Idea: the often toxic discussion about gender is partly explained by people struggling to understand that behaviour labelled as masculine or feminine can have both biological and cultural origins
There’s an obsession with gender identity these days. This often toxic debate frequently includes claims about whether sex-specific behaviours (i.e., behaviour often associated with males or females) are biological in origin or not. Many feminists claim that gender is completely “socially constructed”, while transgender activists might claim they “just know” their gender so it must be innate. Neither of these claims seem to me particularly well founded.
I’ll deal with the evidence base for and against both claims in separate posts; this post is more focussed on a concept that I think both sides struggle with, which is that sex-specific behaviour for individuals can have both a biological origin and be socially constructed. To illustrate this, look at the figure below:
Across time and in different places, what counts as masculine and feminine has varied, but we can agree, I’d imagine, that wherever you’re reading this you and those around you have an idea what these labels refer to. The horizontal axis on the graph above illustrates this division. We can imagine that every individual will be a collection of feminine and masculine behaviour that positions them somewhere on the horizontal line. Three things are noticeable when this is plotted based on number of people (i.e., the vertical axis). Biological males and females cluster into two groups, most people are averagely masculine or feminine within their respective group; and there’s overlap of the distributions, especially with just biologically driven sex-specific behaviour.
As I’ll discuss in separate posts, on average there are biologically driven differences in sex-specific behaviour which societies have added to and reinforced to construct what we label as gender. It’s the difference between the ‘on average’ and how that relates to individuals where much of the confusion and anger originates. This is especially the case when people aren’t aware their brain is automatically noticing the binary distribution in the figure above and they expect people, based on their biological sex, to conform to whatever ‘average’ exists in the time and place they live in (see the point about how we make generalisations in the post ‘The Neuroscience Revolution’ for more on this).
In certain contexts, it may be useful to reference the ‘average man’ or ‘average woman’, but this is a statistical concept. It doesn’t define any particular individual, unless by chance. You can see when people are struggling with this idea when, for example, someone says to a woman, “women prefer x”, and they reply, “but I don’t prefer x”, or, “I have friends that don’t prefer x”. This rebuttal just illustrates this person doesn’t understand the concept of a ‘population average’. The correct response would be to challenge whether the average actually exists, if that’s the case. Properly understood, individual instances that vary from the average are in fact part of what makes the average an average!
Being able to understand what a population average is and how it’s made up of individuals that vary by some characteristic is a key insight to release people from much of the toxicity surrounding the gender identity debate. Almost all the thoughts and feelings about gender that people have can be understood by this insight: people’s intuition that a gender binary exists, women who have no need for a gender identity, men who want to be ‘feminine’, the science showing biology contributes to sex-specific behaviour, gender being socially constructed, etc. It can’t incorporate, however, a situation where biological males are biological females simply because they feel they are, and I’ll deal with this in separate posts.
The ideas set out above aren’t novel. What is novel to this post and in keeping with one of the general themes of Structured Openness is that you need a certain level of intelligence to understand these concepts. The toxicity of the debate about gender is often driven by the negative emotions that naturally follow when people argue because they lack the necessary knowledge and understanding to see where they could find common ground, or understand their own thoughts and feelings better.
Before I end this post, I’ll quickly mention some caveats I'll deal with in other posts. I’d imagine some people might claim that others can understand the concept of a population average, for example, but they ignore it or refuse to accept it due to things like ‘motivated reasoning’. I’m currently writing a post to challenge the idea of motivated reasoning. In short, I don’t think it exists as commonly imagined. It’s intelligence (as outlined in the posts ‘Reclaiming The Word Intelligence’ and ‘The First Assumption’) that determines differences in people’s opinions when they share similar goals. In Reclaiming the Word Intelligence, I also stated that I don’t think most complex behaviour is biologically determined. This would seem to clash with what I’ve said in this post, so I’m also writing something that will try and deal with the issue that some complex behaviour appears to be influenced by innate biology.