mastodon.world is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Generic Mastodon server for anyone to use.

Server stats:

13K
active users

@jeffowski Same people who say women were tricked into feminism never bother to ask themselves why the legal system needed to be set up to enforce housewifery if that was what all women naturally gravitate to.

@jeffowski

That's the thing about slave economic systems too.

If it's so great, why were there so many slave revolts?

If Jim Crow was so accepted & "normal" why was there a constant series of court cases and civil rights marches against it?

If patriarchy was so wonderful, why was there a suffrage & women's movement?

If transphobia & homophobia was universal, why are bigots in the courts & politics fighting so hard?

@jeffowski
Enforcing gender norms. Think about that.

What next, enforcing height norms?

@jeffowski Humans would probably be mostly more or less bisexual and mostly promiscuous or polygamous if they could grow up without any cultural pressure towards heteronormativity and monogamy.

@jeffowski Interestingly, the latest evidence from neuroscience suggests (ironically) that gender identity may well be "innate" to a significant extent. Brains and primary sex characteristics develop along separate genomic pathways, and scans of trans people both before and after HRT consistently reveal them to have neuroanatomy matching their gender identity, not their natal sex.

To put it bluntly, gender - while expression varies - may be about as much of a "choice" as sexual orientation. 🤷‍♂️

@ApostateEnglishman @jeffowski Gender identity being innate, or at least having a significant innate component, is certainly possible and decently supported, but that doesn’t imply that gender norms, i.e, differences in behaviour between genders, is also caused by some innate quality. Variation between cultures and over time makes that unlikely.

@janef0421 @jeffowski Oh I agree! We should never be overly reductive. There's a complex interplay between nature and nurture, biological/neurological factors being only one piece of a very messy jigsaw. It would be a disservice to trans and non-binary people to collapse their entire identities down to some developmental quirk.

On the other hand, having science confirm the experience of gender incongruence to be no delusion - as it has been viewed in the past - can only move discussion forward.