Saturday, June 10, 2023

Young Americans are Shifting Back toward a Two Gender Model

Via Kevin Drum. 

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3 comments:

G. Verloren said...

1/2

What a weird question just on a fundamental level.

Gender is a social construct. It doesn't exist, except as an abstraction of collective thought. So how do you properly answer a question about something that fundamentally relies upon the thoughts and feelings of others?

An example to illustrate what I mean - suppose someone asked "does the color blue exist"? You might expect that everyone would reply, "Of course it does!". But that isn't actually the case, and that assumption doesn't account for the various ways a person might interpret the question.

Does the color blue exist? Well, that's actually entirely relative if you stop and think about it. There is a band wavelengths of light in the visible spectrum that many people call "blue"... but there are serious disagreements about where the edges of that spectrum fall, and whole swathes of wavelengths see arguments about whether they're actually blue or green, or actually blue or purple, etc.

Then there are entire cultures which simply don't even have a conception of "blue" as being a distinct color from some other color (usually "green"). For such people, "blue" literally doesn't exist, despite the fact that they are seeing the exact same wavelengths of light that other people are.

Then there's the classic philosophical pondering of whether or not different people looking at the same wavelengths actually experience the same phenomena of color - the idea that two people might call the same color by the same name because of the nature of language, but how that color visually resolves in their minds might differ completely. What one person sees as "yellow", another person might see as "pink" - but they both call it "green", because they both grew up seeing their version of the color and being told "that's green" by society. That sort of thing.

June 10, 2023 at 11:07 PM
G. Verloren said...

2/2

In that vein, if someone asks "Are there only two genders", how is the respondent supposed to interpret that question?

I imagine for an unfortunate number of uninformed or unreflective people, they view it as a question about a fundamental aspect of reality - they literally think that gender is some sort of self-evident law of the universe, rather than a fabricated and wholly arbitrary social norm. They fail to realize that we can have as many genders as we wish to invent for ourselves.

That then gets compounded by the problem of language conflation - there is a major problem in America with people not understanding the difference between "gender" and "sex". Lots of people who respond that "there are only two genders" most likely actually mean that there are only two sexes.

And even then, they're still not strictly correct. Biological sex is a product of X and Y chromosome pairings, and unfortunately for those who wish for a simple and easy answer, it turns out there are more genetic combinations possible than the two default options, because genes do weird things sometimes.

Rare as it is, there are (and always have been) people with neither XX nor XY chromosome pairings, who instead exhibit various other combinations due to unexpected genetic variance (usually triplings rather than pairings, but sometimes even larger groupings of duplicate X and Y chromosomes). Sometimes these genetic combinations are virtually indistinguishable from standard XX or XY pairings - and sometimes they vary considerably, to the point that you can't realistically fit such people into a simple binary, and MUST at least consider a broad catch-all third "intersex" option, if not a whole slew of more specific biological sexes beyond male and female.

Of course, getting back to the angle of gender being a social construct, what about the people who respond not based on their personal feelings or inclinations, but based instead on the nature of the social construct?

One might personally not believe in gender, but when asked "are there two genders", one might respond "Yes" simply as an acknowledgement of the prevailing social view. (Just as someone who doesn't believe in private property might nevertheless say "Yes" when asked about it.) Society agreeing that something is so "makes it real", even if the thing itself doesn't actually exist. Money doesn't actually have any value on a fundamental level. But because we act as if it does, that very belief ~makes~ it valuable.

Are there only two genders? Currently, in a broad practical sense within American society and culture, yes - because most people only recognize those two!

But at the exact same time, no - there are actually an infinite number of genders, we just don't actually subscribe to most of them currently!

And also, simultaneously, there are actually zero genders - since gender isn't a real thing, but rather a made up social construct!

So I say again - what a WEIRD question!

June 10, 2023 at 11:28 PM
G. Verloren said...

Oh, and of course, the methodology also has the typical sorts of problems common to these kinds of surveys.

The survey was conducted among a representative sample of 5,046 adults (age 18 and up) living in all 50 states in the United States, who are part of Ipsos’ Knowledge Panel and an additional 392 who were recruited by Ipsos using opt-in survey panels to increase the sample sizes in smaller states. Interviews were conducted online between March 9 and 23, 2023.

So they've already introduced a self-selection bias of people who already part of their program. It's the old Nielsen Ratings issues: for all the talk about sampling being representative, the kind of people who sign up for these sorts of things do, in fact, differ from the majority of people who don't.

This survey was conducted by the PRRI - the Public Religion Research Insistute. While the organization itself does rate well on non-partisanship and lack of political bias, it is intrinsically an organization interested in religious topics, and their program members and respondents choose to take part with that knowledge, and expecting to respond within that context.

Respondents are recruited to the KnowledgePanel using an addressed-based sampling methodology from the Delivery Sequence File of the USPS – a database with full coverage of all delivery addresses in the U.S. As such, it covers all households regardless of their phone status, providing a representative online sample. Unlike opt-in panels, households are not permitted to “self-select” into the panel; and are generally limited to how many surveys they can take within a given time period.

So they're automatically excluding all people who don't have mail delivery addresses. That comprises a huge number of Americans, from a broad array of common situations. Lots of people do not have the option to receive mail where they actually live, and instead are reliant on Post Office Boxes, "General Delivery" mail, and other such solutions to have their mail delivered.

Building their "Knowledge Panel" purely on mail delivery addresses, they automatically make their sampling non-representative. The do the same thing by also arbitrarily limiting the ability of households to respond / participate in a survey if they've already responded to a certain number of other surveys within a certain amount of time.

They also go on to admit a substantial amount of "filtering" and "weighting", which they of course do not go into details on, and they also finish off with a frankly surprising admission that: "In addition to sampling error, surveys may also be subject to error or bias due to question wording, context, and order effects."

June 10, 2023 at 11:58 PM

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