Gaywallet

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

Be the change you want to see in the world! Make text posts, or start discussions in the threads of links that inspire you 💜

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

Steroids in themselves are a synthetic testosterone

This is an extremely outdated understanding of steroids. While forms of testosterone are often still used for performance enhancement, the vast majority of anabolics are not testosterone at all. There are a variety of different classes of anabolics and they are often used in junction with each other. But modern doping goes much further than just that, with all kinds of new drugs such as SARMS (selective androgen receptor modulators) acting upstream to androgen receptors, drugs which affect HGH or thyroid function, erythropoeitin (EPO) and other interventions to increase blood oxygen efficiency, beta-blockers and other drugs to enhance recovery and performance through other means as well as stimulants and other drugs to increase performance in the moment.

In general I would say it is best to avoid any discussion about performance with respect to gender because any level of sports where there is money and reputation at stake is going to involve more kinds of doping than you could possibly imagine and the performance of these individuals is entirely based on how well they can hide how much they are doping and avoid testing. As a fun little anecdote, about a decade ago the Olympics changed its policy on blood tests, allowing them to hold onto blood to be retested in the future as new techniques to detect doping were developed, and there is one year in which the gold medal for a specific weightlifting event is now in the hands of the 8th or 9th place individual as all other individuals have been disqualified since.

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

Have you asked her husband how they want to be referred to? It may be a miscommunication. Other ways to approach this would be to use other words like “y’all” or “you two” or “you and your husband”. English is a pretty flexible language so you can probably find another way to avoid this, but it sounds like they are using “their” as a name and want you to never give this person pronouns and only use the name “their” as a point of reference.

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

We’re not sure about the neurological mechanism behind the innate sense of gender as of yet, but we have been able to confirm that there are structural differences between masculine and feminine brains that are more consistent with people’s reported gender identity than their genitalia.

Actually, there’s almost no differences between masculine and feminine brains at all. The book delusions of gender by Cordelia Fine goes into this in detail, but the long story short is that just about all science on the difference between men and women is actually just bias of the researchers or poor study design. Honestly it’s a super interesting read if you’re curious about how the brains of men and women are different (spoiler alert, the difference is pretty much entirely social convention and those social pressures can be overcome in very interesting ways) and just how pervasive gender is in our society (babies start to recognize social patterns of gender before even one year of age) and just how deeply it shapes all of our lives.

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

A few thoughts on subjects that haven’t been touched on a ton or framing which might help you understand some of the points you’ve brought up:

• I think it’s important to note up at the top that all words are made up and definitions are merely attempts at society to agree on what a word means so that we can communicate with each other. The presence of slang, the creation of new words, and the shift of the definitions of words over time are all important factors when we talk about the deep specifics of a particular topic or idea.
• Nearly everything in this thread is about a topic which broadly falls into the category of “loosely defined social concepts” more formally known as social constructs. Examples of loosely defined social concepts include: gender, romance, beauty, family, race, wealth, trendiness, class, art, and status.
• Social constructs exist on a spectrum, with some having stricter definitions. For example, dictionaries exist in languages because additional structure is useful. Currency is often defined by governments to help more directly understand wealth or money so that individuals can exchange on equal terms and so that individuals can be taxed.
• Sex and gender used to be interchangeable words in western society, back before we understood any “modern” science which delineated the two.
• Over time sex became a legal and medical term, to describe people who were assigned female at birth generally by genital inspection of the doctor or whatever was recorded on the birth certificate
• Gender theory, or at least the modern roots of it, emerged during women’s suffrage in the united states as a way to separate the social factors from the biological ones - to provide framing to examine social pressures, social norms, social ideas as a construct and not innately biological
• Modern gender theory importantly separates gender identity from gender expression. Much of the discussion in this thread about gender nonconforming individuals such as tomboys being different from trans masc individuals comes down to this framing and their assigned sex at birth. Strictly speaking, having a gender identity which does not match the assigned sex at birth can be considered trans. I say “can be” because labels should never be forced on someone else
• Labels are personal, and therefore messy, and do not always neatly match with definitions for words that are in dictionaries or generally accepted in whatever social circles. For example, a person who has a gender identity of non-binary, who presents very feminine, could still identify as a transmasc individual as an explicit recognition of their internal sense of gender or the steps of transitioning they may have taken.
• Titles and pronouns and honorifics are individual preference and are not strictly gendered. Take, for example, the historical use of words such as lord, king, grace, duke, doctor, baron, viscount, jester, chief, lieutenant, esquire, the honorable, elder, sensei, the wise, acolyte, apprentice, etc. - these are used to signify a specific role in society or someone’s personal preference. Unsurprisingly, people can often have feelings about the use of these words
• If you or someone you know happens to have a nickname or another name they go by in certain contexts or overall, it might help to reflect upon these names and the reason they are used. In some cases, they are forced upon people and undesirable, such as nicknames that come from hazing or bullying. In other cases they are adopted for any number of reasons, including that the person just doesn’t like their name or prefers this one. Think about how the person who uses or has these names used on them feels about their usage - this same framing can be used when it comes to pronouns or just general perception by others in a society.
• A lot of the framing in this thread is on the gender binary, or genders created out of the sex binary (importantly, not a true binary in any science… nature is messy). Attempts to understand non-binary individuals through a binary lens will necessarily fall flat as these individuals do not see themselves as existing within the binary.
• Gender identities which are non-binary are often based on one’s gender identity - which is also a loosely defined word. A sense of self ultimately likely comes from feelings, and just like some people feel strongly that being a mechanic is a masculine trait, people might feel that literally anything is gendered and their gender identity is composed of those feelings. Thus even things which binary folks don’t generally consider to be gendered may be an important part of one’s sense of their non-binaryness.

Gaywallet, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Yes I caught that study! It’s a fantastic foray into how existing brains which have already been influenced by social pressures interact in the real world. Unfortunately, however, it isn’t explanatory and there’s a lot of methodological considerations which still need to be explored. Of note, much of what I’m going to bring up below are also brought up by Cordelia Fine in the fantastic book I mentioned above as they are considerations often overlooked when designing studies to find differences between sex or gender.

It should be noted first and foremost that most brain imaging data is not a reflection of structure itself, it’s a reflection of activity in specific areas of brains. But even that is circumspect for a number of reasons, most notably that you can reliably detect brain activity in individuals which are not alive. Ignoring some of the technical issues with detection of activity itself, in the context of activation patterns, we should expect significant difference from individual to individual in how thoughts are processed, and we likely should see patterns amongst individuals which share commonalities such as social identities. We can, for example, see reliable patterns of activity amongst world class athletes as compared to those with no training. Patterns of activity in the motor cortex based on physical requirements of one individual isn’t quite comparable to a social identity, however, and for a closer analogy we could look to language or social status to see that patterns of activation are rather malleable and can denote all kinds of social roles.

Applying that to social roles, such as gender, it is not surprising in the least that we can detect gendered differences based on how society treats us and what roles it provides and gives us access to. For example, ignoring brain imaging studies for a moment, we can detect reliable differences between the sexes when we give them math tests. However, a deeper analysis on this difference reveals that this can be easily reversed and influenced merely by priming the individuals. In fact, when we go a step further and look at brain imaging and activation patterns, we also see that there are sex differences in how the math areas are activated. Unfortunately, however, I have yet to see a design which combines those two concepts together - how do brain activation patterns differ when an individual is primed with a narrative which runs counter to that which they have internalized from society?

To take this point even further, I think it’s important to note that the study you are linking includes exactly zero transgender individuals. It also doesn’t attempt to investigate nor discover differences in gender expression or conformity to social roles. The patterns that they have detected could very easily be a reflection of internalizing the values which society instills in us based on our gender roles - there is simply no way to separate the two with this existing literature. But to take that a step even further, even if we did find that there were reproducible sex-based differences which persisted even across a representative sample of gender diverse individuals, we would need to also conduct this kind of imaging at different points in these individuals lives (especially early on and through childhood where one’s concept of gender evolves) to understand just how much is biological and how much is an influence of nurture. Even then we would still only have at best an understanding of brain activation profiles which happen to meet statistical significance, a trait shared with brain activation profiles of completely dead individuals, which calls into question the statistical validity of the precision at which the imaging technology is calibrated - we would need to redo all of that research with more precisely tuned imaging to be sure it’s an accurate reflection of brain activation… and we still would not be able to make any definitive statements about structural differences because activation is a reflection of action potentials at a specific point in time (notably all action potentials, not just the ones used in the cognitive process of the task at hand, but also those involved in living and perceiving an environment and thinking about other things) and not a true understanding of the underlying architecture which supports these action potentials (two very different circuit boards can produce the same electrical current in the same spatiotemporal area).

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

Hey y’all, since this is a sensitive topic and there’s been a lot of discussion which involved big emotions, I wanted to just drop by and assure the community that we’re aware this thread exists and that some of the discussion here can be uncomfortable. At least at this point in time, I don’t personally feel the need to step into any of these conversations to intervene, because I believe that the community has managed to have a meaningful discussion over a really difficult topic.

With that being said, there are some big emotions in this thread and some of the content may trigger you, especially if you’ve suffered abuse from people struggling with mental disorders or you have a mental disorder that is heavily stigmatized. There are strong statements on both sides of the field here, and I personally think leaving them up is healthier for a nuanced understanding of how much abuse can destroy someone’s life as well as how much assumptions about behavior can be deeply hurtful to experience as well.

However, if you do see behavior in here that is clearly not nice behavior and you believe that one party is instigating please still go ahead and report it. We’re not all seeing and all knowing and we don’t want this post to go off the rails either. Thanks! 💜