196

Stealing the answer because I'm nowhere near as articulate on this matter:

The basic (and simplified) idea is that gender--what we think of as masculine and/or feminine--is performed in the ways we act, speak, dress, move, etc. and doesn't really exist outside of that performance. We learn how to perform this way from dominant culture and conventions--what someone might (incorrectly) call "normal male" or "normal female" behavior. But these "normal" qualities (and genders themselves) don't actually exist--rather, we are all repeatedly mimicking them and are rewarded for doing so (or punished for not doing so). We merely impersonate the qualities we've been taught match the gender we've been told we possess (like females being demure or males being aggressive) until those impersonations (and gender itself) become belief and seen as something natural and assumed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4dddcq/eli5butlers_gender_performativity/

A lot of insights in neuroscience and psychology come from tragic incidents rather than experiments. The function of various brain regions has mostly been deduced by studying people with traumatic brain injuries. What little we do know about atypical development in children comes from tragedy as well.

There was a case study of a neglected child who experienced nearly no human contact for most of her life, and she had severe developmental delays compared to everyone else. The doctors mismanaged her care to an absurd degree, but not intentionally. From what they did observe, she was mentally typical outside of her lack of human contact. Her progress mostly stalled because the system didn't let her form meaningful relationships with parental figures. It's a really sad story.

In terms of gender, significant insights have been gained by misguided attempts to treat people with atypical sexual development. Intersex children still regularly undergo "corrective" surgeries to make their genitals fit the male/female binary. Many intersex people come out as transgender, only to realize that their genitals were altered at birth in unnecessary ways.

The doctors have tried to compensate by studying prenatal hormones to more accurately assign genitals, but the whole thing is fundamentally flawed. So long as the genitals don't pose a risk to the child's health, the reasons for doing the surgeries are purely normative. They just want the genitals to fit a binary because having them exist outside the binary is "abnormal," which they see as inherently bad.

............

The surprising truth is that doctors are biased to believe that gender can be forced. It all comes back to persistent philosophical assumptions about identity that date back centuries.

• Descartes viewed the self as something fundamental, the first thing we could be certain of. In actuality, our sense of self can be wrong, as demonstrated by trans people who thought they were cis, only to learn that they hate being their assigned gender and love being another.
• Locke viewed human beings as blank slates that are shaped by our environment. While we are strongly shaped by our environment, case studies of separated identical twins show that many psychological traits are strongly biological, while almost all traits are a mix of both. If an identical clone with the same DNA as you is trans, the chances of you being trans are only ~50%
• We can be any gender and gender differences are purely cultural. Western philosophy has a strong bias towards believing in free will; that everyone is created equal and that we each have the freedom of self determination. We are rational beings that aren't constrained by nature like simple animals that operate purely on instinct. These ideas are more reflective of what we want to believe and what is useful to believe.

The last case study I'll mention is the case of the guy who was forcibly feminized and gaslit into believing he was a girl. After a botched circumcision that completely destroyed his phallus, David Reimer's parents were told that they should just raise him as female. They touted "Brenda" as proof of gender being arbitrary, even as David began to insist that he was a boy. He was given estrogen and experienced crippling gender dysphoria as a result. When he was finally told the truth, he adopted a male identity.

Sadly, David committed suicide at the age of 38, going public with his story before then. Over the 3 decades that his false story was left uncontested, the view of his psychologist had dominated, doing irreparable damage to gender science. Afterall, if a cis boy could be made a girl, why couldn't intersex and trans people just live as the gender they were told they were?

The truth doesn't just undermine gender, but fundamental biases embedded in most people believe about the world. False ideas can be more useful that unfortunate truths, as believing in free will, believing in self determination, believing that things are just and fair helps the machinery ramble on. You're more likely to succeed if you think you can, so believing we have control of ourselves is appealing.