Nostalgic Pushhead

No... I think in most cases the doctors tell the parents "Its a girl!" and the parents believe them. And of course, the parents are the most important factor... but NO ONE besides them probably knows about it. The community at large wouldn't act any differently.
And I think there's enough of these cases to prove that gender isn't something that can be "molded".

And your second point, although I'd agree with it off the record (but not scientifically), it doesn't have anything to do with my question, and it reveals your bias.

I think behavior and gender are different. I think behavior is a combination of social and biological (conditioning and hormones, for example). Gender is seperate from that. I think its purely in the brain. So masculine or femenine behavior isn't the right way to classify gender. Butch dykes might be masculine, but they're still female gendered. Could they be male gendred? Sure, but then they'd be transsexual.

Ps418- thanks. I'll see if the school library has any of those

Starboy

1) X or Y
2) Male vs Female behavior
3) Male vs Female dress, literature, music, history, etc.
4) Male vs Female thought processes.

Three out of four are definitely different based on gender [1,2,4] and [3] could be a toss up with some bias.

Starboy

Undercurrent

If "gender" is not to be based on gross anatomy, nor is it to be based on behaviour, what is it to be based on? By your reckoning, given a person, how do you determine its gender?

I think you are (and a lot of people do this) implicitly asking two questions:
[list=1][*]What is the concept referred to by the word "gender"?[*]Is the concept referred to by the word "gender" a pure social construct?[/list=1]

And trying to answer the latter before the former when the latter requires knowlegde of the answer to the former to make sense.

RBH

In my less-than-humble opinion, English professors are purely social constructs. Was his argument 'takes one to know one'? (Mutter) Sounds like his name should be Stanley Fish.

RBH

Nostalgic Pushhead

Ah yes. I ran into this question while writing my second response. I didn't really come up with an answer.

I just wrote a bunch of paragraphs, mostly brainstorming, and I've come to the sorta conclusion that-

Fetus' start off the same, except being either (ussually) XX or XY.
Hormones turn them male or female.
Since there are demonstratable mental and physical differences, hormones and chromosones have an affect on both the mind and the body.

So, gender (brain sex) is the difference in the brain caused by pre-natal hormones.

But that makes them out to be the same thing. Why not just say gender doesn't exist, and its just sex?

But then how do you explain exceptions where gender and sex don't match up?

I got no freakin clue. I'm going to bed. My head hurts.

Undercurrent

That would be a perfectly valid conclusion. (To say "sex is defined as blah" and "gender is defined as blah2" and deduce that "sex == gender" all the time).

How can you say that there even are exceptions without a definition of "gender" (and a definition of "sex"). If you say that there are mismatches, then you must have something in mind already. I'll bet that you're thinking of something bahaviour-related (i.e. why are some people who are physically male act in some way like females do.)

Give an example or two of a mismatch, and we can probably induce what it is you mean gender to be.

Nostalgic Pushhead

Well, my first example was intersexed children... but if I follow my conclusions above... They have ambiguous sex, and this is altered by surgeons to be one sex or the other. Sometimes this works, and sometimes the kid just don't jive with it.
I don't know much about this, so I don't know if the kid's gender identity always matches their ambiguous birth sex...

And my other example was transsexuals, who are physically of one sex but don't jive with it, in the exact same way an intersexxuals often doesn't. Based on my quasi-theory, this is impossible. But it happens.

But, possibly the explanation for this is, a transsexual person is intersexxed, but the screw up only took place in the brain. If the morphology of the genitals can be goofed up, why not the morphology of the brain?

So, my revised stupid theory:
Gender doesn't exist. There's just sex- average variations in traits between male and female caused by hormones and chromosones. And in rare occasions these screw up.

Men acting feminine, women acting masculine, is just normal variation of "traits".

Okay, I don't know if I buy that myself, but its all I can think of.

Godot

I sat in on a sociology and gender class a bit last year. As I recall, sex referred to the physical characteristics (and this would include brain biochemistry to help account for the t/s & t/v's) while gender was a sociological construct.
Dominant concepts for these have arisen and they are largely cultural in origin. The example that was put forth was the south pacific island populations where the men wear sarongs. While we in the west would/may call it a skirt and effeminate, it is acceptable male dress in that culture.

Nostalgic Pushhead

And Scotsmen wear kilts. There's nothing feminine about a dress, its just something that western culture has deemed "feminine". Its just a social norm. Like most elements of "gender" which aren't biologically based.

Dr Rick

Or vice versa.

Rick