so i was trolling and arguing with some bigots online (hey i had some time to kill lmao) and i said something about gender and sex being two seperate things so one of them brought up john money who i had never heard of before. so i looked up john money and looked into what leftists and transgender people had to say about him. obviously the guy was a pos but the general consensus was that he was trying to prove gender was learned with the reimer case but was proven wrong and that gender is innate. which makes sense, reimer never knew he was born a man and had dysphoria from that so transgender people aren’t “socialized” wrong, that’s how they’re born. but what i’m confused about is isn’t gender a social construct and aren’t the social roles, etc, all learned so how would it be innate? like boys aren’t born liking the color blue, and so on and so forth. so is someone just born with a predisposition to be more likely to identify as a certain gender? is it a combination of nature and nurture? something else?

idk i feel like i get it but i’m simultaneously brain farting

  • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    No conclusions can be drawn from the case beyond "abusing children is bad." Seriously. Ethics in science matter, and unethical "experiments" should be dismissed completely. He didn't prove that gender identity is innate or that it's learned, he proved that when you abuse children it fucks them up, and that's it.

    Scientific ethics are not just a polite suggestion, there are actual reasons why they're important, even from a sociopathic standpoint of only caring about the truth. An experiment like this cannot be replicated and it cannot be peer reviewed, and we cannot take David Reimer as representative of most people because the vast majority of people were not subjected to the same kind of abuse. It's possible he identified as male because of something innate to his brain, and it's also possible that the trauma he endured influenced his identity - especially since that trauma was associated with attempts to make him identify as female.

    Whenever unethical experiments are conducted, obviously the most important thing is the harm caused, but it's also virtually guaranteed that the experiment will be contaminated by the "researcher," because if they're abandoning scientific ethics then they're probably fucking up all sorts of other practices, and ofc since it's illegal they have to keep it hidden, so you're left with nothing but conflicting testimony and dubious evidence of what even happened, less like a laboratory procedure and more like reconstructing a crime scene, which, to be clear, it is.

    According to Money's biography cited on Wikipedia about this:

    Money's rationale for these various treatments was his belief that "childhood 'sexual rehearsal play'" was important for a "healthy adult gender identity"

    And in his own words:

    If I were to see the case of a boy aged 10 or 12 who's intensely attracted toward a man in his 20s or 30s, if the relationship is totally mutual, and the bonding is genuinely totally mutual, then I would not call it pathological in any way.

    For Money to be proven wrong about gender being learned, it would mean that he conducted a successful experiment, that produced different results than he expected. If your "experiment" involves the equivalent of grabbing a bunch of random chemicals and throwing them in a beaker, then it doesn't matter what it is you were trying to prove or disprove because your methodology is shit and there's nothing to learn from it.