[How do you define gender?]

13 minutes ago, Pam in CT said:

re wider/bigger bucket of more fluid/asexual/androgynous range giving kids more room

I'm not musing about "giving out options" or telling young people they belong to some specific category" so much as dialing back the social/cultural expectations side of things (that I myself think of as "gender expectations/roles," but recognize that others on the thread don't embrace that particular language).

That if there were less calcified expectations about what folks wear, makeup/manicures/hair, career & compensation, expectations about behavior in bed, roles/expectations within household... all the stuff that *doesn't* directly tie to body parts... kids might have more space.

I do think that those expectations have actually hardened, not become more flexible, since the 70s. Maybe it's porn, maybe it's backlash against feminism, I dunno. 

When I was in high school (Dorothy Hamill days), *lots* of girls had short hair. (Today, on the East Coast at least, it is signalling.)  *Lots* of kids wore jeans, chinos, sweaters, Bean boots in bad winter, Converse in good weather. Cut & sized for the female v male body, but the styles were quite similar.  (Today, here, that kind of garb is signalling.) In college *lots* of women opted out of makeup, shaving, tight or restrictive clothing. Not all women, or not every day... but it wasn't a statement one way or another.  Superficial stuff perhaps, compared to pay equity and unreciprocal sex. But visible and apparent in a way that the Longer Term is not.

Yes, these things have become worse. I've wondered if one reason isn't that it makes it possible to sell more things to people.

There's also some interesting research that suggests that in societies where men and women have more similar lives, they make more differentiation in terms of things like clothing and social signals for sex. So maybe that is a factor.

Unfortunately the gender norms like non-binary identification and such seem to be making all that worse rather than better.

[How do you define gender?]

19 minutes ago, LucyStoner said:

While I definitely tend to agree with this, having two kids with a range of developmental and mental health issues, I have also wondered that sometimes we may have overcorrected and have a tendency to medicalize and over diagnosis what may well be a normal part of the highs and lows of life.  

Not every distress is clinically significant.  My thinking on this may be partly because I have realized that sometimes for my sons, less is more in helping them through their anxiety and helping them learn to navigate their various challenges.  

 

So something I noticed this past year that disturbed me with my daughter who is struggling with anxiety is that we realised, after a while, that the various symptoms she was manifesting seemed to be tied to either what they were covering in health class, or things she'd heard about on You-tube videos. And while it might just be chance, the whole ramping up of her anxiety seemed to correlate with a large unit they did in school on it. 

And that's not to say it isn't real, because it is, but it seems a lot like somehow it was triggered by this focus on introspection through these classroom materials trying to identify problems. There was some kind of brain loop created that has not been helpful. But whether that's true or not she was getting ideas about what anxious people with problems do from sources that were supposed to be telling her it was ok to deal with these things.

[How do you define gender?]

32 minutes ago, Pam in CT said:

 

If that is the case, then if kids could wade in a wider/bigger bucket of more fluid/asexual/androgynous range -- rather than fast-track to bodily changes, I mean -- would, I would think, HELP over time. 

 

re assurances from grownups, and how they land to adolescents

This is hard, because (I know from hard-won experience as both a onetime hard-to-parent kid, and also as a parent to a hard-to-parent kid, that...) some kids can't hear that "This Too Shall Pass" message from parents. 

Not "won't."  Can't.

I'm not sure. My gut feeling is that giving options out as if they are just normal things can have the opposite effect that you are suggesting, and actually I think the research supports that inasmuch as it exists. Because in some ways it becomes much easier to accept something that is an inevitability - you will be male or female, and so rather than try and be something else, often with quite limited success, you have to mature and realise that you are yourself, and that the kind of person you are is what a female or male person is. In a way you could say that it forces a kind of transcendence of the categories.

I'm not convinced that telling young people they belong to some specific category of sexual orientation that they have to figure out is terrible helpful either, compared to stressing that sexuality is often emergent through the teen years and even the early twenties and there is really no need to give it a label until then, or ever if you prefer. It really isn't uncommon for girls at 15 to not be all that interested in sex in a real way (some are of course quite the opposite.) That doesn't make them asexual, it just means they aren't that interested in sex at the moment. And that's true whatever age it happens at, or if it stays the same your whole life. For some these things are quite stable, others less so, and you don't really know till you die though most people settle into something of a predictable pattern by adulthood. 

[How do you define gender?]

1 hour ago, Catwoman said:

I have heard others say that, as well. When the body they have always been able to count on to allow them to live active lives starts slowing down, that’s often not an easy adjustment, and when something like sudden illness or injury causes that change, it’s even harder. 😞 

In her case it wasn't the function she was thinking of. It was how she looked. She said her inner sense of herself was as a young woman, and when she looked in the mirror she saw someone else, and it made her feel disembodied.

And FWIW that's how I felt in my early teens when I started puberty. It was like I was in the wrong body, it didn't correspond to my inner sense of my vision of myself, which was of a pre-pubescent body. Again, like an out of body experience.

[How do you define gender?]

Quote

Once that body changes, dramatically, in an unwelcome manner, they can become deeply uncomfortable with that body - it no longer feels right to them, because it has changed dramatically. 

This is exactly how my grandmother described the experience of getting old.

[How do you define gender?]

4 hours ago, Pam in CT said:

I'm much more interested in the second question. I have been frankly astonished, over the last five years, at *how many* young people experience ~~some version~~ of dysphoria. The sheer numbers. Unless there's some explanation for what is different, in this moment, that is causal to that distress... it suggests that a STAGGERING NUMBER of people must have felt a staggering weight of un-languaged in-actionable distress in all prior generations.

Possibly there is a real increase here, some people have suggested porn and harder gender stereotypes have put off many girls, for example.

But I think there is actually another factor which is sometimes expressed not as clearly as it might: it's completely normal for teenagers to be what we now call "dysphoric". Many, especially girls, have always felt this way during puberty. But typically it wasn't medicalised, and the message that adults tried to give kids was that these feelings were common, developmentally normal, generally would pass or at least they would reach a place of acceptance, and that their bodies were good and all kinds of bodies were attractive.

And as far as clothes, the message was that to at least some degree you could wear what you wanted, a lot of things were pretty general neutral, and also that clothes were not so important that we should get too upset about them.

Instead what you have now is kids being given a completely different set of messaging about these normal feelings, about how to be "authentic", that presentation is important. And the possibility of opting out of the difficult elements of girlhood - menstruation, the experience of suddenly having quite a different kind of body, accepting that men will think of you in a different way that might seem intimidating or even creepy.

Once that road has been taken, even socially, the formation of a comfortable female identity which only comes by passing through adolescence is actually prevented. 

And for a lot of boys it's very similar. I have a close gay male friend who says the same thing a lot of women I know say, which is that as a teen he would have been very vulnerable to that way of thinking.

[How do you define gender?]

7 minutes ago, Joker2 said:

This thread is actually making me want to push back against every single female and gender stereotype there is. I can’t imagine what my dc, who have actual issues, feel when hearing/reading this stuff. 

It's not gender neutral clothes that are the issue, it's the idea that they will solve some sort of problem that is caused by our sex. Make people see men and women as the same, or mean they don't notice who is male and who is female.It won't do that.

It's actually, even now, not that difficult to get gender neutral clothing in our society, especially casual ones for adults. Men and women both can easily wear a pair of straight leg jeans, a pair of converse or cowboy boots, a hoodie or a plaid lumberjack shirt, and a t-shirt. I worse that through the entirety of high-school as did about 70% of the other girls and 99% of the boys.

There is a big difference between something that is a fact about a population and a stereotype. It is not a stereotype to say women are generally shorter than men, with different proportions, smaller feet, etc.

[Mom in Va. who lived through Cultural Revolution addresses school board regarding Critical Race Theory]

5 minutes ago, Sneezyone said:

I’m not sure what you’re getting at. My local community is my local community. I’m not extrapolating national trends that aren’t otherwise substantiated by DATA, like increases in HBCU applications and admissions, which reports suggest are being driven by inhospitable public schools and communities.

You've been arguing that people are not really seeing what they're complaining about across the country, so that kind of seems like an extrapolation to me.

[Mom in Va. who lived through Cultural Revolution addresses school board regarding Critical Race Theory]

9 minutes ago, Joker2 said:

I just keep thinking of how the states that are coming up with legislation against CRT need it the most. I grew up in Texas and I vividly remember the day my dad came home and asked my brother’s friends who was the person waiting in the car outside. They informed him it was one of the few Black kids in our school, and he didn’t come in because he didn’t know if we allowed Black people in our home. My dad was furious and I think it was one of the first times us white kids realized what he was dealing with growing up. My dad brought him inside and had a long talk with us later. This young man had actually been denied entrance into homes where I lived but none of this was ever talked about in public or school. My history teaching was extremely whitewashed. These things need to be discussed in schools and history needs to be taught factually. I have been told so many times that it’s, “facts over feelings” in regards to different issues but race seems to be the one issue that is considered the opposite for those same people.

Many people who are complaining about CRT are doing so because they think it's a racist theory. Not because it makes white people feel bad or something like that, but because at a fundamental level they think that's what it does and it's foundation. 

That's not just conservatives either, many people on the left also think that to be the case. They would say that in places where CRT approaches come to dominate in schools you are likely to see a worsening of problems with racism. CRT is not the only way to address racism or history and it's controversial, even in academia, so it's not some kind of zero sum either, CRT or nothing.

So while I think you are entitled to your view that those places need CRT most, other people would think that it's about the last thing they need. And there really isn't much empirical support for the effectiveness of CRT approaches to anti-racism. So basically you have a theoretical approach with a questionable application in schools, without an evidence base, and controversial among both parents and academics as to whether it accurately portrays history or helps fight racism.

It doesn't sound like a slam-dunk winner.

[Mom in Va. who lived through Cultural Revolution addresses school board regarding Critical Race Theory]

18 minutes ago, Sneezyone said:

No, it’s not. In my area, kids like DD silence themselves. I mentioned before how a sleepover with a cheer teammate turned into an emergency pick up request after the n-word was casually tossed out and George Floyd was declared responsible for his own death. I, literally, sent an email full of cookies to an English teacher this year for her required reading choices. While DD didn’t feel comfy speaking in class, she enjoyed discussing the readings with me at home. They were very well done, diverse authors and subject matter. My ‘lib’, black kid is a minority here, visually and ideologically.

How is that not local?

[How do you define gender?]

If stores that cater to young people think it will appeal to them to organise their stores that way, whatever. 

But it doesn't change the reality that the designers that design the clothes are basing their sizing on male and female bodies, not gender neutral bodies. And it does bugger all to fight sexism. It's just a marketing ploy.

[How do you define gender?]

5 minutes ago, BaseballandHockey said:

Why would it imply that.  Does the fact that there’s no white section or Christian section make you feel that there is something wrong with being white or Christian?  

What? Christians and white people don't have different sorts of bodies than other people.

Though I have seen places which specialise in small size shoes mainly for Asian ladies.

[How do you define gender?]

Young women and to some extent young men are often much more likely to be able to wear opposite sex clothing easily. Especially if they are thin.

 

[How do you define gender?]

10 minutes ago, BaseballandHockey said:

Has anyone here proposed hiding gender?  I missed that.

I treat my religion as personal information.  I don’t hide it.  I wear a cross.  I sometimes wear a sweatshirt that says St. Somebody’s Catholic School.  I hang red and green lights in my house at Christmas.  One of my favorite pictures that used to sit on my desk at work had my kid in his choir robe in front of an altar.  I don’t think most people are confused about my religion.

If someone expected me to check a box for my religion, on circumstances when I am asked to check Mr. or Ms., I would not find that appropriate.  If someone referred to me with a word that implied they had figured out my religion, in the same way that people use “she” to refer to me when I haven’t expressed a preference, I wouldn’t find that appropriate.  That doesn’t mean I hide my religion it means my religion is my information.  

I don't really understand what the point of gender would be in your scenario. If it's some inner feelings of being masculine or feminine, with no outward manifestation, surely that's basically completely irrelevant to everyone but the person with the feeling?

If there is supposed to be some outer manifestation, like you are going to ask for  other people to use different than the usual pronouns, or want to go into the feminine change rooms, than it's no longer a personal thing, it's social and public.

[How do you define gender?]

5 minutes ago, Dmmetler said:

What I’ve seen is having, say, one section of jeans and measurements for inseam, waist, hips,  whether fabric has stretch, etc. If anything, it’s easier to find something that fits than when you have 12 designs labeled size 8, but no two fit the same. It’s the way men have been able to shop for years. 

 

 

 

They type one and two is now a thing as well. But as for jeans, I know lots of women who would like pants labeled that way, but even if you put them together in one big group, you have still in the end pants proportioned for male bodies and pants proportioned for female bodies. The sizes and combinations they manufacture are not just random, they are based on the structures of two separate kinds of bodies.

The result is that people either realise this and so you really are not further ahead, or they don't, and that means that they are out of touch with the physical world. Which isn't really something that helps anyone.

[Mom in Va. who lived through Cultural Revolution addresses school board regarding Critical Race Theory]

3 hours ago, Ordinary Shoes said:

So would the Marxists who criticize CRT pass muster in Florida now? 

Maybe?

 

[How do you define gender?]

1 hour ago, Melissa Louise said:

I have trouble not seeing sex as relevant re clothing either, beyond early childhood. 

I have two kids who sometimes dress in clothes opposite their sex. OMG - the $ I've spent on alterations!

Male and female bodies are different. 

Men's shirts big enough to fit female breasts are, on more petite women, too long in the body and the arm. Pants often don't fit female hips. Conversely, women's clothing isn't a great fit for narrow-hipped, flat chested boys. 

 

Yeah, I don't get this business of not categorising clothes by sex but calling them something like "type 1" or "type 2".

All that means is clothes designed to fit men and women but with a euphemistic label.

[Mom in Va. who lived through Cultural Revolution addresses school board regarding Critical Race Theory]

And I'd add, that while legislation of this type seems likely to be ineffective, part of the reason it's happening is that schools seem altogether too ready to implement curricula that many parents object to, that are clearly underpinned by a particular and often controversial ideological viewpoint, that parents don't want, and it's often done on the sly as well, and even with the explicit goal of undermining the home culture and beliefs. Often there seems to be little parents can do about it and they risk being called bigots if they speak out.

That approach is bound over time to produce parents who are angry, reactionary, mistrustful, and will do whatever they can to undermine what's going on at the school. 

[Mom in Va. who lived through Cultural Revolution addresses school board regarding Critical Race Theory]

3 hours ago, HeartString said:

Because of the wording of the laws being passed.  They are *saying* they are banning CRT, but the language they are using in the laws being passed actually ban any discussion of anything that could make a child uncomfortable.    

Any kind of law like this would be impossible to write well, IMO. It's just too difficult to define what falls within the range of a theoretical system like this. It's always going to include a lot of overlap with other systems. So it would be easily badly applied and used.

However, I'm not reading many of the posts in the thread as saying that, quite a few seem to think that CRT is the only reflective way to study history, as if historians didn't understand how history can be political or biased, or people interested in sociology or law didn't understand systemic problems, before CT.

[How do you define gender?]

15 hours ago, regentrude said:

And as other previous posters mentioned, the early sorting by sex, girls vs boys, throughout school and in so many situations where this is in no way relevant, sets the stage.
Imagine we had a culture where it was absolutely taboo to reveal what sex your child is and where all kids were just raised gender blind... maybe then we would be a step closer towards eliminating this one aspect from all the interactions where it is completely unnecessary - pretty much anything that isn't related to medical circumstances or sexual relationships.

I think this is completely impossible, for two reasons:

The first being that human beings have thousands of years of evolution directed towards reproduction. We notice the sex of other people without even trying. And we think about that, and our sex, quite a lot, because most people are interested in sexual activity, particularly at certain points in our lives. Many (most?) young men and women are very interested in identifying themselves as prospective sexual partners, even if it's only n a small way. Men and women who interact, even with no intent of looking for a sexual partner, are often very aware of each other as sexual beings.

The only societies that I've even seen that manage to somewhat overcome that do so mainly by more or less segregation and rather strict codes on behaviour between the sexes. (I'll also say, my own first career was in a workplace where the jobs and uniforms were completely standardised - identical for all right down to underpants, and it actually seemed to increase the awareness of sexual difference.

The second problem is that much as the social constructionists deny it, there are behavioural differences at the population level that differ between men and women. People notice these and can't help but do so, no matter how much the culture tries to tell us it's not true. The brain is very much designed to pick up on those small but widely spread differences. And that kind of pattern recognition always influences our thinking.

[How do you define gender?]

On 6/24/2021 at 1:33 PM, SKL said:

Yeah, why are girls so horrified by the thought of becoming women?  Really a good question.  Maybe I'll ask my kids if that is going on at school and what they think about it.

I do recall my kid saying she thinks God is sexist because he put all the natural burdens on women.  I disagreed.  I think there are lots of benefits to being a woman.  Though, to be fair, I didn't have that wisdom when I was my kids' age.

There was and is a lot of rhetoric that amounts to victim mentality.  I mean yes, obviously discrimination is a thing and stereotypes are bad etc., but none of that stops women from having happy, productive lives in general today.

And it's not like being trans would make a person more likely to face discrimination, wrong stereotypes, etc.  Do kids not realize that?  If not, why not?  I would have understood that at their age, even though we didn't have internet etc.

This sounds a lot like my daughter at the moment, who is early teens. She cannot see any good things about being a girl, and feels that if she were not a girl, all her problems in this area would be gone. A lot of the difficulty is focused on her breasts though she has quite a boyish figure really, but she also hates getting her period, and the girl drama at school, and the way the boys treat the girls in gym etc. But she's hyper-focused on the breast thing, which is typical for her.

The thing that really strikes me is that I was not dissimilar at that age. I found the physical changes in my body made me feel like I was in a sort of out of body experience. I struggled with menstruation because I had painful heavy periods and couldn't wear a tampon. I found the girls difficult to get along with and most of my friends were boys (as is still the case really.)

But the idea that I could rename myself and opt out wasn't there, and frankly I think that made things easier. I learned to deal with some of the problems, to accept others, to see my body as mine again, and mainly it took time and brain maturity. 

Not only that, but had I had the option of trying to disassociate from my body to cope, or hide the changes in my body, that would not only not have helped the problem resolve, I think it would have made things much, much worse. And that's what I am seeing in a lot of these kids. They can't work through to the formation of an adult woman's identity because they try and opt out and society reinforces that rather than allowing them to find their places as women. Or indeed helping them do so - I've been really startled by the extent the kids seem to see body modification as a healthy response, or think psychological or emotional discomfort is permanent and means something is wrong. When I was in school it was constantly ehasised that it was normal and k to feel distressed at times, almost to be expected due to the nature of the teen brain, and there was a lot of body positivity that now seems wholly absent.

 

[How do you define gender?]

On 6/20/2021 at 4:58 PM, MercyA said:

I've found it incredibly valuable to learn about so many different perspectives here. I do live in a rural bubble and can't have discussions like these with my "in person" friends. (I was going to say "IRL" friends, but you all are just as real to me and just as loved as the friends who live nearby.)

I have always used the words "gender" and "sex" interchangeably, but these are words which are changing meaning in our culture. So, how do you define gender?

Totally open-ended question. 

Anthropologically.

Gender means cultural structures that are attached to sex in  society. It could be customs around clothing that are fairly arbitrary but are related to people's interest in differentiating sex. It could be laws round maternity provisions which clearly related to significant biologically based differences between the lives of men and women. It could be an artistic or literary tradition that tells us something about the different experiences of men and women in society and also how they are viewed in society.

So not the same as sex, and not all societies have the same approach to gender, but inherently tied to sex, and it's inevitable that human societies have gender.

[Mom in Va. who lived through Cultural Revolution addresses school board regarding Critical Race Theory]

11 hours ago, Melissa Louise said:

When people argue that the concept of white privilege should form a core part of instruction, K-12, when white privilege instruction is shown to weaken liberal and progressive commitment to alleviating poverty, as mediated through negative attitudes to the poor, they are engaging in a project that is reductionist. 

 

Yes - this.  And while I have no research to back this up, I'm not convinced it even creates an attitude that is desirable around poverty and problems in non-white communities. CRT typically very reductionist even in terms of the problems it claims to be elucidating. And there is some interesting research that tells us that when people are told problems are in systems beyond their control, it makes them less likely to try and fix them, and in some cases it also seems to make them more wary of the people being affected by the problem.

I really don't understand why people keep saying that without the lens of teaching being CRT it means not teaching about racism, historical slant, bias, and so on. Those ideas are not confined to CT approaches.

 

[CDC removing mask mandate what will you do with dc under 12]

Just now, Not_a_Number said:

I'm not sure I appreciate being called "some of the more fearful." Perhaps a less loaded phrasing would be "some of the more cautious people." 

For the record, we're planning to see all of our friends this summer outside. We're planning to do outdoor dining and to have our babysitters come in again. We're opening a LOT since the numbers are so low. Unmasking indoors simply isn't on my radar as a way to improve our lives, though, because it doesn't add very much except risk. My kids are used to their masks and I expect them to keep them at least somewhat safer. I'd rather use my risk budget on something else. 

I didn't have you in mind particularly, and I don't really care what other people do. If they want to mask until they day they die it's their business so long as they don't expect other people to. But most people would like to have some sense of when the risk is low enough that they can go back to a more normal routine.

[CDC removing mask mandate what will you do with dc under 12]

2 minutes ago, Not_a_Number said:

Neither can the people who disagree with you. The problem is that they are convinced they don't do much. 

I think the interesting question is how to bridge this divide. 

I'm not sure people are even saying they aren't useful at all. The problem is people keep comparing surgeons wearing masks in surgery to show that efficacy in other settings must be real and significant. But it's just not the same kind of thing, for a lot of reasons.

As far as I can see, people are also not so much questioning whether masks can be useful generally so much as, at what point would some of the more fearful be willing to say, ok, the risk is low enough. Because the risk is never going to be gone, just like with every other disease in existence, some quite serious.