I’m not totally sure, and I notice that it’s a confusing topic.
Okay, fair enough. It’s very plausible to me that most of our problems relate to socialization rather than biology. But you seem to be implying they are 100% sociological, which seems wrong.
Since humans can’t think quantitatively, I prefer to just say “gender is learned” rather than “gender is almost entirely (95-99%) learned but the remaining part is biological.”
In fact, it might be that gender is entirely non-biological. But I’m sure it’s mostly social.
(This is not me setting up a followup ambush argument, just asking)
To what extent would it alter your philosophy if we learned that gender was 70% social? 50% social? Right now, these questions are vague and difficult to test, but they may not always be. And I think it’s much sounder (both from an instrumental and epistemic standpoint) to think in advance about how your philosophy should shift if different facts were confirmed.
I don’t know what the answer is but the existence of transpeople (and genderqueer people and others who don’t fall neatly into the gender binary) suggests to me that it’s unlikely to be 95%+ social. But even if it turned out to be as low as 50% social, dealing with those social issues properly still requires a radical upheaval of the popular consensus on how we should socialize people.
I’m not totally sure, and I notice that it’s a confusing topic.
Since humans can’t think quantitatively, I prefer to just say “gender is learned” rather than “gender is almost entirely (95-99%) learned but the remaining part is biological.”
In fact, it might be that gender is entirely non-biological. But I’m sure it’s mostly social.
(This is not me setting up a followup ambush argument, just asking)
To what extent would it alter your philosophy if we learned that gender was 70% social? 50% social? Right now, these questions are vague and difficult to test, but they may not always be. And I think it’s much sounder (both from an instrumental and epistemic standpoint) to think in advance about how your philosophy should shift if different facts were confirmed.
I don’t know what the answer is but the existence of transpeople (and genderqueer people and others who don’t fall neatly into the gender binary) suggests to me that it’s unlikely to be 95%+ social. But even if it turned out to be as low as 50% social, dealing with those social issues properly still requires a radical upheaval of the popular consensus on how we should socialize people.