Read more about Androgen Insensitivity Disorder.
Does God have the right to reassign your gender?
Read more about Androgen Insensitivity Disorder.
What rights do we suppose God does and doesn't have, to begin with?
Who's this God critter you're talking about? Or what?
Is nature the only force that's allowed to take a crap on the human gender binary?
I wonder what the people that say "gender is your chromosomes" would say about something like this.
Would they just say that's a guy?
Or have to admit gender isn't that simple? Of course, they wouldn't admit this one; probably revert to ideas like "gender is social contract" or that's just a dude with a 'terrible' condition.
Androgynous Robot Dreamer - Not really human, but good at pretending.
Originally Posted by Number 9 large
^ are they men ?
Can secondary sexual characteristics override primary sexual characteristics in terms of gender identity?
Nah.
Watch the OP.
I'm familiar with it (always love Sapolsky videos). I just think the straightforward XX/XY chromosomal schema is fine enough for taxonomizing gender.
And yes, I'm aware that sex chromosome disorders exist where people can be born XXY, XYY, etc. But these are such edge cases (1 in 20,000 or more?) that I don't think they represent any fundamental challenge to the standard gender binary.
Do you think people with AIS be considered fully male?
If gender is binary, then quantifiers like "fully male" or "somewhat female" have no relevance.
Else we'd get trapped into other definitional rabbitholes like trying to adjudicate gender by levels of sex hormones or what not.
Ok, but Would you say that people with AIS are male?
Might makes right. Depends on whether or not he exists.
Yes.
If they're indeed men with an abnormality, assuming we have the procedure, is it unethical to force them to develop male characteristics at the time of birth?
I haven't completely thought this through yet.
But I'll go with: No, it'd be perfectly ethical to induce their development of secondary sexual characteristics. We give growth hormone to children w/ pituitary impairments, so why not this? Likewise glasses, hearing aids, braces, etc to encourage a normal course of development.
Sure, but this assumes that AIS is a disorder as opposed to a condition. These people seem happy to function as "women;" people with pituitary impairments aren't happy or healthy. Is it ethical to give someone a procedure that would overhaul their personalities in ways an adult self may find highly invasive?
As a though-experiment, if you were an alien anthropologist trying to classify humans empirically, would you start with a top-down definition (XX/XY) of what constitutes gender -- if so, how do you know that it isn't arbitrary? Or would you define gender bottom-up via induction and arrive at a more encompassing though less explicit definition?
I'm okay w/ calling conditions disorders when they interfere with leading a functional human life thru no fault of the person's own.
Isn't it also possible they'd be equally (or more) happy being raised as men with corrected testosterone sensitivity?These people seem happy to function as "women;" people with pituitary impairments aren't happy or healthy. Is it ethical to give someone a procedure that would overhaul their personalities in ways an adult self may find highly invasive?
They might be, but couldn't you make the same case for changing a baby's personality from an artist's to an engineer's?
Not as easy to execute given that personality is contingent on a host of complex interacting factors. Whereas this would be correcting a single variable.
I'm more leery about trying to steer complex systems to predetermined ends. Too many things to go wrong.
Suppose we had the technological procedure to make exact changes to someone's personality then.
EDIT: although I lean towards calling people with AIS women, it's still a pretty murky topic and I'm enjoying taking in different perspectives.
Supposing we could, altering an otherwise functional personality into another is quite different from correcting what's clearly an isolated mutational flaw (in this case, malformed androgen receptors).
Nature makes mistakes, and it'd be cruel not to address them if we possess technology to do so. For the same reason it'd be cruel to deny corrective lenses to someone born with poor eyesight.
I think this gets to the heart of your position -- you're presupposing that AIS a "flaw." Why is this a warranted assumption -- is it because AIS doesn't fit into a neat binary? Lots of things don't. Why should we have the right to reshape people's individuality to match what we consider to be politically correct?
Inferring from teleological context. It appears everything else in their genome prepared them to be a male—indeed, they produce prodigious amounts of testosterone as Sapolsky points out. But the receptors are broken, so no uptake.
Seems better then to fix the mutational flaw and allow that teleology to proceed to phenotypical fruition. Rather than merely allow them to develop into a functionally incomplete female.
Who decides what is the teleological context?
Who decides what is functionally incomplete and why does human identity need to be delineated as cleanly as that?
We do, from reverse engineering nature. Not a huge leap of epistemic faith in this case—easy to fill in blanks of how the system ought to be working, and what the consequences will be if the error is left uncorrected. Just like knowing what'll happen to my computer if the RAM sticks aren't installed correctly.
If we could correct phenylketonuria (PKU), I can't see anybody saying no nor falling back on "well but they seem happy this way". In principle, the ethics of correcting PKU should be no different than correcting AIS.
A female denied the choice to ever bear children can be considered 'functionally incomplete'. Human identity doesn't "have to be", but for whatever reason binary gendering is ubiquitous across Earth's evolved biosphere, and constructed deviations from that probably won't end well…Who decides what is functionally incomplete and why does human identity need to be delineated as cleanly as that?
Ultimately we're groping at this (from E.O. Wilson On Human Nature):
Here's a thought:
if you can't procreate, you are sexless. If you can, then you are either male or female. You know you're male because you can't procreate with another male.
gender however, is stupid and means nothing.
Based off these two ideas, a fully transgender person is genderless and sexless.
It seems pretty obvious that there are at least some people on Earth who don't fit gender norms. Some people have chromosome differences, some people have genital differences, some people have psyches that don't match the norm(notice I didn't use the word "brain"), and so on. People have the right to define themselves. If someone wants to be a female, and they were born with other than the normal female characteristics, I don't see why that should matter.
People have strong reactions to things that break whatever they are used to. The English language conforms to the idea that there are two genders, male and female, and people generally want to call someone by the gender they see them as, regardless of what the person on the receiving end of the pronoun thinks. There are many people who find it easy to deal with breaks in gender norms, but there are others who will fight tooth and nail to keep the norm.
I don't think there's anything really wrong with people who find trans, intersex, and other issues to be unacceptable or untenable. I don't think there's a psychodynamic cause for the hate or distaste. I think it's just that most, or many, people have a really hard time with adapting to new ideas, especially when those new ideas drastically change a way of thought that's fundamental to their experience of the world.
Some people like binaries and prefer them. It seems like there's a movement somewhere in the Left that wants to destroy all binaries. I even dealt with that idea specifically during my university education. Some encourage it. I don't see a problem with binaries existing, and I don't think they're necessarily false. I also don't really have a beef with non-binary understandings.
We could probably talk about gender and debate it for a long time. Ultimately, there won't be a resolution, because gender is just another word of the English language, and all that happens most of the time is people arguing about what definition is right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable, when the word itself is just an arbitrary configuration of sounds or symbols.
My own observation is that most humans seem to be sexually dimorphic in certain ways. Social traditions like short haircuts for men, armpit shaving for women, etc, are ways of increasing the appearance of the dimorphism. Some people are not going to fit the mold, though, and I don't see a problem with that.
In practice, there will be people who will not fit the box and want to fit into the box, and vice versa. Until technology improves drastically, we won't be able to accommodate everyone's desires. There will be people who want to change their bodies, but will realize their desire to change too late for medicine to help them in some ways. If you make a decision for someone, you have no idea if they will or won't like it until they're capable of telling you. You run the risk of making someone happy or rather depressed. Only by further studying trends in people who don't fit norms will we find a way of guessing what people outside those norms will want for themselves. It's not an issue that's immediately solvable.
Calling breaks in gender norms defects is a statement of personal value and feeling. You could call them ice cream if you wanted. The word defect generally means for most people that something is wrong, though. And people who happily break gender norms don't like being called defective, because that word applied to them invalidates their identities. Then you get into the issue of whether or not other people are required to validate your identity....
People who debate whether or not breaking gender norms is a defect are engaging in an implicit war of values and beliefs and a war of definition.
Last edited by Aramas; 06-24-2019 at 02:56 AM.
I don't know why we have to completely destroy the power of concepts on one side of the coin and use them to discriminate on the other. The first is insane and the second is unexplainable.
What if they couldn't afford it ?.?
People are different. To get them to get along, you have to get them close enough for society to function while letting them have enough space to be themselves. It's a constant issue and a balancing act.
The question is, why do we feel "psychologically male" or "psychologically female"? And why do we feel attracted to such male or female psychological identities? There are people who are born as female, and yet they have always felt that they were a "boy", until people around them told them that they were a girl. Why is that, other than that's just the way the brain is structured or something like that?
Saying that the gender debate should be settled on whether we're male or female based on biology is a biological explanation. But that would be ignoring the realm of our psychological reality. Obviously, the psychological explanation is going to be much more difficult to find, since we have so few, if any, psychological theory that we can draw from that can explain much of our psychological identities.
I think that the non-binary definitions obviously have greater focus on our psychology rather than our biology. And yet psychological explanations must also not contradict biological explanations. They must be consistent with one another. But ultimately, the psychological explanation is going to be at the highest-level, and the simplest explanation in the hierarchy of explanations.
I think that non-binary definitions will become the standard once people can find and explain why we have the kind of (gender) identities that we do. It will transcend the limit of our current biological explanations.
Then they can't afford it.
I wouldn't expect such an intervention to be affordable to everyone upon initial release. But in time there's no reason to expect it wouldn't be as readily available as routine vaccinations are now.
Because bad faith actors and ulterior motives.
The point I was making is that AIS people are themselves a complete byproduct of nature, and would therefore have to be included in any definition of gender conjured up by the naturalistic argument you're making. If we call AIS a flaw, then we allow for someone to call having XY chromosomes a flaw -- it would be easy to reclassify men as women who happened to be born with a pair of functionally incomplete XX chromosomes.
But I don't think we're going to agree, so let's just leave it at that.
No more a byproduct of nature than is PKU or being born blind. Should we leave those conditions as they are too?
But XY chromosomes in of themselves aren't evolutionary dead-ends—all functional potential is present to survive, thrive, and reproduce. So such an argument would never make sense.If we call AIS a flaw, then we allow for someone to call having XY chromosomes a flaw -- it would be easy to reclassify men as women who happened to be born with a pair of functionally incomplete XX chromosomes.
Bolded is the part that cuts to our disagreement: the fact that something has to pass on its genes in order to not be flawed seems arbitrary to me. Besides, in a way, they can pass on their genes: by devoting more attention to the rearing of their nephews and nieces, they give their genes a survival advantage by proxy.
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