Gender is not just a social construct

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Some people are born with 3 legs yet humans have 2 legs.

You don't know that. Remember that mindblindness thing I was talking about earlier? Yeah...

All sorts of gendered behaviour have been rooted in endocrinology and neurology.

It isn't as simple as "Person X is male, and so is neurologically wired to be masculine" and "person Y is female, and so is wired to be feminine". Hence the term "male and female minds" being misnomers; it's more accurate to say that people naturally gravitate towards masculine or feminine behaviour (and to feel comfortable in male/female bodies), whichever genital configuration they were born with.

Nature is very, very complex and it has many more variances than just male vs female. Hormone levels during pregnancy are found to permanently predispose the foetus to future masculine/feminine behaviour. After pregnant mice were injected with synthetic testosterone, it was found that their daughters consistently exhibited both homosexuality and stereotypically masculine behaviour (Pinker, 2002). Neurologists now very much do believe that phenomena like homosexuality and transsexualism are rooted in biology, as are cisgender, heteronormative behaviours. Why else did David Reimer turn out to be a standard, masculine and heterosexual man?

Sex really isn't as simple as XX and XY. If you think that, you're going to have a shock when you find out that 2% of fertile adults who were born with penises are XX and 2% of adults born with vaginas are XY (Serano, 2007). For all you know, you could be one of the 2% as 'affected' people don't usually find out that they are.

And your jaw will hit the floor when you find out that females - including female humans - have to fight throughout their lives to stay female! There is one gene called FOXL2 (the "female gene") and it can very easily be switched off. When turned off, SOX9 (the "male gene") takes over and the ovaries morph into testes and start pumping out testosterone. This makes sense, seeing as we all start off as female and approximately half of us change to being male. It used to be believed that gonadal sex change only happened in utero, but now it's known that it can happen to adults.

Source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ful ... .200900193

Don't get me started on fish who change sex: https://link.springer.com/article/10.10 ... 006-7595-x

All the people who think they know how simple sex is because they did GCSE biology (or its equivalent), and were taught "XY = male, XX = female" remind me of me when I did GCSE maths at school and thought it impossible for -1 to have a square root. Amongst geneticists, there's no agreement over what "biological sex" is because there is just too much variance and too many nuances.

I have no idea what you are trying to say. Nature is not a being it does not make choices it, it does cannot make mistakes.

Has any XY produced a fertile egg? Has any XX produced fertile sperm? I do not buy for one moment that geneticists disagree about what biological sex is. A biological male produces viable sperm and a biological female produces viable eggs.

A man having a more feminine personality does not make him any less male, just as a butch lesbian is no less female.

Yes. Bitteschön: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2190741/

Then don't "buy for one moment" that geneticists disagree In the meantime, do check out 'Evolution's Rainbow' by Joan Roughgarden, who is a Professor of Biology. A preview is available on Google: https://books.google.de/books?id=6O9Wj8 ... &q&f=false

Some male fish produce "viable eggs".

Agreed! I have never claimed otherwise.

The thing is Daniel98, nature is changing humans whether its a mistake or part of the process. Humans evolve mostly through our technology since our technology makes us extra-fit... but this could very well be a part of nature continuing to evolve humans or more likely these days humans evolving humans. The rest of what you say is just attempts to apply rigid criteria that you personally believe in. Just because you say it's so doesn't make it fact.

Yeah, I gathered that.

Did someone mention Klinefelter Syndrom to which it feels like a call to this thread for me?

Also gender is a social construct. Just because certain behaviors are controlled by hormones, doesnt mean that an actual gender naturally exists but as a sociocultural it is interpreted as "gender". Other cultures have more than two genders and some cultures dont really make a distinction.

What your explaining is labeling of gender and recognizing that gender is more complex than just the binary. That doesn't make it less deeper than just social influence. It's correlation rather than causation.

If gender was only a social construct then why would there be certain traits across multiple cultures? Why would it be that more than one culture has defined more than 2 genders? Do animals also have a society in order to define the social construct of gender among themselves? Or are they just getting it from observing humans?

I can acknowledge the fact that gender isn't completely socially constructed, especially from a prototypical standpoint. It's strange how in ASD people gender can be weird and not the norm.

Just because someone interprets it as such or just because a majority interpret it as such doesnt mean it is true. For hundreds on years the majority of people attributed weather conditions to a higher power. Interpretation is a bad measure.

I believe people talking about social constructs mostly wildly misunderstand what it means when something is a social construct. Every concept we humans have made are social constructs. That doesn't mean that they are some kind of "made-up" or "fake" things but that we never can observe or understand them as if outside our social realities and how we understand further in endless cycles shape how the thing "is" because we can't separate it from our understanding. Chair is a social construct but you can still sit on it. In another world there could be some of what we now understand as "gendered" behaviours but which we would think with different framework than gender. In fact that's most of human history!