Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
This is what makes it trivial to break substitution ciphers given a long enough ciphertext.
There are no differences; this is not a category of any interest. Urdu is a non-western language, except of course that it is, in a global sense, very closely related to French. (Why do you think we say "Indo-European"?)
2. Ideograms.
The modern language that comes closest to using written ideograms is Japanese. But the language that comes closest to what you're probably thinking of is Mandarin Chinese, where every character is fairly rare.
You have exactly the same options that you do with any other language: you could render the text into an alphabet of interest, or you can do your analysis on the symbols the text is originally written in. That second approach will make some questions much easier; if you sample a letter and get န်, you can be certain you're not reading French.
It will make analyzing Chinese harder because character frequencies are so low. (see https://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/statistics/char/li... - the most common character in written Chinese is 的 at 4.1% of all characters; the second most common accounts for an additional 1.6% of all characters. The top 152 characters collectively account for 50% of all text.)
This will mean that codebreaking requires longer texts.† It won't have much effect on the problem of identifying the language by sampling unenciphered monograms from it; that stays easy, because the commonly used characters are highly informative even if e.g. you're comparing written Mandarin to written Cantonese. You'll probably need more samples (for an equally reliable judgment) than you would for a script that didn't have so many unique characters.
† This problem is significant. Specific content words will all be rare, and we can't really expect a message, even a very long message, to discuss every possible topic at the same frequency that the corpus of written Chinese as a whole does. Even if we could expect that, the amount of ciphertext you'd need to reliably distinguish the 3100th-most common character in this corpus (酱 [noun, 'sauce'] representing 0.09% of all characters) from the 2494th-most common (娶 [verb, 'to marry a woman'] representing 0.19% of all characters) would be quite large.
The mechanism is just multiplication. Suppose you have a quantity that increases by 20% every period. (Doesn't matter what the period is.) Let's start the quantity at 4 times 10 to the power of irrelevant. We'll consider the leading digit every period:
4
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(You can see that it will be the same for any growth rate by considering that you can always match the observations of a system with the same observation period and a different growth rate by instead imagining a system with the same growth rate and a different observation period. But varying the observation period doesn't change the amount of time spent in any given quantity range.)
Inversely, the lowest order decimals tend to be evenly distributed, which is also a useful way to detect tampering (trying to make the numbers look "random" does anything but).
(30 mins with explanations)
I found it really interesting and fun.
No, it doesn't. It says that there are striking differences in the distribution of personality traits between the sexes, and does not take a stand on the source, besides that it is “certainly” a mix of biological and social contributions.
As gender identity, in the current population, correlates very strongly to “sex” [0] (less than 2% of the adult population reports a transgender, nonbinary, or other identity divergent from their “sex” assigned at birth), any strong gender-based personality difference would also be associated with sex, and vice versa.
[0] a misnomer for what is more accurately an externally-ascribed gender; biological sex is multidimensional, the binary division of “sex” by a subset of sex traits is an imposed social construct.
Edit: Nevermind, you can leave the email field blank.
By the way, the test really isn't all that interesting IMO. The results were extremely predictable, in my case at least.
"The biggest correlation we found between gender and any one personality trait was r=0.42, which means that gender explains 18% of the variability in that trait. Another way to put this is... if you knew a random person's score on that one personality trait, and you tried to guess that person's gender using just that score, you'd mispredict that person's gender 31% of the time!"
They think that's low! That's crazy high for just one trait, it would be called "Highly significant" in any paper.
It’s saying these differences are connected to sex, but it’s not saying they’re not connected gender. Didn’t the article say that research hasn’t been done?
It would be interesting to see whether these differences were more or less correlated with gender rather than sex.
It would also be interesting to see what differences there are between trans and cis men/women, and whether/how these change as a trans person transitions.
We have hundreds of years of claimed differences which today sound a bit silly.
By extension, it could be eliminated in a single generated given total control of the socialisation and schooling process.
This is not a meme or a rare view - Steven Pinker wrote a book countering this worldview 20 years ago.
The only way the above is logical is if there are no inherent differences between men and women. Otherwise, we have no way of determining how much disparity is from inherent factors and how much is from environmental. Put another way: if you believe female (or any race) under representation is caused by discrimination you should be able to define the correct level of representation if there was no discrimination (I have yet to see this number defined in any instance, which is concerning because there’s no way to measure impact or progress).
Given that we’re broadly implementing much policies is strong evidence that many believe there are no inherent differences.
It usually takes the form of insisting that underrepresentation of women in $profession is proof of discrimination and/or a hostile environment.
It’s truly amazing and wonderful that we can do this, and I’ve learned so much from the experience. It’s hard to describe the changes precisely, but I’m finding that women make more sense to me and are more interesting to talk to, while I have a lower tolerance for men trying to act tough, which before seemed silly but now seems annoying. I’ve also found that I have less interest in action movies and recently I’ve been more interested in romantic comedies and stories of people.
At Christmas dinner my dad got really racist and previously I would have gotten very angry and probably tried to set him straight, but instead I just felt sad and upset and I calmly got up from the table and walked away to calm down.
I’ve also started experiencing monthly cycles where for about one week a month I feel more tired and weepy like I could cry very easily. I have WAY more sympathy for women who have difficult periods now, because I never actually understood the extent to which it affects them. I think now it’s unfair that we expect women to show up and work every day and perform the same, because for some women their period can be physically disabling.
I’ve felt like my emotions have gotten stronger except for anger. My other emotions like love and empathy and sadness have gotten stronger, and I also find more variation in them throughout the monthly cycle. Before, my emotions were pretty much the same every day. I mean I had ups and downs, good days and bad days, but it always sort of stayed within a certain range. Now I feel like I’m a certain way for three weeks, and then for the fourth week I have that aforementioned weepyness and stronger feelings.
It’s a real shame that people get so bent out of shape about trans people. I think it’s beautiful that we can do this. It’s helping me understand so much about a world I never quite realized was there. I remember male comedians in the 1990’s complaining about women. It was always a punchline to a cheap joke. But now through hormone therapy individuals can actually cross that line, and experience the other side. I hope that more people do this and share the experience. Everyone needs to hear this story.
Also contrary to what some people would think, I’m no less interested in engineering. I’m still designing and building an open source solar powered farming robot (see my profile) and designing circuit boards and setting up servers for fun. But I’ve also realized that stuff isn’t the only thing I want to do, and I’ve been spending more time sewing and cooking too. I think I’m developing an appreciation for more of the world and becoming a more well rounded person. I wouldn’t say everyone should do this, but it’s definitely the right thing for me. And everyone should have the right to make the same choice if they’d like.
Depending on method of administration, changes occur sooner or later. A common one is "monotherapy" with only estrogen injections in oils which get released over time.
Do you see any possible downsides at the individual or societal level?
I don’t see any downsides to more people doing this.
The idea that there are no downsides doesn't mesh with reality.
These drugs you are taking are no joking matter and your fortuitous lived experience doesn't make your claim less preposterous
It's a bit sci-fi, but the way you described it is so beautiful, I'd love to better under the complete richness and beauty of the human experience from both sides, even if only temporarily.
I'm sure the world would be a better place if all had the chance to experience both sides and then chose.
Anyway either way you’re right I think it’s a pretty neat experience!
It’s also helping me understand women more.
I disagree. I think you're understanding your own experience more, but then you've trying to fit that to what you see or hear about from women based on a lot of assumptions that probably aren't valid.
Since we have no direct access to the internal mental state of others (and scarcely that of ourselves sometimes!) we can never be sure that we're experiencing what others are. There's a millennia-old thought experiment about imaging how we each experience the color red. How can I know that what you experience when you see an apple or a fire engine is anything like what I experience? If we could stimulate the same neurons in the optic nerve or in the various brain structures, would we each understand the stimulus as "red"? And I think that modern observations of phenomenon like synesthesia suggest that our internal qualia really do differ a lot.
That leads me to believe that it's wrong to think that hormones have changed you to experiencing things "the way a woman would", and more strongly, I'm skeptical that there's any set of qualia that can be placed in a bucket as how a woman experiences the world - I think it's absolutely individual.
(this also, by the way, makes me question how anyone can believe that their internal experience more closely matches "being a man" or "being a woman")
The biggest thing that helped me understand women was when I changed my hormone dose and added progesterone two months ago. The subsequent few weeks were a roller coaster for me. I had a short temper, was irritable, and couldn’t control my emotional responses. My therapist said “you sound like a pregnant woman”. (I’m not saying it’s the same, just pointing out that this is something my therapist said.)
I have a partner who is non-binary but AFAB, has had two kids, and is going through perimenopause. They have strong monthly cycles, which have increased in intensity in the last two years due to perimenopause. We met this year so it’s all I’ve known.
Once a month they get really irritable, have a short fuse, and a harder time controlling their emotions. (I’m not putting this on them, they’ve been telling me about it as we have to plan our dates properly during this time.) Their emotional response to their period is more pronounced than anyone I’ve dated, probably because they’re in perimenopause.
I never fully understood the extent to which emotional regulation became difficult until I suddenly added progesterone to my body. Then I experienced a similar moodiness due to a change in hormones.
What I came to understand was how strong these changes can be in women. I now realize that for some women their period can be really intense, and they really can have a genuinely hard time with certain things. Exactly like I would if I was going through that.
So one thing I understand better is how hormonal fluctuations can change your body and your mind. When I first met my partner I didn’t understand the extent to which things would get difficult for them during their cycle. Then I started taking progesterone and I experienced strong emotional swings. It “clicked” for me how bad it can get for my partner.
The other thing is that women just make more sense to me, just in conversation. It’s hard to describe but things click more than they used to. You can never fully understand another person, but the point of conversation is to communicate complex ideas and mental states to others. I find that easier now than it was. Sorry that’s subjective but it’s funny actually it seems like women are more likely to believe someone’s subjective experience without interrogating it and demanding it get resolved to some factual kernel hah.
I have a partner who is non-binary but AFAB, has had two kids, and is going through perimenopause. They have strong monthly cycles
At first I thought you were saying that all three of them - mom and kids - have strong cycles. That makes sense, since it's known that women living in close company can synchronize their cycles, but your later discussion makes that sound really weird.
After a few re-reads, I realize that it's a pronoun problem. Your use of the plural pronoun made your comments rather more difficult for me to read.
My wife has lower then normal for women testosterone levels, but she always have been a bit less girly then other females (in behavior, not looks). She felt for example that she had little to no maternal instincts after giving birth to our child.
It seems rather unscientific to make such baseless claims about a very specialised area most people don't have knowledge of, and mentioning anecdotes about your wife is totally irrelevant...
The other is an assumption that someone's observed characteristics are caused by one particular hormone level, with no evidence to support that.
You could attribute her height and preference for fatty fish to her T levels too, if you strained hard enough.
But this is subject to placebo effect, as the OP said, so you can't directly infer a casual influence on behaviour.
> The other is an assumption that someone's observed characteristics are caused by one particular hormone level, with no evidence to support that.
The OP did not say the lack of maternal instincts was caused by lower than normal testosterone, they simply noted that she had both characteristics.
However testosterone and estrogen (and progesterone) pretty seriously affect the mind. There are very real effects beyond just placebo.
Higher levels of estrogen do generally make emotions feel more intense and lower levels of testosterone generally would make someone less likely to engage in a conflict.
Hormones don't really change your core personality though. I dbout someone would become less interested in something like tech because of a change in hormone levels. However, you might be more likely to pursue emotionally fulfilling careers and hobbies in the future, and I think in arrogate this could be what accounts for some of the sex differences we see in male / female career paths. As you mentioned, estrogen make emotions more intense and it seems likely to me that this might in part explain why women seem to enjoy social careers more - perhaps because they provide more emotional stimulus.
Neonatal levels of hormones probably have a larger role in shaping our core personalities though. One example of this would autism spectrum disorders which tends to make people more interested in "things". There is now some evidence that autism is a product of irregular hormones levels during development.
Do “maternal instincts” exist in the first place, and how do they differ from just parental instincts?
Explaining a failure to bond with your child through gender seems very questionable to me.
In some mammals, fathers have literally no contact with their offspring while mothers care for them for years (eg, bears). In others, the mother and father both remain as part of a pack, but the mother does all of the direct care and the father is doing hunting or protection. In some, the father may have a minimal role in early life but then become more involved later as their offspring learn to hunt or fight.
The social construct of both parents having equal and identical roles in parenting at all stages of child development is very new and very culturally unique to Western, industrialized and affluent societies. Across all primates and all evidence of pre-industrial humans, maternal and paternal roles were very different.
So, it is simply not true “across all” anything. I will forego badly parroting what actual experts say, so instead I recommend Robert Sapolsky’s lectures on this in his biology courses at Stanford. They’re available on YouTube.
I also notice you just vaguely referred to various animals in instead of humans, which is curious.
My position here, to be clear, is that there are gender differences in personality and phenotype, but they are mostly inconsequential for child rearing in a resource-rich society, ie, both genders are equally competent parents. Individual variation outweighs gender differences.
Intentionally so, because humans are animals and that's an imaginary distinction. Modern western society likes to pretend like we're these abstract minds that are attached to bodies. We're not, we're primates, only a tiny bit different than our ape cousins.
If you want to stick to humans, for about 99.9999% of the 315,000 years humans have been around, no mother was pumping breastmilk and sticking it in the refrigerator so that the father could do the 4am feeding.
Your comment is essentially putting a causal arrow backwards. Biology and nature would have us behaving in far more strongly differentiated gender roles. Contemporary western social norms and modern technology allow us to go against that nature. "Maternal instincts" are as real and fundamental as any other survival instinct humans or any other animal experience.
But please don’t let “human is just smart monke” turn into some naturalist fallacy wherein men must be manly because we were made so. We weren’t, but given a stressful environment, we CAN turn out that way.
This sounds like wishful thinking to me. In women, the periodic mood changes happen during the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, and coincide with the rise in progesterone that is triggered by ovulation.
Males don't have ovaries, so do not ovulate, and thus cannot experience the menstrual process that causes such periodic symptoms.
I think you're seeing this pattern because you want to, not because it has any underlying periodic hormonal cause.
The "monthly cycle" thing is not usually reported.
Not that I'm saying that isn't truly your experience :)
Certainly I do not doubt that they have recently started enjoying romantic comedies, human interest stories, sewing, cooking and not getting into arguments about racism, but I am skeptical that these are caused by externally-induced hormonal changes, rather than correlating as part of a broader set of intentional gender-transitional changes.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19789167/
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17117339/
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25505380/
Also, the first paper is written in Croatian and the second in Spanish, so it seems odd to link these on an English language forum. The odds of finding someone who understands all three languages well enough to discuss these researchers' work with you is, most likely, extremely low.
You are dismissing articles that contradict your beliefs on the basis of lacking the capacity to read them, not of their content.
No comment on the other 3 references, thus that response does not contribute to the discussion, except for showing that you do not care about reaching some truth. But then again that account is only a few minutes old.
If you would like to make a point about why you believe that enjoying romantic comedies, sewing, cooking, etc. are driven by hormonal changes rather than some other factor, please lay out your case.
Citing a random selection of papers that you haven't read does not help to achieve this. It just gives the impression that your viewpoint is not a seriously considered one.
Changes in activation patterns affect our perceptions, our senses, and literally the medium by which we experience the world. They may not affect our personality instantaneously, but our personality is malleable, and depending on feedback, it changes.
If our brain's activation patterns change s.t. certain things are more enjoyable, then these new patterns integrate in our personality.
If you're correct, then it's quite possible that all the other subjective feelings experienced by the poster are similar ... psychosomatic, maybe?
The placebo effect is a real thing.
So far as I'm aware, there's zero evidence that women's emotions are stronger (what would that even mean?), and certainly not that while the other emotions are stronger, anger is excepted. I'm pretty certain that women experience anger just as strongly as men.
As mentioned down-thread, this could be placebo. But there are also lots of other potential explanations, ranging from the simple passage of time, maturation, and aging, to immense relief at having achieved their transition, and so on.
For my part, I had a sharp change two months ago when my estrogen dosage increased and we added progesterone to my routine. (One effect of these meds was to reduce my testosterone levels.) So that was not an aging or maturation related change because it happened in a month. I found it easier to cry and harder to get angry.
Well, there’s now a conflict of rights between sex-based and gender-based identities.
When you say “It’s truly amazing and wonderful that we can do this,” you’re expressing a kind of euphoria [1] over becoming more feminine, but to many female people being feminine isn’t particularly what they want to be or to them what makes someone a woman - a woman is just an individual who happens to be female.
[1] “the experience of pleasure or excitement and intense feelings of well-being and happiness”.
I’ve no problem with people who wish to live in what’s called ‘a gender non-conforming way’ but I do have issue with the view that (for example) “To be identified as woman one must conform to one of a subset of appropriate genders”.
Here’s a thought experiment - if typical female people started behaving more like your father, brother, uncle etc now act - if as a social change the ‘gender’ associated with females became masculine - would you still identify as a woman?
Nothing in your post supports, or is even suggestive of, any such “conflict of rights”.
At most, it demonstrates a conflict of preferences for how gender is ascribed to other people with other people's gender identity, but imposing gender on other people is not a right.
So I apologize but your questions don’t really fit with what I meant. I don’t personally like the idea of rigid gender roles.
The issue which people react so allergic to is the complete lack of tolerance by the transgender community.
If someone points out that a man who really wants to be a women is in principle still a man then they get instantly labelled a bigot. It completely misrepresents the definition of tolerance. Tolerance can only exist in a state of disagreement. If we all agree on something then we have nothing to tolerate. Tolerance is really the act of people accepting that some men want to live their lives like women without actually believing themselves that these men are women. That is tolerance and therefore anyone should be allowed to hold the opinion that trans women are not women but that’s okay because we’re still cool in calling you a female name and complimenting you if you wear a nice dress.
It’s like with religion. It’s perfectly fine to tell a hardcore christian person that you think god doesn’t exist. It doesn’t make you a bigot, just a human being with an opinion. As long as we still let people live their own experiences without fear or discrimination then we don’t all have to believe in the same god. It’s the same about gender ideology. The trans community needs to accept that only because they feel they are something that it doesn’t mean everyone feels that way about them. The vast majority of people have no issue with transgender individuals. They just know that a man with a mental health condition is in principle still a man and we shouldn’t be ostracised to state truths like this.
Objection: assumes facts not in evidence.
Being transgender alone does not constitute a mental health condition. Dysphoria is the culprit. If people could transition at will The Culture style there would be zero confusion on this point.
The problem is that a lack of genuine acceptance of trans identities (i.e. that trans men are men, and trans women are women) inevitably leads to trans people _not_ being treated the way they want to be treated.
The classic examples of these are bathrooms and athletics. Trans people want to use the bathrooms and compete on athletics teams corresponding to their identity. It sure feels like intolerance when this choice is denied from trans people.
I don’t know your own personal views, but it’s certainly not the case that “the vast majority of people” are aligned with trans people on the above issues.
I know I'm not the first person ever one to bring this up, but it's unclear to me how letting someone with (largely) the physique of a man compete against women is acceptable.
There's a reason why (competitive) sports are usually divided by male/female, and that reason still overall holds for someone who is trans. There's a lot of gray area here depending on if and when they undertook HRT, sure, but labelling this as "intolerance" is not right in my book.
This division is arbitrary. The reason for this is the premise of fair competition that identical people should compete. Yet white males dominate male swimming whereas black males dominate male sprinting. There have been physiological explanations based on center of mass things afaik. Knowing that, why don't we split the competitions accordingly? Martial arts have categories based on weight, why shouldn't we have categories based on arm-length or blood volume? It's easy to see that the whole premise of fair competition is very naïve: where do you stop? What are the criteria for determining if competitors are "identical enough"? Choosing these criteria will be a political choice. Transgender people in sports are disturbing the status quo, but they just made apparent the inherent instability of the thing.
Now i don't know about you, but when i personally do sports, for one i'm not good enough that physiological characteristics make the greatest differences: this problem mostly appears when we reach the limits, by "optimal training". Second, i'm playing as an amateur, that is for entertainment and for the art of it, which means that i will mostly play to be part of a good game, show off and see nice skill displays, and share this experience with other people, some of them with different levels of training and physical capabilities.
I just wanted to say that this thread is imho unrelated to the issues of transgender and more to the fact that competitive sports is broken and the political struggle between professional and amateur sport.
what the hell, how is Men's and Women's sports categorization arbitrary? its clearly defined who plays in which category.
No, actually the reason is that it makes both watching and competing more interesting. A competition where women never got anywhere near first place would mean women would simply stop showing up (or vice versa). A boxing championship with no weight classes would mean no lightweight boxers would sign up.
On the other hand, with enough subcategories you can get to the point where some competitors win by default, or where you have championships of one or two matches.
So no, it's not arbitrary to separate competitors by some physical characteristics and not others. There are practical reasons to do so that are unrelated to the whims of organizers.
If we remove the gender division from, say, javelin throwing (random choice; current difference in world records there is currently 30% for reference). Now there won't be any (cis) women competing at the top level any more.
So somebody goes ahead and creates a women's division (or whatever you want to call it). Should we somehow forbid this? Or would it be required that they accept any transgender individual in any state of transition? And either case is just "back to square 1" - no cis women have a chance. I don't see how "let's remove the 'women' category in this competition in the interest of fairness to trans people" is improving things for anyone...
This is an interesting one.
I definitely find being told I have to accept that "trans women are women" off putting and like the Aesop's fable with the wind and the sun, it feels like the wind blowing and makes me want to hold on to that jacket tighter.
The way I see it, trans women are trans women, and trans men are trans men. They occupy a different category in my mind than either.
I'm trying to imagine how I would feel going to either bathroom as a trans person, and the only answer I can come up with is "riddled with anxiety".
Who says so? What has been your personal experience with "the transgender community"? If you're seeing it through the polarized lens of online (specifically big platforms) interaction, then for sure you are seeing it as intolerant. But the same could be said about almost every pov online: most of what we get to see widely is vocal, shallow, unsubstantiated takes. Because that's what get viral.
So for one, there is no such thing as a "transgender community". There are most surely publicized simplified canons of what a transgender person is like, just like there is for "the average white dude", "the academic leftist", "the trump fan" or "the new age craftsy person". The thing is, there are very few person actually like that and the one that are, are usually like that because of tremendous influence of online platforms on their views.
All in all, with all respect, i think you are fighting a strawman. Personally, my course of action in this matter (shallowness, simplifications and argumentative intolerance getting more widespread) is not to fight against it for people you disagree with, because they for sure won't listen to you, but to fight against it for people you actually agree with. This is the thing: in every of these "communities" you describe (transgender, religious, could be anything) there is actually little internal cohesion and there are different political ideals interacting. I prefer to put my own house in order. In fact that's the only thing i can meaningfully impact.
I am a lesbian woman and in a gay dating app I have been receiving dozens of death threats and I was even banned after I got reported by a group of people because I put this sentence in those exact words in my profile:
“I support LGBTQ+ rights and I am a proud member of this wonderfully vibrant community. I welcome all transgender people and count many as my friends. However, without causing anyone upset I would like to state that I am only interested in dating female bodied women and I would kindly ask everyone to respect my sexual preferences.”
I’ve been a lesbian for 39 years and I never felt this hated and attacked by any other group of people. I am not saying that transgender people attack me, but it’s transgender activists (often men who identify as men) who say the most vile and nasty things to me because of my sexual preference which I tried to express in the most respectful way.
I doubt that is the main reason. Society has been pretty clear for a long time that certain people found trans people too strange to accept them. Gay people have been treated the same way. I think most people that don’t like trans people are probably also uncomfortable with gay people even if they are more likely to say it’s okay to be gay.
> If someone points out that a man who really wants to be a women is in principle still a man then they get instantly labelled a bigot.
You can avoid being called a bigot by understanding the following basic concepts.
Sex and gender are two distinct ideas. Gender as described by Judith Butler is a kind of performance that you do. It starts in childhood where we give boys the color blue and toy trucks and we give girls the color pink and dolls. Men wear pants and never wear dresses and women wear dresses and skits and use a purse. A man never wears a purse and if he has anything close it’s called a bag, definitely not a purse.
The above are made up concepts. Clothes and bags and pink and blue are not biological reality, they’re just made up by society. They’re part of a performance of gender. You can change your gender just by changing your performance.
Sex is a biological concept that relates to what secondary sex characteristics your body presents. Hormone levels, genitals, etc. this is still don’t a binary concept as intersex people exist and are something like 1% of the population. It’s also unclear if someone completely changes their hormones and has surgery to change their genitals, what is the point of saying “you’re still a man”? Such a statement is likely to bring up feelings of pain and misery the person has had from people who have been intolerant towards them. It also is unclear if you’re referring to biological sex or gender, and trans people are often terrified that they’re not performing their gender properly.
It’s like going up to a fat person and saying “wow you’re fat” and then walking around saying “fat people are intolerant because they get upset when I call them fat”. Maybe on some level you’re right, but you’re being an asshole if you insist on saying that. And again, if a trans person has severely changed their sex hormones, the concept of “sex never changes” is shaky anyway.
So stop trying to tell trans women they’re really men. Such a statement completely misses all the subtle realities of such a statement, serves no productive purpose, and is rude as hell.
Surely you meant people who desire to transition? If I could have that experience in a completely temporary way without messing up my hormones, I might. But I like being a man and don’t want to mess up my health just to experience that. It’s not the same as recommending more people try meditation or volunteering with disabled children. Those things can change your worldview without totally altering your body chemistry.
It’s great that you want to do this and are able to. But I think most people don’t want to.
Personally, I don't think that taking HRT will actually make a man understand women any better, so perhaps my response to GP should have been that.
Edit: fix op/gp monikers
In my experience, the best way to understand how women experience the world is just as you said: spend time with them, talk to them, and - most importantly - listen to them. I think many men could benefit from having more female friends (and I mean truly friends, not secretly trying to get in their pants).
I've learned so much about how differently women experience the world just from befriending many women over the years. It's really opened my eyes to how differently women might experience the same situation. It's amazing how different society treats women and it can be totally invisible to men unless you're willing to look for it. I think it's made me a better husband and father as well.
Edit: sorry, I sorted writing this a while ago while making tea, none of the other responses were there, and now that I've posted it I see a whole bunch of people making similar points. Sorry.
Relying on our gut like our ancestors, who for example believed in the obvious reality of witches, is the best way to be ignorant of what is really true.
Indeed, if they were real, we would be quite correct to persecute them.
Would we? I'm not familiar with the law that disallows contracts with Satan, or disallows ownership of supernatural powers.
For example I can point you the the hordes of research papers done on the effects of alcohol. The source of cancers, 40-50% of violent crimes are done under the influence of alcohol, predisposition to evils such as gambling, assualts, SA, domestic abuse, drink driving, effects on mental and physical health and much much more. Truly an endless well of evil that stems from this substance. It has been explicitly verified with the scientific method that it carries significant harms that outweigh any so called benifits.
Yet I can guarantee almost all people who assert science as the only way to truth and morality, promote alchol consumption despite the very clear studies backed by research on the depravity of alcohol with regards to the individual and society.
So as much as science can say something is bad, the people who say science is the only way to truth need to be consistent and onboard its conclusions rather than picking and choosing moral boundaries when convenient.
Science is definetly not the only tool for validating reality.
Testimony is an integral part of all of our lives for ascertaining truth. We know that the country of Japan exists because we have maps and images of the place and geography teachers have testified that "this is Japan". It you really think about it, most of your entire life for knowing the truth is testimony. How many times do people pull out their microscope and scientific instruments to verify the world around them using the scientific method? We can even take a step further to say that we use testimony of scientists through their research papers to gain truth and understanding of a matter without having to peer review their papers.
Essentially we can assign high probability something is the truth with testimonials of individuals.
In regards to our ancestors it would be incredible to be dismissive of their experience and testimonies regarding the "supernatural". How is it possible that civilization all across the globe without contact have some sort of ghosts, spirits, demons, Jinns in their world view. Why do we discard their testimony instead on saying what is the probability that civilization without contact all have belief in a super natural entities?
This is an argument from incredulity, a common logical fallacy.
The consensus (across many scientific disciplines) is that our brains are more "buggy"than we realize. We routinely fall for biases, fallacies, superstitions, mass hysterias/hallucinations and other silly behaviour.
We're intellectually sophisticated compared to our ancestors. Yet, many of our contemporaries still "see" ghosts. "The Believing Brain" by Michael Shermer is a very approachable intro to the topic of how this phenomenon came about and why it persists.
> How many times do people pull out their microscope and scientific instruments to verify the world around them using the scientific method
It's a regular occurrence in schools around me. YMMV
> Essentially we can assign high probability something is the truth with testimonials of individuals.
This statement is another example of fallacious logic (specifically, argumentum ad populum).
The business of truth is not a democracy.
> Why do we discard their testimony instead on saying what is the probability that civilization without contact all have belief in a super natural entities?
Because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
These goofy exercises in the eugenics of common sense and the obvious all require us to believe that if I raise one mouse in a dark 6 in^3 wooden box, and let another mouse run free (or even in a different kind of box), that at the end of that process I should still have two identical mice. The fact that men and women have different personalities and cultures is no more necessarily genetic than the fact that the English and the French speak entirely different languages.
I'm sure there are some genetic sex differences, but looking at the huge difference in how society treats kids from the youngest age on, I'm going to say it's very hard to differentiate between genetic vs. society.
Even more we don’t even remotely understand how those confounds work - much less be able to control for them. This is why most psych / sociological experiments are weak.
The problem is not of one isolated mouse but a society of mice and how your physical size, vulnerability (men don't have period pains or pregnancies) affect how you relate to society and thus your personality.
The question of how genetics causes us to mold our children according to gender norms might be at least as interesting as the question of how genetics directly influences preferences.
Women are not a permanent lower caste. In term of their social status (and social economic status) their median are similar, even slightly higher than men. Their variance is much smaller, with few women at the very high and and very few at the very bottom. This difference in variance do causes problem for society but the fixes are less obvious than in cast societies where one demographic fully dominate the bottom of society. When looking at household social status, women have much higher in average social status than men (for the above reasons).
Women are also not victims of violence more men. The opposite is true. Men are much more likely victim of violence then women. Women are much less likely however to be perpetrators of violence towards men. In term of behavior there is also the slightly less known fact that in domestic context, violence from a man to a woman, man towards an other man, and woman towards an other woman is identical in violent domestic disputes per household. This is why the full title of those reports tend to be called "men's violence again women and violence in same sex relationships". The implication in terms of genetics is that either a person sexual preference influence violence, or women and men are equally violent but in different contexts.
(Edit: To pull down some statistics from Sweden as an example. Men are the most common recipient to need social support. Single men without children living below poverty line are more than twice the size of the next group below, which is single women without children living below poverty line. The group after that is single mothers, and the one after that are families with two married adults and at least one child.)
Aren't the females of almost every first world demographic objectively better off than males in many metrics?
They experience longer life, less violence, more social services, better education, more bursaries, less injuries at work, higher median income amongst the entire population, lower sentences for crime ... and more?
Are those metrics not important?