How Attached Are You To Your Gender?

[JNAProductions]

Take me, for instance. I was born male, am male, plan on staying male, and while I did have a brief period of gender dysphoria, I've come to realize something.

I'm a man, I'm okay with that, but I don't really care about it. I'm not especially attached to being a man-gender just doesn't mean that much to me personally. It's sorta like being white-it's just a thing that happens to be, not something that really affects who I am.

So, I'd like to know how the playground feels. Are most people like me, and gender ultimately isn't that important? Or is being male or female intrinsic to who you are? Or is it a more even mix?

[AMFV]

I would say that my gender and being masculine is pretty much intrinsic to my identity. It isn't the most fundamental part of it, but it is a central part of it. I don't know if I can go into too much more detail since I haven't thought of it in any deeper sense than that. But being a man is probably one of the things I think would be most important to me in terms of my behavior and my habits.

[DataNinja]

I haven't really ever been in a position where my gender's really mattered that much to me. If something like that came up, I'd likely have cause to re-evaluate, but, thus far it's not been a large part of my life. It's part of why I enjoy being on the internet, because (in theory) it doesn't matter who you are. I've been thought of as both male and female online, and, really, as long as it's clear when people are addressing me, I don't really care what pronouns are used.

But, then again, I'm also in a place that our society considers 'default' for gender, so, I'm sure that likely has something to do with it. When you're not breaking the perceived default simply by existing, it's easier, I imagine, to have such a thing not really matter as much, because you don't have to continually assert who you are.

[Knaight]

As far as I can tell the entire concept of gender as something one has internally only applies to other people. There's a certain level to which a gender is imposed and I knuckle under because I don't care enough to fight it, and there's a certain extent to which being read a certain way informs social interactions (more than a little), but the idea of gender as an intrinsic part of an identity is foreign.

[druid91]

Do I have a gender? If so I haven't noticed. Personally I find the whole concept of gender fairly medieval.

[Trekkin]

Gender has no bearing on mathematics and shouldn't affect my ability to do science, so I have no need of it, and it isn't interesting enough for me to care about it for its own sake. Gender has no significant impact on any of the factors that make other people useful to me, either. Much like all the other labels we have for other people, it's a uselessly arbitrary and purely human construction that does little other than get its associated baggage in my way.

[RossN]

It's tricky to say honestly. I'm biologically male, dress act and look male and tend to think of myself as male and I can't say gender is meaningless because I am only romantically/sexually attracted to women.

Having said that... I've often wondered what it would be like to be female. There have been moments were if I could magically turn myself into a woman I'd have jumped at the chance. I can't in all honesty say I'm transgender or anything like that and I am fine with body as is... but yeah at times I do wish I'd been born a girl.

[Emperor Ing]

It's extremely easy to take gender for granted, but it's a fundamental building-block of who you are. The male and female brain is wired differently, that's just fact. It's not the end-all-be-all of who you are, obviously, but it's foundationally important in ways you might not even recognize. I would dare argue that if your friends and family met the alternate universe version of yourselves who had all the same upbringing, experiences, genetics, etc, the only differece being the X or Y chromosome being swapped, they'd say you were totally different people.

I'm fine with who and what I am, and am in no hurry to change it.

[Friv]

I have a number of trans friends who have discussed the myriad little ways that they find themselves behaving and processing information differently once they start transitioning; differences in hormone production do actually change the way that you think. Not in huge ways, but in ways that are noticeable if you're paying attention (weird fact - someone who transitioned female said that it reduced her ability to focus intently on one thing, but increased her peripheral awareness).

As such, I kind of expect my gender is a big deal to me; having those hormones all matching the way my brain expects them to behave is important. I've also never felt uncomfortable being male; I'm occasionally curious about what it would be like to be a woman, but I wouldn't want it as a non-reversible process.

[Telonius]

It's probably more important to other people than it is to me. Like, if I woke up tomorrow and was magically turned into a woman, I'd still be very much in love with my wife, and I'd have pretty much the same opinions of everybody I know. But I know for certain that other people would start to treat me differently, both for being a woman generally and a lesbian (I guess?) specifically. On the plus side, it would be nice to have my whole name match my sex. My last name is a common female first name; lots of confusion in e-mails because of that.

[2D8HP]

I'm a guy, but I'm not a "guy's guy:.

I find spectator sports boring (especially American football), I can actually watch basketball or soccer for multiple minutes, but hours? Nope. My co-workers have teased me about my indifference to "the team", but after I told them "put on some collegiate women's beach volleyball, I'll watch that", they stopped.

I have far less tolerance for viewing violence than my wife. She enjoys watching 24 which I find awful viewing. She also likes Game of Thrones more than I do, whereas I like stuff like The Princess Bride and The Grand Budapest Hotel more.

Most guys seem to like "slasher" and "zombie" films. I can't stand them.

I cry easily when watching movies.

I can listen to musicals, jazz, and opera and enjoy it, sometimes all three at once ("Surabaya Johnny")!

I think wearing football team jerseys looks stupid.

When it's time to order pizza I want some vegetables.

I enjoy salads and quiche.

I've never been hunting, and I find fishing boring.

I prefer a bicycle to a pickup truck.

I like cats (my wife hates them).

While she has an attractive body Angelina Jolie's jawline makes her look unattractive to me.

I don't feel any fear or hostility to men who aren't "straight", nor do I pretend to.

I don't pretend to not fear pain.

I vote more like an American women, than an American man.

I think complaining about "the feminist agenda" is stupid.

I don't own any guns.

I'm not under the delusion that American women find bulkier men more attractive (they don't, they want us skinny).

I usually enjoy fiction written by women more than fiction written by men.

---

In other ways I'm more typically a "guy":

I don't care if it's the "current fashion", if an article of clothing would look odd 100 years ago, I don't think it's appropriate for a man to wear.

I find women in dresses more attractive, very attractive. .

My work is very blue collar, and I don't flinch to go into the Jail and the Autopsy Room.

I liked the movie Excalibur which I've never known a women to admit to.

I'm usually taciturn, and anti-social.

I like beer more than wine.

I like dogs.

I find "full figured" women more attractive than "super-model thin" ones (American women for some reason think they must starve to be attractive).

I used to be very into motorcycles.

I read as much history as fiction.

I care more about how the yard and the exterior of a house looks more than the interior.

[The Eye]

I'm a guy, but I'm not a "guy's guy:.

I find spectator sports boring (especially American football), I can actually watch basketball or soccer for multiple minutes, but hours? Nope. My co-workers have teased me about my indifference to "the team", but after I told them "put on some collegiate women's beach volleyball, I'll watch that", they stopped.

I have far less tolerance for viewing violence than my wife. She enjoys watching 24 which I find awful viewing. She also likes Game of Thrones more than I do, whereas I like stuff like The Princess Bride and The Grand Budapest Hotel more.

Most guys seem to like "slasher" and "zombie" films. I can't stand them.

I cry easily when watching movies.

I can listen to musicals, jazz, and opera and enjoy it, sometimes all three at once ("Surabaya Johnny")!

I think wearing football team jerseys looks stupid.

When it's time to order pizza I want some vegetables.

I enjoy salads and quiche.

I've never been hunting, and I find fishing boring.

I prefer a bicycle to a pickup truck.

I like cats (my wife hates them).

While she has an attractive body Angelina Jolie's jawline makes her look unattractive to me.

I don't feel any fear or hostility to men who aren't "straight", nor do I pretend to.

I don't pretend to not fear pain.

I vote more like an American women, than an American man.

I think complaining about "the feminist agenda" is stupid.

I don't own any guns.

I'm not under the delusion that American women find bulkier men more attractive (they don't, they want us skinny).

I usually enjoy fiction written by women more than fiction written by men.

---

Do people still actually hold the "macho type" as the ideal of masculinity? Didn't that die with the 90's? I thought that now men are expected to follow the same impossible standards of beautiful women had to for so long.

[2D8HP]

Do people still actually hold the "macho type" as the ideal of masculinity? Didn't that die with the 90's?..

In my experience most still have the same attitudes as in the 1980's, and I'm usually one of the least macho among my coworkers.

In the 1990's I worked at a motorcycle shop, and in the 21st Century I've worked construction and building repair, and currently most men I encounter are either cops or inmates, so maybe that's skewed my perspective.

Also I'm 49 years old, and I'm one of the younger guys on the crew, so I seldom deal with people (other than the inmates on the 7th floor) who grew up post '80's.
We did have one young guy (40), who just got sent to the 9-1-1 call center, and he was a pickup truck driving, gun shooting, ex-marine, so yes more "macho" than me.

He was a good worker, and he got along well with the cops (his brother is one), but he couldn't refrain from "salty" language and bigoted comments (in San Francisco! ), which made him a poor fit for encountering the lawyers and the public, so we had him stationed where he will only deal with cops.

He would have gotten along well with our old boss and may have been kept by him, but our new boss is only 48 and a little bit more progressive, so that's a change.

I suppose in 20 years (maybe sooner judging by how many are retiring lately), I'll be considered one of the "macho" ones, but not now.

[thorgrim29]

Not a lot I think. In many ways I'm stereotypically male but it's not like I don't know nerdy girls that are slightly emotionally withdrawn, bad at reading people, listen to metal, watch action comedies, like red meat, beer and whiskey. I other ways I'm not stereotypically male. It's also very hard to know what is innate and what comes from socialization in that arena so I don't think behaviour (I believe the gender studies term for that is performance?) is a good metric. But barring something more concrete than feelings all I can say is that I spend about as much time actively thinking about it as I do my breathing or heartbeat. Like, when I read the Culture novels and they mentioned that most people try out multiple genders before settling on one if they ever do my though was "Hey that would be an interesting thing to experience" not "OMG that is repulsive to the core" or "This would complete my life".

I've read a bunch of stuff from and on trans people (not like academic papers, more like testimonies and interviews and posts on this forum) specifically because that experience is so alien to me and it seems that for most of them gender is A THING in a way it's just not for me. Which would not be surprising except it seems like it might also be that fundamental for a lot of cis people, which I find fascinating, and I wonder how the proportions of "super cis" and trans people stack up.

[Trekkin]

It's extremely easy to take gender for granted, but it's a fundamental building-block of who you are. The male and female brain is wired differently, that's just fact.

See, this is why I really don't like pop science pseudo-journalists; they keep simplifying complex things until laypeople think they understand them without actually saying that they're butchering the work of actual experts until it fits in little lay-size factoids with no nuance or context.

To his miniscule credit, the author does note several problems with the study: for example, that they don't control for brain size. It's kind of important to do this, because brain size has a large impact on the connectome (Hänggi, 2014) which totally confounds the gender difference. Further, later research with more precise techniques has confirmed that the differences between "male brains" and "female brains" are more statistical than any kind of constant; maybe one brain in twelve is either exclusively male or exclusively female in terms of its structural features. (Joel, 2015)

In short, no, that's not "just fact." The answer, both more complicated and less satisfying than can fit into popular science, is that brains are complicated assemblages of parts that vary wildly between individuals, and while there are statistical differences between male and female brains there is nowhere near the kind of correlation needed to run the other way and say that women have this structure or men have more connections in that region. Furthermore, the relationship between brain structure and behavior is complicated enough to confound any straightforward attempt to correlate them anyway. You are quite wrong, and you should know better than to cite popular science anyway, particularly about things that so many people have such strong feelings about.

Sources:

1. Häggi J, Fövenyi, L, Liem F, Meyer M, Jäncke L. The hypothesis of neuronal interconnectivity as a function of brain size-a general organization principle of the human connectome. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 2014;8. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00915.
2. Daphna Joela, Zohar Berman, Ido Tavor, Nadav Wexler, Olga Gaber, Yaniv Stein, Nisan Shefi, Jared Pool, Sebastian Urchs, Daniel S. Margulies, Franziskus Liem, Jürgen Hänggi, Lutz Jäncke, and Yaniv Assaf Sex beyond the genitalia: The human brain mosaic PNAS 2015 112 (50) 15468-15473; published ahead of print November 30, 2015, doi:10.1073/pnas.1509654112

[Liquor Box]

Do people still actually hold the "macho type" as the ideal of masculinity? Didn't that die with the 90's? I thought that now men are expected to follow the same impossible standards of beautiful women had to for so long.

I think there has been a subtle change in certain microcosms of society. But manly men like Channing Tatum and Chris Pratt are still starring in main stream block-busters

[BWR]

Male by sex, male by gender, male by nature. It's not the sort of thing I would have thought about if I hadn't been made aware that not everyone has that sort of relationship with themselves and society. 'Male' is a central part of my identity. Not the only part and not the most important part, but a significant part.

I'm a guy, but I'm not a "guy's guy:.
*snip*r.

I align with you on many points. Never felt like less of a guy because of that, nor has it been an issue with friends or colleagues. I guess the environment and society I grew up in and live in isn't quite as strictly gender stereotyped as yours. Which isn't to say that there aren't people here who would say, and at least partially mean, that I wasn't a real guy because I do/like certain things and don't do/like certain others, but it frankly isn't nearly a big an issue around here as it seems to be other places. I'm pretty fortunate to live somewhere that has an understanding of male gender that these days includes a lot of things that might be considered feminine certain other places. A more accurate phrasing would be that a number of things that were heavily gender-specific previously have been moved to the 'stuff anyone can like regardless of sex and/or gender' category.

[Emperor Ing]

You are quite wrong...

It goes without saying that there isn't a single configuration for a MALE brain or a single LATINO brain. Not every man and woman thinks and acts exactly alike, and we'll all have certain traits that will be more commonly found in the opposite gender. Men will have some feminine behavior traits, and vice-versa. Not a judgment on them, but I thought this went without saying. My point was that men and women are neurologically predisposed to certain behaviors. Not a good or a bad thing, not a deterministic thing, and it's definitely not an absolute. I shouldn't have to explain how bell-curves work, but just because you know a short European or a tall Chinese person doesn't make the statement 'Europeans are taller than Chinese people' false.

...and you should know better than to cite popular science anyway, particularly about things that so many people have such strong feelings about.

Not an argument.

[Ifni]

It's extremely easy to take gender for granted, but it's a fundamental building-block of who you are. The male and female brain is wired differently, that's just fact.

I'd suggest you read the discussion linked from that article, Crossed Wires, which says a subsequent study found that the differences in the original study "were driven by differences in brain size rather than sex" - obviously gender is correlated with size, but if a tall woman with a large brain volume has "wiring" more similar to a man with the same brain volume, rather than a woman with a smaller brain, it's a bit hard to see it as a fundamental sex difference. (Similarly, while it's almost certainly true that more women fit easily into economy class airline seats than men, you wouldn't generally say "fundamentally, airline seats accommodate women but not men" - short people have enough legroom, regardless of gender.)

And beyond this single study, I am not aware of any study of brains that finds any sex difference remotely large enough to be able to reliably identify people's genders from brain scans. In other words, when people talk about male and female brains in the context of scientific studies, what they almost always mean is that the population distributions of some measured characteristic look slightly different for men and women - but those distributions still overlap to a very large extent, so it's impossible to predict whether a certain person has a "male-like" or "female-like" brain. (For illustration, maybe if they're a woman they have a 55% chance of having "female-type" and 45% chance of having "male-type", and vice versa for men - this would be a hugely statistically significant difference, if observed in a large enough population! But almost half of women would still have "male-type" brains.)

EDIT: Slightly ninja'ed, but will leave this here anyway. I do think it's hard to claim that gender is a "fundamental building-block of who you are" if you're basing that only on "it means you have a slightly higher probability of having a specific trait", so I had assumed you were arguing for a stronger association of "brain wiring" with gender. I mean, I know from family history projects that I have some distant Irish ancestry, which probably slightly increases my probability of being a carrier for e.g. Alpha 1 antitrypsin deficiency (the first genetic disease unusually common in Ireland that came up when I googled) - but that is not any kind of fundamental building-block of my identity.

It's not the end-all-be-all of who you are, obviously, but it's foundationally important in ways you might not even recognize. I would dare argue that if your friends and family met the alternate universe version of yourselves who had all the same upbringing, experiences, genetics, etc, the only differece being the X or Y chromosome being swapped, they'd say you were totally different people.

Well, if I'd grown up as a boy, I can say pretty definitively I wouldn't have had exactly the same experiences - e.g. a bunch of the bullying I got as a kid was explicitly because I was an insufficiently-feminine girl (I spent a few years in a country where "good at math" = "unfeminine", and the school counselor bought into this attitude as well). But I've dreamed myself as a man, and it felt perfectly fine and natural there, just like dreaming myself as a woman who isn't exactly me. Based on actual experience of how I reacted to being told "you can't be a girl and good at math" at age 12 - which was pretty much "OK, I'll try to get people to see me as a boy, then" - I'm pretty sure "scientist/math nerd" is a much bigger part of my identity than my gender.

I'm in the camp that finds the idea of gender as an intrinsic part of one's psychology to be pretty alien. Of course, I believe others when they tell me they do experience gender in that way (as something that feels intrinsic) - but I find it hard to grok the concept, or imagine how it would feel.

To me my gender feels like my nationality - i.e. it was assigned to me at birth, that assignment has shaped my life in important ways, and it's now part of the identity I've built up over the years. But there's no sense in which there was One True Correct nationality for me, a little flag engraved in my brain, and my parents had to guess it and got lucky - I could easily have been born in a different country and ended up with a different passport, and most of the time I probably would've been okay. (Most of the time. Some of the options would've been inimical to my future flourishing - for example, my birth country doesn't have a single university, so that probably would've been bad.) And as an adult I've found happiness in a country that is not my home country; parts of the culture in my new country fit me and some don't, but there are some really important ways in which it's a better fit than the place I grew up in.

Just rambling now, but there are other ways in which moving across the world seems a little like what I've read about transitioning to a different official gender: lots of paperwork and bureaucratic hoops to jump through, you often lose connections to family and friends, your knowledge and skills need to be adapted to a different setting (and there will be things you just don't know, never having needed them before), there's culture shock. People can often identify you as a newcomer by your voice or clothing or appearance, and that can single you out for ostracism or unkindness, or even put you in physical danger. But there are big differences too, of course, I'm not trying to say it's just the same - (cis) immigrants aren't usually dealing with dysphoria on top of all the issues that come with how other people see you, for one thing, and transphobia is very prevalent and pretty different from anti-immigrant prejudice.

[Honest Tiefling]

Personally, I'd find it pretty funny if it is found out that there are gendered differences to the brains...But 90% of people fall along a spectrum. Oh, the complaining and whining that would cause.

In other ways I'm more typically a "guy":

I find women in dresses more attractive, very attractive...

I find "full figured" women more attractive than "super-model thin" ones (American women for some reason think they must starve to be attractive)...

...Uh. I'm confused by this, are lesbians somehow attracted to thinner women? Is that a woman thing? That hasn't held true in my experience, but I don't know that many lesbians to begin with. Or are girly men more attracted to thin women?

As for the question, I don't really view myself as terribly masculine or terribly feminine and I'm okay with that. I don't feel a need to prove my manhood, but I am very much not camp either. In some ways, I'd like to be the opposite gender just for a short time to see what it is like because I think that experience would probably be pretty informative. But I sorta like where I am, so I would not be terribly happy to wake up as a slightly different person, even if it is a somewhat minor thing in many circles.

[2D8HP]

...Uh. I'm confused by this, are lesbians somehow attracted to thinner women? Is that a woman thing? That hasn't held true in my experience, but I don't know that many lesbians to begin with. Or are girly men more attracted to thin women?...

Sorry to be confusing!

Um... what I was getting at is that American men tend to think bulkier is more attractive than American women do, and I fit that tendency/stereotype.

I don't know how much of the reason for that is projection, and how much it's marketing.

What I've seen is guys saying that they need to "bulk up", and "get buff" "for the ladies".

Yet the ladies I knew had posters of David Bowie, not Arnold Schwarzenegger on their walls.

I also have seen all the diet ads that women are bombarded with, and have heard very thin (to me) women say that they're "watching their weight", yet most men I've known do not describe the "skinny girls" as "hot".

For years I thought "something weird is going on", and I eventually "Googled" and found that men do indeed think women prefer bulkier men than women actually do, and women think that men prefer thinner women than men actually do.

Oh well, someone's making money selling supplements and pills, plus there's all the magazines sold on "how to look".

I'd be curious to learn if gays have a more accurate idea of what other people find attractive on average, or if they're just as mislead.

I just thought of another way I'm typically a guy: I like Rolling Stones song more than Beatles songs.

But....

I also enjoy Prince and Culture Club, which when I was a youth you couldn't say out loud without fear of a beating.

That is not hyperbole.

In the 1980's I did get suckerpunched by jerks who yelled "Devo" or "queer" (no they were not fans of Devo, for some reason it was a slur like "nerd") and I came to consciousness to see my assailants running and laughing. This happened twice, once outside of Berkeley High School, and again when I was waiting outside of Slims to see the Flaming Lips.

Role enforcement by violence was a real thing, fear kept you "between the lines".

I make a lot of jokes about how the "old days were better", but they really weren't.

It was pretty bad, and I hope it doesn't become that way again.

Don't buy "the good old days".

[Scarlet Knight]

I don’t really understand the question: it’s like asking “How attached are you to your kidney?” Your gender is who you are. Anyone who says otherwise simply does not understand the human body. It effects how we treat patients, whether due to body size, muscle mass, fat ratio, hormone influences, personalities… and that’s without taking in primary and secondary sex traits. If anything, medicine gets into trouble when it treats men and women the same.

Do people still actually hold the "macho type" as the ideal of masculinity? Didn't that die with the 90's? I thought that now men are expected to follow the same impossible standards of beautiful women had to for so long.

Only in small pockets of the world like Greenwich Village. The majority of the world still promotes macho as male ideal. Even in the civilized West, feminine men are not prized.

… study found that the differences in the original study "were driven by differences in brain size rather than sex" - obviously gender is correlated with size, but if a tall woman with a large brain volume has "wiring" more similar to a man with the same brain volume, rather than a woman with a smaller brain, it's a bit hard to see it as a fundamental sex difference)

So the reason so many WNBA players are lesbians is because they’re tall and muscular? We may cut back on funding women’s athletics…

But....
I also enjoy Prince and Culture Club, which when I was a youth you couldn't say out loud without fear of a beating….
In the 1980's I did get suckerpunched by jerks who yelled "Devo" or "queer" (no they were not fans of Devo, for some reason it was a slur like "nerd") and I came to consciousness to see my assailants running and laughing. This happened twice, once outside of Berkeley High School, and again when I was waiting outside of Slims to see the Flaming Lips.
Roll enforcement by violence was a real thing, fear kept you "between the lines"...

Sadly, there will always be violent people looking for targets. I notice they’ll hit “queers” but if none are around, they’ll find any outsiders… even if it’s just for wearing the wrong team jersey.

[Trekkin]

I shouldn't have to explain how bell-curves work, but just because you know a short European or a tall Chinese person doesn't make the statement 'Europeans are taller than Chinese people' false.

Indeed; that would be a reduction of the problem to the point of absurdity. At any rate, the statement 'Europeans are taller than Chinese people' is neither true nor false; it is ambiguous. As it is a favorite pastime on these forums to endlessly debate lingual minutiae and from there devolve merrily into pointless bickering, let me simply say this: what you posit is a set of two (normal) distributions, and for the sake of not dragging race into it let us call them A and B. Were we to say that all A are taller than all B, we would be in error; were we to say that at least two A is taller than at least two B, we would be only trivially correct. It is more useful to say that the average member of A is taller than the average member of B, and we could go on to calculate the probability that an individual X of a given height H is a member of either group A or group B given those two distributions, but we could not with certainty assign X to either group. Assuming that they are both normal distributions with different means (and thus together form a bimodal distribution), it is obvious that the predictive power of this method increases as H approaches the extremes of the observed range but decreases the more A and B overlap; in other words, the closer the means of A and B, the more extreme H needs to be for the probability of X being in either A or B to be significantly different.

With brain structure, what we see in the aforementioned studies (which I strongly encourage you to read if you can access them) suggests such a case, albeit for a multivariate dataset not describable as a bell curve. Individual brain structural metrics are only minimally predictive since the "means of the distributions", to oversimplify it, are close together; further, only very few people's brains would be predicted to be entirely, unambiguously "male" or "female" based on the entire set of metrics. Thus, to say that "men and women's brains are wired differently" is to be only trivially correct; some men's brains are wired differently from the brains of some women, but some men's brains are wired exactly like the brains of some women to the limit of these metrics to detect (and vice versa.) Absent any single statistically significant set of brain structures to clearly delineate male brains from female brains, we have no basis on which to claim we can meaningfully differentiate a female neural connectome ("wiring", in your words) from a male one in any way that has meaning for individual women or men.

It therefore follows that the truest thing we can say is that there is no set of structures, predilections, or behaviors that define one's mind as having a particular gender. A given man can just as easily have a bigger region of the brain responsible for, say, promulgating ludicrous stereotypes about the behavioral implications of brain structure than a given woman, or a smaller such region, and the probability that they were male would not meaningfully shift; even many such traits shift the distribution only modestly in all but the most extreme, and therefore rarest, cases.

Therefore, we cannot do better than to say that a given brain might be male, female, both, neither, or something else entirely, and the best way to find out is to encourage that brain to think about it and then tell us what it likes to be called and what that implies. To do otherwise -- like, say to refer to discredited research as a source of dubious and overly simplistic biotruths -- is not only hurtful to people for whom such a simple answer belies much grief on their part, it is manifestly illogical.

Not an argument.

That's true. It's an admonishment. Well spotted.

[Knaight]

I don’t really understand the question: it’s like asking “How attached are you to your kidney?” Your gender is who you are. Anyone who says otherwise simply does not understand the human body. It effects how we treat patients, whether due to body size, muscle mass, fat ratio, hormone influences, personalities… and that’s without taking in primary and secondary sex traits. If anything, medicine gets into trouble when it treats men and women the same.

That would be your sex - gender is a distinct concept largely tied to how sex is interpreted mentally and culturally, and that's a very different question.

[Eldan]

Difficult to say. I mean, I don't do anything stereotypically male. I don't do any sports, I'm not large, or muscular, I'm not aggressive, I'm not protective, I'm not competitive, I don't especially like being outdoors more than indoors, I don't drink often, and if I do, I stay away from beer, I'm a massive coward, I don't know how to handle tools or repair things, I could probably go on for a while.

I still think that I'm a man. Mostly for biological reasons. I don't really know how else one would know, really.

What I'm saying is, I suppose, I don't understand gender. I've read a lot about it, but I don't get it.

[Eldan]

The male and female brain is wired differently, that's just fact.

No, they aren't. That study was massively criticized as soon as I came out, mostly for statistical artefacts and shoddy analysis. There's still no consensus on that.

[hustlertwo]

I am as attached to my gender as it is to me.

*rimshot*

[Juggling Goth]

A friend of mine had a theory that it can be plotted on two axes: the gender spectrum on one and the intensity of feeling on the other. So you can be very intensely neither male nor female, or definitely male or female but not too bothered about it, and everything in between. Or I guess if your identity fluctuates a lot you could skip all over the grid. Works for me (definitely a woman, not that bothered about it).

[Cozzer]

I'm attached to my gender like I'm attached to... I don't know, my left arm? I like my left arm, it's part of me, and I've never felt the need to think about the matter more deeply than this.

About the stereotypes on my gender, on the other hand... well, part of them are harmless and quite fun, as long as nobody's taking them seriously. Part of them are really annoying, and I deal with it by pretending they don't exist and making my best "...SERIOUSLY?" face whenever somebody tries to bring them up.

[AMFV]

Sorry to be confusing!

Um... what I was getting at is that American men tend to think bulkier is more attractive than American women do, and I fit that tendency/stereotype.

I don't know how much of the reason for that is projection, and how much it's marketing.

What I've seen is guys saying that they need to "bulk up", and "get buff" "for the ladies".

Yet the ladies I knew had posters of David Bowie, not Arnold Schwarzenegger on their walls.

I also have seen all the diet ads that women are bombarded with, and have heard very thin (to me) women say that they're "watching their weight", yet most men I've known do not describe the "skinny girls" as "hot".

For years I thought "something weird is going on", and I eventually "Googled" and found that men do indeed think women prefer bulkier men than women actually do, and women think that men prefer thinner women than men actually do.

Oh well, someone's making money selling supplements and pills, plus there's all the magazines sold on "how to look".

I'd be curious to learn if gays have a more accurate idea of what other people find attractive on average, or if they're just as mislead..

I'm going to interrupt because this is like the second time you've said this. Ladies do find bulky strong men pretty attractive depending on your ladies. I mean, not bragging, but I'm the kind of dude who looks like he could wrestle bears, and I've found plenty of women who find me plenty attractive. I wouldn't comment on this but this is like the second time you've done the "ladies like skinnier men", which has not been in my experience the case.

What I have noticed is that women tend to have less of a "type" than men do, like women can go from dating a skinny guy to a less skinny guy and that sort of thing.