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Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

blogs.scientificamerican.com

111–120 of 199 posts

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Men: it's ok for you to sew, cook, cry, appreciate beauty etc. You don't need to take HRT to experience it. You just need to ignore the macho expectations that some people have of you. End transmission.

Are you implying those are womenly activities? How is crying and cooking going to help me understand how women think and behave?

No. I'm saying that some men live in social groups that think these are women's activities. I'm saying that they're not, so if you're a man and you want to sew, have at it. And of course that means that sewing won't make you understand women. A lot of women can't sew.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of human cultures across time and space don’t recognize gender in the sense you do. There’s sex, roles, personality, trends, etc but the concept of a man identifying as a woman and vice versa is a very rare one. There are European countries (most recently Switzerland) that outright reject these notions, and they were almost unheard of in the US just a mere decade ago. What seems like basic reality t…

I think you misunderstood me - OP wrote he doesn't have a concept of sex where he comes from. Since that's the biological term it sounded funny to me. I'm sure he meant to say gender.

What ruszki wrote was "where I come from, this notion is basically non-existent". It's ambiguous whether "this notion" refers to sex, gender, or the distinction between the two, but since both sex and gender are human universals, you should have inferred that "this notion" referred to the distinction.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#113
post #8
post #7

Is there anything in real life which you divide in two groups you wouldn’t get differences in some metrics on average? I’ve never heard anybody who thought that there was no differences in women and men behaviours on average.

Well, but what this article is stating, is that those differences you pointed out being connected to gender, are actually due to the sex of the individual, not due to the gender an individual chooses to identify with.

For the vast majority of the population that isn't actually concerned with that and is happy to conflate the two, doing so will produce a useful enough result given the two are synonymous enough of the time that the person isn't at risk of drawing a conclusion that maybe doesn't hold true because they forgot to consider the edge cases.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying those are womenly activities? How is crying and cooking going to help me understand how women think and behave?

No. I'm saying that some men live in social groups that think these are women's activities. I'm saying that they're not , so if you're a man and you want to sew, have at it. And of course that means that sewing won't make you understand women. A lot of women can't sew.

So.... what does your reply have to do with what GP has said? He simply stated he doesn't want to risk his health in order to better understand how "women think" by taking potentially life-altering drugd. I'd wager to better understand women you should actually spend time with them and talk to them, not engage in random activities that you yourself said aren't indicative of a certain sex

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#115
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s a real shame that people get so bent out of shape about trans people The issue which people react so allergic to is the complete lack of tolerance by the transgender community. If someone points out that a man who really wants to be a women is in principle still a man then they get instantly labelled a bigot. It completely misrepresents the definition of tolerance. Tolerance can only exist in a state of disagr…

This argument, that it’s the trans community that is intolerant and not those who don’t fully accept trans gender identities as legitimate, is simplistic and in bad faith. The problem is that a lack of genuine acceptance of trans identities (i.e. that trans men are men, and trans women are women) inevitably leads to trans people _not_ being treated the way they want to be treated. The classic examples of these are ba…

> Trans people want to use the bathrooms and compete on athletics teams corresponding to their identity.

I know I'm not the first person ever one to bring this up, but it's unclear to me how letting someone with (largely) the physique of a man compete against women is acceptable.

There's a reason why (competitive) sports are usually divided by male/female, and that reason still overall holds for someone who is trans. There's a lot of gray area here depending on if and when they undertook HRT, sure, but labelling this as "intolerance" is not right in my book.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#116

Taking sex differences in personality seriously involves taking the reality seriously that women are treated radically differently than men in almost every society on earth, and that radical difference is generally that women are a permanent lower caste, and are victims of violence far more than they are perpetrators of violence. These goofy exercises in the eugenics of common sense and the obvious all require us to…

[dead]

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#117

In the past 12 months I’ve gone from having normal male levels of testosterone and estrogen to having normal female levels of both. It’s truly amazing and wonderful that we can do this, and I’ve learned so much from the experience. It’s hard to describe the changes precisely, but I’m finding that women make more sense to me and are more interesting to talk to, while I have a lower tolerance for men trying to act toug…

> It’s a real shame that people get so bent out of shape about trans people The issue which people react so allergic to is the complete lack of tolerance by the transgender community. If someone points out that a man who really wants to be a women is in principle still a man then they get instantly labelled a bigot. It completely misrepresents the definition of tolerance. Tolerance can only exist in a state of disagr…

> The issue which people react so allergic to is the complete lack of tolerance by the transgender community.

Who says so? What has been your personal experience with "the transgender community"? If you're seeing it through the polarized lens of online (specifically big platforms) interaction, then for sure you are seeing it as intolerant. But the same could be said about almost every pov online: most of what we get to see widely is vocal, shallow, unsubstantiated takes. Because that's what get viral.

So for one, there is no such thing as a "transgender community". There are most surely publicized simplified canons of what a transgender person is like, just like there is for "the average white dude", "the academic leftist", "the trump fan" or "the new age craftsy person". The thing is, there are very few person actually like that and the one that are, are usually like that because of tremendous influence of online platforms on their views.

All in all, with all respect, i think you are fighting a strawman. Personally, my course of action in this matter (shallowness, simplifications and argumentative intolerance getting more widespread) is not to fight against it for people you disagree with, because they for sure won't listen to you, but to fight against it for people you actually agree with. This is the thing: in every of these "communities" you describe (transgender, religious, could be anything) there is actually little internal cohesion and there are different political ideals interacting. I prefer to put my own house in order. In fact that's the only thing i can meaningfully impact.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#118

Taking sex differences in personality seriously involves taking the reality seriously that women are treated radically differently than men in almost every society on earth, and that radical difference is generally that women are a permanent lower caste, and are victims of violence far more than they are perpetrators of violence. These goofy exercises in the eugenics of common sense and the obvious all require us to…

Your above exercise is silly because it doesn’t control for genetics. How can you run a robust experiment without accounting for major confounds?

Even more we don’t even remotely understand how those confounds work - much less be able to control for them. This is why most psych / sociological experiments are weak.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#119
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but, pasting in five citations of papers you've not read, from another commenter who probably just grabbed the first five they stumbled across from searching PubMed, doesn't really add to the discussion. Also, the first paper is written in Croatian and the second in Spanish, so it seems odd to link these on an English language forum. The odds of finding someone who understands all three languages well enough to…

You can take a look at the abstract and then look for related articles in English. You are dismissing articles that contradict your beliefs on the basis of lacking the capacity to read them, not of their content. No comment on the other 3 references, thus that response does not contribute to the discussion, except for showing that you do not care about reaching some truth. But then again that account is only a few mi…

It is not my responsibility to fill in the blanks of what you want your argument to be.

If you would like to make a point about why you believe that enjoying romantic comedies, sewing, cooking, etc. are driven by hormonal changes rather than some other factor, please lay out your case.

Citing a random selection of papers that you haven't read does not help to achieve this. It just gives the impression that your viewpoint is not a seriously considered one.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I'm saying that some men live in social groups that think these are women's activities. I'm saying that they're not , so if you're a man and you want to sew, have at it. And of course that means that sewing won't make you understand women. A lot of women can't sew.

So.... what does your reply have to do with what GP has said? He simply stated he doesn't want to risk his health in order to better understand how "women think" by taking potentially life-altering drugd. I'd wager to better understand women you should actually spend time with them and talk to them, not engage in random activities that you yourself said aren't indicative of a certain sex

I think I was taking too much from OP's version of feeling more like a women after transitioning, rather than replying directly to what GP said.

Personally, I don't think that taking HRT will actually make a man understand women any better, so perhaps my response to GP should have been that.

Edit: fix op/gp monikers

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