Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

https://iai.tv/articles/consciousness-ha...-auid-2238

Descartes famously separated body and mind. While our bodies clearly have a gender, some argue that our minds do not. Consciousness is not physical; can the immaterial awareness that makes up the core of our identities, have a gender? writes Olivia Fane.

EXCERPTS: Here’s a question I’ve been pitting to friends and family this last month: if tomorrow you woke up without a body, would you be able to guess what gender you are?

[...] Societies create gender-roles and biases. There is nothing ‘essential’ about gender.

But my point is this: if biological sex is not the determining factor of gender, and culture is permanently shifting decade by decade and country by country, what is the determining factor?  If there is no objective criterion, and the choice of gender is simply ‘what feels right for the individual’, then there are suddenly as many genders as there are individuals, in fact possibly as many genders as there are people who have ever lived, at any time and in any place. So why bother with gender at all?  For, in giving oneself a gender, isn’t one automatically being sexist?

I write novels. I always write in the first person as a male. Last week I had lunch with a male novelist who found himself always writing in the first person as a woman. I only have sons; he only has daughters.  We wondered, are we just empathetic to those around us? Together we toasted the end of gender and set about the real task of being human... (MORE - missing details)

RELATED (scivillage): The fraught quest to account for sex in biology research

When the most egalitarian countries display the most stereotypically gendered behavior in the sexes, it's fairly clear that gender roles are determined by physiology (biological sex), not culture. Otherwise these countries should have the least stereotypically gendered behavior. That being the case, it seems pretty clear that gender dysphoria, et al., is a dysfunction of simply accepting reality. There's also the fact that infant humans and apes display clear gendered preferences based on their sex...before they can be indoctrinated either way by the culture.

This means there is no science behind culture determining gender and all the science behind physiology determining gender.

And if consciousness isn't gendered, there's nothing else left to imbue a gender identity contrary to biological sex...other than indoctrination, mental illness, and peer pressure.

I thought a good portion of consciousness meant awareness. If I’m aware I am equipped with machinery enabling me to deliver a baby then I should also be aware of who deposits their share of genetic information to help make this happen. But I suspect that probably doesn’t count towards gender declaration.