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Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

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191–199 of 199 posts

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#191
post #176
post #168

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[flagged]

You expressed incredulity that someone would define men/women in a reductive way (they didn't by the way, you missed their point) and then in the very next paragraph demonstrated that you have an extraordinarily reductive view of what defines a 'man'. Come on! You can do better! I believe in you!

Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes everything worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#192
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

What is going on on HN? This talk is ridiculous. Replace "men" and "women" with "black" and "white" and read your stuff again. Why is that different?

Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes everything worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#193
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I came from, this notion is basically non-existent. I meant sex. And also, the article didn’t state anything about gender. There is a specific footnote about this.

Also in my language. The adjective both for identifying the sex and the gender of someone, is the same.

It was in English until yesterday, and organically in conversations it is still used that way.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies for what may be perceived as everybody jumping on you. It’s also helping me understand women more. I disagree. I think you're understanding your own experience more, but then you've trying to fit that to what you see or hear about from women based on a lot of assumptions that probably aren't valid. Since we have no direct access to the internal mental state of others (and scarcely that of ourselves sometime…

Respectfully, you’ve misunderstood me. The biggest thing that helped me understand women was when I changed my hormone dose and added progesterone two months ago. The subsequent few weeks were a roller coaster for me. I had a short temper, was irritable, and couldn’t control my emotional responses. My therapist said “you sound like a pregnant woman”. (I’m not saying it’s the same, just pointing out that this is somet…

Side note - I had to read this twice:

I have a partner who is non-binary but AFAB, has had two kids, and is going through perimenopause. They have strong monthly cycles

At first I thought you were saying that all three of them - mom and kids - have strong cycles. That makes sense, since it's known that women living in close company can synchronize their cycles, but your later discussion makes that sound really weird.

After a few re-reads, I realize that it's a pronoun problem. Your use of the plural pronoun made your comments rather more difficult for me to read.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably just met someone from a non-English culture. The sex/gender distinction is an invention of the past 20 years, and outside of the English world has probably only been picked up by people who interface with English speakers a lot (i.e. academics). I can assure you that Korean makes no distinction: the dictionary translations of the English terms are "sex" and (the full phrase) "one's feeling of one's sex."

Isn’t your last sentence the essential difference in English as well?

You may have misinderstood, and I also oversimplified. The word "sex" is translated by the main online Korean-English dictionary as 성, the local pronounciation for the classical chinese character for the category of sex, or 성별, which translates back into English again as "sex".

The word "gender" is also translated as 성별, and also has an entry for [grammar] 성 구분, or the grammatical difference between sexes.

However the entry under "gender dysphoria" is "feeling that one's birth sex is not one's sex." So the social role idea is totally missing from the Korean-English dictionary.

The Korean-only dictionary has an entry, however, for 젠더 "jendeo," which is the imported modern Western concept of gender with all its academic usages explained in detail.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#196
post #154

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Actually, there are many species who share the burden of child rearing equally. It is often a matter of resource availability, if food is scarce, males become aggressive and patriarchal structures emerge more prominently, and vice versa. Human history has been harsh, so it is not surprising that our ancestors tended to that type of society. So, it is simply not true “across all” anything. I will forego badly parrotin…

> I also notice you just vaguely referred to various animals in instead of humans, which is curious Intentionally so, because humans are animals and that's an imaginary distinction. Modern western society likes to pretend like we're these abstract minds that are attached to bodies. We're not, we're primates, only a tiny bit different than our ape cousins. If you want to stick to humans, for about 99.9999% of the 315,…

”We’re basically monkeys” is a bad argument when monkeys share child rearing duties IF they have resource abundance, as do other animal species. Pair bonding is a term to search for here, this is a really well-studied question. I again don’t want to parrot experts badly. Sapolsky is again a great popsci level resource here. Interestingly, parental investment is also correlated with long reproductive cycles such as humans. It makes sense I guess.

But please don’t let “human is just smart monke” turn into some naturalist fallacy wherein men must be manly because we were made so. We weren’t, but given a stressful environment, we CAN turn out that way.

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people who call themselves witches... but witches in the sense of women who have made a pact with Satan in exchange for supernatural powers are not real. Indeed, if they were real, we would be quite correct to persecute them.

> Indeed, if they were real, we would be quite correct to persecute them. Would we? I'm not familiar with the law that disallows contracts with Satan, or disallows ownership of supernatural powers.

[dead]

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if experimentally doing this is reversible. Feels like Banks's Culture. Could be interesting to try, to get a feel for the differences in perspective GP reports.

It’s largely reversible in the first six months or so. Generally breast growth is not reversible and for some people that takes a while to start but for some it begins to happen sooner. You could try it for a couple of months and stop if you feel tender nipples, which is a sign of breast growth activity. Though my biggest changes have come a year in to the hormones due to the way they ramp things up over time. I was…

Very interesting. Thank you for sharing your story and participating in the discussion. I looked some of these things up with a search engine, but do not know what to trust. Regarding progesterone I saw a few places assert that it increases testosterone (example link below), but it did not discuss the mixed case with E(strogen) you mention.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15669543/

Re: Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

#199

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…

Something completely different than hormones, but on drugs I've also found to have a very different outlook on life, situations, emotions, thoughts, relationships. While the recreational side of it was a lot of fun, it was also pretty confronting to better see how we're just a bunch of lizard brains controlled by our chemicals. On the other hand I think it's made me a little bit more forgiving and less judgemental about others, as there's not as much agency in our behaviour as we think.
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