a family resemblance of language games and their attended forms of life, rather than as a condensate of self identifying speech acts (alone).

I don't personally care about whether it's a choice or not. To me that looks like the wrong framing entirely. @Harry Hindu is framing things that way, and I'm trying to follow him down his personal rabbit hole and place some landmines.

Edit: Harry's original post, which I should've quoted, contained the claim that someone can reject gender as a social construction and become non-gendered as a result (and this is fine), but someone cannot reject any particular gender and become another as a result of this identification. Yes, for those reading, the whole framing of this is stupid, because it's not a personal choice and personal choices are not sufficient for gender identity - people make a choice to transition or present differently because of lots of reasons, not some abstract on-off social identity, like changing your clothes to dress as a scene kid. Anyway...

So someone can disown the entire social construct of gender and become non-gendered, but they can't disown the gender associated with their birth sex. The first is not biological, the second is. Let's describe it some other way.

Let's paint a picture of gender where it's some {M, F} thing where each person gets branded with M or F. Now, what you're saying is that the only rejection of a gendered social construction which can happen is the rejection of {M,F}, and they thereby become non-gendered by rejecting the couple {M,F} as applying to them. Why can't someone reject a member of this set, {M,F}, and identify with the other one?

Why is rejecting gender so different from rejecting the gender you're wrongly branded with?

Let's just forget that you're treating social identity as a personal choice. Which, you know, you're simultaneously saying is a conceptual error making it logically impossible and claiming this is really what people are doing when they are trans (also see @Isaac 's position on the PLA and @StreetlightX's comment on it).

If gender is a social construction that is being rejected by an individual, then that makes that individual non-gendered. — Harry Hindu

Now... what if instead of disowning the entire social construction of gender and throwing the baby out with the bathwater, a person came to disown the gender associated with their birth sex?

A social construction can't be rejected by an individual feeling, or else it's not a social construction. — Harry Hindu

What are you imagining happens here? Like... are you literally imagining that someone says "I'm a woman" and then they become a woman? Is this the social process you're attacking? As if it's real?

No, social constructions aren't magic. They're just like being able to disown a family you're born into. You don't disown the hereditary mechanism, that'd be a category error, but you don't belong in a family just because you're born into it; otherwise disowning would be impossible. If you can bend your mind to accept a dictionary definition, or Google's, or the UN's, where gender has socially constructed aspects, I'd be very happy to continue trying to explain word meanings to you.

Otherwise, I hope the low hanging fruit is tasty where you're from.

Now, let's imagine a world where we have this mystical new word called 'gender_H', which refers to the socially constructed aspects of gender. We're going to forget the bits and bodies and look at what people do with them and how the words come out of their mouths. Can we do that? Can we forget the bits and bodies for 'gender_H' like we could for family? Or are you not prepared to enter into the mystical magical world of socially constructed aspects of gender?

You can only disown the socially constructed version. — Harry Hindu

But how can you disown the socially constructed version? I thought there wasn't one!

You can't disown genetics. I did use that term, right - "genetics"? Yep, so either you're not paying attention, or you're building straw-men.

So you imagine a sorting procedure.

Person -label> Gender

And it's important that -label> is done 'publicly', whatever that means here. What I'm guessing you mean is that the information about each person which is used to label them with a gender is done 'publicly', so it's something which has a social-behavioural-biological component which everyone has access to.

So when someone says they feel like a different gender, I imagine you imagine that they're taking their feeling 'I'm not this gender, I'm that one', and they're trying to put this feeling through the sorting machine above, and voila they're now whatever gender they desired as a result of their feelings. IE, their feelings suffice for the correct application of the identity label.

This sound about right?

So the form of life would be that of assigning people in our community to sub-groups. — Isaac

Can you describe how this works to me? Like, give me an example.

What I'm talking about is language use and language use alone. — Isaac

What form of life underpins the uses of the word 'woman', 'man', 'gender' etc? Come on, words are never just words alone. We have the benefit of a social background to look at here.

one is not speaking about something other than gender, but rather a fact of gender itself, set by nothing other than itself. — TheWillowOfDarkness

:up:

Other than seeing gender as an umbrella term that partakes in lots of social/biological processes, I agree. The content of gender norms is just what we count as part of them collectively, with some influence from statistical properties of bodies changing over the sex difference, but most of what's relevant to gender is history and socialisation.



I guess what grinds my gears here is that trans people have commonalities of experience, as do men and women, so do non-binaries. You can do sociology, anthropology, psychology and medicine on this topic. If discourse on gender and the self reports/gender identifying processes of people were so lacking fixity, like the arbitrariness you suggest in:

I'm saying that it makes no sense for them to have a private view as to what referent the gender words are used to pick out.

I'd think the world would look a lot different. If gender identification actually worked like what W criticises in the private language argument; there could be no articulable commonalities. And there are.

I'm not in any sense saying that people do not have a private view as to what gender role they act out. I'm saying that it makes no sense for them to have a private view as to what referent the gender words are used to pick out. — Isaac

And why do you think this view is commonplace?

One of the things that suggests a rule is in play is that mis-identification can happen. It does. Most of the time gender non-conforming teens stop gender non-conforming and do not feel the need to transition. There is at least tension there.

Formally speaking anyway, 'identifying with a gender' isn't a speech act on par with writing down a symbol for a mental sensation, it's a whole social role which is performed; a correlated series of speech acts with bodies and gestures, choices, thinking styles, norms... The image that you have of 'identification' with a gender is very shallow if you think that it resembles writing down a symbol to convey the presence of a sensation in all relevant respects.

But the moment the word 'woman' is used to describe how a single individual feels, with no external reference at all (associated behaviours such as with 'pain', 'happiness' etc), — Isaac

Right. I can see that. But it completely baffles me how you think gender identity is just what an individual feels, rather than a composition of how someone feels and society's norms... how they identify with them? Their place in them? Can you really not talk about how it feels to take a place in a social role? Society? Culture?

What it feels like to be a Wittgensteinian doing philosophy...

Ok, so why does the way the UN definitions of gender expression/identity and transgender and sex put you in mind that it's a private language? Or analogise to it? I would be extremely surprised if anything which is decided by a committee and put on a public resource for general consumption is anything to do with a private language.

And a community of transgenders or non-binary people who report conflicts between the cultural norms they're in, their gender expression, the expectations of their bodies, and the words they need to use to describe them... This doesn't count as a linguistic community? I mean, this isn't a private language. There are commonalities of experience here, shared cultural norms, shared words - just a different embedding in them.