Sorry, as I mentioned I'm fairly sick in the Life Plane and ill in the Mental Plane, so I forgot a couple points:- I didn't intend to leave cisgendered men out of this discussion. There is much harm done to them by society, in terms of gender, in my opinion. Their aspiration has not so much been amputated but warped, and they are being shamed for this as well. This is a fascinating and important topic in itself.- Some cisgendered women with abnormally high testosterone report mental changes in a masculine direction from this condition. This is kind of a minor interesting parallel to being transgender, where hormone therapy can get things back in alignment mentally in each case.Okay that's it! Thanks for helping me use this space to process; I'm dialoguing with Vervaeke in the near future on the subject and hoping to be as prepped as possible to try to create space for understanding.RHello sw ~I am sick with Covid, and was going to just write back to your email for now because your questioning is extremely alive for me right now, although I also appreciate the rest of the conversation and will have questions for others when I have the energy. I think my prefrontal lobe is a bit offline right now, so the response did get very long. Apologies for that. It does at least seem sort of coherent to me, so hopefully that's correct!I share and appreciate your curiosity around this topic. I would say that for me it has attained the level of some kind of burning aporia. At some point during my own struggle with gender identity, I began to question, "Wait, what even IS gender?!" I think it is necessary to be curious and cautious around such a fraught topic. It has proven to be furiously difficult, given the strength of opinions and the dearth of real knowledge I have encountered. I found that real wisdom on this topic came not from the constructivist vs. biological debates of academia and society, but from the work of people like Gregg, John Vervaeke, and Agnes Callard in other domains, which I applied toward gender.The BPS framework maps super well to Gregg's ToK, and you can hear him elaborate on that toward the end of the podcast I did with him. I have found that you can really poke holes pretty easily in any definition of gender which reduces gender to one aspect of BPS or Plane of the ToK, and so I try to hold space for all the planes at once in order to honor the whole and not argue from a narrow view. (Capitalizing when I'm referring to Gregg's terminology, hopefully accurately.) At this stage a wide net seems advised.Starting with B, clearly gender has very strong and unbreakable ties to sex (in the Life Plane of the ToK). The great majority of people have a sense of gender which is congruent enough with their sex so that it does not cause them significant hardship in and of itself. But sex is basically binary (with an astrisk and fine print), whereas people's experience and expression of gender at the Mental level seems fantastically diverse, and interacts with very diverse societal differences through time and space, regarding both the number and purview of societally-sanctioned genders. I assume that effects from the Mental level could also reflect back on epigenetics (Life Plane).The endocrine aspect of B is in itself fascinating and adds complexity to even this aspect. Adriana Forte Naili, a member of this group, talks about female hormonal cycles in her podcast episode with Gregg, and how accepting a more cyclic mentality in addition to a static one could enrich society (i.e. collective Relevance Realization per Vervaeke).Leading from B into P, there are some interesting indicators that gender at the P (Mental) level can change course from sex at the B (Life) level. Many of these center on transgender people and brains (referencing Sapolsky), and observations of primate brains and behavior (see the link that started this thread). While trans people do seem to show some interesting differences in pure non-brain biology, such as the ratio of 2nd and 4th digits and the activation of a certain number of genes (I think it was 9 out of a set of 16 the last I heard, but I'm not sure how accurate that is) along with the non-interference of epigenetics regarding these genes, the most dramatic differences seem to be in the brain. Not only areas associated with gender, but regions like the corpus callosum are affected. At the Mental level, which trades in the base currency of neural networks, there is an increase in left-handedness and ambidexterity. There is also, often, a sense of being "in the wrong body," etc.Biopsychologist Dana Bevins has this great term, "genetic gendered behavioral dispositions," which serves to bridge from B into P, creating neural networks which the emergent Mental level plays upon to create a conscious sense of gender.If we are not to take the brain as the biggest "decider" among the organs in terms of gender, I think we are denying what makes us most human and reducing us in this aspect to the level of any simple creature such as a cockroach. I feel that this is what people who reduce gender to sex are in effect doing. However, to stop at the brain is still a sort of physical reductionism, which doesn't afford me much practical application when it comes to what gender ought to be.Interestingly, there is a phenomenon which further gives credence to a discontinuity between the conscious experience of the gendered mind (Mind 2 in UTOK-ese) and the sex of the body. Quite a few of us meditators have experienced something called the Pure Consciousness Event (PCE), which is a conscious state that lacks any qualia except for a positive Oneness. In Zen master Dogen's writing, it is called "mind and body dropping away." It also relates to a base consciousness called FINSTING (don't blame me for this term), which is also a sense of hereness-nowness-togetherness empty of other qualia. You can hear Gregg and John Vervaeke talk about all this in the fantastic Untangling the World Knot of Consciousness series. Of interest to me is that the PCE is also empty of any sense of gender or sex, indicating that there are at least some instances of consciousness which are phenomenologically independent of either. There is a fundamental shift going into the conscious Mental Plane, and there are no simple biological realities which pass through the veil in a completely continuous fashion. Here is a gap between sex and gender in a priomordial sense.Looking purely at the P level, you have something like a lens which gives one a "sense and sensibility" onto the world. This lens is obviously deep in our psyche because for most (i.e.. non-trans) people, it is transparent. It is only when this lens is mismatched with how society has defined you, and perhaps how you have defined yourself, that a grating mismatch begins to be felt, and the lens can become opaque if the mismatch becomes realized consciously. For many trans people, this is enough to convince us that sex and gender are not synonymous. For others, it is helpful to note the vast diversity of experiences based on basically the same sex differences.I think "lens" is a better term than a "feeling," although many trans people use the word "feeling." For one thing, your gender can produce and relate to many different feelings. For another, there are some converging trains of thought. Gregg talks about a man's salience landscape being generally more oriented toward the individual agentic, and a woman's being more oriented toward the relational. This coincides with the experiences of people who experience a condition noted by the lab of V.S. Ramachandran, "alternating gender incongruity," in which people sometimes report a flipping of their inner sense of gender as like changing a "lens." I myself have experienced a bit of this. One's sense of gender, and the sensibility that one's gender brings to bear on the world (especially the social world), may be rooted in this lensing action moreso than a feeling.Cognitively, at least according to Vervaeke, there is enormous overlap between males and females in terms of performance. Modest differences in some areas may be due in part to how each respective salience landscaping evolved - women giving birth and taking more care of children, for example. Emotionally, hormones certainly play a role, as any trans person who has taken hormones will tell you.The Mental Plane is important when it comes to individual aspiration. If gender were just "cultural construct" or sex, it would not be possible to aspire towards self-development in a gendered fashion. This is based on the work of Agnes Callard, the philosopher who wrote "Aspiration," and she did validate my thinking that gender could be a source of aspiration for many people, often unnoticed, in an email.Finally, we come to S and Culture. We can see that there are many social constructs around gender, and I would argue that these are literally part of gender where People are concerned, because they reflect back through the Rogerian Filter and into the Private Mind, altering how we experience our conscious gendered selves. It is also clear that different societies across the world have had very different gender systems, again based on the same relatively simple sexes. So there appears to be some function for gender in determining societal roles, although these are flexible. Perhaps there is a dynamic evolutionary process, where the variations in individual disposition get selected by society into delineated categories based on society's needs, and then if enough people don't fit into society's categories well enough, this enables societies to alter their categories to a degree. Beyond which "jobs" are given to each gender (finally getting to this part of your question), this could be a process of collective Relevance Realization, adding bifocal (or trifocal, etc.) depth perception on the issues which face us collectively. I.e., individual agentic vs. relational lenses.In my shorthand, gender is potentiated in Life, realized in the Mental, and actualized in the Cultural.I hope that this kind of theoretical approach can loosen our grip on gender enough to shift it into a more effective tool. It is clear that, despite work roles becoming more similar, many people still have a deep need for gender, and we ignore this at great peril. I think that others have had their inner sense of gender amputated due to violence, oppression, etc., and that if they understood gender as an aspirational option and not a fixed imposed category some of them might heal from this. I think my line of thinking can give us more individual meaning, and also ways to reshape collective gender in the modern world. Further, I hope that this can make room for both the concerns of trans people and cisgendered women.Yours in the wondering,RachelCAUTION: This email originated from outside of JMU. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.
I poke my head in this thread sparingly, and I was not disappointed in any way upon popping into this one.
I remain curious about how a BPS (I’m assuming this stands for “biopsychosocial”) framework would clarify the relationship between gender identity and biological sex. It’s fun that that term (BPS) popped up in this thread, given that a phrase that popped into my mind this morning is, “a woman is a biopsychosocial phenomenon.” To me, this term is inclusive without being blindly wokist.
I’m especially interested in this given recent archaeological findings that I have read about, with more and more women being found buried with weapons of both war and the hunt.
It has me curious if certain roles in society are innately feminine or masculine, or if they are neutral in themselves but can be approached in a distinctly feminine or masculine way. For example, how stay-at-home-dad is to housewife.
That’s all I’ll say for now. Mostly just appreciating the ability to recognise the complexity of these topics and how they’re related.
Also: can confirm UTOK-induced alopecia is a real thing as I make painfully slow progress reading your book, Gregg.
Wish me luck in falling asleep, TOKers!
sw############################
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Rachel: well, maybe not a monastery. All genders/persuasions are welcome. Acolytes, maybe? (in the general sense of acolyte)############################
On May 5, 2022, at 4:18 PM, Rachel Hayden <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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If people are going virtually bald, is this a virtual monastery? 🤓
Okay okay... seriously, if I hadn't stumbled on Gregg's work I'd probably blithely accept the definitions posted in previous emails as well. Now when I hear people change "mind-body" to "brain-body" using the same definition for each, I get extra wrinkles.
R
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Sorry.############################
I’ve done that before - and still don’t know how I accomplish it.Perhaps, I have a hidden fault of being a politician.
The message is a response to Gregg’s comment to Rachel about to tearing out one’s hair as one becomes a ToK devotee:
- I am now virtually bald.
On May 5, 2022, at 11:17 AM, michael kazanjian <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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I received a blank. No message.
############################On Thursday, May 5, 2022, 12:52:59 PM CDT, Waldemar Schmidt <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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________________________________
> On May 5, 2022, at 10:28 AM, Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>
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