p0lka
Illuminator
Instinctive would imply 100%, so lots could be any percent greater than 0 really, it's enough to cause 'instinctive' to be in doubt.
Trans women are not women (Part 8)
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Skeptical Greg
Agave Wine Connoisseur
Until hormones kick in, I would say it is 100% nurture and cultural..
The Atheist
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Paul2
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A discussion between shuttit and EC about some fundamental issues looks to now be well and truly engaged, and, speaking as one who had to extricate myself from a political discussion with shuttit to save my sanity (no offense?) I am getting the biggest tub of popcorn I can find.
Hormones kick in in the womb. There are behavioural differences between the sexes from birth.
Rolfe
Adult human female
How long would the preference for running around in the altogether last though? I have a memory of trying to get into my bathing costume on the beach, aged five, hiding under a towel. My mother was telling me not to bother covering up so obsessively, I was only five, it doesn't really matter when you're only five. To which I piped up "It only starts to matter when you're six, then," and continued to burrow under the towel. She laughed but declined to put an actual age on when modesty should begin.
Maybe that was all conditioning, but it sure took extremely well.
Skeptical Greg
Agave Wine Connoisseur
Are babies born with a preference for playing with guns or dolls?
Well, kindof. I believe there is evidence that boys show more interest in objects while girls are more interested in faces within a few days of birth. Obviously babies aren't born with a concept of a doll, or a gun.... but the basic divergence in interest that leads to girls being interested in dolls and boys being interested in guns is there from birth.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2003/apr/17/research.highereducation
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Meadmaker
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I think every culture has some thing that boys do and some thing that girls do.
The specific thing varies.
I think the instinctive thing is wanting to be "manly" or "womanly" (or "ladylike", or something.) How you do that varies by culture, but there are patterns that make certain things more common as "manly" or "not manly".
ETA: I just bought a new bike. I went with a women's bike. It was really weird. It felt awkward. Not the bike itself. That was fine. My old body adapted to it more readily. However, it felt strange to ride the "women's" model. I wondered if I should buy it, even though, from among the bikes available in my price range, it was unquestionably the best choice.
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Meadmaker
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Sexual intercourse is something that babies and toddlers have no interest in, but by adolescence they're pretty much obsessed with it, and I'm pretty sure that most people would figure it out even if no one showed them or suggested it.
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Meadmaker
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Not really. Instinct can be shaped, and in humans, it can be shaped a lot.
Even in animals, dogs do not naturally catch frisbees, but they can be taught to do it. As for humans, we know that there is some nature (instinct) and some nurture (conditioning), but even things that are "natural", or instinctive, don't show up in ever human being ever, and almost all humans can be conditioned to defy instinct. (For example, overcoming common phobias and such.)
In humans, instinctive behavior is about tendencies and trends, but not necessarily things that cannot be overcome, willingly or unwillingly.
Ziggurat
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I think his point is that in order to protect female-only spaces on a rigorous basis, you have to conclude that men and women are fundamentally different in important ways. And once you do that, you can no longer justify the push for equal representation in everything, since justifying that requires claiming that the differences are trivial. They are mutually exclusive in terms of their justifications.
In other word, you can’t be conservative on this one tiny issue but liberal on everything else, it’s not stable.
Ziggurat
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You might be correct, but I don’t think it matters. Instinctual or not, I think modesty is required in order to keep social frictions to a manageable level in any society where strangers of mixed sexes have to interact. So in that sense it’s not arbitrary and it’s not dispensable. We have to maintain it, there is no real choice in the matter.
Meadmaker
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It seems to me, though, that ShutIt carries things a lot farther than most people. He seems to assert that unless you keep all aspects of traditional gender roles, and enforce them, or at the very least socially ostracize those who defy them, your civilization will collapse. Once you normalize deviation, and I think tolerating deviation would be considered the same as normalizing it in his view, you're on a slippery slope that ends with.....well I'm not sure what but it isn't good. At the very least, you certainly can't retain female only spaces if you let boys marry each other.
And I don't think that's an exaggeration, but ShutIt can correct me if I'm wrong.
I don't agree with him. I think liberal principles can tolerate deviation from the norm without inevitably destroying the norm. I think the current political climate has strayed away from those liberal principles, but I don't think we're on a one way trip to societal Hell as a result. I just think some effort has to be put into restraining the excesses. I think ShutIt would say that's impossible.
Ziggurat
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That’s true. And I don’t agree with everything he’s said, as I think I’ve already made clear. But I think he does have a point, even if he carries it too far.
905
Student
It helps balance my other regular reading on this topic: the Mumsnet feminism board, Ovarit, links to the best efforts of both sides to win hearts & minds, and as deep a dive into the social media feeds of especially prolific trans activists as I can stomach in a day (Veronica Ivy's being the latest. It's like swimming deeper and deeper into vomit. McKinnon/Ivy first came to my attention when he danced on the grave of Magdalen Berns.)
This is what always gets me, the vile tactics underpinning #NoDebate. The harassment and violent language always handwaved away, free speech doesn't come without consequences <shrug>. The only silver lining is that it has introduced me to incredible people and stories I probably never would have known about otherwise.
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Aspects of gender roles change over time. That is as natural and inevitable as the existence of gender roles themselves. The world changes, and we change with it. Ziggurat's summary of my position is a simplification, and I am probably a little bit more radical than that summary, but it captured a lot of the essence of what I feel.
There is a difference though between recognizing change, and that the form in which basic, fundamental truths take will alter over time.... and engaging in a project to oppose those basic fundamental truths and their consequences.
I think that is true in as much as it's the same thinking that argued for boys marrying each other that is now arguing for trans-women to be treated as women. There are probably other ways that a culture could come to boys marrying each other that would be leading in a different direction. It's not as if conservatives didn't say that gay marriage was a slippery slope, and they were laughed at and mocked. Now you have SC nominees claiming not to know what a woman is.
If you like where the slippery slope leads, terrific. If not, at least take a look at how we got here. Can you imagine in the 50s women being told they weren't allowed to complain about autogynefiles using their changing rooms, and men entering womens sports? Then feminism came along and empowered women and showed us that everything was just a social construct and equality of access was of overwhelming importance. Now complaining about autogynefiles in changing rooms is as socially frowned upon as them entering changing rooms would have been in the 50s. It's like a wish in a fairy story, you get your wish but it doesn't turn out how you wanted.
I think it's interesting that we haven't really done away with social pressure to conform, we've just reconfigured it and redirected it. The more autogynefiles are treated as normal, the more you are treated as abnormal. A society without social pressure to conform, and without people falling outside of social acceptability is impossible. What has been achieved is to make a very small number of sexual deviants and mentally ill people socially acceptable, while making the opinions of large numbers of formerly "normal" people unacceptable and deviant. You want female only changing rooms? - you are a bad person! You've been tricked into getting to this place by the idea that everybody was going to be accommodated in the brave new world, we just needed to "be kind". That isn't the case, and can't be the case.
Liberal principles, maybe. Liberal principles that preach the utopia of radical equality, absolutely not. That's the utopia that liberation struggles have been pushing towards since the 60s. The idea of equal numbers of male and female CEOs is a radical egalitarian liberal demand that rejects reality and bimodal distributions in preference for ideology.
Maybe you can conceive of a liberal movement that isn't merrily heading down this slope. That isn't the one we've got though. Liberal progressivism and second wave feminism are the descendents of marxism with it's radical ideas of a flattened social structure. It's not a coincidence that so many of the people involved in these struggles were marxists. In feminism, women took the place of the proletariat. Egalitarian utopianism is baked into the DNA of the struggle.
There is an idea on the dissident right that, at some point, I guess beginning with FDR and ending with Civil Rights, the old liberal ideas of the Bill of Rights, the Constitution and all that 18th century stuff were swapped out in the US in a kind of silent, soft revolution. People still talked as if that was the operating principle of the system still, but it really wasn't. Civil Rights Law and social engineering to achieve an egalitarian end replaced them. Obviously that process isn't complete or total, but a huge shift happened. It's more muddled in the rest of the world, but things like hate speech laws are expressions of the same shift.
No. What is happening is the same thing as has been happening for decades, with the same justification... it's just that you were happy with where the slippery slope lead up until now. Taking away freedom of association was great when it was for civil rights, now we are "straying away from those liberal principles" when we take away freedom of association from females. That was never what liberal progressivism was about, or it hasn't been for a very long time. What it is about is a radical programme of egalitarian utopianism. All other principles have been sacrificed and will be sacrificed as is convenient towards that goal.
It can maybe be pushed back for a time. The problem is that the call to push it back is an illiberal conservative objection. You can't simultaneously be in favour of progressive liberalism, and against where it leads without incoherence. I think it means that you are fighting with one hand tied behind your back. Maybe partly this is because to really attack the meat of what is insane about trans-activism and strike at its heart, you can't avoid attacking things that are close to your heart and pretty much off cultural limits to attack.
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One additional thing to add on to that final point. I think the basic radical egalitarian urge is very, very old. You see it in the French Revolution, you see it in communities that grew up around the English Civil War, you see it in early Christianity. What is unusual is making it the operating principle of nations.
One dissident right wing idea is that this radical egalitarianism is basically just a type of female thinking that works within a domestic, home, small community setting.... of a patriarchal society. The men of the primitive community have the responsibility of taking care of security, facing threats, raiding other villages when resources are short, and being the final settlers of disputes etc... The women then, in the context of that security, manage everybody's needs and competing interests with egalitarianism.
What happens sometimes is that everything seems secure enough for long enough, or some great and permanent victory seems to have been won, that the brutishness of the men with their hierarchies and so on feel unnecessary and unkind and female egalitarianism takes over. But of course, some people will take advantage of an egalitarian system and where once the men would have come along with a big stick because their wives were upset, or their honour, or the security of the community was threatened.... now they are feminised and are, just like the women, looking around for somebody to come to their rescue.
One dissident right wing idea is that this radical egalitarianism is basically just a type of female thinking that works within a domestic, home, small community setting.... of a patriarchal society. The men of the primitive community have the responsibility of taking care of security, facing threats, raiding other villages when resources are short, and being the final settlers of disputes etc... The women then, in the context of that security, manage everybody's needs and competing interests with egalitarianism.
What happens sometimes is that everything seems secure enough for long enough, or some great and permanent victory seems to have been won, that the brutishness of the men with their hierarchies and so on feel unnecessary and unkind and female egalitarianism takes over. But of course, some people will take advantage of an egalitarian system and where once the men would have come along with a big stick because their wives were upset, or their honour, or the security of the community was threatened.... now they are feminised and are, just like the women, looking around for somebody to come to their rescue.
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Rolfe
Adult human female
It's a funny thing about bikes. The frame on a man's bike is made with the crossbar in that position because it's mechanically stronger. But it's a damn nuisance having to mount by swinging your leg across the read wheel, as if you were mounting a horse.
I've never come across the frame on a ladies' bike failing because the crossbar was in a mechanically weaker configuration. Although I do remember going fast down a hill in the Fichtelgebirge with not only my youth-hostelling gear in the saddle-bags but some quite heavy purchases (vinyl records, believe it or not) also strapped to the thing. I felt the bloody frame flex under me and thought, is this where I find out the men really have the right idea about bicycle frames? But no, the bike held together just fine.
So are men putting themselves to unnecessary inconvenience by having to grapple with the crossbar in an inconvenient place, or do women just not realise that mounting over the back wheel is easy once you're used to it?
Of course it's all about being able to ride the bike while wearing a skirt. I have a number of divided skirts bought when they were in fashion precisely to make cycling while dressed smart easier. But I still appreciate not having a crossbar in the way.
Rolfe
Adult human female
Ziggurat said:
I think we've probably taken this as far as we can and will have to agree to disagree. But I still disagree.
Men and women are fundamentally different in important ways. I cannot however see that it is necessary to enforce regressive sexist stereotypes in order to be able to justify single-sex provision in situations where these fundamental differences really matter.
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