Gender Change

The phrase "mass-mediated hyper-reality" refers to the way TV, the Internet and other interactions reflect back to us the reflection we get from them of our expectations. Rather than begin with speculations, allow me to suggest two sources, one factual, one fictionalized.

Prof. Deirdre McCloskey wrote about "bourgeois virtues" back in 1990 when she was Donald McCloskey. Her website has a tab for Gender Change:
http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/gender/index.php

My own understanding - reading, not experience - is that a long process is involved antecedant to surgery including the adoption and absorption of the cultural gender role - actions, dress, mannerisms. Moreover, hormone therapy is also a precondition ahead of physical reconfiguration. This is not a simple decision, nor is it considered as such by the medical professionals who make it possible.

The movie Normal (Avenue Pictures Productions, made for television, written and directed by Jane Anderson) takes place in a small town in Illinois. The viewpoint characters are a married couple who have been members of a Lutheran congregation for 20 years. His announcement that he is a woman trapped in a man’s body and he wants a sex-change operation causes tension, anxiety and hostility in church, at work, and within his family. The husband, Roy “Ruth” Applewood (Tom Wilkinson), has been keeping this to himself for most of his life. At one point, at a family gathering, his father says that when Roy was about ten, he found him in the barn dressed in his sister’s clothes. Knowing looks appear on those closest to Roy, though the deeper meaning is lost on the rest of the family. Eventually, as Roy transforms, his choice becomes obvious. The movie shows his gradual yet inexorable transformation from a man into a woman. The impacts on his family and co-workers are given perhaps more focus than his own adjustments, though they are nominally the subject of the movie.

Humans are complicated. Gender is as much a matter of nurture as it is of nature. Beyond that, it can be a matter of choice. Ultimately, perhaps in the near future (100 years), choosing your gender will be as optional as choosing your career: five times in a lifetime...

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 6/20, 7:09pm)

Post 1

Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - 8:59am

I'm curious about evidence supporting 'nurture' claims. To my knowledge, David Reimer blew most of them away.

Post 2

Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - 9:24am

I once heard Nathaniel Branden opine that transsexuals were homosexuals who felt guilty, usually for religious reasons, and so hit on this as a rationalization: feeling attracted to men is, for a man, sinful; if I'm really, in my heart of hearts, a woman (or vice-versa), it's OK. What his evidence was I have no idea.

Post 3

Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - 9:29am

"What his evidence was I have no idea."

While I don't think he mentions transgenders (just homosexuals), I think his reasoning, by inference, is found in The Psychology of Romantic Love.

Post 4

Tuesday, June 21, 2011 - 11:57am

The last thing I heard Nathaniel mention regarding homosexuality, and this was a long time back (late eighties or early nineties), was that he believed there were three causes for homosexual actions:
1) Genetic: sexual attraction to the same sex that is wired in, just like the heterosexual population has a wired in attraction to the opposite gender. And that research supports this being nearly the entire story,
2) Situational: as in prison, for example, where the sex drive, being more powerful than anything in competition with it, wins out over the gene-based partner preference. Heterosexuals engaging in homosexual behaviors only because of the situation.
3) Psychological: a tiny portion of those motivated towards homosexual acts were so motivated as a result of very strange parenting creating, and deeply locked in, a powerful aversion for the opposite sex, causing them to psychologically override their genetic orientation.

That description is what I remember of a short explanation he made to a group... but I've recounted it in my words - and they aren't necessarily the ones Nathaniel would use.
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Going beyond that, my own understanding is that the sex drive is a more fundamental force in our being than nearly anything else. We each are a product of its success, given that if it had been successful generation after generation without a single ancestor having failed to leave behind offspring, then we wouldn't be here. That is a long chain that stretches back to the beginning of life. Evolution decreed that we survive and procreate. Period.

This force comes from the genetic wiring that first began to be laid down the moment single-celled organisms shifted from simple division to sexual recombination, and that predates our fore-brain by an enormous span of time. With the passing of eons the wiring evolved (without ever deviating from its primary purpose) as layers were added on.

We now have a brain that serves our survival by understanding ourselves, the world we live in, and conceiving of actions we should take. It also serves as as the engine that creates our motivational fuel - the feelings and the emotions without which we wouldn't act. The modern brain is now wired into the overall system as part of the path that is channeling that primitive sexual energy.

The deepest, oldest wiring would be for a sexual energy - and the urge to fuck something. The next deepest bit of wiring would be what is the pattern for acceptable partners at the most basic level (same sex or opposite sex). But then there many other more recent levels that aren't in the DNA but rather the programming individuals build as they lay down values and beliefs - things that govern our sociability, the intensity of the drive we allow ourselves to express, cultural influences on what is attractive, built-in inhibitions regarding incest, how to flirt, etc.

Post 5

Wednesday, June 22, 2011 - 12:59pm

Changing genders is different from homosexuality. Generally, homosexuals like being the gender they are; only that they like others who are, as well. The patterns of behavior - butch, fem, call it what you will - might vary; but those are patterns of behavior. I am occasionally suprised by young, straight married guys with kids who act (ahem) "unmasculine." I think the word is "metrosexual."
In a class on social psychology, I met a woman who worked the LGBT help desk on campus. She said: "Sex is what is between your legs. Gender is what is between your ears. And orientation is what goes on between the sheets."

None of that has to do with transgendering.

Changing gender is not a matter of "liking" people of the same sex, but of not being comfortable with the sex you have. Google "Transgender children" and read some of the stories. These kids responded "naturally" to opposite-sex cues in toys. Their parents offered them every incentive - and disincentive - known to get them to straighten out. It is not a matter of learning - and it is not homosexuality.

Completely ignorant of neuroscience, many cultures had (have) ways of dealing with this, without being able to differentiate homosexuality from gender-crossing. Read about the berdache tradition among Native Americans. Moreover, some warrior cultures (Spartans, Zulus) engaged in homosexuality without allowing gender-crossing.

In the movie, Normal, Ruth (nee Roy) stays with his wife. She stays with Roy (now Ruth) because she loved the person, not the package. In real life, I met a transgendered police officer. His (now her) wife stayed with him. So, it's not fiction - and it's not homosexuality. It's more complicated than that ... especially down the road, late in life when you live with the choices you make.

Transgendered children have brighter futures, at least potentially so.

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 6/22, 1:26pm)

Post 6

Wednesday, June 22, 2011 - 1:24pm

Conjugation
Spirogyra, a freshwater filamentous alga, also exhibits conjugation, where two nearby filaments develop extensions that contact each other. The walls between the connecting channels disintegrate, and one cell moves through the conjugation tube into the other. The cells fuse to form a diploid zygote, the only diploid stage in the life of Spirogyra.
Read more: Sexual Reproduction - Conjugation - Cells, Cell, Occurs, Fuse, Mold, and Zygote http://science.jrank.org/pages/6098/Sexual-Reproduction-Conjugation.html#ixzz1Q2KUB3h7

The Evolution of Sexual Reproduction
NOTE: These are lecture notes for Biology 391, Organic Evolution
For example, in water fleas (crustaceans in the genus Daphnia), which live in ponds, reproduction is asexual -- females produce females asexually -- throughout the spring and summer, but when they are getting ready to produce the forms that will overwinter and hatch out the next spring (possibly in a very different environment, since it will be a different year), males are produced and then they reproduce sexually. So sexual reproduction is timed to occur when the environment is about to change.
http://www.utm.edu/departments/cens/biology/rirwin/391/391SexEvol.htm

Homosexual Activity Among Animals Stirs Debate
James Owen in London- for National Geographic News - July 23, 2004
Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it. So go the lyrics penned by U.S. songwriter Cole Porter.

Porter, who first hit it big in the 1920s, wouldn't risk parading his homosexuality in public. In his day "the birds and the bees" generally meant only one thing—sex between a male and female.

But, actually, some same-sex birds do do it. So do beetles, sheep, fruit bats, dolphins, and orangutans. Zoologists are discovering that homosexual and bisexual activity is not unknown within the animal kingdom.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/07/0722_040722_gayanimal.html

A Robot that Tracks ALL the Genes in a Cell Reveals Key Patterns: Yeast Researchers Get a Head Start
How Similar Are We To Baker's Yeast?
It is hard enough to accept that little creatures such as worms and flies are, as one researcher put it, "our relatives," but what about baker's yeast? What can we possibly have in common with this humble cell, really just a fungus, which is generally used to make dough rise or to brew beer?
The answer is stunning: We are so similar to yeast, in some of our genes, that human DNA can be substituted for the equivalent yeast gene—and it works just as well. This was first demonstrated in 1985 ...
Howard Hughes Medical Institute here
http://www.hhmi.org/genesweshare/a110.html

(My comment: According to Objectivism, animals have automatic modes of survival. They cannot choose to be anything other than what they are. We inherited two billion years of evolution from them. Dr. Leonard Peikoff claimed that transgendered individuals are irrational and anti-reality, declaring that their whims are superior to nature. (Did he say nature or "Nature"?) Rather than acting contrary to reality, they seem to be acting in accordance with it.)

Post 7

Thursday, June 23, 2011 - 9:26am

I once heard Nathaniel Branden opine that transsexuals were homosexuals who felt guilty, usually for religious reasons, and so hit on this as a rationalization: feeling attracted to men is, for a man, sinful; if I'm really, in my heart of hearts, a woman (or vice-versa), it's OK. What his evidence was I have no idea.

That may be the motivation behind some transsexuals, but apparently, it doesn't fit all of them. I was watching a Dr. Phil Show awhile back, and there was a married guy on there who was heterosexual, but liked to dress up in women's clothes and actually wanted to be a woman even to the point of getting a sex-change operation. If he did, he would then be a lesbian. Maybe he wanted to be a woman, because he felt guilty about being heterosexual! ;-)

Post 8

Friday, June 24, 2011 - 7:34pm

A heterosexual male insists he's hetero, but not really? Did Dr. Phil's head explode?

Post 9

Saturday, June 25, 2011 - 12:47pm

He didn't insist he was "hetero" -- just that he liked women so much much he wanted to be one. :-P

Did Dr. Phil's head explode? After what I've seen on that show, I don't think anything would surprise him.

(Edited by William Dwyer on 6/25, 12:57pm)

Post 10

Saturday, June 25, 2011 - 6:58pm