Shatterface wrote: ↑Sat Dec 02, 2017 6:44 am
Steers, height and IQ aren't analogous to gender. Height and IQ are continuous quantities and if we plot their distribution on a graph we get a bell curve. Gender is a binary. You are male or female. If you plot that on a graph you get two towers of roughly the same height.
I haven't a fucking clue how you get from the fact that height and IQ are continuous quantities to the idea that gender is too.
That's like saying if what parents spend on their kids at Christmas follows a bell curve there's no distinction between a PlayStation and an X Box.
Don't think it's at all justified to insist "gender is a binary". As I've argued - and as a few here have agreed - the whole concept is largely incoherent twaddle, a ruddy dog's breakfast. But to the extent there's any credibility at all to the concept, it seems it refers to a wide spectrum of physical and psychological attributes that correlate more or less strongly with sex - which comes in two, count em - two, flavours: male ("produces sperm") and female ("produces ova"). Consider this Wikipedia article on
gender:
Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity. Depending on the context, these characteristics may include biological sex (i.e. the state of being male, female or an intersex variation which may complicate sex assignment), sex-based social structures (including gender roles and other social roles), or gender identity. ....
And
femininity is described thusly (masculinity analogously):
Femininity (also called girlishness, womanliness or womanhood) is a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles generally associated with girls and women. Femininity is socially constructed, but made up of both socially-defined and biologically-created factors. This makes it distinct from the definition of the biological female sex, as both males and females can exhibit feminine traits. ....
I think there's a bit of a circular definition there as, for example, "feminine traits" are, presumably those exhibited by females or more commonly exhibited by females. Which simply adds to the dog's breakfast.
But the essence seems to be that any attribute that correlates to a greater or lesser extent with one sex - i.e., the type of gamete produced, or not, I suppose - than it does with another is then considered to be an element of gender because it is a
characteristic that
differentiates between the different genders. Hence, any characteristic that doesn't have different degrees of correlation with respect to sex - number or arms and legs, for example - is then not considered a part of gender. But as each of those characteristics - of which there are probably hundreds if not millions - has their own range, each with any number of continuous or discrete "steps", the total number of "genders" is simply hyper-astronomical - a spectrum. Which kind of makes the whole concept incoherent twaddle at best, and certainly nothing to call for separate pronouns and labels (gawd help us) for each, or drop-down list boxes to select which one might appeal most to our vanities - or not.
For some details, you might check out this archived copy (? which may be a copyright infringement) of chapter 18 of Pinker's
The Blank Slate.
