Understanding

>>6397639
>Gender identity isn't gender
Gender is gender identity. Well, as long as there isn't some underlying mental issue causing it.

>>6397639
>>6397639
As a transanon, I see gender as a separate thing from sex, but as something that still has it's roots in biology. I don't think that I have such strong feelings about my gender identity for no reason. I believe that sometime during pregnancy something got fucked up and didn't develop properly, leaving me with a body that doesn't match my neural map. Not to the degree of intersex people, but something similar (and less physically obvious).

>>6397659
How does that work? Everything I've read says that gender identity breaks down to the group you knee-jerk mentally classify yourself. More or less pronouns.

>>6397639
Don't ask any trans people this, they'll give you circular bs answers.

>You either feel like a girl or a boy!
>There is no such thing as feeling like a girl or a boy!
>But I still feel like a girl/boy!

Gender is just gender roles and obviously depends on your sex, and there's no such thing as transgenderism. You can't have a girl/boy brain because brains aren't gendered.

>>6397678
>Brains aren't gendered
This is false. All modern science goes against this statement.

>>6397678
you definitely can have gender dysphoria, it's a documented condition. Some people just feel like there's something wrong biologically, and currently there's no treatment outside of modifying the body to suite the brain.

But I definitely have been getting the feels runaround elsewhere.

>>6397639
>Biology gives rise to different brain archetypes based on sex
>The archetypes have tendencies toward certain behaviors, forming the biological part of gender.
>Each culture creates a social construct of rules and expectations which apply to each gender, forming the social portion of gender.
>Gender as a whole is formed from both portions; among scientists the argument is not "nature vs nurture" but "How much is nature, how much nurture?"

>>6397722
So gender is nothing more than a combination of social norms and chemically induced behaviors?

>>6397732
Yes BUT. The thing to remember about gender is that it is actually an abstraction. Just because a certain archetype *tends* toward some behaviors does not mean that every member of that archetype will behave that way due to individual variation within a given sex's band. In fact due to how statistics work it seems pretty likely that just about every member of a given sex will deviate from it in at least a couple of ways. Thus, like the average person, the essential male/female does not exist in the flesh. Strong social norms typically try to steer individuals down the road of conforming to the specific culture's view of that non-existent ideal male/female.

Things get really complex when you get to intersexed individuals who don't fit a culture's neat attempt at separating the sexes by gender-based social norms, especially since sometimes their brains are intersexed and so actually have a unique set of tendencies.
Another troublesome situation is when someone wishes to adopt the gender-based social norms of the other gender despite belonging to the "wrong" sex.

>>6397795
this is why i tell people nonbinary is a bullshit indentity as everyone is nonbinary to some degree

>>6397817
there's nothing nonbinary about having mixed male and female characteristics

>>6397795
My thoughts exactly. It's just a game of averages.

>>6397817
Wellllll, will you get mad at me if I add that I think there's some basis to non-binary claims? Normative men and women usually fall within a certain range of what is typical for their sex. Some folks are partially neurologically intersexed and so have their own profile of behavioral tendencies. It could be argued that this set of tendencies is distinct enough to place them apart from the rest. With that said most folks who claim to be non-binary are not intersexed and are just breaking the social gender norms which is a very different thing.

If what you're saying is accurate, if that's what gender is, then isn't that what we already call "masculine" and "feminine"?
Why go to the length of referring to someone as a man or woman when that already means something biologically?

>>6397914
It seems like this whole thing has been made unnecessarily confusing.
If we all used a common vernacular to talk about the issue, a lot of confusion (and there's clearly a lot of it going around on the subject) would disappear and actual progress could be made with less dispute.

Are you people retarded?
Go back to /pol/ or /tumblr/ or wherever the fuck you come from.

Gender = gender identity
Gender identity = which sex you feel you should be.

That's how fucking simple it is.

>>6400395
See, this is exactly what I'm talking about, no one seems to be on the same page about what gender means.

>>6400395
If gender identity is just the biological sex you feel you should be, then gender would actually just be a synonym for biological sex.

Don't listen to these other trannies they're confused. Gender is sex is what you are physically. They're all the same. Thing is I didn't want to be a dude so I changed that with the power of modern medicine because I had that gender dysphoria.

>>6397639
Sexologist John Money introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in 1955.

Before his work, it was uncommon to use the word gender to refer to anything but grammatical categories.

However, Money's meaning of the word did not become widespread until the 1970s, when feminist theory embraced the concept of a distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender.

Today, the distinction is strictly followed in some contexts, especially the social sciences and documents written by the World Health Organization.

However, in many other contexts, including some areas of social sciences, gender includes sex or replaces it.

Although this change in the meaning of gender can be traced to the 1980s, a small acceleration of the process in the scientific literature was observed in 1993 when the USA's Food and Drug Administration started to use gender instead of sex.

In 2011, the FDA reversed its position and began using sex as the biological classification and gender as "a person's self representation as male or female, or how that person is responded to by social institutions based on the individual's gender presentation."

In non-human animal research, gender is also commonly used to refer to the physiology of the animals.

The modern academic sense of the word, in the context of social roles of men and women, dates from the work of John Money (1955), and was popularized and developed by the feminist movement from the 1970s onwards. The theory was that human nature is essentially epicene and social distinctions based on sex are arbitrarily constructed. Matters pertaining to this theoretical process of social construction were labelled matters of gender.

Categorizing males and females into social roles creates a problem, because individuals feel they have to be at one end of a linear spectrum and must identify themselves as man or woman, rather than being allowed to choose a section in between.

>>6402858
So what does gender mean in an era where arbitrary social distinctions between the sexes begin to break down?

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>>6402742
You.
I like you.

>>6403028
That's a very good question.
IMO This question is why some people are very confused and why some other people are quite judgemental about the way others express their confusion.

>>6402628
No, obviously not, since your biological sex doesn't have to be congruent with your gender. Like with intersex and transsexual people.

>>6397696
Got a source for that? No, I didn't think so.

>>6410682
Just google for bnstc

>>6410682
Look, you are asking me to prove something which is as basic and commonly accepted as evolution. The extraordinary claim is that there ISN'T any difference between the brains of men and women despite the scientific consensus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_sex_differences

>>6410602
If >>6400395 definition of "gender identity"="biological sex you feel you should be",
if we assume "identity"="you feel you should be", then that leaves "gender"="biological sex".

I'm not saying he's right, I'm just breaking it down.

>>6397639
>gender roles and gender presentation aren't gender
They literally are, as evidenced by the fact that you're struggling to explain the concept without referring to either gender roles or presentation. The word gender was coined by sexologists to refer to what they initially called "sex roles".

>>6397668
/sci/ here
A partial intersex condition that only takes place in the brain is physically impossible. Look up fetal development.
If something done fucked up when you were swimming in your mom's juices, you'd at the very least have your cockhole in the wrong place or some other mild expression of intersex. The cortical homunculus is responsible for body mapping - none of the existing trans brain research shows any abnormalities in that area.
I feel for you and godspeed with your transition, but science wise it's all wishful thinking for now.

>>6410749
The question is what makes you feel that having male brain morphology with a normative XX female body would be possible and vice versa.

>>6412420
A 2014 study suggests otherwise, but people never seem to understand that "partially intersexed" in this connotation means "mostly of the birth sex with some significant regions feminized/masculinized outside of the norm" rather than "literally a brain of the other gender".

>>6412441
It isn't. What there is evidence of is that you have someone who is physically male, suffers from gender dysphoria, has a brain which is largely male but some of said brain's regions tend toward those of the other gender in a way which they don't in normative males. In other words it seems that for this subset of transsexuals these brain differences could account for the feeling of dysphoria. They don't have female brains, but it is hard to call their brains typically male in light of the differences.


I feel like this thing has been linked ten billion times over the last few weeks but here's the paper: http://pastebin.com/BiNLNBRh

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>>6412583
Those are homosexual males. The brain difference could be attributed to orientation or even mental illness. These studies have their shit all over the place with variables and controls, as well as tiny sample sizes. The post mortem one by Zhou has a whopping 9 subjects, iirc.

This whole confirmation bias compilation is laughable enough from just taking a brief look at it, but the funniest part is that they cited Swaab, a man who found a "difference" in MTF subjects that's almost identical to the one he previously found in gay men. The only study with a decent sample that isn't all over the place with controls and variables has found that nonhomosexual MTFs have the brains of straight men.

So far trans "science" sensationalist nonsense that is typically performed to confirm a preconceived notion. It's utter garbage in terms of quality when compared to any reputable neurological research, sorry.

>>6412634
>Those are homosexual males
..Hence Homosexual Transsexuals? They literally started the thing with saying that.

>The brain difference could be attributed to orientation or even mental illness.
What do you mean by attributed to? They are the cause, not the consequence.

>These studies have their shit all over the place with variables and controls, as well as tiny sample sizes. The post mortem one by Zhou has a whopping 9 subjects, iirc.
A lot of the studies were pretty lousy but that's not reason enough to dismiss this one. Ray Blanchard, pretty much the world's foremost expert and proponent of the alternative approach to the whole "born in the wrong body" thing, has both approved and has been vindicated by this study since it supports his hypothesis about the difference between homosexual transsexuals and non-homosexual transsexuals.

>This whole confirmation bias compilation is laughable enough from just taking a brief look at it, but the funniest part is that they cited Swaab, a man who found a "difference" in MTF subjects that's almost identical to the one he previously found in gay men.
That makes perfect sense given Blanchard's old hypothesis about homosexual transsexuals being a result of extreme homosexuality.

>The only study with a decent sample that isn't all over the place with controls and variables has found that nonhomosexual MTFs have the brains of straight men.
Which, again, does not clash with the study I linked because it focuses on homosexual transsexuals for this very reason.

>So far trans "science" sensationalist nonsense that is typically performed to confirm a preconceived notion. It's utter garbage in terms of quality when compared to any reputable neurological research, sorry.
Honestly, from your response, it seems that you are the one with the preconceptions, out to prove something. Half of the points you raised as objections were supported by this very study.

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I'm trans, and I try to be reasonable about it, but I don't really know the answer. For some reason somehow, I got the idea that I would rather be a girl, I looked at my options, I chose transition, and I've been just taking that one step at a time and I feel better. If it was making my life worse, I would have stopped.

Maybe all the bitching and whining about technical definitions of every thing are just bullshit? But so what? Should I be forced to stop?

I think that for the most part, whether you go with the definition the gender studies folks push, or more conservative definitions, it's all just down to ideology. Nobody's ideology is that special in my eyes, I wish people would just be chill and decent to each other. Personally, the way I see it is I like the changes I've made to my presentation, and I like the changes to my body, I do my best to be courteous and inoffensive about what is happening with me, and I don't want to stop it just because someone's ideology.

>>6412677
What I mean is that the studies completely fail to point out any meaningful correlation between what they found and abstract cross-sex feelings. Gay men have the same sort of "feminization" and are cis. That is, if we omit the fact that the methodology in these is godawful and shouldn't be taken seriously in the first place due to questionable samples, subjects and controls.
It's bad science no matter how you spin it.

>>6412634
>>6412677
I mean, if you boil it down, the whole claim is "The brains of homosexuals who suffer from gender dysphoria are feminized in some regions, to the point where they are distinct from those of both men and women". This isn't some huge claim about transsexuals "really being women" or whatever.

>>6412706
>What I mean is that the studies completely fail to point out any meaningful correlation between what they found and abstract cross-sex feelings.
Correlation is not necessarily causation, but when you, again and again, find self-reported dysphorics who have the same neurological disorders then it seems pretty likely the two are connected.

>Gay men have the same sort of "feminization" and are cis.
As I understand it it's a matter of degree. Faggots and transsexuals might just be different points on the spectrum with different symptoms as a result. This is what Blanchard theorized back in the day and one of the reasons he thinks both should be included as mental disorders.

>That is, if we omit the fact that the methodology in these is godawful and shouldn't be taken seriously in the first place due to questionable samples, subjects and controls.
Some studies were especially awful but overall I don't think you can throw all of them out for this reason. They are not as rigorous as those dealing with the harder sciences but psychology/neurology basically never is due to the difficult of getting a large sample size.

>It's bad science no matter how you spin it.
If it's bad science but the world's leading experts on both sides of the fence support it then we're honestly fucked. I tend to believe scientific consensus because, presumably, these people know more about it than those who haven't studied the subject.

>>6412721
I know, I just don't like that it's all over the place. There needs to be a study with at least 1000 subjects and proper fucling categorization of controls by sexuality, as well as rigorous mental health screening to rule out everything else. Some of these refer to neuron volumes that only change after puberty despite the fact that the subjects reported cross sex feelings from early childhood. That needs to be taken care of.

In addition to that, we should consider the implications of using brain scans in GID diagnoses, to prevent regretters.

If the subject interests you, I just recalled another fun fact (courtesy of D.Swaab): mtfs are up to 25% more likely to have BID than the general population. Someone needs to inspect this more closely, since it's pretty much identical to "true dysphoria".

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>>6412721
Why are people so obsessed with getting us to concede that we are not really women? I know that I'm not as good as the real thing, or that on some level I'm just a medically feminized boy of sorts, but everyone seems to be nice to me irl, and call me a girl without really choking on their words. It makes me feel really good too, I don't demand pronouns and get them anyways.
Dwelling on how much worse than a naturally born girl only makes me kinda sad. I do my best to face my sadness on my own, but it's kinda pathetic to just want to rub our faces in it for your amusement.

>>6412787
More rigor in psychology? I'm all for that, though chances are the people giving funding aren't.

The BID thing's neat and probably connected. I honestly do think that we will find a way to prevent people from developing these disorders in the future but should treat those who have them now with more kindness.

>>6412790
That's not my intention. Sorry. I'm actually immensely pro people presenting and being treated however they prefer so long as this doesn't hurt anyone.

>>6412843
I mean, there's enough rigor in autism research, for instance. There's no reason why it shouldn't be this rigorous with GID.

>>6397817

A cis guy is content with his body in terms of its sexually dimorphic characteristics.

An MtF, because of her dysphoria, wants her body to have the sexually dimorphic characteristics of cis females' bodies

A nonbinary person's dysphoria might make them wish they had been born with Klinefelter syndrome.

Most people don't really come anywhere close to the third example, but those who do have every reason to adopt a nonbinary gender identity.

>>6412922
Never met an nb person who wanted a disorder of sexual development. It's either about fashion or completely impossible physical characteristics, like having both penis and vagina. The only "true" nbs I've seen are already intersex.

Also, what about nontransitioning MtFs, or those who don't have bottom dysphoria?

>>6412843
It's ok then. Sometimes some people just seem to get off on putting us down. I'm glad you are not like that.

I'm not too invested in the rhetoric obviously, but I do feel like something about me made the need for this immutable, somehow. I was even raised Mormon. I wanted to overcome it, and tried my best.

Dunno if it's some macro or micro scale brain thing. I hope someday some kind of really advanced neuroscience replaces most of psychology. Psychology is in an age of working on symptoms and assumptions, like studying diseases before we had a microscope.

>>6412361
No, you're literally retarded.

I've explained it as well as you can, and you still don't understand how what you're saying is retarded. There's no point int trying again.

>>6412420
>/sci/ here
Oh, so a basedweller who is trying to study science in college?
Good luck, till you drop out.

Saying you're from /sci/ means shit, because none of you have any education or work without science.

>>6414069
>triggered gender belieber

>>6414062
The majority of replies disagree with your assertion. Maybe someone will take you seriously if you can bring something more than petty insults to the conversation.

>>6412677
trans women are female though..

>>6397675
>More or less pronouns.
Thanks feminism!

>>6410749
>Look, you are asking me to prove something which is as basic and commonly accepted as evolution.
If only your ignorant convictions had any basis in reality. There's far more variation within each sex than between them. Stop parroting your beliefs of convenience as if they were fact, you insufferable cunt.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28582-scans-prove-theres-no-such-thing-as-a-male-or-female-brain/