Do you believe there are only two genders, there’s an spectrum (with infinite possibilities) or something else entirely? Please elaborate if you don’t mind.
I don’t know much on this issue, but according to Wikipedia, it may depend on the definition of gender.
If it means biological sex, wiki says there are male, female, and intersex variation. I believe the intersex variation is a spectrum.
Two. There are a tiny number of people who are born with abnormalities who are arguably intersex, but basically two.
I have no problem with people playing at being a different gender, but gender isn’t a social construct.
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hijra is a biological construct?
Yes it is. Basically by definition. Quoting from my computer dictionary: “either of the two sexes (male and female), especially when considered with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones.”
Leaving aside binary vs spectrum, sex = the body parts you have; gender is how it’s manifested. Long hair on women today, make-up on women today, fluffy white wigs on European men a few hundred years ago, pink as “girlish” and blue “boyish” today - that’s what gender is. The cultural construction of how we manifest sexual differences. My wife and not me giving birth - that’s biology / sex. Fifty years ago having the woman do all the child-raising, and today a cultural expectation that men do more of the child-raising - that’s culture / gender.
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Only because the definition of gender has changed over time.
They’re male. I’m happy for them to define themselves as a third gender, but they remain male just as a man who gets castrated in an accident remains male.
No, that’s fashion. Of course fashions change over time.
If you want to go around claiming that sex has exactly the same meaning as gender, I suppose you can do that, but that makes it a pretty useless word. But the difference that I’ve seen for my whole life is that sex is biology, and gender is culture.
How many are there? Which particular trait is more biological, and which more cultural? Those questions are more loaded. But the difference between sex and gender as terms is quite longstanding.
Gender replaced sex because of the connotations associated with the word sex. It was simply down to prudishness. Since then a succession of sociologists have gradually altered the original meaning of the word gender. It’s not science, it’s politics.
The evidence that cultural conditioning of male/female behaviours outweighs biology is minimal and usually relies upon a few outliers as proof.
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are they recognized as male in their societies?
I believe they’ve managed to get third gender status in some states. This gives them some economic benefits.
As to how 900 million Indians view their gender? I’m afraid I can’t answer that. It doesn’t matter how they’re recognised anyway. I could recognise them as pork pies and it doesn’t change biology.
Saying gender is a social construct is not scientific. We know from studies males and females display different behaviors on average without outside influences. We see them in infants. Those behaviors we find overwhelmingly in men are what we define as masculine and in females feminine.
To say it’s a social construct is ignoring biology. Male and female have different physical makeup.
Ignoring physiology. We see overwhelmingly evidence that it’s not a social construct. But hey…it doesn’t fit the agenda of the people trying to push for this so it’s ignored.
This whole gender is a social construct is anti science
If a boat is sinking, everyone is a woman or child.
All the evidence shows it’s not a social construct.
We see it in young children
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/icd.2064
And we see it in adults as less inequality is in a society, the more profound the differences in job choices. Again counter to the feminist arguments so they just ignore that and keep pushing women into STEM fields when many don’t want to lol
http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/gender-inequality-index
Science continues to piss feminist off. Why wouldn’t my son play with dolls!!! Why are women not going into stem!!!
More meta analysis showing differences.
Gender is the rule of nature. You either have XX, XY. There’s nothing wrong with the body. There’s a disconnect with the mind. We don’t allow people to cut off their limbs because they believe they are amputees because they have body integrity disorder. But we allow people to cut off their breasts and genitalia because they think they’re the opposite sex and give them a load of hormones??? Sadly I feel like people are using trans people (yes they exists) as a political pawn for pushing an ideology instead of helping them.
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Please don’t remind me of the sex junk clip. I still have ptsd.
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Really? Women grow long hair because they biologically grow long hair, and men have short hair because our hair stops growing at 3cm or whatever? Women are genetically programmed to wear dresses, whereas men are genetically programmed to wear trousers, except in Scotland, where those men are genetically programmed to wear kilts?
Of course some aspects of gender are social constructs, otherwise all men and all women would have behaved and acted in exactly the same way for all of history. Our biology hasn’t changed that much in the past few thousand years. But the way we manifest gender has varied a hell of a lot. Where to draw the line between what’s socially constructed and biological is a different, and much more complicated, question.
As for saying it isn’t science - well, exactly. It isn’t. Gender is study of culture. It’s loosely related to biology, but only loosely. That’s why it’s a useful term, because it’s not the same in meaning as sex.
Maybe the word has changed in definition. Sure, whatever, but it did that at least before I was in school in the 80s. Words do that. I suppose some people could choose to be really awkward and insist that sex and gender have the same meaning, but … why do that?!
I’m sure we will be seeing a lot of legal action in the future by people who will feel they were operated on unnecessarily. Pre-op counselling is considered transphobic as it suggests that there may be a psychiatric aspect.
People who’ve had their family jewels removed because they were mentally ill are going to be suing the crap out of the doctors who did it.
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