this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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I dunno, I feel the need to lightly push back...
A person telling you, "I don't feel like man", is something you can observe. A person telling you, " I don't feel like either gender" is something you can observe. A person telling you, "I feel like a woman" today but next week telling you "I feel like a man" is something that can be observed.
I suppose the issue might be that anyone can claim they feel anything and all we can do is take them at their word. It's easily falsifiable and therefore much harder to definitely call it an observable material concept.
This may be a bit of a nitpick, but you have this backwards. Falsifiability is a prerequisite for any kind of hypothesis to be scientific. If a hypothesis, theory, or model is not falsifiable, what that means is it can never be shown to be wrong (false), and so it is fundamentally not scientific. And in this case, it is the difficulty (the impossibility, even) of falsifying what a person says they're feeling that puts statements like that on shaky ground, scientifically speaking. Having to take someone at their word is not "easily falsifiable," it is unfalsifiable, and that's where the problem lies. If someone says "I feel sad today" then there is virtually no way we can ever prove this statement false: hence it is unfalsifiable. However, given the understanding of that caveat we do scientific studies all the time that involve the subjectivity of a person's experience, even as a focal point. From the efficacy of depression medication to the polling done in order to sell more products/candidates, countless scientific studies still rely on people self reporting their feelings. The subjectivity just has to be recognized and factored in as part of the study.
In short, the unfalsifiability that is inherent in dealing with human experience doesn't suddenly make it impossible to study human experience. We just have to control as best we can for things like bias in self reporting and recognizing and taking measures at eliminating reasons participants may have for saying things that aren't accurate about their experience, and including relevant error margins.
I agree, I don't mean to imply that it is impossible to study the human experience, far from it, you can (and should) always take one at their word when it comes to how they self report. I simply meant to say theres a significant difference between that sort of study and what we can concretely observe and experiment on in other material sciences.
What is "feeling like a man"? What is "feeling like a woman"? What is the biological mechanism that determine these feelings?
I can observe a person who has near death experience telling me they met god. Should I take it as face value?
I don't think my society is willing to accept such fickleness, even if we are willing to accept transgender.
Gender is a social construct often upheld by patriarchal societal standards. The being of a man or a woman comes with many societal expectations, and quite a lot of people don't agree with that. Some people go as far as to not even agree with the body they are born with. Non-binary people, for example, don't feel like they can express themselves by being merely 'man' or 'woman' and in fact chose to be none of the two or equally both. Transgender people don't agree with the gender they were born is as it does not coincide with the gender they feel like.
Now, I only want to comment on the gender aspect as I am sure that you, master observer that you are, can acknowledge stuff like intersex people existing, who are born with both sets of genitals for example.
Now, gender as we know it now has evolved in capitalist societies. For thousands of years the human concept of gender has been very different throughout the ages. Non binary people, for example, have been around since the beginning of mankind and have even been acknowledged by historic societies. The concept of 'man' and 'woman' is made up and should be seen as seperate from sex. Hence why some people come to the conclusion that they don't fit in with either gender, and sometimes even that their body doesn't match with who they see themselves as.
You comparing gender identity with someone dying and claiming to see God is a bit weird as it seems to imply that you think gender and gender expression to be somewhat of a delusion. It is not a delusion. It is not the same as someone suffering from, let's say, schizophrenia seeing entities that are not real.
Lastly, what is your society you speak of? Is it Vietnamese? As there are a lot of transgender or genderqueer Vietnamese people. They will have their own struggle against the status quo perceived notion of gender in Vietnam, just like the LGBTQ+ communities have done in the west for example.
Do you mean "gender role"?
Patriarchal societies often have different expectations for people of different biological sex. A Confucian society would expect a man to follow the Son of Heaven and a woman to follow her father or husband. This is gender role, and gender equality means the abolishment of gender roles.
I don't think I can agree with conflating the concept of "gender" and "gender role".
After some thought, I think I see your point. If one considers intersex a biological sex then their true gender should be separate from their sex. Is that what you were trying to convey?
Please tell me what the concept of gender was like in other societies. Be it Medieval Europe or Imperial China or whatever society you are familiar with.
Please provide me documents. I may take my time to research them.
I had asked you guys to prove me wrong from the very first comment. Unfortunately, the answers I received are a bit unconvincing.
Maybe the document you provide can change my world view, but I must take my time to read it first.
The difference being, If I was assigned "male" at birth and society categorized me as "boy/man" and treats me as boy/man but I don't "feel" boy/man and would like to be treated as girl/woman, what will that society do?
Somebody talking about a near death experience with God occasionally, probably won't get them lynched, denied housing, proper and dignified medical treatment, the ability to have a romantic relationship, etc.
A society deciding that its weird or uncomfortable to know that a hetero cis gender person marries a person who happens to be transgender, that's not being uncomfortable with "fickleness" that's drifting into bigotry territory.
wow... that was a "yikes!" comment from kredditacc.
Happiness and sadness are easy to comprehend because all humans experience it. Their biological mechanisms have also been studied and partially understood by science. "Gender feelings", not so much. Let put it this way: How can a biological male, who was never a female, know the feeling he feels is that of a woman?
How does a person who was born without the ability to see, or hear, or walk, want to do any of those things?
How can a biological male who was never a different individual biological male, know the feeling that he feels is that of another man? He can't! He's never been another man, only the individual that he is. So he can never know that the way he feels "as a man" is anything at all like how another man might feel "as a man." However, since as a social species we have empathy we can make reasonable assumptions about how other people feel, in part based on what they say they feel, and no less so because they have different bits between their legs than if they have a different color of hair.
None of us can unambiguously know what it is like to be another person. This is an obvious truism. The way you're trying to use it to draw this arbitrary line between what people can know about their own feelings, but only as determined by what kind of genitalia they were born with... it's gross. And whether intended or not, bigoted. People of any and all genders can have empathy for anyone else of any and all genders. We can also know how we feel internally when society around us sees us as we feel we are, versus how we feel internally when society around us sees as as what we feel we are not. The former is good and affirming. The latter is painful and dejecting.
Btw, there has been scientific research on transgender issues. Famously, there was a great trove of it that was burned by the Nazis in Germany. You know those infamous book burnings? Yeah, that was transgender scientific research. Fortunately, there has been a lot of other valid scientific studies done since then, too. All of it confirming the things people in this thread have been trying to tell you, even when you call it "fickle" or insist that your society isn't empathetic enough to ever accept (which I categorically reject.)