I claimed that the WHO article communicates a social constructionist view of gender (i.e. that gender is a social construct). This is based on how the WHO article specifically says:

Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other. As a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time.

Emphasis is mine.

Furthermore, gender (as a social construct) is differentiated from sex, which is treated as biologically real, again from the WHO article:

Gender interacts with but is different from sex, which refers to the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons, such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive organs.

I am failing to see what doesn't track about my interpretation of this WHO page, which part of my interpretation do you think I am mistaken about?

I feel like picking on an overview that explicitly acknowledges intersex individuals for not addressing the social construction of sex, while simultaneously being critical of it for addressing the social construction of gender is a bit nit-picky

Hm, I don't yet see the connection you are making between intersex individuals and sex? Are you saying that the acknowledgement of intersex individuals implies sex is a social construct? The article explicitly says sex is the biological and physiological characteristics, and contrasts it with gender as a social category.

Perhaps I am being nit-picky (I've been told I can be this way, lol), but I don't intend to be critical or harsh as much as just very clear about what the WHO article is communicating - which is the typical sex/gender distinction that I am trying to point out doesn't work.

I really feel like there’s this persistent conflation of gender categories and gender identity in your interpretation of what others are expressing, and an insistence that talking about social constructs is an endorsement of social constructionism as a whole.

It seems like we agree that the roles and attitudes we ascribe to gender categories are not objective, but socially constructed. “Gender” is regularly used to refer to both the category and the individuals identity as being to some degree a member of that category, and it’s expected that people know which is being referred to by context.

I've been thinking about this. You want to distinguish gender, as social roles and categories, from gender identity and point out that gender is clearly a social construct but gender identity is not.

Sure, the biology determines the gender identity (read: subconscious sex), but it also plays a role in behavior and physiology in a way that can't be cleanly separated from social roles, attitudes, categories, etc. Just to state the obvious, sexual traits have a bimodal distribution in a way that shows up in the binary quality of the social categories - it's not really a coincidence that the biology displays broad sexual dimorphism and the social categories reflect this, even if the biology is much more nuanced and complicated than our social categories imply. My point here is that the social categories are not entirely separate from the biology, there are obvious ways the biology influences the categories.

Furthermore, the gender identity is a way that the biology has consequences on gender as social categories and vice versa, since gender identity seems to orient the person's gender and those social categories can either accord or conflict with that person's gender identity. David Reimer, a cis man, being raised as a girl felt conflict with being raised that way - he was rowdy and showed certain proclivities that boys commonly do, despite being raised as a girl. Trans people have similar experiences where their innate tendencies accord with the gender category they were not being raised as. Somehow a person knows they should be a man or a woman, despite those being social categories.

I don't think the gender vs gender identity distinction solves the problem I am describing though it is an interesting argument. There are still biological components that play a role in what we call "gender" that we cannot claim only comes from socialization, even if some aspects of the social categories clearly are due to arbitrary socialization (like girls being drawn to pink and boys being drawn to blue).

Meanwhile, we tend to think about the biology wrong too, we fail to see the way the biology itself is communicated and understood through scientific concepts which are created to be useful to a particular end, and are not perfect accounts of the underlying reality it is trying to describe. Our biological concepts are useful fictions in many ways, and in that sense the supposed objectivity of "biological sex" melts into the same arbitrariness of a social construct. Sex is not as objective as we would have thought, and gender is not as arbitrary as we might think. In fact the sex/gender distinction doesn't makes sense when we know the gender category a person lives as comes from the biology and the sex characteristics are oversimplified models.

In your example involving race, I don’t think that’s a good comparison. In your example the person is saying words that generally minimize the importance of race while attempting to convey that they’re not prejudiced. Critically, everyone agrees to what the words are referring to. In the “gender is a social construct” case, I don’t think there’s agreement about what the word “gender” is referring to. The speaker means gender category, and the listener keeps understanding it as gender identity.

I used this example precisely because it illustrates a case where the person is accidentally racist, and where the racist doesn't understand the nuance and racist side-effects of their supposedly progressive color-blindness. I think this is exactly like "gender is a social construct", since it has accidental transphobic outcomes that are not commonly understood and certainly aren't what people usually are trying to support.

You don't have to think gender is gender identity to think "gender is a social construct" is problematic, hopefully I have managed to communicate the reasons why above.

You might feel empty still, but you might also feel a massive improvement. A vaginoplasty is a known effective treatment for the feelings you are having, and it honestly sounds to me like you are sacrificing the potential and known good because you can't have the perfect.

When I was in denial before my egg cracked, I often rationalized that I shouldn't transition because as you mention I can never be a woman for a million reasons - that even with estrogen and surgeries I would never experience a woman's orgasm, I even had the same thought as you about the number of nerve endings in the clit vs a penis.

But I can tell you I definitely have what would be characterized as powerful female orgasms now despite the supposed deficiencies of my genitals. I underestimated how it would feel on the other side.

What I have heard about neo-vaginas is that they are not distinguishable from natal vaginas, in they way they look, feel, or function. We can nitpick and find minor differences, and we can certainly focus on those differences to fuel dysphoria and insecurities, but choosing to do nothing makes less sense to me since the outcome is obviously worse (genitals that won't ever or in any way work).

All this to say, I share your fears and capacity for rationalizing myself out of difficult choices like this, but I have gotten to the point where I feel more pragmatic and I am willing to trust that there is potential for a vaginoplasty to improve my situation.

Of course I am terrified of how I might feel, how my perfectionism and dysphoria might respond and reject my artificial genitals, but it is a leap of faith, and one that I feel is justified by extensive research that over and over confirms that this procedure improves the kinds of suffering we are experiencing. Hopefully it improves things, but worst case scenario I think it will still have been a rational choice to take that risk given the alternative.

😳

Hopefully you can see that I'm not making "the biological argument" you probably had in mind, i.e. a biological essentialist account of gender. The biology totally supports non-binary people, and in fact the current evidence is that brain sex is largely "non-binary", with very few people having brains that fit into binary boxes.

EDIT: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4687544/

Our study demonstrates that although there are sex/gender differences in brain structure, brains do not fall into two classes, one typical of males and the other typical of females, nor are they aligned along a “male brain–female brain” continuum. Rather, even when considering only the small group of brain features that show the largest sex/gender differences, each brain is a unique mosaic of features, some of which may be more common in females compared with males, others may be more common in males compared with females, and still others may be common in both females and males.

The lack of internal consistency in human brain and gender characteristics undermines the dimorphic view of human brain and behavior and calls for a shift in our conceptualization of the relations between sex and the brain. Specifically, we should shift from thinking of brains as falling into two classes, one typical of males and the other typical of females, to appreciating the variability of the human brain mosaic.

Only around 1% of brains fit consistently with the binary "male" or "female" characteristics.

I think their point is more that if gender is socialization, then why would anyone ever have a strong and persistent sense that they are a gender other than they one they were socialized as? Gender is socialization means you are what your gender is what you were raised as. The idea is that it was the way you were raised that makes you a boy or a girl. This view absolutely has problems accounting for trans people, since trans people are generally claiming to be something other than the gender they were assigned at birth and then raised as.

lol, thanks - hopefully I'm actually helping, I feel so far like I'm just pissing people off

We can cry about the actions of a company that we boycott, because it impacts other people or has larger political consequences. Don't make this about some kind of individualist consumer choice, that's a very convenient way to ignore political problems and victim-blame consumers.

did you just call me the L word? 😤

Sure, you have to realize - I spent several decades never questioning my gender and living as a man, and I certainly could have gone the rest of my life that way. It took a lot of change for me to even recognize the experiences I had were even gendered. You may actually lack the hermeneutical tools to interpret and understand your gendered experience, but it sounds like "agender" is already giving you a foothold. Feeling alienated from both genders is a thing that tells you "this is me". The evidence from the brain scans about subconscious sex shows that most people are going to not evenly fall into two camps like male and female, so why is it surprising that you wouldn't feel at home in either?

What I mean about psychological self-conceptualization of my gender: when I dream, my brain sometimes generates a "me" that moves around and does things, interacts and experiences in the dream, etc. That "me" has a gender! I think of myself as a certain way, and it determines how I interact with other people, and how they interact with me. When I am stuck thinking of myself as a man, even when I feel dysphoria from being a man, it can be distressing - but I don't have direct control over my self-conceptualization. It's like a habituated way of thinking about myself.

Sometimes in my dreams I will be interacting as a man, and then a sudden shift in my gender happens as I interact with a male stranger for example, shaking his hand I become aware of my breasts and suddenly I'm interacting with him as though I were a woman. It is a bizarre experience for me, and most of my life I never thought about my self conceptualization at all. Of course, the self concept is not just in dreams, and when I started voice therapy I realized my self-concept influenced how my voice sounded, and that I had to tackle habituating a voice partially by habituating conceiving of myself as a woman, by reminding myself over and over that I look like a woman and I need to navigate the world as a woman.

You probably have a self-conceptualization as a woman to some extent, you probably have to for pragmatic reasons. I think socialization can play a big role in that psychology, the ways we acculturate and learn how to interact according to the gendered roles. To not do so is generally not adaptive and creates friction, for example I am learning that my habit from living as a man of holding doors open for everyone is starting to backfire as I learn that men would rather die than have a woman hold a door open for them. I am violating social norms when I hold doors open, and they rush forward to take over holding the door I'm trying to hold open for them.

The socialization is still separate from the self-conceptualization, but I think they can be related in terms of the self-concept tapping into those social roles we have learned.

Good luck exploring your gender!

A vaginoplasty absolutely can provide you with some of the anatomy like a clitoris and vagina ... ovaries and a womb might be necessary for reproduction, but HRT substitutes for the ovaries and I don't see how a womb necessarily increases sexual function in the sense that the researchers meant (which is the ability for arousal and orgasm).

I hear you about the womb, though - it's painful to me in ways I don't understand that I can never become pregnant. This is a bizarre change for me, since I have been very clear about not wanting children my whole life, and I felt the biological urge to reproduce only after taking estrogen. I completely understand why Lily Elbe tried (and tragically failed) to have a uterus surgically implanted.

Sexual desire & function decreasing is commonly seen as a negative thing, and dysphoria not improving is clearly negative - so I am attempting a kind of sympathetic humor at the unfortunate irony of a treatment being unsuccessful. It makes me sound monstrous, now that I have to explain it.

Dysphoria did not significantly improve in either group, while sexual desire and function decreased at six months in both

💀