."˜For over a century, psychological scientists have relied on the gender binary in research"™. Thread summarizing a thought-provoking article that came out in 2018, about challenges to the gender binary. http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-32185-001
Es geht um den ubiquitären Einfluss binärer Geschlechterdenke auf wissenschaftliche Arbeit. Konkret, wie die gewohnte Zwiedenke den Blick auf Zwischentöne und Gemeinsamkeiten verstellt, bzw. Unterschiede schafft, wo eigentlich ein Spektrum existiert.
Von dem Artikel ist bisher nur der Abstract verfügbar, den C.Townsend oben detailliert hat. Erscheinungsdatum soll 2019-07-19 sein.Belief in the gender binary assumes that membership to the category male/ female is biologically determined, apparent at birth, stable over time, salient to the self, & a powerful predictor of psychological variables.
1) The Challenge from Neuroscience: Human brains are not internally consistent for male-typical & female-typical featured. Instead, most human brains are a mosaic of these features.
2) The Challenge from Behavioral Neuroendocrinology: Gonadal hormones are not fixed but are dynamic & can be influenced by gendered social experiences e.g. testosterone baseline levels across gender/ sex change as a function of multiple environmental factors.
3) The Challenge from Psychological Research: Humans are characterized by a gender mosaic. Small effect sizes for gender differences found in meta-analyses imply overlap in distribution scores for men & women
4) The Challenge from Psychological Research with Transgender & Non-binary Individuals: Birth-assigned sex/gender categories are imperfect at predicting how a person will self-categorize, some individuals experience sex/gender as discontinuous or irrelevant.
5) The Challenge from Developmental Psychology: Social practices relating to sex/gender e.g. labeling of individuals, causally contribute to children"™s tendency to categorize & stereotype based on gender/ sex. Experiments indicate such sorting is not innate.
The gender binary is an obstacle to scientific progress: it misrepresents human biological & Psychological processes, obscures complexity when used as a proxy for other variables, overlooks overlap in distributions & causal interaction between biological & environmental factors.
The gender binary has social costs: it denies & denigrates the existence of trans & intersex individuals; causes discrimination, harmful & false stereotypes e.g. boys are better at math, & institutional gender biases e.g. legal policies.
The gender binary should be replaced by a conception of gender/ sex that stresses diversity, including a multiple category system whose categories are fluid, not mutually exclusive & allow for the possibility that gender is viewed as irrelevant to the self.
Happy to respond to good faith questions/comments that are answerable based on details in the article & my reaction to it as an anthropologist. Anything more complex should be addressed to the authors e.g. @SarivanAnders
