Introduction and Gender vs. Sex

Hi. My name is Preston, and this is a blog about changing my mind.

        I am the type of person that gets a lot of things wrong. I am quick to judge and slow to change. My world view is plagued by bias and riddled with illusions about how the world works. Several years ago I decided to dedicate myself to the destruction of as many illusions in my perspective as I can find. I have tried to find as many logical contradictions and fallacious lines of thought in my sense of the world as might exist - and challenge them. I am writing about them mainly so that I can find more. I would hope that anyone who reads this would point out as many errors in my thinking as they can find. The greatest signs of care and friendship I have come across are times when people have shown me errors in my train of thought. There have been occasions, lasting years at times, when I have been stuck. I have had some problem or another and have spent most of my free time letting it weigh on my mind. I turn it over and over, and yet can find no way to solve it. In these times, the problems are almost always solved by some true friend showing me an error in the mental cage that I have built for myself. If I had not been so blind to my own closed mindedness, much effort in mental struggle would have been saved.

        Finding this pattern being repeated throughout my short life, I decided to attempt to get out ahead of my own ignorance. This meant a process of trying to find any idea that I held as just "true." There have been many of these ideas, and they tend to be unjustified beliefs which I hold for no logical reason. My worldview was, and still is I am sure, of these entirely unsupported beliefs. Its meant that my actions have been based on a view of the world that has been mostly made up, and that is an unpleasant thought to have rattling around in my brain. So every now and then I will be writing up something that I assumed I knew about, and why I changed my mind on the subject. Some things may be big, some things might be small, and my hope is that my friends will share with me the reasons why I am still wrong on the subject, point out all the mistakes I am still making. Entirely new subjects that I should consider changing my mind about.

      This leads me to the first thing I would like to share my change of heart about. Gender. Gender is a subject that has had a bit of controversy surrounding it in the recent zeitgeist.

                  

 

      One of the things that drew my attention to this subject is the meme above. I came across it, and found myself more or less agreeing with the sentiment.Here comes the hardest part of this, doing justice to a point of view I no longer think is valid, and am not proud that I once held.

     I believed there was no difference between gender and biological sex. Whenever I read or heard someone talking about the existence of more than two genders, I immediately dismissed their view as ignorant. I have always tended to be on the left side of the political spectrum, but this one thing I disagreed with putting my 9th grade biology understanding of this above any new piece of evidence that may come across. Though I do not have a clear memory of anyone instance of this happening in my own education, I believe it to be quite likely that in that biology class I took in 9th grade the teacher or textbook used the words sex and gender interchangeably. If it didn't occur in that specific location, it certainly was a common enough element of popular understanding. I do not know if this is due to a lack of understanding in psychology that gender may not be tied to biological sex at the time, or a popular unwillingness to accept such an idea. Either way I was of the understanding that it was extremely unlikely that gender and sex could be separable. I had seen Tumblr's list of genders and thought about how the aggregators of this list could be nothing but ignorant of chromosomes definition of sex and therefore gender. In a system defined by only two binary variables, at most there are only 4 variables, and since one of the two variables is fixed in this case, how could you possible have more than two? It is a very simple math problem, counting the possible states of this system. 

     My error in this view was the conflation of the ideas gender and sex. The best part of this error was that it was easily corrected with a quick google search. From the American Psychological Society's 'Dictionary of Psychology' : 

 Gender(n):

The condition of

being male, female, or neuter. In

a human context, the distinction

between gender and SEX reflects

the usage of these terms:

 Sex usually refers to the biological

aspects of maleness or

femaleness, whereas gender

implies the psychological,

behavioral, social, and cultural

aspects of being male or female

(i.e., masculinity or femininity.)

     Of course definitions of words is a fraught issue in itself. This may even be a new view of the word gender. However, I don't see much point in using two words to describe the same thing, especially when there is another aspect of the phenomena that clearly needs description. I had not had an issue with people "identifying as both man and woman, yet neither at the same time"  (Ambonec, again from Tumblr's gender master list) in their head. My issue was the claim that their biolgical sex was Ambonec. This clearly could not be true. However, when I realized that the were not talking about biological sex, and that our disagreement was simply a matter of definition, I realized that I was defining a word differently from them and then holding them to my definition. I had made a straw man, and instead of disagreeing with the actual claim, I disagreed with a claim that had never been made.

     This is not an issue I was likely to be vocal about, and did not hold onto passionately, and therefore it made it easy for me to be swayed after minimal effort into research. It only took me spending a few minutes actually attempting to understand the claim of the other side before I recognized how I was wrong and changed my mind. In future posts I plan to discuss issues that took more than a conversation with my partner and small bit of research to change my mind. I welcome arguments that I may have missed on this issue, send me a message or make a comment!