Online Gender Workshop 3

I’m going to apologize upfront. First, this is a day late. Real life has intervened, and it looks like every other day may end up being the schedule. I want to keep the momentum of one post a day, and I will try again to do that, but family responsibilities and an upcoming law final are limiting my ability to get longer posts done in a timely manner. For my second apology: I set up a trap exercise, at least to some extent. I won’t do this in the future, but to get a real appreciation of a trap, sometimes you have to be pushed into it. This is one of those times where the artificial trap in the exercises should (I hope) reflect the nature of traps that are integral features of the gender terrain.

Antiochus Epiphanes clearly caught on with comment #25 in the previous thread:

I’m not trying to be difficult, but can an object be said to have a gender?

Call me a jerk for setting this trap if you like, but today we’re going to begin to go back and look at our previous definitions of masculine, feminine, woman, man, and gender. Are your definitions inclusive of objects? If not, and if you then took this exercise seriously, what does that mean?

Feminist analysis of gender has been crucial to the ethical progress the English speaking world has made in the last 200 years. I by no means wish to throw it under the bus. Nor is it illegitimate to argue that objects and their placements in pictures or videos can be used to send messages. But objects have gender only in the sense that objects have sale prices (not even just prices, but sale prices).* In the every day territory of gender naïveté, gender binarism is not merely dominant, it is literally unquestionable. But those who “problematize” gender rope in a blizzard of semiotics.

The result for trans* and intersex folk attempting to explain themselves, attempting to be, literally, recognized by others while interacting with the gender binarists is like living inside a misshapen forcefield. While others might find the field quite protective, a trans* person often can’t function without painfully straining against the field from the inside just to perform everyday tasks. The problems for intersex folk are traditionally different: as doctors are about to bestow a forcefield to an infant, the doctors recognize a difference in shape in one of the most sensitive areas of our human bodies. Thoughtfully, the doctors have a solution: cutting the body to fit the forcefield.

In conversations around gender in those willing to consider either modified gender binarism (yes, it’s binary, but man is not isomorphic with male, and woman is not isomorphic with female) or non-binary gender, it is now possible to have a conversation with others about how trans* people are gendered and intersex people are sexed. However, this topic is given weight and treatment distressingly similar to that of discussions on the gendering of staircases.

In one world, we are painfully confined and, since we are assumed not to exist (and cannot be properly seen through the distorted field when we try to make ourselves known), have no access to help. Our requests for help are not even intelligible. In another world, we have the same status as fascinating objects. In short, there is no language, there is no context, in which trans* people have full humanity. Intersex people are denied their humanity in ways different, but just as consequential.

Where are the gender-descriptive or gender-identifying words that area always humanizing (could never be applied to mere objects), yet just as applicable to trans* and intersex folk as to non-intersex cis folk? Have you seen any in any of the discussion here yet?

This provides an environment of forced choice: if a person can cushion contacts with the field through throwing on a sequined pill-box hat, a tuxedo, a pair of doc martens, or all 3 at once, might it be worth the confinement to have the protection of the forcefield, now that the protection is merely confining, and not actually harmful? If a person feels sufficiently protected by other forces, might more freedom of movement be worth tossing aside the safety of the force field?

And here we get to interesting questions. Like all lives, trans* lives are confluent lives. Is it possible that a person with more money, more class status, or whiter skin will be more likely to feel safe enough without a forcefield? Which disabilities make a person less threatening, and thus less a target for certain types of violence? Which disabilities make a person appear powerless, and thus more of a target for certain types of violence? How many disabilities have both these effects? The effects of confluence are a major factor influencing the number of murders of MtF PoC.

These effects also influence whether a particular victim is more likely to be identified publicly as a victim of a gender or sex motivated murder. Is an FtM person who goes by Alex and wears Dickies going to have hir story told accurately in the paper? Is a wealthy, white MtF person murdered at home going to have family or others concealing the circumstances (even the victim’s clothing!) to “protect his reputation”? And will the police be more likely to forgive the family their deceptions and accede to their wishes than they would be for an MtF person of color murdered on the way home from a bus stop?**

Any number of aspects of trans* life are directly affected by class, race, gender assignment at birth, legal sex, religion, and other socially important aspects of our lives and bodies. But one thing does not change: the gendered world around us is thoroughly dominated by a culture created by and for cis* people. In that world, because of that culture, cis* folks’ obsession with gender rules.

Obsession?

Well, yes. You’re the group that defines gender in terms of people but then tries to shoehorn in pencils and mugs. It is not enough that we have to know the gender of the people around us, but if we wish to engage with others, we have to know the gendered implications of literally everything around us, our entire context.

Why? Social rules and social consequences. As I’ve said elsewhere, it’s trivially easy to prove that behavior varies with the gender of one’s interaction partner. Studies of eye contact initiation, cessation, and duration between pairs of persons serve quite ably as proof of concept.*** Violating social rules caries consequences. In an effort to minimize those consequences, it becomes vital for those living in a gendered system to be aware of context and follow social rules of gender. While “nature” might have soft, feminine connotations in many contexts, “the outdoors” might have masculine connotations just as often. Which did your conversation partner use to describe the setting of a vacation? How do patterns of word choice (and tone of voice, use of questions and question marks, and more) influence how one is perceived? While it’s perfectly fine to be something other than a housewife-paragon or warrior-paragon, the more one deviates from gender expectations, the higher grow the risks.

Cis* people often have traumatic stories to tell about younger years when learning contextual gender interpretation and gender risk management. But for cis* folk, by definition, it is possible to live a psychologically healthy <i>adult</i> life that feels authentic <b>and</b> which is also sufficiently far away from the risky features of the gender terrain for cis* persons to make the vast majority of choices without any fear that <i>this one small step</i> will be the step to cause an injurious – or fatal – fall.

It is this relative safety, the distance from dangerous edges, that makes it possible for a cis* dominated culture to be so gender naive and gender obsessed at the same time. Without criticizing anyone, I note that the conversation about what is phallic took (predictably) quite confusing turns: a hexagonal pencil might not be phallic, one suggested, but a cylindrical pencil just might. Likewise, in everyday contexts, children must learn that grabbing a softball for a game of catch is coded feminine, while grabbing the smaller baseball is coded masculine. Take the time to read through just a little bit of past discussion again. Without taking anything away from the utility of becoming **aware** of gender signals, what does it reveal about the depth of our societies’ gender obsessions that we can find gendered cues literally everywhere we look? Imagine being so frequently at the edges that literally anything – whether one’s pencil is hexagonal or cylindrical – might be enough to make one’s gender a safety liability.

Moreover, we excuse our gender obsessions in ways that are horribly harmful. Most of us are willing to go so far as to say that objects <b>have</b> gender, rather than that we, as humans, project gender onto those objects in a manner as artificial as a shopkeeper slapping on a sale price. The price is by no means a property of the object, nor is the gender. It is a property of ourselves, which is, in part, why we can differ so much as individuals and as societies in the gendering of clothes, mugs, and other objects. When we dodge responsibility by saying things like, “Blue <b>is</b> a masculine color,” rather than, “I masculinize blue,” we are teaching gender irresponsibility and gender naturalism at the same time. Is it any wonder then, that in those too-common cases where trans* people’s assailants or murderers are brought before a justice system, defendants will displace the source of rage onto the victim? Is it any wonder that jurors, judges, and the media sympathize with defendant whose expectations of naturalism were violated and who certainly played no role in <b>creating</b> those expectations? If they did recognize that, rather than trans* deception or trans* victimization of cis* folk, what was actually happening was a setting of a trap by cis* folk specifically to catch out and punish trans* folk for being trans*, those jurors, judges, and media representatives might feel uncomfortably guilty.

And they should. While those determined to protect themselves from harm through the reinforcement of rigid gender forcefields go about deliberately confusing sex and gender, those like feminists who have much to gain from separating the two appear to be unable to muster a consistent vision of separate sex and gender, and in both cases the ultimate effects on those outside the norms of gender and sex are similar: dehumanization and invisibility.

So let’s take a look back at our original definitions from a less naive stance. The point of these exercises is still to get a definition of these terms <b>as you use them</b>, not as you would like them to be used. We will come back to these definitions one more time at the end of the workshop to come up with some that we feel will be helpful going forward <b>after</b> the workshop, but changing habits is hard if we don’t know what the habits are in the first place.

 

Exercise 12: Redefinitions. Let’s look carefully at just a few definitions:

a. Gender

b. Man

c. Woman

d. Feminine

e. Masculine

 

Try to come up with a new definition for at least 3 of these. Use your experience in the video exercise (including your critiques or rebuttals, and others’ critiques of your ideas) to guide you. Look back at the cues you used: these are gender cues, even where the assumption is that they reveal something about sex directly and gender only indirectly. What definitions of masculine and feminine accurately represent the indications of femininity or masculinity that you used?

Now think about the object exercise: did you gender an object? If you did, how can you define gender consistently with how it has been used by you in these exercises? Many people in gender studies break gender down into subcategories. Would you find it helpful to create multiple, subcategoric definitions? What would the subcategories be? What would the definitions be?

 

Exercise 13: Justice. No one used the word, or even from what I remember the concept, of justice in these definitions during our first attempts to understand these words. Does the concept of justice belong in the definition? Is gender active or passive? Are we better defining gender first and then looking at the implications for in/justice? Or are we better off specifically defining gender in part in relationship to how it contains or enacts in/justice? As a separate matter, note that I’ve been using pretty common psychological testing schemes: present one exercise, with attention to certain details, but actually testing and examining different details. Did you feel trapped? Do you feel like the exercises were unfair in having both a surface point <b>and</b> an unstated expectation that you would likely reveal what I’m calling gender naïveté and gender obsession? Is the experience of a gender-trap familiar to you? If you aren’t trans*, is it possible to see how the relentless examination of so many aspects of a person’s look, behavior, and context might be harmful? For trans* folks: do you find your response to be more often one of exhaustion or pain, or do you find yourself to be cultivating ignorance of the relentlessness of gendering as a coping strategy? Both?

 

Exercise 14: 4th Report. Unlike other reports, there is no part of exercises 12 or 13 that I’m not encouraging you to report back. Post as much of that thinking as you are comfortable making public. Only after that should you feel free to pick out individual portions of this post for free form response, but, yes, once 12 and 13 are done, anything in here is fair game for any type of serious response.

 

Previous Workshop Thread.

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Notes:

*I’ll let you all work on that for a while. Clearly we have some great minds working this stuff out here. If y’all want me to go into that metaphor more later, I might.

** It seems highly unlikely that the apparent targeting of MtF PoC over other trans* people does not reflect a reality of greater actual targeting of MtF PoC. But we’re frustratingly unable to know for sure, or to quantify those risks.

***See, e.g., Mayo, C and Henley, N M. Gender and Nonverbal Behavior.

 

 

 

It’s not the accent you hate. It’s the people.

Vocal fry is in the news again! Bethany Brookshire explains:

Bringing to mind celebrity voices like Kim Kardashian or Zooey Deschanel, vocal fry is a result of pushing the end of words and sentences into the lowest vocal register. When forcing the voice low, the vocal folds in the throat vibrate irregularly, allowing air to slip through. The result is a low, sizzling rattle underneath the tone. Recent studies have documented growing popularity of vocal fry among young women in the United States. But popular sizzle in women’s speech might be frying their job prospects, a new study reports. The findings suggest that people with this vocal affectation might want to hold the fry on the job market — and that people on the hiring side of the table might want to examine their biases.

I’m at a liberal arts college that is attended by at least 60% women, and I hear it all the time — and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. People have different voices, there are patterns that mark men and women, young and old, regions and races, and it’s no big deal — I actually find that the vocal fry becomes more common as people become less formal and more friendly, so it’s more a signature of a kind of knowing familiarity.

I thought that if it were off-putting in a job interview, as that study finds, it might be because that’s a situation with an expectation of greater formality, or as Language Log suggests, it’s because the recordings used in the study were a bit forced, and people trying to use an unnatural (to them) style of speaking can easily come across as insincere. But surely we don’t judge people by small variations in their speech, do we?

I forgot. People suck.

In an article on vocal fry on NPR, the commenters persuade me that there probably actually is considerable discrimination going on.

Ms. Eveleth admitted that she “sometimes” catches herself in her own high rising terminal (“upspeak”). How could she miss it, considering the number of people it must cause to void the contents of their stomachs?

More alarming than Eveleth’s contemptible defense of creaky speak was prominent on-air talent Rachel Martin’s claim that she’d never even heard of “vocal fry”. This is the state of broadcast journalism.

Upspeak bothers you? So much that you want to vomit? I suggest that the problem isn’t so much with the speaker as it is with people who want to so thoroughly police others’ speech patterns to the degree that they feel physically ill when they hear variants. I’m wondering how this commenter reacts to a Southern accent, which I find lovely, or to a Black American accent (which I also heard all the time when I worked at Temple University), or, horrors, the pitch accent of so many people in the upper Midwest.

Vocal fry is so subtle that most people don’t recognize it as a discrete entity, but apparently it is an indictment of all of journalism that a reporter should fail to deplore it with the vigor this commenter demands.

This one is even worse.

Also funny that Rose Eveleth doesn’t think vocal fry would interfere with job performance. I’d suggest that she consider how impossible it is to work with someone who habitually scratches out the final words of every statement. Vocal fryers don’t hear each other doing it, I guess. A community of unconscious croakers.

It’s not just women, either. You hear it in interviews with young male media hipsters. Guy Raz of the Ted Radio Hour has a curious sing-song vocal fry.

Awareness is the first step toward a cure. America needs mass speech therapy in the worst way. Up speak, vocal fry, and Valley Girl princess speech all constitute a national cultural emergency.

Edit: On second listening, Ms. Eveleth is not that bad a fryer, mostly lapsing into it in the egg story. And fortunately, Rachel Martin is completely fry-free, and a full vocalizer.

It’s a national cultural emergency! Speech therapy must be administered immediately to eradicate all variation from General American!

Jebus. I’ve been all over the country, and one of the things I like is that people have their own unique ways of speaking — ways that are distinctive and regional and act as indicators of identity. I’ve been to the United Kingdom and heard the range of voices there — I don’t know what that is they speak in Scotland, but it deserves a more appropriate label than “English” — and that makes the addition of a faint growl to the end of sentences trivial.

This isn’t about language at all. These vocal variations don’t affect communication in the slightest. This is all about language as a marker for class, race, and sex, and providing the excuse of subtle differences in speech as a way to publicly air prejudices. That guy who detests “Up speak, vocal fry, and Valley Girl princess speech” isn’t actually perturbed by how they speak — he has singled out a set of patterns associated with young women.

I also notice an omission. If we’re going to have mass speech therapy for the entire country, why is it to correct everyone to the General American standard? Flat and nasal isn’t pretty. If we’re going to do this and enforce uniformity, I’m going to insist that we use Shelby Foote as a model and get everyone to talk like that, with voices like soft music. Or maybe the casual, confident, laid-back style of Snoop Dogg. I also wouldn’t mind Sarah Silverman as a voice coach.

Anything but the boringly level voice of standard radio announcers everywhere.

So…when is George Will going to retire?

There ought to be a pasturage somewhere for out-of-touch old white men. His latest nonsense, in which he tells women to shut up about rape, will raise a few eyebrows.

They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous ("micro-aggressions," often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.

What exactly are these privileges one obtains when one is a victim of sexual assault? Name one. Show me one woman who covets being raped.

Will isn’t even aware of his inconsistency. He tries to do simple math and fails to recognize his failure.

The administration’s crucial and contradictory statistics are validated the usual way, by official repetition; Joe Biden has been heard from. The statistics are: One in five women is sexually assaulted while in college, and only 12% of assaults are reported. Simple arithmetic demonstrates that if the 12% reporting rate is correct, the 20% assault rate is preposterous.

Or that the 12% reporting rate is incorrect. The 20% number has been confirmed by the CDC, including both assault and attempted assault (an attempt can be traumatic, so there are no good grounds to exclude that), so it is likely very sound; the 12% reporting rate is an inferred estimate, because there is no directly measured number of unreported assaults — if there were, they’d be reported. So what should be understood from the “simple arithmetic” is that the frequency of reports is far lower than 12%.

But think about what Will is saying: being assaulted is supposed to be a “coveted status” that “confers privileges” on college campuses, but somehow, even with his inflated number, the vast majority of incidents are being kept secret by the victims. Why? Don’t they want their prize from the box of Cracker Jacks?

I’ll also note that Will complains that sexual assault includes nonconsensual touching as well as forcible penetration. I don’t get this attitude. Why does he want to narrow the definition of assault so much? Does he think it would be bad if someone walked up to him and shoved a dildo up his ass, but it’s OK if they instead slide their hand down his pants and gently cup his balls? There are a heck of a lot of things one could do to George Will short of literally raping him, and I think he’d agree (as would I) that a great many of them would represent criminal violations.

Perhaps he simply thinks all women ought to be accessible to a little involuntary fondling.

Online Gender Workshop 2*

You’ll note that we now have a separate thread for each exercise set. I won’t go back (if it’s even possible) to pull out exercises 5-8 and your responses from the first thread, but starting now we’ll be able to have people continue one discussion (on say, the video exercises, where it looks like Sundays wasn’t a great day for a lot of people) while the next begins.

Today’s exercise may be technically difficult for some of you, so I expect fewer people to complete it, but I hope everyone that joined us last week engages in the discussion. On the plus side, it requires a bit less time commitment than the video exercises, which may allow some people to catch up.

Exercise 9: Think of a gender neutral object. No. Not that one. Because gender, right? Exactly. That other one. Now you’ve got it. Ready? Sketch it. Sketch it without any context whatsoever to keep ideas about gender in relation to the object free from distractions caused by gender in relation to the context in which the object is drawn.

When finished drawing, upload that sketch somewhere (I recognize this won’t be possible for everyone).

Exercise 10: 3rd Report. Narrate a bit about choosing an object (whether or not you were able to post your sketch). Was it easy? Hard? Did the first thing that came to mind remain your choice? Now talk about the actual process of drawing. Did you stop, erase, and/or redraw at any point because of concerns that the sketch might not communicate gender neutrality?

In this report, provide a link to your sketch if you were able to upload an image.

Exercise 11: Discussion. Look at a number of the uploaded images. If there are any choices (or implementations of choice, through the image in the sketch) with which you disagree, say so. Provide an argument for gendering the object someone else considered gender neutral. If there are none with which you disagree, find someone’s comment that does disagree with one or more choices. Read that person’s argument and respond. Are you persuaded? Why or why not? You are welcome to defend your own choice in discussion, but if you do, you must do it using new arguments than the ones you made in exercise 10 when you initially discussed your choice and process.

 

Previous workshop thread. Next Workshop Thread.

*must. not. type. “:Electric Boogaloo.”

Damn you, Ed Brayton!

An experimental online workshop on gender

Crip Dyke has offered to lead a discussion of gender right here in the comments. Read the instructions below if you’d like to participate.

By the way, take it seriously and constructively if you do participate. I’ll be especially ruthless in slapping down trolling.

Gender is an endlessly complex subject. There are people who spend their entire lives attempting to understand and explain it. This is true even among those lucky languages speakers, I’ve been reminded, where “sex” and “gender” are separate words with intelligible histories that we can understand give them distinct meanings. [Note that here any points about language will be limited to English language terms, and not translations or cognates. We’ll have ourselves a sufficiently grand time struggling with one sex and gender in one language.]

And yet, despite thousands of lives devoted to understanding and explaining gender, sex, and their relationships to each other, very little new information has trickled down to those outside of the specialized disciplines that study them. This is at least in part because within and between these disciplines there is often confusion. “Gender bender” is a term thrown around science journalism, and sometimes by scientists to refer to chemical effects on protein expression in fish in colorado, as just one example. But to others, “gender bender” is a term specific to individual resistance to a cultural imposition of mores limiting the capacities, rights, responsibilities and roles based on nothing more than a person’s gender and assumptions that flow from a person’s gender about that person’s sex. Who has more “right” to the term and whether it has been misappropriated is tricky with such an idiom. The argument from etymology gives the nod to culture warriors, with the online etymology dictionary crediting the first use to a 1980 description of David Bowie. But as the same dictionary notes, gender itself was used to describe what we might now call sex for centuries, including the entire period of transition from traditions of “natural philosophy” or “natural history” to the newer tradition of biological science.

With different disciplines in conflict and with persistent public confusion rendering fine distinctions and points barely intelligible – if at all – in mass media, most folk are still struggling to catch up with the distinctions between sex and gender first articulated by second wave feminism. In fact, most feminists largely give up on such distinctions in communication outside academia, and sometimes even inside it. Abandoning the lessons and logic of past distinctions between sex and gender is probably overdetermined, but at least one cause is that English language cultures tend to relentlessly re-conflate sex and gender. In that environment, a feminist would have to be quite pushy indeed to force the concepts consistently apart, and we know all too well the consequences for feminists deemed pushy.

Where, then, should someone turn if interested in understanding sex, gender, their interplay, and the social dynamics thereof?

Inward.

In a rather unusual move for a blog (Thanks, PZ!) this space will be set aside for a workshop, of sorts. Over the next little while, starting late Saturday night PDT, I will comment here, approximately once every 24 hours, on aspects of sex and gender, then leave an exercise or two for those who wish to do them. Much of what is required is off-line thinking, and the results of some of these exercises I’ll encourage you to keep to yourselves. But for most, I’ll be asking you to post your thoughts when you are done. The first pair, found at the bottom of this post, will include one private exercise and one public where you are encouraged to share your thoughts. These exercises will lose quite a lot of value if you read others’ comments before you undertake them. So please, if you want to get the full benefit of this online workshop, look for my name and don’t read past my comment until you’ve completed any exercises you intend to do.

At that point, posting about the exercises – both about your thoughts and experiences while doing them, and any results that I might ask you to include – and responses to others’ thoughts, experiences, and results are quite welcome and helpful. Following along at home but choosing not to share your thoughts or results is also fine: this workshop is for all those who wish to learn something about sex and gender, not only for the extroverts and regulars.

Over the course of this workshop, each of us will be exploring inward alone, but I’ll be connecting your personal searches to outside information and context. For too many of us, we simply do not know where our knowledge of gender stops and our assumptions begin. We cannot even identify when we are misunderstanding others because we are so uncertain of our own thoughts, we cannot recognize when our assumptions aren’t shared. Eroding this barrier is the first task of those who want to have truly productive communication about how sex and gender manifest in ourselves, in each other, and in our societies.

For people who find concepts of transgender, transsexuality, gender queer, and gender fuck particularly tough nuts to crack, you may be surprised how much more leverage these personal explorations give than even the best set of definitions. For people more interested in social dynamics of gender, we will use limited numbers of “what” and “how” examples to explore the less well mapped terrain of “why”. Why do so many people choose to engage in a system of gender that hurts so many? Why do systems of gender have vocal defenders? Why do some people choose to spend so much effort attempting to dismantle it? Why are people so afraid of a world in which gender rules do not exist? While simple answers might not be available in this or any other forum, I hope and intend that people that engage seriously with the exercises, themselves, and with others’ comments will reach a level of insight necessary to know the frontiers of one’s own knowledge, and to ask good questions capable of moving past those frontiers into new realms.

Frontiers, however, are often dangerous places. They can be unsettling simply to experience, and too often instincts well adapted to other contexts fail us. Acted upon, those instincts can be dangerous, or worse: threatening. I fully expect that this terrain will be unsettling, frightening, and even dangerous for many of you.

But this frontier will not be lawless.

As your guide, I will be watching carefully. Behavior by persons of good will, but generated by maladaptive instincts will be noted and [hopefully-] helpful constructive criticism provided. But making the same mistake twice will be considered evidence of ill will. Unlike in other threads, if you believe a troll has infested this one, I ask that you simply send an alert to monitors. Do not engage here. Feel free, if you wish, to quote an objectionable comment from this thread over in the ThunderDome and then tear it apart there. But this is not a place to shine teeth or make points. These exercises will be more productive the safer we all are to take risks. My time and my words aren’t free, but the cost is minimal: be kind to others. Part of this kindness will be my quick attention to trolls. Part of yours will be to keep up a welcoming, supportive, collaborative tone.

That said, I’ll leave your first exercises below. Do them yourselves – don’t go ogle someone else’s language or ideas. If you’ve found this thread after Saturday (June 7th), feel free to join the conversation late but remember to tag any comments that include responses to exercises with the name or number of that exercise as the conversation will have moved past the exercises you are on.

Welcome to the Undiscovered Country, my gender nerds. Mount up.

==================================================================

Exercises:

1. Gender Identification: Use a word or short phrase to express your gender identification. Think of this as your private answer to your best friend, who knows tons about you and with whom you have shared intimate experiences and secret language … but happens to be a martian and, out of honest but kind-hearted ignorance, has just asked, “So, what is your gender?”

This can be as simple as a standard, one-word response, but if you find yourself going over 5 words (not including “I am a …” at the beginning) think seriously about whether you are writing a **description** or an **identification**. This is giving a name to a category, not giving a life history. Remember that your martian best friend knows your life history already. The fact that you are giving a name to a category, of course, does not preclude the possibility that the category has a total of one member.

This identification is for you alone. You are not expected to share it in the comments, though you are, of course, welcome to do so if you wish. More productive for commenting would be a narrative about how you came up with your gender identification. Was it automatic for you? Was it initially automatic and then you second-guessed it, but couldn’t find anything better? Did you have an initial identification that you rejected? Or did you start without an idea of what you might say and carefully considered a number of options?

2. Gender/Sex Definitions: Define at least three words from the list below. Do not define more than 6. (Two thou shalt not define, unless it is to then proceed on to define three.) Write a definition of each word you’ve selected without looking up the words on the web or in books. This includes declining to read others’ definitions in this thread until after you are done with your own. The definition should express – as exactly and honestly as you are able – what you, personally, mean when you use that word. If you know that you use the word in multiple ways, provide multiple definitions. However, each definition should be a definition according to your use of the word, not the uses or meanings of any other person.

a. Female.
b. Feminine.
c. Gender.
d. Male.
e. Man.
f. Masculine
g. Sex. [In this case, you may omit any definition that relates to “gettin-it-on” activities.]
h. Trans (with or without an asterisk, as “Trans*”)
i. Transgender.
j. Transsexual or Transexual. You may also choose to explain any differences between these that occur in your usage.
k. Woman.

l. Socially constructed/social construction. Feel free to take it on only if you’ve already defined at least 3 and no more than 5 other terms.

Once your definitions are written, you should include them in a comment posted to this thread.

3. Introduction and first report: Write a comment that introduces you to the others in this thread. It should say something about why you’re choosing to do these exercises, what level of gender knowledge you feel you have coming in, and what you hope to get out of this. Any other background information that you feel might help others in understanding your responses can be included (for instance, if English is a language you learned as an adult, people thinking about your definitions might benefit from knowing that). After introducing yourself, feel free to include anything (or nothing) that you wish to say about exercise 1. Add your definitions from exercise 2 **without commentary**. Do not include any information “about” the definition that doesn’t fit “in” the definition. If you feel embarrassed by your definition, think about whether the definition is honest and whether it is as clear as you can make it. If it is, you’ve done your work. Be proud. If it isn’t, try to dig up the courage necessary for more honesty or the language to make it more clear. Repeat as necessary.

4. Comment exchange: Read others’ comments after you have posted yours. If someone has defined a word that you also defined, think about how your definitions are the same and different. After we have at least 5 people who have offered an introduction, first report, and definitions, you can also post any thoughts inspired by others’ writing. Please make sure you’ve allowed at least 4 persons besides yourself to comment before you start this process. If 5 is a number that isn’t working, we can revisit that in the future.

Bon courage, and see you Saturday night!

Your friendly neighborhood Crip Dyke.

A clusterfk

In an interesting discussion of the genetic structure of human populations, Jeremy Yoder weighs in on Nicholas Wade’s little book of racism.

So with all due respct to Sewall Wright, modern genetic data pretty clearly show that if aliens arrived tomorrow and started sequencing the DNA of planet Earth, they would probably not sort Homo sapiens into multiple genetic subspecies. It is true that people from different geographic locations look different—and we have known that these visible differences have a genetic basis since the first time distant tribes met and interbred. But that interbreeding, and our drive to explore and settle the world, have maintained genetic ties among human populations all the way back to the origin of our species.

As the evolutionary anthropologist Holly Dunsworth notes in her discussion of A Troublesome Inheritance, whether you choose to focus on the visible differences among human populations, or on those deep and ancient genetic ties, comes largely down to a matter of personal inclination. Knowing what I do of evolutionary genetics, and of how our judgments about the visible differences among human populations have shifted over time, I’m far more inclined to think that the social, economic, and cultural differences among human societies are products not of our genes, but of how we treat each other.

Wade’s inclinations are, quite obviously, different from mine. However, comparing Wade’s claims to the scientific work he cites, I find it hard to conclude that we are simply looking at the same data with different perspectives. Time and again, data that refutes his arguments is not only available and widely cited in the population genetics literature—it is often in the text of the papers listed in his endnotes.

By the way, Wade has responded to various criticisms. I would not have thought he could dig himself any deeper, but he succeeded.

Despite their confident assertions that I have misrepresented the science, which I’ve been writing about for years in a major newspaper, none of these authors has any standing in statistical genetics, the relevant discipline. Raff is a postdoctoral student in genetics and anthropology. Fuentes and Marks are both anthropologists who, to judge by their webpages, do little primary research. Most of their recent publications are reviews or essays, many of them about race. Their academic reputations, not exactly outsize to begin with, might shrink substantially if their view that race had no biological basis were to be widely repudiated. Both therefore have a strong personal interest (though neither thought it worth declaring to the reader) in attempting to trash my book.

Holy crap. Nicholas Wade is a journalist who has no standing in any field of biology, and his criticism is that those who have repudiated his book aren’t experts in the very narrow and specific subfield of biology that he has deemed the only one of importance? And that they’ve only published scholarly reviews in science journals, rather than in the primary literature? You know that publishing a tertiary summary in a mass-market newspaper would have far less credibility to scientists, right, especially with Wade’s penchant for getting the science wrong?

Getting a Ph.D. is only the start of a scientific career — scientists spend their whole lives learning and exploring new ideas (that’s why it’s a little weird to see people getting multiple Ph.D.s — it’s really not necessary. Once you’ve got one, you’ve got the tools to be a scholar.) My grad school advisor started out his career with a degree in immunology, and drifted towards neuroscience, and then development, and then genetics as his career progressed — it would be really weird to judge his work as just an immunologist.

Scientists get trained in thinking scientifically more than anything else — something that Nicholas Wade missed.

When did New York and Texas secede?

Sriram Hathwar and Ansun Sujoe were the co-champions of the 2014 spelling bee. They have unusual names, and their skin is brown, so many good patriotic Americans questioned the legitimacy of those furriners takin’ over our spellin’ bee .

Sriram and Ansun are from Painted Post, New York, and Fort Worth, Texas. I think the comment that made it clearest was the one disappointed that all the ‘caucasians’ had been eliminated — everyone knows the only Americans that count are white.