Jordan
First a preamble:
(a) Let’s keep in focus that the subject arose from Patrick’s ideal of (1) sound science and (2) changing morality in the upbringing of children. My point was that the two may, sometimes, clas.
(b) This area is relevant to my professional scientific training and 32 years of clinical practice, so I’m not just winging it!
With that set out, you’ll appreciate that the use of a picture by a psychologist does not make it scientific! Once, psychologists used pictures of phrenologial brain areas, now all debunked (aprt from Broca’s area). And for much of the 20th century, psycholgists divided the mind into Freud’s id, ego and superego, which are now considered unscientific.
So gendered ginger notwithstanding, sex differentiation does not originate in the genitalia, but in a chromosomal difference involving every genital, bone, muscle and brain cell in the body. And this explains not only physical differences, but the two distinct (though overlapping) distributions of mental characteristics found in the two sexes.
It’s also basic science that gingerbread men don’t have hearts… but also that the heart is not the seat of the affections. Extensive studies have shown that no physical differences govern sexual attraction, and that there are only very loose correlations with genetics in twin studies. The latter is not surprising, as no complex human activity is genetically determined. Attraction, therefore, is based in the complexities of the mind, as is evidenced by the fact that sexual orientation can, and frequently does, vary through life. We are unlikely to find out more about the causes of these things in our lifetimes, because such research has for decades been deemed unethical.
That brings us to identity (and particularly gender identity), which is also (as the diagram correctly says) based in our minds: no physical evidence pointing to opposite or new genders has been found. But bear in mind that those with “unconventional gender” fit neatly into the psychological spectrum associated with their biological sex.
As @nwrickert rightly says, gender was originally a grammatical concept (and in most languages there are three! Don’t forget neuter). The word was purloined, I think in the 60s, originally to justify the feminist contention that there are no real differences between the sexes: ergo, “gender identity” must be socially constructed, not biological. Hence “gender” was divorced from “biological sex” ideologically.
Unfortunately, a host of studies across the world and cross-culturally confirm that the mental differences of the sexes do have a strong biological basis, though the complexities of gender-roles are, of course, cultural (pink used to be a blokes’ colour!).
Extending from the feminist coining of gender came the work of sexologists like John Money, with an interest in what is now “gender dysphoria” (though rapidly being re-cast as “gender incongruity.” Clearly a non-biological basis for gender identity would fit that case too, and he claimed that a biological boy brought us consistently as a girl would fit the latter role. That’s the research that was ongoing when I studied psychology, and that’s the research that was later shown to be partly farudulent, and which ended tragically in the detransitioning and suicide of the index case.
Such was the sociological state of play in the 1970s, but note that even in these circles there were only two genders, although some individuals were thought to possess one that didn’t match their scientific sex.
So it took a further step of “gender fluidity” to multiply the number of gender identities beyond two. One of the leading psychiatrists involved for decades in gender identity cases at John Hopkins (until recently sacked, like young Murray in the Scottish school, for his scientific views!) believes that the rise in these multiple genders arose from the availability of online interest-groups, to which unhappy teenagers were attracted.
Be that as it may, activists claim anything up to 63 separate genders. But is this in any way scientific? There is no definitive list, with definitions, of genders in the scientific literature. And as already stated, there is no objective evidence for their existence beyond the stated mental experience of those possessing them. All of these have come into existence in recent years - as I said above, even the maverick sexologists of the 1970s recognised only two genders. And like sexual orientation, they can change during a lifetime (several studies confirm that untreated childhood gender dysphoria resolves in >90% of cases after adolescence - unless confirmed by adult medical interventions… but that’s another, rather serious, subject).
So, how do we define science? Surely it includes objective, publicly accessible, reproducible findings and, usually, a theory of causation. The multiplicity of genders is entirely based on individual feelings (even the genderbread theory agrees that it is purely mental). But there is a basic tenet of scientific psychiatry worth remembering before paying too much attention to plausible diagrams: “feelings ar not facts.”