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Just because you don't put a name to it that wouldn't 'abolish gender'. Whether or not it was conceived of as such, gender roles as separate from sex clearly existed prior to the semi-recent past - without the existence of gender, what would it even mean to behave as 'more masculine' or 'more feminine'? If anything, putting a name to the notion of gender surely helps to abstract behaviours away from sex rather than strengthening, as without it the only language with which to describe gendered behaviour is sex-based.
Without gender:
"I'm a woman that like shooting guns, intense physical exercise and get really competitive."
"Ok, you're a tomboy, a woman that likes manly things, things that most women don't like. That's unusual but whatever."
With gender:
"Are you sure you're a girl and not a man trapped in a woman's body? Are you a man? What is your gender? Do you want us to cut off your breasts or create an artificial penis out of flesh from your arm? This is a really serious issue of determining your true authentic self."
Just because what we now call gender roles are called gender roles, there's no need to have a concept of gender. We could call them sex roles instead. Gender isn't needed.
So we could indeed rename it but what would the point be? It wouldn't change anything. You're 'without gender' examples still includes roles at least two of which are not really connected to sex in any meaningful sense. Gender is present there whether you want it to be or not. Also, I'm not sure why you think that using concept of gender somehow entails that one must believe that expressing gendered attributes of the opposite sex necessitates a sex change. It has no real bearing on that question.
What do you mean it wouldn't change anything? One is implying you should introspect furiously, and consider surgery, just because you have particular preferences, and the other shrugs and accepts you as you are. You think these are basically the same thing?
They are connected to sex in the sense that they are strongly correlated with it. This is the whole reason why gender theorists claim you're a boy for playing with trucks, etc.
The point would be to not create superflous entities with no explanatory power.
You have to prove that claim. There's nothing that the concept of gender helps you explain that can't be explained without it as far as I can see.
Probably because this is exactly what experts in the fields of gender are explicitly saying?
The other commentor said this but I don't see why using the concept of gender implies that deviating from gender norms is a sign of trans-ness. Just acknowledging something exists isn't an endorsement of the way its currently treated in society. What I mean by that is that if I use gender to refer to the socio-cultural attributes generally associated with being a man or woman, especially those with no direct link to sex, that by no means entails that I also think it's good that there are such gendered attributes, and if you deviate from what's expected you therefore need a sex change. Indeed, there are many gender abolitionists who would do away with any notion of gendered attributes if they could, which would presumably also render the whole idea of transitioning obsolete, but they still use the concept of gender - in order to criticise it - but it usefully describes an existing phenomenon.
Also, literally no-one of any relevance claims 'you're a boy if you play with trucks'. What gender is for, among much else, is to describe the expectation that boys play with trucks, which exists whether I like it or not, which has no connection to sex that I can see.
Because gender is not primarily discussed as a mere set of behavioral tendencies that might be analyzed by anthropologists in a detached way, it's primarily discussed as a core part of your identity, and "a core part of your identity is not what you think it is" obviously implies making some radical changes to be more in line with it.
Would a clinical psychologist running a gender clinic in a children's hospital, saying things like that at a transgender health conference be someone of some relevance? Would the medical professionals in attendance, giving absolutely no negative feedback to these claims, be someones of some relevance?
I do think that gender is frequently a core part of people's identity, but in the first place I don't think that's something you can ignore by using different words, and secondly that doesn't mean I think it ought to be a core part of someone's identity. 'Your behaviours tend to align more with male gender roles' might be an argument for a woman to transition, but an alternative answer would be to simply stop caring about wanting to align your gender with the one usually associated with your behaviours. Me thinking that latter answer is often a much better response, however doesn't suddenly mean gender or gender roles don't exist, simply because I'd rather they didn't.
Well yes but it would depend exactly how 'like that' such statements actually were.
I'm not sure I agree with "frequently", but the bigger point is "gender will always be there" is only true for the hypothetical anthropologist's word for tendencies in behavior. If we're talking about core parts of identity, it is very much the case that gender might not be there.
a) So it's pretty clear you're using agreement with the idea that there might be some sex-based tendencies in behavior, to smuggle in acceptance for the "core part of your identity" idea.
b) Actually, you'd need to further define "gender roles" for me to agree. To me, the word implies normative prescriptions, not mere correlations, and western societies have spent a lot of time deconstructing the former, so I think to the extent they still exist, they're barely hanging on.
Well if you think "a preverbal child unsnapping a onesie to make a dress / pulling out barrettes out of their hair is a gender expression" is quite "like that", allow me to introduce you to Dr. Diane Ehrensaft of Benioff's Children's Hospital. She recently repeated that claim at a recent National Transgender Health Summit (sorry, no timestamp or clip), where she also said she was transitioning a non-verbal autistic child until the parents pulled them out of the clinic.
I don't disagree with this in a hypothetical sense but that world is borderline unrecognisable from the one that exists today or has ever existed in the modern West. Except for a small number of people widely regarded as eccentric, gender has always been critical to almost everyone's identity in the recent past, and still is.
Perhaps, but I think overall you're being a bit restrictive here. In order for gender roles and gender to be important, it doesn't have to be some strict delineation between male and feminine roles, strictly policed, but could instead be merely about expectations surrounding patterns of behaviour etc. I think 'normative prescriptions' is also a bit restrictive, as such expectations can exist without any individual considering 'normative'.
Watched the shorter clip and her statement, while I wouldn't necessarily agree with it, also definitely was not saying 'your child is a girl is they make their onesie a dress'. I think she was simply saying that children can be cognisant of gender from an early age, and so in doing something like that it's plausible that a child knows the gendered connotations of what they are doing. Again though, that doesn't mean they are a girl, and I don't think Ehrensaft is saying that, the point is just to show that children can be surprisingly attuned to gender norms. You could draw various conclusions from this, but I don't think her statement implies anything close to the level of 'if you want to wear a dress as a young child you're probably a girl'.
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