A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
I’m low key annoyed about the whole “it’s a social construct” to mean “it’s not real”. Social constructs are real as fuck and they can fuck you up good.
The economy is a social construct. Days of the week are a social construct. I still need to show up to work on Monday morning so I can give my socially constructed fiat currency to the grocery shop in order not to fucking starve.
Some people push it like that, but that's not really what the observation is about. It's meant to highlight that it's not preordained. Life is mostly made up and we should learn to acknowledge that openly. Especially when aspects of that made-up-ness actively oppress people
I've socially transitioned and I can safely say it's like going through a portal into a different dimension.
I mean it's a bit like saying software is just 1s and 0s. Ya great but I still need to run Krita to draw.
What bothers me is when people use that argument to advocate for replacing 'constructs' which evolved more or less naturally over tens of thousands of years, even before the dawn of civilization, with something deliberately engineered by individual humans. Is a cis-normative nuclear family the only way that it's possible to live? Of course not, but it's also what the vast majority of the population wants in their lives, which is why it's the standard.
This is patently absurd. For one thing, the nuclear family itself is not currently what the vast majority of the population wants; if you look at the global population, both now and historically, the extended family is dominant. I might as well argue that children abandoning their parents and home is an unnatural construct, that's replacing the 'tribal' way of living that was natural for humans for millennia. I could further argue that (since the nuclear family only became the most common type in the US in the 1960s and 70s), it was done in corporate interests to sell more cars and suburban houses, and that it is in fact YOU that is slobbering all over corporate cock.
But I wouldn't make that argument, because it's reductive and, frankly, a bit silly to let a narrative take the place of actually reading some sociological studies.
You might enjoy reading some analysis into how capitalism requires the nuclear family in some ways
It's a very interesting article. I broadly think its argument is sensible, but there's a couple of places I'd offer some dissent:
I think the idea of greater socialisation of child raising is framed as avoiding turning back the clock to a time when the nuclear family was stronger. I'd disagree with this framing of the suggestion; in many ways this is a return to tradition. Capitalism and the autonomy it represents has led to a loss of the kinds of community the author is describing. It has allowed the destruction of the 'village' in the idiom 'it takes a village to raise a child'. There is now enough wealth for parents to leave the extended family and the local community to form their own, isolated nuclear family, which I personally think can be damaging for children's socialisation.
I think the author makes a good point about 'gay' and 'lesbian' as identies having the space to exist as subcultures with the greater autonomy afforded under capitalism, but I would take issue with the suggestion that queer identities are only able to exist as a result of capitalism. There are numerous examples of historical transgender and homosexual identities, not just behaviours (e.g. two-spirit people in Native American culture).
Overall I think it's an interesting narrative and a good point about the distinction between homosexual behaviour and desires, and queer identity.
That’s a huge strawman jk. We really just want the hets to stop trying to harm/kill people that are different from them.
TEH GAYS WANT TO DESTROY THE FAMILY is vintage homophobia and really needs to go jk.
How convenient of you to ignore not only a much bigger chunk of human history than the last couple thousand years (if even that), and so so many cultures that aren't the handful you're familiar with, but also all of the vast systemic social man made influences that make it that way, like religion, patriarchy, and even capitalism...
Babies do not have gender, because baby minds aren't developed enough to understand that kind of social construct. A baby's gender is both a social construct AND not real.
I'd love to go to that kind of party, where rainbow cake is served along with a slice of anthropological oration. But even though I'm gay (and therefore supposed to accept every odd idea that comes along, apparently), I'm not sure gender is a "social construct" alone. There are so many other things that can play into it including hormones and body image and psychological stuff - yet I still feel it was so much easier and breezier when we could just call ourselves men or women or he or she. *(not that I'm against people calling themselves whatever else they want).
Oh! I'm going to present the following in good faith.
You're referring to sex. Sex is biological, gender is a concept. Sex is related to your hormones and your healthcare and what's in your pants, but the idea of masculinity or femininity being tied to specific behaviors or clothes is a social construct. (Gender.)
IE; I'm a woman. Very much a woman. Super secure in that. I've got all the parts, enjoy having them. When I go to the gym or when I drink my cousins under the table or when I work on a car, those things shouldn't be tied to an idea of being masculine, because I'm not suddenly more masculine for doing them. I'm definitely still a woman the whole time. That's the difference here, is that there's a concept of gender which is different than sex.
Of course it's not devoid of the effects of sexual dimorphism. It's just that how one's sex determines societal roles and stereotypes (a closer definition of gender), shouldn't be so rigid and unmovable.
Actually, we should go the other way and have more reveal parties for other genetic traits, and elevate them to the same level of perceived importance as apparent biosex! Let's have blood type reveal parties! Joint mobility reveal parties! Relative nose and eye position reveal parties! Relative limb length reveal parties! Roof of mouth topology reveal parties! Single nucleotide polymorphism reveal parties!
Sex, like all genetics, is way more important to how people turn out than people give credit for lol. That's beyond the cheating route and using strictly physical differences. Height, weight, puberty, etc.
It's kinda like the back swing to people complaining that parents should be lynched for something their children do. The Sins of the Father runs both ways. People really don't like to think that the genetic roll of the lottery can give you a serial killer though. The entropy of life is a hard thing for pattern seeking humans to deal with.
Boys and girls are different, but most psychological sex differences are modest in size. For example, gaps in verbal skills, math performance, empathy and even most types of aggression are generally much smaller than the disparity in adult height, in which the average five-foot, 10-inch man in the U.S. is taller than 98 percent of U.S. women. When it comes to mental abilities, males and females overlap much more than they differ.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-differences-in-boys-and-girls-how-much-is-inborn/
Helicopter or hands-off parenting? The choice won't impact a kid as much as you think
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1193176710
Lots of evidence going back and forth regarding how male / female brain structure has an influence on gender incongruence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_gender_incongruence
Brothers and fathers of men convicted of sexual offences are up to five times more likely to be convicted of sexual offences than men in the general population, a new study shows. Genetic factors were found to make a substantial contribution to this increased risk with the shared family environment having a relatively small influence.
https://www.psych.ox.ac.uk/news/sex-offending-genes-more-important-than-family-environment
Contemporary research in neurobiology (a branch of science that deals with the anatomy,[9] physiology, and pathology of nervous system) of addiction points to genetics as a major contributing factor to addiction vulnerability. It has been estimated that 40–60% of the vulnerability to developing an addiction is due to genetics.[10][11]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction_vulnerability#Genetic_factors
Aberrant brain activity in pedophilia links to receptor distribution, gene expression, and behavior
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-023-00105-0
A good read about how the cards can be stacked against people from the moment they're born. You might still end up with a winning hand, but it's just that much harder.
Minor Physical Anomalies and Congenital Malformations
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00940/full
All men are created equal is the biggest lie there ever was. I wonder if there will ever be such a thing as genetic equity.
Sex, like all things, matters. How much you attribute to it can vary anywhere from 0 to 100 due to what you get stuck with in your DNA. Sussing out those nuances is going to takes us decades to centuries still.
Nature probably has way more control over nurture than we would like to think. It's much easier to look down on others in disgust than compassion though and I'm a much bigger optimist and advocate for understanding others than Lemmy likes lol. I'm also for free will over determinism both philosophically and through quantum physics... but sex, something genes are very much tied to, matters.
Blood type? I blame that for how much mosquitos like me, besides oily ass skin.
E: More sauce and tidbits.
Oddly I think parties like this would be more beneficial to the child.
If my parents had thought to have a joint mobility party for me, then maybe my hip joint deformity would have been found in infancy, when it's treatable, and not when I was 17 after years of being told I had "growing pains".
I motion we re-name them "genital reveal parties"
Yeah let's reveal your child's genitals.. doesn't have the same ring to it
Better yet, don't even mention a child. Just invite all your friends to a Genital Reveal Party and see what happens.
Genital Reveal Party
Children welcome!
Hoho, I've been to plenty of those
Aren't there skeletal differences that an anthropologist would point out?
Humans have sexual dimorphism, but it's a cultural thing that women wear skirts and men drink themselves to death instead of talking about their problems (both of these are jokes btw. I have a friend who wore kilts quite often and my mother drank herself to death)
Also, genetics is tricky, there a plenty of examples of people who do not fall into one category or another for these sexually dimorphic traits. There are people who have genetics from both sex, as well and differences in hormones distributions will causes these traits to appear or not appear.
Is a huge grey area.
You're confusing sex with gender
I want a sex reveal party. Who’s having sex in the bedroom right now? Let’s find out!
Isn't that basically what they did at weddings in times gone by?
Which no one would then know at the point of a typical gender reveal party.
A baby is a baby! Don't need an excuse to celebrate new life. :)
In the off chance I ever reproduce, I want "I'm pregnant, chips and dips party!" style events. Everyone wins at those.
The anthropologist might see skeletal differences but they'd also pay attention to the manner in which the subject was buried or what possessions survived with them that could also serve as clues of the subject's identity in life.
Exactly; for instance, if two people of the same (biological) sex were buried together, it means they were definitely just very good friends.
It's a cultural anthropologist, obviously! :)
My favorite part of this is that anthropology majors can find inconsistent gig work not involving food delivery and they still have to be a professor to qualify
wildly based science posting 