What is Reddit's opinion of Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Anyone who enjoyed this talk will be delighted to hear that Cordelia has a book out called Delusions of Gender, which is excellent and, redundantly, has made a lot of men very upset.

If you’re interested in the science of it, I highly recommend the book Delusions of Gender. It’s an excellent breakdown about how the “science” behind those assumptions is deeply flawed and doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

You don't seem to separate what women 'want to do' from the way they're treated when they do this certain thing that they want to do, which makes it very hard to get through to you on this topic.

I would advise that you do actually watch the video, because it addresses the very 'brain differences' you are invoking and demonstrates that women have been shown to have equal potential in the case of mental competition. Invoking 'brain differences' also kind of undercuts your realist posture.

>I never said women can't compete (in Dota), I'm saying they don't.

I'm saying they don't play because of the bullshit we experience, and largely not because of lack of interest. Interest is made self-evident by these tournaments. If nothing else, try to understand that. Women's tournaments removes the primary source of bullshit, allowing us to grow as players without the focus of each pub team becoming team chatting shit to a girl. You do realize we can't even use mic most of the time without some neckbeards getting tilted? What kind of training experience is that? You need to think about the conditions that lead someone to keep playing and progress or not.

If you want to learn more about stereotype threat and see lots of the data you asked for, I suggest reading Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine.

Though, that book's intent was to demonstrate that what differences we naturally have are minor, and most of what we associate with men or with women is molded by our culture. Eliot's work actually backs up what I'm saying; it doesn't refute it.

She does pin gendered interests on neurology, but more contemporary research has shown that to be vastly overstated as well. This book has more current information on that topic, if you're interested.

FWIW, I also dislike most mobile games, and prefer MMOs, ARPGs and FPS'es. Though that is just a single data point. ;-)

Not really. Brain differences between the genders exist on a bell curve, and neurological gender differences observed in the brain are likely caused by psychological and cultural factors at least as much as hormones. Check out Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine sometime - she does an excellent (and trans-affirming!) job dismantling the sexist myth of "brain sex".

There's a reason the connection between the intersex community and the trans community (and LGBT community in general) has historically been kind of fraught. A lot of intersex people identify as trans, and many intersex issues overlap with trans issues (right to bodily autonomy, right to respectful and educated medical treatment, people asking invasive questions about your body/genitalia, bathroom bills and other gender policing), but it's not perfectly analogous.

I guess what I'm saying is this isn't a bad comparison but it's not really the best.

Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine. Because most of what it's believed about gender is buried in myths, misunderstandings, and idealization. Also, NO ONE should be expected to fulfill any gender role based only on their genital structure.

I'm familiar with the claims made in these books - it's amazing how neatly her "findings" fit into stereotypes out of a 1950s sexist's diatribe about 'wimmins'.

For a review of the neuroscience of gender that isn't based on one person's ~~marketing strategy~~ research, I highly suggest this book. It specifically addresses most of the stereotypes presented in Dr. Brenzadine's work and shows exactly how much (or, in most cases, how little) evidence there is for the claims.

REPUTABLE research fails to show any major differences between "male brains" and "female brains". Read Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender and disabuse yourself of that bullshit. http://www.amazon.com/Delusions-Gender-Society-Neurosexism-Difference/dp/0393340244/

Okay, correction, you got it out of your butt and a bunch of pop psychology books. In that case I'll see you those and raise you Delusions of Gender, which is a pretty broad overview of the study of neurology VS gender. That's from 2011, by Cordelia Fine.

One of the biggest problems with what you are doing is you're leaping from "there are some behaviour differences in the brain, but it is incredibly complicated" to "this stereotype is true and it works like this!"

Kindly don't lecture me on keeping an open mind on the subject, this was half my university degree. :)

Keep in mind that male and female brain structure differences are EXTREMELY controversial. Most brain researchers agree that there are no average differences. Dr. Dan Karasic, professor of psychiatry stated that "Studies like this expand our knowledge of the brain and gender identity, but do not have clinical utility. There is more overlap in male and female brains than there are differences." There are numerous (1) books (2) and articles (3) written (4) stating such differences are the results of bad science and sexism.

Regardless, the study in question in no way comes to the conclusion as the poster above suggests. The researchers state "other variables may be independently affecting both the expression of a transsexual identity and the neuroanatomy in transsexuals that led to the observed association between both. Some possible candidates include genetic predisposition, psychosocial and environmental influences, hormonal exposures, or most likely an interplay between these variables."

Finally, these differences are with adults. Similar effects are not seen in children, which suggests it's likely just a result of environment.

>Wait, why did history picked men instead of women for war materials.

i answered this already - men dominate politics and get to choose all the rules, the women had no say

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>If you grow, woman and man in a wild nature, a women will always aim for peaceful grow.

early societies were egalitarian, that's nowhere near accurate

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/14/early-men-women-equal-scientists

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22071-inequality-why-egalitarian-societies-died-out/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4143610/

please actually read up on this stuff if you're interested

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>Have you read "the nature of genders" bruh?

now we're talking genders instead of sex? can you not even get this straight? yes i've read plenty. i can direct you to plenty of books and articles

https://www.amazon.com/Delusions-Gender-Society-Neurosexism-Difference/dp/0393340244

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seriously, you're literally just making this stuff up. or someone else made it up and you swallowed it whole rather than bothering to question it. just because you

Physical differences between gendered brains are not as clear cut as they are made out to be. Read Delusions Of Gender by Cordelia Fine. Really dives into the science and the methodology behind the studies that "found" a difference.

Amazon link for your convenience :))))
https://www.amazon.com/Delusions-Gender-Society-Neurosexism-Difference/dp/0393340244

Nature by itself isn't necessarily virtuous ; and I'd like to see more evidence for the biological wiring you speak of. Especially see there's been a long history of attempting to essentialise socially constructed differences in terms of biology in order to put it beyond critique. See Cordelia Fine's https://www.amazon.ca/Delusions-Gender-Society-Neurosexism-Difference/dp/0393340244/ref=asc_df_0393340244/?tag=googleshopc0c-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=292967644263&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=15142238553942091415&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9061009&hvtargid=pla-333448569315&psc=1 for a critique of the tendency to attribute the impact of social processes to biology instead.

Further, we have a long history of basically acting to override even known natural differences / disadvantages through social (dis)incentives and science and technology , and there is an active strain of feminism that seeks to use technology and society to override any disadvantages women are put at because of how biology operates in a given social context (xenofeminism).

Copy pasting something I wrote to hopefully make this discussion suck less:

>Gender comes from the latin word genus and was used by linguists in the 15th century or so to talk about whether common nouns were masculine or feminine in languages which do that sort of thing (like French or Hindi). This percolated into a synonym for sex withing a few decades. Sociologists borrowed it to refer to social roles that were linked to sex but didn't have a 1:1 correlation sometime in the late 1940s. Radfems still use this definition so to them, gender is a social construct. (plus some theory on how person with vagina = likes pink is obviously illogical so the word "woman" is used to provide a stepping stone and grant some legitimacy to the superstition)

>In the late 1950s, John Money and other sexologists from John Hopkins used it to refer to the idea of a brain sex (for example a brain with more grey matter in the frontal, temporal and occipital lobes would be a male brain irrespective of whether it was in a female body or not). Transmedicalists use this definition of gender and to them gender is biologically encoded. (plus they also belive in differing brain mapping of the body due to hormone soup in the uterus (leading to dysphoria) but there is limited evidence for this)

>The popularity of brain-body dualism slowly began to fade and evidence came to light that differences in the brains of the two sexes are more likely to be due to socialisation than biology. And now we're onto tucutes who seem to use two different definitions of gender. The first is the same as sociologists, gender is a social construct except tucutes believe that this means people can identify as any gender they want. These sort tend to talk about xenogenders and make more genders and the inherent nebulousness of all definitions etc. The other type talks about a gendered essence that exists within everyone independent of the body (basically a more spiritual version of dysphoria). They talk about qualia and more philosophical constructions.

>So that's where we are with three different groups of people arguing past each other using different definitions of gender in some elaborate comedy of horrors.

I've been meaning to add sources for a while now but I'm lazy. If anyone else wants to do that, feel free to.

https://www.amazon.com/Delusions-Gender-Society-Neurosexism-Difference/dp/0393340244

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/feb/24/meet-the-neuroscientist-shattering-the-myth-of-the-gendered-brain-gina-rippon

https://www.fastcompany.com/40441920/everything-you-believe-is-wrong-there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-male-or-female-brain

This is not a stupid question. 20 or 30 years ago your conclusions about women being gatherers and men being hunters would have fit in nicely with the anthropological paradigm of the time. Its important that these hypotheses were formulated and evidence gathered mostly from the perspective of male anthropologists. As the field diversified so did the evidence. Nowadays we know that hunter gatherer societies are diverse in their social structure and tend to be much more egalitarian than more 'modern' agricultural based societies. The notion that women are "nesters" and men are "hunters" has gone by the wayside. There is a really great textbook called Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective that gives a myriad of examples of gender and social diversity among human cultures.

The two-sex two-gender system of modern western societies is relatively new compared to the diversity of societies and gender roles that we see both historically and in a more modern context. I would recommend the book by Cordellia Fine: Delusions of Gender as a place to explore this topic further. Its really important to understand that contrary to much popular opinion, brains are not female or male and that gender is a social phenomenon.

Basically what I am trying to say is you like shopping because you were trained and engrained as a women (in general) in our two-sex two-gendered system to enjoy shopping. Its why men (in general) are not. (note: there are always individual exceptions, i'm talking about averages) This isn't about evolution so much as about social conformity. If you had been born into a society where the roles of women and men were reversed then its likely the men in your life would have by and large enjoyed shopping, whereas the women would not. I know its hard to think about us being shaped and moulded by the society that we live in but we are very social creatures. Our social upbringing is just as important, if not more so, than our genetic predispositions. Our environment plays a large role in who we become, people tend to forget that and focus on the evolutionary reasons for this behaviour or that behaviour. It can be hard to come to terms with the fact that the reason why women like pink, shopping, and homemaking is because its society has shaped us to prefer these things and not our genes. Obviously there has been a great push in our society to accept more than just the two-gendered two-sex system. We see both men and women breaking free of their proscribed and prescribed roles.

Here's a good read:

https://www.amazon.com/Delusions-Gender-Society-Neurosexism-Difference/dp/0393340244

I downloaded sections of Cordelia Fine's book from Amazon onto Kindle. There's no way I'm going to pay for the whole thing. The selections are enough to dismiss it, and I think Simon Baron-Cohen's response is far too tolerant.

Fine’s book starts by selecting the worst examples she can find of what sounds like sexism from recent popular science books. She quotes numerous scientific researchers out of context, and tries to amalgamate their findings with pre-Darwinian theology. For example, she deals with Simon Baron-Cohen’s “The Essential Difference” by quoting him as if he thinks all women have one type of brain, and all men have an entirely different one. In fact, he writes about the distribution of psychological traits between average members of the two sexes.

She says that Baron-Cohen’s thesis “has been described as ‘a masterpiece of condescension’”, as if feelings trump facts. She approves of Neil Levy’s disapproving summary of Baron-Cohen as follows:

> “on average, women’s intelligence is best employed in putting people at their ease, while the men get on with understanding the world and building and repairing the things we need in it” -

and says it “can’t help but bring to mind” an eighteenth-century man who believed that God put woman in her place.

Whether a scientific treatise makes a feminist feels she’s being “condescended” or “mansplained”, or whether it reminds her of an ancient text is irrelevant. What matters is whether it is falsifiable, and what attempts have been made to falsify it. Whining about it doesn’t count.

The worst part of her argument is not the denial of science, but the reversal of the political power structure. A man just got fired from the world’s most important company because his statement

> Differences in distributions of traits between men and women (and not “socially constructed oppression”) may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership.

felt painful to women in the company - following his

> “polemic against diversity efforts has left female staff “shaking in anger”"

> “a number of female staff described their disgust"

that it was

> “rigged in favour of wealthy white straight men"

and the CEO of Youtube, Susan Wojcicki, said she “felt pain”.

Like Wojcicki and the hysterical feminists who got James Damore fired, she not only confirms the idea that women are more feelings-oriented, on average, than men, she seems to conform to a sexist exaggeration of that idea.

It’s also supremely ironic that she quotes various big corporations being influenced by “sexist” science books about the differences between “male” and “female” brains. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I've been trying to knock items off my media-to-consume list, so I've been reading and watching a lot lately.

Anime: Planetes! Planetes is great. I've tried a couple others lately, notably Psycho-Pass and Aldnoah Zero, and haven't been able to get into them.

Movies: Harbinger Down and The Machine aren't very good. Wer is pretty good, esp if you want to see a werewolf fight a SWAT team.

Games: Just started Penumbra: Overture. It is spooky!

Books: Delusions of Gender, about how the evidence for innate neuro gender differences is often exaggerated. It's pretty good!
Red Mars is good ol' hard science fiction about terraforming, with decent characters and social studies. Shades into the good kind of MilSF late in the book.
Permanence: SF with some cool xenobiology/ xenopsychology. I liked it, but won't feel the need to pick it up again.
Zone One: It's a zombie novel, but literary! Enjoyed it.
Life at the Edge: not the recent quantum bio book, an older book on unusual living things. If you happen to be near New York, go to the Natural History Museum's Life at the Limits exhibit - it has more and cooler stuff that hits the same itch more accessibly.
I've been reading snippets of Neural Networks and Deep Learning during lulls at work. I'll need to do some coding to really get it.

Courses: I'm halfway through Coursera's Data Science Specialization. Definitely enjoying it, learning a lot. Need to practice using R more in my spare time.

Yes, but do these physical differences translate into actual behavioural/psychological differences? - the evidence is less clear. More on the compelling research being conducted at Rochester university

I recommend this book.

> I minored in Sexuality Studies in college so you don't need to go explaining how sex and gender work,

Well I didn't know you minored in sexuality - so you can't blame me for trying to be thorough. A lot of people don't understand sexuality, or how it relates to biology. Sorry if I touched a nerve there. I have a biological background FYI.

To continue on your points - Biological sex doesn't determine ones gender (we both seem to understand this, but just to reiterate for others) - however biological sex is fact. One cannot change the biological sex one is born into (except through surgery but I think this is besides the point). A person is born male, female, or intersex. There are no other options. It like saying that hair colour is a social construction...one is born with brown hair or one is not. One has XY or XX chromosomes (or less likely another combination) there isn't anything more there - there is no social construction in this interpretation of how our chromosomes are set up. Humans [generally] have 23 pairs pairs of chromosomes, one pair which determines biological sex that we have called the "x" and "y" chromosomes. There is nothing socially constructed about this fact. These are discrete categories with no social interpretation...so in this way I think I understand your struggle "I've struggled to understand that idea and I'm not sure I agree with it".

But attributing emotions, cognitive talents, to one sex or another isn't based in good science. Biological females are not more likely to be nurturing, that is our gendered social construction of what it means to be feminine in North America. Delusions of gender explains what I am trying to get at. "And everywhere we hear about vitally important hardwired differences between male and female brains. The neuroscience that we read about in magazines, newspaper articles, books, and sometimes even scientific journals increasingly tells a tale of two brains, and the result is more often than not a validation of the status quo. Women, it seems, are just too intuitive for math; men too focused for housework. Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology, Cordelia Fine debunks the myth of hardwired differences between men's and women's brains, unraveling the evidence behind such claims as men's brains aren't wired for empathy and women's brains aren't made to fix cars."

Basically while our biological sexes are discrete, this does not translate into a meaningful or determined outcome in terms of cognitive behaviour. Perhaps this is what we are trying to get at? I find this very interesting because so many people just think boys and girls inherently behave differently because of their biological sex - but we, including children, are so heavily influenced by social constructions of gender that unbiased testing is nearly impossible. Cordelia really gets into how biased the testing has been, and breaks down these neurological studies. I think she (and other researchers like her) are really beginning to show just how variable humans are even from an early age.

I'm not "naive" of a lot of the beliefs espoused by the Red Pill, MRAs, and neurosexist evolutionary psychologists. I wish I were, because it's pretty disturbing, and ignorance would be bliss.

But it is psuedoscience. Neurosexist, Evo Psych psuedoscience, is fringe science. Not "basic biology".

I recommend this video, though it doesn't talk about neurosexism in dating so much as neurosexism in STEM fields, but the basic point is still true.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXj3DenRsOg

And more importantly, I recommend this book.

http://www.amazon.com/Delusions-Gender-Society-Neurosexism-Difference/dp/0393340244

There's a great chapter in this book about labour/wage inequities. I think you'd find it to be quite useful.

Radical feminism is an actual movement that has a history and certain parameters for ideology (the Wikipedia entry is extremely vague and does not do it justice). I'm sorry for being rude in my previous comment, but it just ticks me off when people on the internet think "radical feminism" means being feminist and angry, or feminist and extreme. Radical feminists tend to be all of those things, but simply being angry or extreme doesn't make someone a radfem. Words have meanings.

I took a look at the thread you linked. Apart from the academic jargon that means nothing in the real world (there was a lot of this), they're basically saying that although gender is socially made up/imposed, it also has real world consequences. Well, yes, every radfem in the world would agree with that. That doesn't mean that sex-reassignment surgery is the best way to go.

If a born-female wants to be masculine, she can; if a born-male wants to be feminine, he can. Why take hormones and change one's body? If you think about it, it's actually reinforcing really negative, sexist stereotypes ("I have a wee-wee but I like dresses and pink; I must be a girl because only girls can like dresses and pink").

The trans "argument" usually relies on the de-bunked idea that people are born with "male" or "female" brains. Putting aside the obvious sexism of this argument, it's actually not scientifically valid (link to an awesome feminist book on neurology that shows how our brains adapt to our environments via something called neuroplasticity, and we are not born with inherently "masculine" or "feminine" brains): http://www.amazon.com/Delusions-Gender-Society-Neurosexism-Difference/dp/0393340244/

And finally, yes, radfems hate the word "cis". It's an insulting world that implies women are privileged for a) being born female and b) being socialized into femininity (gender role), which is just ritualized submission.

We have been over this repeatedly.

You use the very same conceptual framework to account for your own position. Simply you adjunctly extend the preconditions to include transgenderism.

1- Ofcourse there are non AGP persons that identify as trans. You seem abstracting themes from your own fantasies and taking them at face value. By this very logic the "faceless man" represents your repressed androphilia. Actually all themes are determined by the very same thing, the anxiety of being related to femininity.

2- I do not know enough about autoandrophilia to have an idea of how fantasy narratives must necessarily function in order to be sexually arousing. Given little or no idea of such I can not propose that social anxiety functions (or even figures at all) in autoandrophilia like it does in autogynephilia. In our culture, young males are usually conditioned to be ashamed to be thought of as feminine or to not be man enough. Whilst for young females, the equivalent is not quite true.

3- lol

4- This has already been addressed here.

5- Consistent immersion with any enjoyed object leads to neutralization, or reconstitution in other manifestations/themes. Lowered testosterone/sex drive.

http://www.annelawrence.com/28narratives.html

6- The study does not show an understanding of the phenomenology of autogynephilia. The misunderstanding can be represented here in terms of the "faceless man". In the series of questions it would be put like,

"I have been erotically aroused by imagining a man?"

The failure is in understand how the man (theme) functions within experience. (Where the very idea of sexual relations with a man is a symbolism of distressing femininity). A more relevant question would be put in terms more like,

"I have been erotically aroused by the very idea itself of being thought of as female".

"I have been erotically aroused by the very idea itself of not being man enough"

7- Are you proposing that they are sexually aroused by themselves? You have to be more specific.

8- Same as 2.

9- "I feel sexy" conflated with "I am sexually aroused by the degradation of the very idea of being related to femininity".

10- Intersexed doesn't necessarily have any bearing.

11- This does not have an inherent bearing on the psychological preconditions in AGP.

http://www.amazon.com/Delusions-Gender-Society-Neurosexism-Difference/dp/0393340244 http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/02/04/study-debunks-notion-that-men-and-women-are-psychologically-distinct/

12- As long a patriarchal attitudes remain, then so shall autogynephilia.

Address for once? It is Mr Molay that has repeatedly failed to address when it matters. He knows the score, yet hides behind his propaganda.

http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=2472400923228993687&postID=2649907507831969339

Conversely, you may want to read and understand what is being proposed.

"I'd very much like to get a deeper understanding of your own erotic fantasies"

http://sissysocial.net/all-video/mediaitem/102-sissy-couture-addiction-stx http://www.petticoatpunishmentart.com/docs/cjart051.html http://feminizationstation.blogspot.co.uk http://sissifyourself.blogspot.co.uk http://sissycockmilker.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/prissy-sissy-faggots.html

"it seems to me like you are indeed quite dysphoric"

You mean because I have a masochistic feminization fetish? How does this inherently differ from any other masochistic fetish?

"your almost evangelical preaching of your own interpretation"

Mr Molay and yourself have your theory, and I have my own. Your time and effort spent in these circles could be interpreted in similar ways.

"telling lots of people who might benefit from transition that they should "embrace their fetish" and leave it at that."

The purpose here is not to prevent people from transitioning, but reduction of post-traumatic stress. You are guilty of imposing your trans narrative, and those who do not agree, you label as repressed transsexuals. It may make you feel reassured in context, but you fail to grasp the reality that AGP is inherently a fetish.

I'm going to drop the numbered-list form now.

I'm curious about the controls as well. I'll ask a PhD buddy to get the article and report back.

I agree with you 100%. However, and unfortunately, dim-witted people are probably going to believe nonsense no matter what anyone tells them. Confirmation bias and general dullness tend to go hand-in-hand. I'm glad you highlighted that point, however, because I honestly hadn't thought of it that way. This is probably because, as someone who happens to be biologically female (psychologically andro, so long as we're doing gender binary hopscotch) -- and as someone who experienced extensive abuse in childhood -- I've experienced the preternatural 'bonding' with an abuser or neglectful person. It defies reason. Personally, that study was just another step in the life-long pursuit of identifying and correcting maladaptive behaviors. Edit: As in 'I realize that I feel ___ way about people when they do __ or __ , and that is possibly because of X / I can alter this by __ and __'.

Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine is a book that I suggest obnoxiously often. It would be a shame if this study were slanted in the way that so many studies [as referenced in the book] are, but it is wholly possible.

> men continued to out-earn their female counterparts, by about 7%, even when graduating from the same school, choosing the same major and working in the same occupation. Source

1/1.07 = 93%.

> Where do women in universities get less pasty for the same qualifications/job title? I am honestly asking, never seen this before - I would be interested to find out.

It was a hypothetical based on information like this, however you might find the data on this page or on Google.

There was more I could have clipped, but I felt bad taking the whole chapter. Maybe you should buy the book if you want to find out more. :)

> But these things are sort of slow reaching changes that stem from social attitudes that evolve over time.

I agree, and I think that we aren't even near halfway to equality in terms of how much time it will take, even though many great strides were made in the last century. Part of the reason is people assuming that the problem is already solved because they haven't looked very closely. That's why I'm so active in this thread. :)

It's not junk science, per a number of academic scientists, including scientists who disagree with him (such as the woman who wrote this book).

He didn't, as far as I can tell, actually call his coworkers inferior.

It's clearly related to his job, since the point of his memo was to argue against Google's diversity hiring policy.