Reddit Reddit reviews Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality

We found 16 Reddit comments about Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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16 Reddit comments about Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality:

u/TychoCelchuuu · 55 pointsr/AskSocialScience

>So my question is what are the factual bases for Bill Nye's claim that there are more than two genders he makes in his new TV series, Bill Nye Saves the World?

If you're just asking about the gender claim, the factual bases are pretty boring: we just look around in the world and notice there are more than two genders. More info here. Nye also claims that sex is a spectrum, that attraction is a spectrum, and the expression is a spectrum. If you're interested in the evidence for those claims, this book is a pretty good one on sex. Attraction and expression are so manifestly spectrums that it's hard to imagine someone claiming otherwise.

>What are the factual bases of his critics of his claim?

If the critics are people like Breitbart, then the "factual" bases are pretty much nonexistent. Perhaps there are more sophisticated critics that you have in mind, but I would not want to speculateabout the factual bases of their claims without seeing their claims first.

> And as a followup, if there are more than two genders, then how many genders do academics accept as real genders?

I don't think anyone's counted. A quick perusal of the Wikipedia page listed in the first thread I linked turns up at least a dozen, I think. In general this is probably the sort of thing that is too vague to admit of any precise number.

u/smokingcaramels · 14 pointsr/Civcraft

Sigh, sex and gender are not the same thing. Your sex is what you are biologically, your gender is what you identify as. I would encourage you to read Fausto-Sterling's Sexing the Body as it is a very fascinating and SCIENTIFIC look at gender and sex and the politics behind a lot of it. Don't want to educate yourself? Here's a link to a pdf Fausto-Sterling wrote titled The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough.

Here are some slides from my Women and Gender Studies class

Also, do you even know about intersex people? What sex and/or gender would you say they have? The world isn't black and white and I would sincerely encourage you to educate yourself as you sound like a right ignorant twat right now.

u/MondoKai · 7 pointsr/TransyTalk

Not doing summaries/reviews, cause it's late and I'm tired. On request, I suppose. Mostly books, with a couple docs and a few blogs.


Less theory, more personal experiences:

u/Qeraeth · 5 pointsr/TwoXChromosomes

>Haha fuck off.

Logic and reason, presumably?

>I don't have all day to hang around reddit, and even if I did, I wouldn't care enough to go searching through threads to find reasonable comments that have been downvoted,

So you admit to making a politically motivated judgement based on incomplete data?

>Do you believe that no reasonable, or correct opinion has been downvoted for the way it was said in, Qeraeth?

Everything gets downvoted here, unfortunately.

>with me saying that if you have XY-chromosomes, you're born man, and XX, born woman. That is absolutely my entire point, and I'm not discriminating.

I explained at length why those conclusions are entirely inaccurate, ground in social ideas and not science, and that biological essentialism is inextricable from the discrimination trans people face. It is scientifically inaccurate (i.e. pop science), and it buttresses discrimination. So, no, you cannot escape the title of 'bigot' any more than a modern day phrenologist would.

>For the purposes of that statement I'm excluding all of the weird medical cases

Weird? My intersex friends send their regards to your arbitrary normalness.

>abnormal (which doesn't mean bad) chromosomal conditions.

You cannot separate the judgement of "weird" and "abnormal" from the implication that they are wrong, less-valid, or bad. Your disclaimer does nothing other than show the fact that you're trying very hard to have it both ways: cling to unscientific social ideas while saying you're all for equality.

You exclude intersex people (who are a lot less rare than you think) because they are an inconvenience to your argument. What makes them abnormal per se? Inability to reproduce? No, actually they can do that as long as surgeons don't butcher them at birth (you know, because they think they're weird and abnormal, and that there should only be two sexes). They empirically exist and for you to exclude them from any analysis of sex seems bizarre and table-tilting.

>Explain to me exactly how that makes me a woman-hater and a transphobic please.

Because it is not a fact.

You are going to discover that how we sex people is considerably more motivated by social ideals and politics and not purely objective science. You keep pretending your chromosome fetish is some kind of fact. It isn't, simply put.

Others might say you are "technically fact" (whatever that means) because we all still live with an understanding of essential sex, but others will tell you that there is no 'technical maleness' about trans women other than what people like yourself choose to project onto them. You cannot argue that trans men are essentially women or that trans women are essential men and not be called a transphobe.

You don't get to decide what transphobia is; the people who suffer from it do, (I know it's shocking, really, but the people who actually live with it may just know it when they see it).

It also makes you misogynist/misandrist because you're essentially defining women and men by their body parts rather than their selves. You'll probably wave your arms and go "but gender gender!" Gender and sex are both distinct and connected, and in a society where we tend to give more ontological weight to what we define as sex, it is problematic when you elect to label people against their will in these matters.

The essential idea that XY chromosomes or penises essential make men is not scientific. That's just how we chose to label things. The presumed essential sex is really just a laundry list of body parts, and as I said in my prior comment to you on the matter, even that changes when it comes to trans people.

I notice you also ignored the question about political correctness. Or have you realised that it's an empty concept used to bludgeon people who have a hard time being automatically respected on their own terms?

u/SecondWind · 4 pointsr/asktransgender

If you need academic citations, Anne Fausto-Sterling is a good source.

She's also the author of the very readable Myths Of Gender and Sexing the Body, which both deal with this topic in a very scholarly way.

u/ofblankverse · 4 pointsr/TwoXChromosomes

Also, here is a book on the same topic from the perspective of a biologist.

"One of the major claims I make in this book," she explains, "is that labeling someone a man or a woman is a social decision. We may use scientific knowledge to help us make the decision, but only our beliefs about gender--not science--can define our sex. Furthermore, our beliefs about gender affect what kinds of knowledge scientists produce about sex in the first place."

u/NapAfternoon · 3 pointsr/NoStupidQuestions

One of the books on your list that looks promising is Sexing The Body. While it may not provide an in depth overview of human biology it will likely provide the appropriate background information. Many other books under the gender studies umbrella do explore and explain biological sex (male, female, intersex), prominent scientific studies, and current areas of research. One book not on the list is Delusions of Gender and it is just one book to explore these issues.

At the end of the day that's a reading list to get the PhD student started. By the end of their PhD they will have ready 3-4x that many articles and books. Those of their choosing will focus in on areas of research that they are interested in. That may include basic research on human anatomy, biology, and sex.

I guess the question is what do you think is missing from these books that discuss gender and sex from a biological perspective that can only be gained from human biology textbooks?

u/ceogoku · 3 pointsr/asktransgender

The best resource is Sexing the Body by Anne Fausto-Sterling. It presents a recolection of scientific papers, research, experiments since 1800 to the present in sexuality and gender and where we are now and her own take on the subject. It presents critisism to the androgen developmental path (the idea that we are "female" and testosterone makes us male), it introduces the concept of an estrogenic developmental path, it challenges the idea of gender and sex as two distinct characteristics, and joins them in a moebius band, both being part of a more complex structure than a binary pole.

The first half of the book is a very well written recolection of these ideas, the second half is basically for supporting the first half with scientific data. I loved it.

u/Mikesapien · 2 pointsr/SampleSize

A person is not born "either male or female."

First, there's biological sex. According to Fausto-Sterling (2000), roughly 1.7% of all live births are intersex. Other estimates put the figure somewhere between 1-2%. Intersex conditions are conditions in which a human body cannot be classified as distinctly male or distinctly female. There are numerous variables that factor into this, and it isn't well understood yet. Some intersex conditions include hormonal insensitivities, or chromosomal mutations, such as XXY, XYX, XYY, or XXX instead of the standard XX (female) or XY (male).

Second, there's gender, which your second question specifically asks about. One may identify as any variety of genderqueer, such as two-spirits, genderfluid, bigender, trigender, pangender, agender, "third" gender / "other" gender, gender-neutral, gender-ambiguous, transgender, etc. Likewise, one may be born into one sex (or intersex), but identify as another gender, as is often the case when surgeons "assign" intersex children.

The assumption that a person is "either male or female" is called gender binarism, and it's exclusive, antiquated, and presumptuous.

u/benderscousin · 2 pointsr/worldnews

To have a really indepth understanding read Anne Fausto-Sterling's "Sexing the body", it is very informative.

https://www.amazon.com/Sexing-Body-Politics-Construction-Sexuality/dp/0465077145

u/DeliriousZeus · 1 pointr/cringepics

I know it's very easy to assume "biology" is always right, but it actually fucks up big time, quite often. It's not that simple to divine gender from a sex organ when that organ is neither a penis nor a vagina. Intersexuality is rare to odd (depending on your interpretation of the word 'intersex'), but it's an abnormality that brings some light to your belief that nature is always right about things. I encourage you to read even the first chapter of Sexing the Body. While many of the statistics Fausto-Sterling cites are disputed to this day, it opened my eyes to a lot of issues most of us would consider silent, and the history is solid. To assume biology can't be argued with is to ignore that a lot of things get messed up on a moment-by-moment basis within each cell, let alone a complex system like the mind which is the center for extremely complex ideas such as gender identity.

u/Quietuus · 1 pointr/TopMindsOfReddit

> Like what reading? I like to read!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sexing-Body-Politics-Construction-Sexuality/dp/0465077145

https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Bodies-Matter-Discursive-Limits-Sex-Routledge-Classics/041561015X/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=CNDN34DGBXQGMJRNHAEQ

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sexing-Brain-Lesley-Rogers-2000-06-01/dp/B01HC0RD82/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1481591782&sr=1-2&keywords=sexing+the+brain

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Delusions-Gender-Science-Behind-Differences/dp/1848312202/ref=pd_sim_14_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=CNDN34DGBXQGMJRNHAEQ

http://bennorton.com/gender-is-not-alone-the-social-construction-of-sex/

http://www.dana.org/Cerebrum/2003/Extreme_Problems_with_Essential_Differences/

would be good places to start, plus numerous other papers, some books and blog posts I don't have quite the google-fu to relocate, and a lot of more tangential stuff. (I originally came to this mostly through the study of the theory of bodies and embodiement in art, as well as my spouse's academic studies in gender and sexuality). In getting to grips with this material and the general position it's important to move away from the facile strawman of the idea that biology is disregarded in a social constructionist view; more profoundly, social constructionists realise that social environment reshapes biology.

>Yeah it is. If you believe trans women only transition because of quote unquote "gender" which is purely social...you're wrong.

But what is a 'gender role'? If you restrict it to something as facile as 'girls like pink' then you can make anything absurd. It's worth remembering that the term 'gender roles' was originally coined by the sexologist John Money to describe the behaviours inhabited by unassigned intersex individuals trying to express a single binary gender identity. From a performative standpoint, gender roles are the entirety of the behaviour with which we signal the gender identity we wish to and are trained to project towards society. To say such things are not bound up in the trans experience is simply wrong; many trans folk experience feelings of dysphoria at being identified as their wrong gender, and lessening of these feelings or even positive counter-feelings at being identified as their correct gender. This is purely a matter of social perception. Therapeutically speaking, people transition because it helps to alleviate their feelings of dysphoria. Whether the underlying cause of the dysphoric state is genetic, epigenetic, foetal or psychological (or even spiritual) or some subtle combination of factors which differs on an individual basis is immaterial to the benefits provided by transition to the majority of those who seriously seek it. This is, it is important to note, only the medically legitimised narrative of the trans experience.

u/javatimes · 1 pointr/asktransgender

The binary sex system was socially constructed by cissexed (or cissexual) humans. It has no place for transsexual or intersexed people. I think more people are realizing how limiting it is towards intersex people, but it's just as limiting towards transsexual people.

It's not like I ever got a choice whether I agreed or not with this cis system of binary sex. I don't agree with it. Therefore, discussing it is a little tough, because every discussion of it assumes that trans people "must" accept "the truth". It's not the truth. My existence disproves it.
I've generally had this discussion with cis folks, and those that seem to be trying a little to accept trans people do seem to want to put us in some "female men" and "male women" categories--but if we can think of gender as socially constructed, it's hard to see why we can't see the sexes as such. We generally assign sex based on appearance of genitals at birth. For the vast majority of people that works out fine.
But not for all people. And being one of the people it doesn't work out for, I'm not likely to accept cis explanations for how I'm wrong.

And it's not like there hasn't been scholarly research on this topic. I'm thinking of Anne Fausto Sterling:
http://www.amazon.com/Sexing-Body-Politics-Construction-Sexuality/dp/0465077145
as one example.

In college I took a "History of Gender" (gender being used to mean both sex and gender) course and at the very end, the professor asked us for our conclusions--what we had learned. I knew this was going to be hard for the cis people in the room to accept, but I said "there's a lot of documentation of the fact that sex is just as socially constructed as gender--I had no idea" (I was 23 at the time and pre physical transition.)
The prof absolutely lit up at my response and said, exactly. It gave me a lot of hope and it was one of the things that encouraged me to transition rather than just accepting the common knowledge of my body as my identity.

u/Maristic · 0 pointsr/TwoXChromosomes

Good points.

In addition, if you read up on the subject (e.g., by reading Anne Fausto-Sterling's [Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality](http://www.amazon.com/you-can-put-anything-you-like-here-i-have-put-a-unicorn-and-a-piglet/dp/0465077145 "Read a book! :)"), you actually find that “biologically female” itself as a nebulous term. You have external physical anatomy, sex organs, genes, and so on. Of course for most of us, these all align the same way (and match gender presentation and gender role), but the key here is that it is most but not all.

For that reason, I have a bit of a problem with the name of this subreddit too. By being “cute” and saying “two X chromosomes”, we slap some women in the face, namely women with Turner Syndrome (only one X), and AIS (XY chromosomes), as well as allowing in some men, such as those with Klinefelter's syndrome (XXY).

u/[deleted] · -2 pointsr/SubredditDrama

You should read this!

http://www.amazon.com/Sexing-Body-Politics-Construction-Sexuality/dp/0465077145

The content is the product of 6 years of exhaustive research done by a biologist at Brown.

EDIT: fellow redditors, when you downvote one half of a friendly and productive conversation you are demonstrating the exact reason why SRS exists.