On 29/04/2024 12:47, Udhay Shankar N via Silklist wrote:
What is a deeply held belief of yours that you think you would change if
presented with data that contradicts the belief?
To be honest, I try not to have deeply held beliefs; merely provisional
hypotheses.
The most recent example of changing a hypothesis that comes to mind is this:
I used to think that gender was purely a social construct. Male and
female people differ in some physical ways to do with baby-making parts
and body hair and muscle/bone density, but the effect of that on the
mind were pretty much limited to the fact that female people tended to
(on average) fancy male people and vice versa. Sure, I saw society
brimming with assumptions about the minds of male and female people, but
I figured this was all just sexism.
However, with transgender people becoming more open and visible and
getting to hear about their experiences, I was perplexed: they talked of
*feeling* male or female "inside". This was completely alien to me! I
feel nothing of the sort. I could imagine people wanting to change the
sex of their body (I mean, I find my facial hair situation kinda
annoying, and I'd really love to be pregnant, but I don't fancy the idea
of having periods!), but sort of at the level of people wishing they
were taller or shorter or thinner or fatter or whatever. But trans
people clearly were feeling something more intense than that, and they
wanted to be *seen* as their favourite gender, and described it as
"feeling right" to them in some way.
So, I came to the conclusion that:
1) Some people do have an innate sense of gender. At the very least,
trans people seem to. I still have no evidence as to how many cisgender
people actually do have a gender identity that matches their body/social
position, as opposed to just being largely happy to go with the body and
role they're born with!
2) I don't. I'm just a person in a male body who is attracted to people
in female bodies, and all this gender stuff is a mystery to me :-)
But there is definitely too much "social gender" about, and it's just
still just sexism. It's just that not ALL of gender is a social
construct; but please still don't things about people because of their
sex or gender, and do let them speak for themselves... Almost all human
sex/gender-linked characteristics are statistical properties of the
population as a whole: "men have a higher upper body strength" is a true
statement about *averages* but there are women who are far stronger than
the vast majority of men!
--
Alaric Snell-Pym (M0KTN neé M7KIT)
http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/
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