Trans women are not women (Part 8)

[Emily's Cat]

I don't know if anyone mentioned it, but the witches won a fairly significant legal victory yesterday. It was ruled that the Scottish government does not have the power to change the definition of "woman" to "anyone whose electricity bill is addressed to Tracy". The definition is and will remain "a female of any age" despite the attempt to sneak something else into a bill about equal representation on public bodies.

So a public body cannot appoint 100% men and still claim to be "gender-balanced" if half of its members put on a skirt and some lippy. The Scottish government is said to be "disappointed" and considering the judgement.

It's a legalities thing. It remains within the power of Westminster to change the legal definition of "woman" but at the moment it doesn't look as if it's going to do that. The point is that the definition of "woman" is somehow reserved (due to the Equalities Act being reserved I think) so the tartan wokerati can't do anything about it.

Oh Fantastic! That is a wonderful, keystone win!

 

[Emily's Cat]

You might want to edit that.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Has it been shown that all of this is actually making trans-women as a class, happier. Not all of them share the politics of the trans-activists. There are ones out there who wouldn't necessarily disagree with Rolfe, and don't want the concept of "woman" deconstructed into nothing.

You're correct, of course. It's an over-generalization. There are quite a few people with severe dysphoria who are adamantly opposed to this ideology. Many of them are detransitioners, and while the majority tend to be female, there are also some males who are detrans and quite strongly advocating for females to retain our rights and our spaces.

Supposing that trans-activists do represent something like the "will of the [trans] people", does that mean it is making them happy? There are certainly mental illnesses out there that humouring them wouldn't be the kind thing to do. My impression is that trans-activism has succeeded in raising a lot of womens hackles and who, rather than maybe being seen as unfortunate individuals who an accommodation can be negotiated with, but instead are becoming seen as the vanguard of a militant political movement that cannot be negotiated with. Does this make the life of the average trans-woman better?

Allow me to toss diplomacy out the window...

Here's my honest thoughts on this. The ideology being pushed by transgender activists doesn't actually result in people with innate severe dysphoria being happier. And it definitely doesn't result in increased happiness for those who are experiencing dysphoria as an expression of a deeper trauma, a neurodiverse condition, or other mental health distress. the only people that it actually DOES make DIRECTLY happier... are males with transvestic paraphilia, particularly those with autogynephilia. I believe it also makes the subset of males that are misogynistic happy, in that the largest outcome of the ideology is to remove the right of females to have physical and sexual boundaries, deprives us of our participation in society, economics, and politics... and essentially results in females being forced back into subservient and submissive roles.

 

[shuttlt]

Why do you think this?

Well, partly because you have pretty much stripped away all the cultural meaning of "woman" beyond her mere physicality. This is a materialist way of looking at things. Men didn't do the whole women and children first Birkenhead Drill thing because of a materialist conception of women.

If there is no more to "woman" than mere physicality, why should I care whether not having been born with a penis prevents women from doing well in sports any more than if another women was born with genetics so she wasn't ever going to be tall enough to make the basketball team. It's all just mere materialist physicality.

Do you believe that females who see a butch lesbian wearing trousers and steel0-toed boots with a buzz-cut are unable to recognize them as being female?

Sure, most of the time.... I've seen some butch lebians though...

Do you think that clothing style alters anatomy?

Not at all.

Do you genuinely think that if a male puts on a dress and make-up... their adam's apple, facial hair, shoulder breadth, and carriage is magically transformed?

Of course not.

That's part of the objection that females have to this gender ideology: Changing how you dress, and even taking hormones, doesn't actually change your sex... and in the vast majority of cases WE CAN STILL TELL THAT A MALE IS A MALE.

Certainly not, but if you reduce being a woman down to nothing but the physical fact of producing ova, it's not clear to me that it's a category worth protecting. My conception of my wife as a woman involves the ability to produce ova, but in a more transcendent sense in terms of the connection to cultural ideas associated with fertility and nurturing and all sorts of other connections and associations. Her being a woman gives me the opportunity to aspire to and try to enact the things that are noble in being a man and require a woman. Yes, at the root of it there is physicality, but if you reduce it to just some materialist thing about ova I think you've thrown away what everybody actually cares about.

Your desire to do away with the associations between the sexes and the cultural instantiations and markers of the sexes reduces women to just being people who happen to have ova. Like I say, who really cares about defending that deracinated category? I don't.

Honestly, is Rolfe's objection to men in women's changing rooms just about ova and sperm....? Thousands of years of cultural accretion and meaning are being reduced down and trivialised.

 

[Ziggurat]

Well, partly because you have pretty much stripped away all the cultural meaning of "woman" beyond her mere physicality.

I disagree, I think you are wrong about what her position is. I think what's being insisted upon is not that only physicality matters, but rather that you can't strip away physicality, that it too does matter. Do you disagree? Do you think physicality is irrelevant?

This is a materialist way of looking at things. Men didn't do the whole women and children first Birkenhead Drill thing because of a materialist conception of women.

Except that the Birkenhead Drill is completely untennable if anyone who says they are a woman is a woman, that physicality plays no role. Who would choose to be a man and sacrifice themselves not for females, but for anyone who decides to adopt a label of convenience?

 

[shuttlt]

Allow me to toss diplomacy out the window...

Here's my honest thoughts on this. The ideology being pushed by transgender activists doesn't actually result in people with innate severe dysphoria being happier. And it definitely doesn't result in increased happiness for those who are experiencing dysphoria as an expression of a deeper trauma, a neurodiverse condition, or other mental health distress. the only people that it actually DOES make DIRECTLY happier... are males with transvestic paraphilia, particularly those with autogynephilia. I believe it also makes the subset of males that are misogynistic happy, in that the largest outcome of the ideology is to remove the right of females to have physical and sexual boundaries, deprives us of our participation in society, economics, and politics... and essentially results in females being forced back into subservient and submissive roles.

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by misogynistic. Lots of men who are called misogynistic hold fairly traditional views on sex and gender. I think you'd still find those ones would be no keener on some perverted autogynephile hanging out in the women's changing rooms than you would. Further deconstructing gender and sex is no win for them. There certainly are some who genuinely hate women, but I don't think they have any cultural power, so who cares?

 

[shuttlt]

I disagree, I think you are wrong about what her position is. I think what's being insisted upon is not that only physicality matters, but rather that you can't strip away physicality, that it too does matter. Do you disagree? Do you think physicality is irrelevant?

Of course, but as I say, there had better be more to it than that.

Except that the Birkenhead Drill is completely untennable if anyone who says they are a woman is a woman, that physicality plays no role. Who would choose to be a man and sacrifice themselves not for females, but for anyone who decides to adopt a label of convenience?

I think now you misunderstand me. By the time you get to men with penises can be women, or wanting women to be just the same as men culturally, except that they produce ova.... the Birkenhead Drill is dead and buried and forgotten.

The progress that Rolfe and, I think Emily's Cat, and presumably you, like of "women's liberation" has already undermined all the aspects of cultural significance that made women worth holding up in the way that is required for some display of high masculinity like the Birkenhead Drill. The history of feminism is a demand to strip all that away. Terrific. Wish granted. I guess there are still thin wisps of that left, but the more this process goes on, the more there is nothing to women than that they are people who happen to produce ova.... and at that point, who really cares?

 

[Emily's Cat]

Trimming for brevity...

Well, partly because you have pretty much stripped away all the cultural meaning of "woman" beyond her mere physicality.

...

If there is no more to "woman" than mere physicality, why should I care whether not having been born with a penis prevents women from doing well in sports any more than if another women was born with genetics so she wasn't ever going to be tall enough to make the basketball team. It's all just mere materialist physicality.

...

Certainly not, but if you reduce being a woman down to nothing but the physical fact of producing ova, it's not clear to me that it's a category worth protecting. My conception of my wife as a woman involves the ability to produce ova, but in a more transcendent sense in terms of the connection to cultural ideas associated with fertility and nurturing and all sorts of other connections and associations. Yes, at the root of it there is physicality, but if you reduce it to just some materialist thing about ova I think you've thrown away what everybody actually cares about.

Your desire to do away with the associations between the sexes and the cultural instantiations and markers of the sexes reduces women to just being people who happen to have ova. Like I say, who really cares about defending that deracinated category?

I think you're taking it to a much more extreme level of materialism than any of us actually hold. The fact that we are evolved to produce ova and sperm is incontrovertible fact. But with that evolution comes many other dimorphic differences - and those differences aren't going to magically disappear if fashion changes to be unisex.

Part of producing ova in humans is the very long period of gestation, as well as the very long period of prepubescence that requires care for our offspring. And that burden is borne almost entirely by females. We would love to have more male help with childrearing, but at the end of the day, there's no expectation from feminists (excluding some very fringe anti-man types) that the burden would be equally distributed. Taking the position that there should be no social barrier to shared child care is not the same as insisting there will not be an evolutionary tendency to childcare in one sex more than the other.

The ability to produce ova or sperm are also tied to several other physical traits, which also don't just evaporate when fashion changes. Males will continue to have wider shoulders, and relatively narrower hips, and facial hair. Females will continue to have higher body fat percentages, wider hips, a tilted pelvis, and boobs.

I'm not imagining some "utopia" where half the males wear dresses and half the females wear dungarees and weld stuff. That's not a reasonable outcome, and it would require a fundamental alteration to our species. Sexual signaling will still exist, and it will still be subject to cognitive manipulation. Even if you reduce the western social pressure for seven-layer dip type facial make up in females... you're *still* likely to end up with a large number of females choosing to darken their lips and smooth their skin. It mimics the physical effects of ovulation and youth, and are attractive to males seeking a mate - even if none of the people involved consciously know that's what they're doing. Most males will very likely still select clothing and outfits that accentuate their shoulders as sexual indicators of virility and strength.

What I'm after is the removal of proscription, not the implementation of prescription. Something not being socially prohibited doesn't necessitate that it be socially obligated.

Think about it in the same general frame as negative versus positive rights.

Honestly, is Rolfe's objection to men in women's changing rooms just about ova and sperm....? Thousands of years of cultural accretion and meaning are being reduced down and trivialised.

Lol, I'm sorry, but I really think this is a very male take of you.

In the sense of having boiled this down to a layer of scum on the bottom of the pan... yes, it has to do with ova and sperm. More realistically, however, it has to do with the inherent natures of males versus females. It has to do with the inherently higher levels of physical and sexual aggression demonstrated by males of the human species across all known times and geographies. It has to do with the physical and reproductive vulnerability of females to predation by males. And it has to do with the evolutionary tendency of females to cluster for safety and protection, to interact more directly with each other, and to seek solidarity with other females when they are particularly vulnerable.

At the end of the day, yes, ALL of that has to do with the production of ova and sperm. It has to do with the evolutionary adaptations our species has made as a sexually reproductive dimorphic species.

Almost every known culture throughout recorded history has had some element of female-only spaces. Even the most regressive cultures, where females were literally viewed as property, had female only spaces where males were not allowed. Spaces where we menstruate, where we miscarry, where we give birth. Spaces reserved for "female mysteries", rituals, and sacraments.

 

[Emily's Cat]

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by misogynistic. Lots of men who are called misogynistic hold fairly traditional views on sex and gender. I think you'd still find those ones would be no keener on some perverted autogynephile hanging out in the women's changing rooms than you would. Further deconstructing gender and sex is no win for them. There certainly are some who genuinely hate women, but I don't think they have any cultural power, so who cares?

I doubt the traditionalist males would support male interlopers in female spaces... but I do think that at least some of those traditionalists would be perfectly fine with the outcome of that, which would result in females being relegated back to staying home in their "proper" roles.

Consider that many of these are the same traditionalists who certainly don't "support" rape... but who also tend to implicitly blame the victim, especially if the victim were dressed in skimpy clothing.

 

[shuttlt]

Trimming for brevity...

This is getting interesting....

Emily's CatI think you're taking it to a much more extreme level of materialism than any of us actually hold. The fact that we are evolved to produce ova and sperm is incontrovertible fact. But with that evolution comes many other dimorphic differences - and those differences aren't going to magically disappear if fashion changes to be unisex.

Part of producing ova in humans is the very long period of gestation, as well as the very long period of prepubescence that requires care for our offspring. And that burden is borne almost entirely by females.[/QUOTE]
Those are all physical things.

We would love to have more male help with childrearing, but at the end of the day, there's no expectation from feminists (excluding some very fringe anti-man types) that the burden would be equally distributed. Taking the position that there should be no social barrier to shared child care is not the same as insisting there will not be an evolutionary tendency to childcare in one sex more than the other.

This idea about there being no barriers, difficulties or social expectations for a woman who wants to take on the societal place as a man, or a man who wants to fulfil the role of a woman is coming from exactly the same egalitarian utopian thinking as the trans-activists. You are just trying to stop the process at the point where you stop feeling comfortable.

The ability to produce ova or sperm are also tied to several other physical traits, which also don't just evaporate when fashion changes. Males will continue to have wider shoulders, and relatively narrower hips, and facial hair. Females will continue to have higher body fat percentages, wider hips, a tilted pelvis, and boobs.

Again, this is just physicality.

I'm not imagining some "utopia" where half the males wear dresses and half the females wear dungarees and weld stuff. That's not a reasonable outcome, and it would require a fundamental alteration to our species. Sexual signaling will still exist, and it will still be subject to cognitive manipulation. Even if you reduce the western social pressure for seven-layer dip type facial make up in females... you're *still* likely to end up with a large number of females choosing to darken their lips and smooth their skin. It mimics the physical effects of ovulation and youth, and are attractive to males seeking a mate - even if none of the people involved consciously know that's what they're doing. Most males will very likely still select clothing and outfits that accentuate their shoulders as sexual indicators of virility and strength.

What I'm after is the removal of proscription, not the implementation of prescription. Something not being socially prohibited doesn't necessitate that it be socially obligated.

Sure, but that isn't how societies operate. Some things are normal, some things are transgressive of the normal. One of the reasons for wanting to deconstruct gender and sexuality so that rather than having big buckets for normal, normal gets broken up and fragmented is because in order to destigmatise the transgressive, you need to de-normalise the normal. It's one of the reasons why immigration is pushed so that there isn't a "normal" race in the country. I'm trying to think of examples of places where abnormal gender expression was normalised.... there is Weimar Berlin, I suppose....

Think about it in the same general frame as negative versus positive rights.

This is where you are going wrong. Negative and positive rights are philosophical concepts. Make what ever cloud castles you like out of them. Sex is a real thing in the world. Just because you can conceive of a world in which nobody attached any particular significance to a man wearing a tutu, and it seems pleasant in your head, doesn't mean that such a world can actually be built with real people.

This stuff has been being thought about for more than 100 years by intellectuals on the left. The reason they have been trying to break apart hetrosexuality, or the concept of woman and all manner of other things is because they think you are wrong. While "normal" exists there will always be sociatal pressures encouraging you to be normal and discouraging you from being abnormal. To normalise the abnormal, the old categories either have to be fragmented, or made meaningless (like a category of women that includes men with penises).

Lol, I'm sorry, but I really think this is a very male take of you.

Thank you.

In the sense of having boiled this down to a layer of scum on the bottom of the pan... yes, it has to do with ova and sperm. More realistically, however, it has to do with the inherent natures of males versus females. It has to do with the inherently higher levels of physical and sexual aggression demonstrated by males of the human species across all known times and geographies. It has to do with the physical and reproductive vulnerability of females to predation by males. And it has to do with the evolutionary tendency of females to cluster for safety and protection, to interact more directly with each other, and to seek solidarity with other females when they are particularly vulnerable.

Right, so females have some kind of natural instinct to cluster together.... but why is that so important? I don't disagree with you from an evolutionary psychology perspective. But that doesn't explain why women is such an important category. Maybe weak 5' tall men should be included in there as well so they aren't bullied?

Tactically, I think this is a horrible argument though. If you make it about the risk of assault then it becomes a negotiation about risk mitigations which people can pretend address your concerns. You've still got the issue of women's sports. Honestly, I think there needs to be something in the category of "woman" that binds to something culturally important and transcendent. Otherwise, why not just count trans-women as women and deal with issues of a spike of women sexually assaulting other women as an implementation problem? I think turning these into implementation problems is a pathway to defeat.

At the end of the day, yes, ALL of that has to do with the production of ova and sperm. It has to do with the evolutionary adaptations our species has made as a sexually reproductive dimorphic species.

Right, but then people want a society in which there are no expectations or pressures on women that aren't on men and vice versa, and everybody has the same opportunities. Actually achieving that is the same radical egalitarian programme that the trans-activists have.

Almost every known culture throughout recorded history has had some element of female-only spaces. Even the most regressive cultures, where females were literally viewed as property, had female only spaces where males were not allowed. Spaces where we menstruate, where we miscarry, where we give birth. Spaces reserved for "female mysteries", rituals, and sacraments.

Yes, absolutely.... but those are bad misogynistic cultures. We have spent decades removing all the things that bound men and women to cultural norms. Now you are looking to the norms of the culture and wondering why they aren't defending the category of "women".

 

[shuttlt]

I doubt the traditionalist males would support male interlopers in female spaces... but I do think that at least some of those traditionalists would be perfectly fine with the outcome of that, which would result in females being relegated back to staying home in their "proper" roles.

Sure, but I don't think they would necessarily see it as being relegated. I wouldn't. It's feminism that sees that as a lesser role and measures the place of each sex by how many CEOs they have. There is a weird compatibility between corporate capitalism and feminism. I'm sure the CEOs of the 70s lost no sleep over the idea of reducing wages by doubling the labour supply.

Consider that many of these are the same traditionalists who certainly don't "support" rape... but who also tend to implicitly blame the victim, especially if the victim were dressed in skimpy clothing.

That is the feminist perspective. I would say that there is a realist perspective of - if you want to go about in the world as if you were a man, but at the same time taking advantages of the perks that come with being an attractive woman, there is the possibility of having a price to pay. It's not a good thing, it's just the world.

You might well think that you have the right to dress is hot pants and stagger drunk across a dimly lit park at 2am on your own, and perhaps you do.... but bad things can happen. I'm sure your rapist will be interested to hear all about your rights. It's a female way of thinking that comes with the expectation of being protected by other people. Feminism has led modern women to want the safety of being protected without the limitations. You can't have that. Pick one.

As a man, I don't feel protected by my "right" to wander about a bad area of town drunk at 2am. That your actions that you have control over may increase your risk of bad things happening isn't misogynistic to point out. Honestly the whole bit about "I have the right to wear a skimpy dress" reminds me of the line from As Good As It Gets where he's asked how he writes women so well and he says "I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability".

 

[Rolfe]

Looking at this from a professional point of view, I think there is something more fundamental going on.

We improve the breeding of livestock by very rigorous selection of the males. Females may be selected to a certain extent, it depends on your precise set-up. Some set-ups have no spare females at all, they are all needed to breed the next generatioin. But males? They're ten a penny. We pick the ones that don't meet the standard to be eaten, and we breed from the remainder. (This is how it happens naturally in most herd animals - most of the males born never get a sniff of a female, and the most successful males sire most of the next generation.)

Human beings are funny this way. Our ideal is the faithful pair-bond for life, but on the other hand we don't live up to that even in times of plenty. The stark rationale for women to be protected and saved first is that if the viability of the community is under threat, they are the breeding stock. Apart from the occasional multiple birth a woman can only have about one baby a year, but one man can sire lots of the things. If things go really really badly and a bunch of men get killed (and having a bunch of aggressive young men with an invincibility complex is really quite useful in bad situations), well maybe we can let that whole monogamy thing slide for a bit. If a bunch of women get killed however, the community's reproductive capacity has taken a serious hit.

We are the evolutionary products of societies where these things were very real selection pressures. So after a few millennia of this, males are bigger and stronger and more aggressive - and very very protective of the smaller, weaker females. Females on the other hand put a lot more into reproduction than the males (you did your bit nine months ago sonny, now bugger off and let the women deal with this).

A society develops where the bigger stronger more expendable men go out and do the heavy lifting while the women stay at home and get obsessive about protecting the children. A few millennia of that and you have some very definite sex preferences for what people like to do.

We observe that males and females are equally intelligent, even if there might be some bimodal distribution of particular types of intelligence. We observe that apart from the actual male/female thing, which is binary, the rest of it is also mostly bimodal, whether size, strength or a preference for sewing over butchery.

The species is not going to get rid of the bimodality of any of this. We'll always find things like the music group having ten women to two men, and maybe the football fans are the other way round. We will always know very easily who is male and who is female, probably till the sun goes nova. Women are likely to continue to want their sex-segregated spaces for all the evolutionary reasons that made men bigger and stronger and more aggressive, and with the propensity to spread their genes further than society usually sanctions only slightly below the surface. Modesty is a real thing.

We are only proposing that the things that are only bimodal, especially the weakly bimodal ones, stop forming a set of expectations imposed on people who don't want them imposed. A woman with a great mathematical brain? A man who is fabulous at sewing? Fine. A woman who prefers to wear clothes more often worn by men, and vice versa? Fine. But where sex is important, and I'm particularly referring to where it's important to the comfort and safety of women, everyone knows which they are, and face it so does everybody else. Stay in your lane.

 

[shuttlt]

Rolfe, I agree 100% with everything you said up to your final paragraph.

We are only proposing that the things that are only bimodal, especially the weakly bimodal ones, stop forming a set of expectations imposed on people who don't want them imposed.

Is this possible though?

A woman with a great mathematical brain? A man who is fabulous at sewing? Fine. A woman who prefers to wear clothes more often worn by men, and vice versa?

These things are, to a greater or lesser degree, abnormal. In the language of queer theory, the project of normalising all this abnormal stuff is, I think, a project to queer society. The more you do this, the more you undermine the normal categories of man and woman. There are consequences for doing that, as you said in your excellent post, the normal categories and their associated typical characteristics serve a function. One of those function, as again you indicated, is to privilege and protect women in certain ways. They can be undermined though. Just like trans-activists, all the focus is on the people who don't fit in while it's just assumed everything is going to be fine with the majority.

Maybe there are consequences for doing that in terms of falling birth rate, aging childless career women alone with their cats and loser young men who can't get a date and women no longer being quite so protected? You are doing the same thing that they did in the French Revolution and trying to build a society based on a set of philosophically derived axioms.

Fine.

No, because it isn't really limited in that way. For decades now the focus has been on how many women are in this high status field, how many women are in that high status field. Have you seen how the UN define sexual equality? If women are less than equal in some positive metric, it's unequal... if women are more than equal, it's equal.

We move from having very few women going to university being unfair, so it gets pushed and women start to dominate the humanities, but it still isn't fair because they aren't equal in STEM so that is pushed, when STEM is dominated by women some sub bit of stem is identified as unequal. Push push push..... there is never any talk about bimodality. Bimodality is any kind of a limiting principle as every bit as much of a lie as anything the trans-activists come up with.

There is of course the issue that you can't really know what the bimodal distribution actually would be free from societal pressure, and the very fact that very few women naturally want to go into some field has a feedback loop that alters whether women want to go into the field. Again, that is why there is all this focus on "representation".

But where sex is important, and I'm particularly referring to where it's important to the comfort and safety of women, everyone knows which they are, and face it so does everybody else. Stay in your lane.

You can't just pick and choose like this. That might well be where you want to draw the line, but society and gender and sex and all the rest of it is a series of feedback loops, incentives, connections and all the rest of it. You can't have this liberal free for all everywhere else and then keep female changing rooms as some bastion of traditional gender seperation. Ultimately you need to pick which of the two things you want, or more realistically it will be (and I think is being) picked for you.

 

[Rolfe]

I completely fail to see why not.

 

[shuttlt]

I completely fail to see why not.

Why not what?

 

[p0lka]

Not speaking for Rolfe, to whom the question was addressed, but I believe that we would. I think this thing that we call "modesty" is an instinctive aspect of human nature. It's guided by custom and how it manifests differs across cultures, but I think evolution has created the basic framework for it to exist. I don't think it's a cultural imprint.

I base that in large part on the fact that every society everywhere has customs based on modesty, in some form.

If it sounds like I am saying that we have evolved to wear clothes, you are right. Some people think that's absurd, because....well, you fill in the blank. No one has ever gotten to a because on that one. The way I see it, though, is that humans did not stop evolving when we first put on animal skins, and 5,000 generations have passed since then.

I don't know how to go about proving it or testing the hypothesis.

clothes are an advantage definitely, it's like armour compared to those without clothes.
Clothes have been successful for so long that cultures make rules about them though, which is separate from the usefulness of clothes.

Your point about modesty being instinctive is kinda demonstrably not correct as our babies and young kids have to be taught to put on clothes?
they would much prefer to just run around without them. They have to be conditioned that clothes are a thing.

 

[Matthew Best]

Yeah, I saw that. The willful blindness involved in it baffles me. McKinnon is an overweight, middle-aged, out of shape male... and is winning female competitions against young, incredibly fit females in prime conditioning.

My google-fu is apparently weak - I can't find anything about McKinnon/Ivy winning a race recently. Can you point me in the right direction?

 

[p0lka]

In my opinion, the specifics of the boy-girl templates are, to some extent, societally created. However, the existence of boy-girl templates is something that I think is instinctive. Also, some aspects of those templates are so common that I think they are, in fact, instinctive.

there are lots of people for whom it isn't instinctive at all though?
when I was a kid (yaaawn) weapons were for boys and dolls were for girls. That was society. A lot of us just ignored it.

 

[shuttlt]

there are lots of people for whom it isn't instinctive at all though?
when I was a kid (yaaawn) weapons were for boys and dolls were for girls. That was society. A lot of us just ignored it.

What percentage would you say? I mean you see the same ideas of gender in The Iliad, in The Mahabharata, in different forms in human societies for all of recorded history and in primates. It's not instinctual for lots of people though? Are we talking about people who would have been filtered out if there was more evolutionary pressure?

 

[Skeptical Greg]

...there are lots of people for whom it isn't instinctive at all though?
...

What kind of percentage would you allow for ' lots ' ?