What is a Woman

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Ecurb
Posts: 2138
Joined: May 9th, 2012, 3:13 pm

Re: What is a Woman

Post by Ecurb »

By the way, I like literature, which means I like words. Change can be good, but it can also be bad, even traumatic. Here George Eliot (a woman, by the way) has Mary Garth respond when her father asks her if she is still set on marrying Fred Vincy. I love the line about "changing the name for everything", the idea of which must have been scary for a wordsmith like Eliot.
"My feelings have not changed, father," said Mary, calmly. "I shall be constant to Fred as long as he is constant to me. I don't think either of us could spare the other, or like any one else better, however much we might admire them. It would make too great a difference to us - like seeing all the old places altered, and changing the name for everything."
Here Henry Tilney lectures Catherine Morland about the word "nice". The battle over "nice" has long been lost, but it's interesting to see how words with specific meanings can morph into words so general as to be almost worthless. Catherine is speaking first, followed by Tilney:
“Not very good, I am afraid. But now really, do not you think Udolpho the nicest book in the world?”

“The nicest — by which I suppose you mean the neatest. That must depend upon the binding.”

“Henry,” said Miss Tilney, “you are very impertinent. Miss Morland, he is treating you exactly as he does his sister. He is forever finding fault with me, for some incorrectness of language, and now he is taking the same liberty with you. The word ‘nicest,’ as you used it, did not suit him; and you had better change it as soon as you can, or we shall be overpowered with Johnson and Blair all the rest of the way.”

“I am sure,” cried Catherine, “I did not mean to say anything wrong; but it is a nice book, and why should not I call it so?”

“Very true,” said Henry, “and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! It does for everything. Originally perhaps it was applied only to express neatness, propriety, delicacy, or refinement — people were nice in their dress, in their sentiments, or their choice. But now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word.”

“While, in fact,” cried his sister, “it ought only to be applied to you, without any commendation at all. You are more nice than wise....
We can all deplore (I suppose) the fact that "nice" has degenerated from a word with a specific meaning, to one so general. Nonetheless, we must accept the change, and the same is true if the pronouns "he" and "she", or the word "woman", are defined in a new way.
Ecurb
Posts: 2138
Joined: May 9th, 2012, 3:13 pm

Re: What is a Woman

Post by Ecurb »

By the way, the first quote is from "Middlemarch", the second from Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey". I forgot cite the books (although, of course, many people would recognize the citations without my help).
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Consul
Posts: 6038
Joined: February 21st, 2014, 6:32 am
Location: Germany

Re: What is a Woman

Post by Consul »

Consul wrote: July 1st, 2022, 1:19 am
JackDaydream wrote: July 1st, 2022, 12:59 am Human gender and sexuality is complex because it involves biology, psychology and social or cultural aspects of human identity.
If "gender" means "sex", then it involves only biology (physiology/morphology), because it is an objective state of the body rather than a subjective state of the mind (or a social role).
Who knows who introduced the term "gender" in a non-biological (or not exclusively biological) and non-grammatical sense into social science?
I didn't know it until yesterday, when I read this:

QUOTE>
"Imagine a world without “gender.” How would we make sense of our social worlds? How would we think about or theorize relations between and among the sexes? How would we account for what it means to be a boy or a girl, a man or a woman? There can be little argument that the concept of gender has become essential to the way that English speakers understand what it is to be a sexed subject. Yet gender did not exist 60 years ago—at least not in the way we understand it today. Gender as an ontological concept has so thoroughly naturalized into the English language that today it seems indispensable. A lack of attention to gender’s origins has led to the common assumption that it has always been available, an assumption due in no small part to gender’s formidable conceptual, analytical, and explanatory power. Yet gender does indeed have a history, and a controversial one at that. Until the 1950s, gender served to mark relations between words rather than people. While there is evidence that it was used sporadically during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the mid-1950s stands as the historical moment in which gender was codified into the English language as a personal and social category and so began its ascent as a potent new conceptual realm of sex.

The story begins in the late 1940s, when a young John Money undertook his doctoral research on human hermaphroditism at Harvard University. Less than two years after graduating, Money offered the term gender as part of a framework for understanding hermaphroditism, as a rationale for clinical practices, and as a conceptual device for understanding human subjectivity. Money’s ideas have come to have a profound effect on how people in English-speaking contexts understand subjectivity as masculine and feminine. This is because he extended his theories of gender from the intersexed to the wider population to offer an account of how everybody acquires their gender. That extension is representative of a common turn in the biological and medical sciences, where phenomena that deviate from a norm are used to demonstrate and explain the course of normal development."
(pp. 1-2)

"John Money offered “gender” as a new conceptual realm of sex in the mid-1950s. He initially did so as part of a framework for understanding the phenomenon of human hermaphroditism. That framework was first and foremost a rationale for clinical practices designed to habilitate the intersexed into girlhood and boyhood, womanhood and manhood. It would become so much more. To contextualize Money’s ideas I begin by tracing his early academic training; the professional context in which he first became interested in the subject of hermaphroditism; and some of the key theoretical influences on his work. His research stands within a long tradition in sexology and medical science but was also heavily influenced by the then-dominant paradigm of the social sciences. What began as a doctoral research project became a life’s work for Money as he built his oeuvre over the next 50 years. Following the completion of his doctoral studies, Money was invited by the esteemed pediatric endocrinologist Lawson Wilkins to take up a position as codirector of a newly created research unit at the Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore. Under the auspices of that unit Money continued his research, gathering increasing numbers of case reports and data with which to evidence his claims. It was in that context that Money identified a need for a single overarching term that would enable him to discuss the masculinity and femininity of the intersexed. The term he eventually settled on was gender."
(p. 23)

(Germon, Jennifer. Gender: A Genealogy of an Idea. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.)
<QUOTE

QUOTE>
"gender: one's personal, social, and legal status as male or female, or mixed, on the basis of somatic and behavioral criteria more inclusive than the genital criterion and/or erotic criterion alone."
(p. 201)

"gender-identity/role (G-I/R): gender identity is the private experience of gender role, and gender role is public manifestation of gender identity. Both are like two sides of the same coin, and constitute the unity of G-I/R. Gender identity is the sameness, unity, and persistence of one's individuality as male, female, or androgynous, in greater or lesser degree, especially as it is experienced in self-awareness and behavior. Gender role is everything that a person says and does to indicate to others or to the self the degree that one is either male or female or androgynous; it includes but is not restricted to sexual and erotic arousal and response (which should never be excluded from the definition)."
(pp. 201-2)

"SEX AND GENDER

Although they are carelessly used synonymously, sex and gender are not synonymous. They are also not antonyms, although they are frequently used almost as if they were. In one such usage, sex is defined as what you are born with, as male or female, and gender is what you acquire as a social role, from a social script. This usage lends support to a second one in which gender is sex without the dirty and carnal part that belongs to the genitalia and reproduction. This is the Barbie-doll usage in which human beings are cast in the role of Barbie and Ken. Though blantantly sexy in shape and clothing these dolls are molded with nothing between their legs, except that some Kens may have a nipple of a penis—but there were no nipples on the chest, nor on Barbie's!

It is the Barbie-doll definition of gender that made possible the political term, gender gap, for which sex gap would be an unacceptable synonym, because of its double meaning. In the politics of the women's movement, the separation of gender from sex was a godsend, because it allowed sex differences in procreation to be set aside in the fight for gender equality in earning power and legal status.

Used strictly and correctly, gender is conceptually more inclusive than sex. It is an umbrella under which are sheltered all the different components of sex difference, including the sex-genital, sex-erotic, and sex-procreative components. The need to find an umbrella term became for me an imperative in the early 1950s when I was writing about the manliness or womanliness of people with a history of having been born with indeterminate genital sex. They were hermaphrodites and their genital sex was ambiguous. In some instances, they would grow up to live as women, but would not have a woman's sex organs. In others, they would live as men without a man's sex organs. In the case of the man, by way of illustration, it made no sense to say that such a person had a male sex role when, in fact, he had no male external genitalia, could not urinate as a male, and would not ever be able to copulate as a male. No matter how manly he might otherwise be, his genital sex role was not that of a man. There was no noun that could be adjectivally qualified to characterize him as manly or masculine, despite the deficit of the very organs that are the criterion of being a male. That is why I turned to philology and linguistics and borrowed the term, gender (Money, 1955b ["Linguistic Resources and Psychodynamic Theory"]). Then it became possible to say that the person had the gender role, and also the gender identity of a man, but a deficient or partially deficient male sex role with respect to the usage of the birth-defective sex organs. The new term made it also possible to formulate such statements as, for example, a male gender role despite a female (46,XX) genetic sex. Without the term gender, one would get bogged down in statements such as this: a male sex role, except that his sex role with the sex organs was not male, and his genetic sex was female.

In popular and in scientific usage, gender role and gender identity have become separated, whereas they are really two sides of the same coin. Other people infer your private and personal gender identity from the public evidence of your gender role. You alone have maximum intimate access to your own gender identity. The acronym, G-I/R (gender-identity/role), unifies identity and role into a singular noun.

There is no finite limit to the number of adjectives that may be used to qualify a G-I/R. One classification is into homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual G-I/R. A homosexual G-I/R itself ranges widely from that of a full-time drag queen or gynemimetic (one who mimes women) to that of a stereotypically macho football hero or Marine Corps sergeant who has a masculine G-I/R, except for the sex of the partner to whom he becomes erotically attracted and male-bonded in a love affair. Some people would say that the macho homosexual has a masculine G-I/R, except for a homosexual partner preference or object-choice. The correct statement should be that he has a masculine G-I/R except for the erotosexual and falling-in-love component."
(pp. 52-3)

(Money, John. Gay, Straight, and In-Between: The Sexology of Erotic Orientation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.)
<QUOTE
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
User avatar
JackDaydream
Posts: 3220
Joined: July 25th, 2021, 5:16 pm

Re: What is a Woman

Post by JackDaydream »

Consul wrote: August 2nd, 2022, 4:32 pm
Consul wrote: July 1st, 2022, 1:19 am
JackDaydream wrote: July 1st, 2022, 12:59 am Human gender and sexuality is complex because it involves biology, psychology and social or cultural aspects of human identity.
If "gender" means "sex", then it involves only biology (physiology/morphology), because it is an objective state of the body rather than a subjective state of the mind (or a social role).
Who knows who introduced the term "gender" in a non-biological (or not exclusively biological) and non-grammatical sense into social science?
I didn't know it until yesterday, when I read this:

QUOTE>
"Imagine a world without “gender.” How would we make sense of our social worlds? How would we think about or theorize relations between and among the sexes? How would we account for what it means to be a boy or a girl, a man or a woman? There can be little argument that the concept of gender has become essential to the way that English speakers understand what it is to be a sexed subject. Yet gender did not exist 60 years ago—at least not in the way we understand it today. Gender as an ontological concept has so thoroughly naturalized into the English language that today it seems indispensable. A lack of attention to gender’s origins has led to the common assumption that it has always been available, an assumption due in no small part to gender’s formidable conceptual, analytical, and explanatory power. Yet gender does indeed have a history, and a controversial one at that. Until the 1950s, gender served to mark relations between words rather than people. While there is evidence that it was used sporadically during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the mid-1950s stands as the historical moment in which gender was codified into the English language as a personal and social category and so began its ascent as a potent new conceptual realm of sex.

The story begins in the late 1940s, when a young John Money undertook his doctoral research on human hermaphroditism at Harvard University. Less than two years after graduating, Money offered the term gender as part of a framework for understanding hermaphroditism, as a rationale for clinical practices, and as a conceptual device for understanding human subjectivity. Money’s ideas have come to have a profound effect on how people in English-speaking contexts understand subjectivity as masculine and feminine. This is because he extended his theories of gender from the intersexed to the wider population to offer an account of how everybody acquires their gender. That extension is representative of a common turn in the biological and medical sciences, where phenomena that deviate from a norm are used to demonstrate and explain the course of normal development."
(pp. 1-2)

"John Money offered “gender” as a new conceptual realm of sex in the mid-1950s. He initially did so as part of a framework for understanding the phenomenon of human hermaphroditism. That framework was first and foremost a rationale for clinical practices designed to habilitate the intersexed into girlhood and boyhood, womanhood and manhood. It would become so much more. To contextualize Money’s ideas I begin by tracing his early academic training; the professional context in which he first became interested in the subject of hermaphroditism; and some of the key theoretical influences on his work. His research stands within a long tradition in sexology and medical science but was also heavily influenced by the then-dominant paradigm of the social sciences. What began as a doctoral research project became a life’s work for Money as he built his oeuvre over the next 50 years. Following the completion of his doctoral studies, Money was invited by the esteemed pediatric endocrinologist Lawson Wilkins to take up a position as codirector of a newly created research unit at the Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore. Under the auspices of that unit Money continued his research, gathering increasing numbers of case reports and data with which to evidence his claims. It was in that context that Money identified a need for a single overarching term that would enable him to discuss the masculinity and femininity of the intersexed. The term he eventually settled on was gender."
(p. 23)

(Germon, Jennifer. Gender: A Genealogy of an Idea. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.)
<QUOTE

QUOTE>
"gender: one's personal, social, and legal status as male or female, or mixed, on the basis of somatic and behavioral criteria more inclusive than the genital criterion and/or erotic criterion alone."
(p. 201)

"gender-identity/role (G-I/R): gender identity is the private experience of gender role, and gender role is public manifestation of gender identity. Both are like two sides of the same coin, and constitute the unity of G-I/R. Gender identity is the sameness, unity, and persistence of one's individuality as male, female, or androgynous, in greater or lesser degree, especially as it is experienced in self-awareness and behavior. Gender role is everything that a person says and does to indicate to others or to the self the degree that one is either male or female or androgynous; it includes but is not restricted to sexual and erotic arousal and response (which should never be excluded from the definition)."
(pp. 201-2)

"SEX AND GENDER

Although they are carelessly used synonymously, sex and gender are not synonymous. They are also not antonyms, although they are frequently used almost as if they were. In one such usage, sex is defined as what you are born with, as male or female, and gender is what you acquire as a social role, from a social script. This usage lends support to a second one in which gender is sex without the dirty and carnal part that belongs to the genitalia and reproduction. This is the Barbie-doll usage in which human beings are cast in the role of Barbie and Ken. Though blantantly sexy in shape and clothing these dolls are molded with nothing between their legs, except that some Kens may have a nipple of a penis—but there were no nipples on the chest, nor on Barbie's!

It is the Barbie-doll definition of gender that made possible the political term, gender gap, for which sex gap would be an unacceptable synonym, because of its double meaning. In the politics of the women's movement, the separation of gender from sex was a godsend, because it allowed sex differences in procreation to be set aside in the fight for gender equality in earning power and legal status.

Used strictly and correctly, gender is conceptually more inclusive than sex. It is an umbrella under which are sheltered all the different components of sex difference, including the sex-genital, sex-erotic, and sex-procreative components. The need to find an umbrella term became for me an imperative in the early 1950s when I was writing about the manliness or womanliness of people with a history of having been born with indeterminate genital sex. They were hermaphrodites and their genital sex was ambiguous. In some instances, they would grow up to live as women, but would not have a woman's sex organs. In others, they would live as men without a man's sex organs. In the case of the man, by way of illustration, it made no sense to say that such a person had a male sex role when, in fact, he had no male external genitalia, could not urinate as a male, and would not ever be able to copulate as a male. No matter how manly he might otherwise be, his genital sex role was not that of a man. There was no noun that could be adjectivally qualified to characterize him as manly or masculine, despite the deficit of the very organs that are the criterion of being a male. That is why I turned to philology and linguistics and borrowed the term, gender (Money, 1955b ["Linguistic Resources and Psychodynamic Theory"]). Then it became possible to say that the person had the gender role, and also the gender identity of a man, but a deficient or partially deficient male sex role with respect to the usage of the birth-defective sex organs. The new term made it also possible to formulate such statements as, for example, a male gender role despite a female (46,XX) genetic sex. Without the term gender, one would get bogged down in statements such as this: a male sex role, except that his sex role with the sex organs was not male, and his genetic sex was female.

In popular and in scientific usage, gender role and gender identity have become separated, whereas they are really two sides of the same coin. Other people infer your private and personal gender identity from the public evidence of your gender role. You alone have maximum intimate access to your own gender identity. The acronym, G-I/R (gender-identity/role), unifies identity and role into a singular noun.

There is no finite limit to the number of adjectives that may be used to qualify a G-I/R. One classification is into homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual G-I/R. A homosexual G-I/R itself ranges widely from that of a full-time drag queen or gynemimetic (one who mimes women) to that of a stereotypically macho football hero or Marine Corps sergeant who has a masculine G-I/R, except for the sex of the partner to whom he becomes erotically attracted and male-bonded in a love affair. Some people would say that the macho homosexual has a masculine G-I/R, except for a homosexual partner preference or object-choice. The correct statement should be that he has a masculine G-I/R except for the erotosexual and falling-in-love component."
(pp. 52-3)

(Money, John. Gay, Straight, and In-Between: The Sexology of Erotic Orientation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.)
<QUOTE
The story by Money which you are describing has been so significant in understanding gender because until that point there was such an emphasis on nurture. As far as I see it, gender is complex mixture of bio psychosocial variables and it may be hard to separate them all. Even with the story of Money it seems that there may have been other factors which led to the person committing suicide. In particular, he had depression and relationship difficulties, which may have been related to all that he had gone through and his twin brother had schizophrenia. In gender histories there are many variables worth considering. In transgender people where there are no biological disorders of sexual anomalies, there still may depression, which has a biological basis. The biology of depression may be addressed by antidepressants but if the gender dysphoria remains the source of depression may continue or be of a continual relapsing nature. Even with the use of CBT I am not aware of anyone ever being 'cured' of dysphoria, even though some people with body dysmorohuc disorder, which could in some ways be compared to gender dysphoria, appear to benefit from CBT interventions.
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