Quote from: jossam on April 13, 2016, 06:14:38 PMdon't get me started on how much I hate evolutionary psychology (such a terrible thing, I swear, especially for trans people and cis women).
You hate evolutionary psychology? Can I ask why?
Personally I don't think evolutionary psychology is somehow insulting or invalidatory of trans people, like any true science - we exist, and are an observable phenomenon; no science can invalidate that. If anything, the people who go around claiming everything and its dog is a social construct is far more invalidating of us because it could always claim we are what we are and do what we do because of social constructs and human gullibility or desire to conform or social conditioning. I don't know about you, but I do not feel as though my mental state and biological plight is the fault of society or other people's opinions. It's a biological anomaly, potentially exacerbated by gender roles, yes... but gender roles and adaptations themselves apparently spring from the natural sexual dimorphism displayed by our species, which is not a social construct.
Evolutionary psychology is terrible to cis women? Are you saying... looking at the psychology of women through an evolutionary lens is sexist and/or oppressive? How, if it is done in a proper scientific way, is searching for biological facts terrible?
If evolutionary psychology claims, say... that women are designed more for crying because a) crying is taken more seriously by female and male peers when an adult woman cries than when an adult male cries, and they typically want to find out what she is upset about and go to her or comfort her or protect her - this behavior helps her, and probably helped all her female ancestors survive better in the past which is why it has become passed on as a trait in females, but not in males because it wouldn't have helped him survive if nobody is particularly going to respond to his crying. Studies have shown that adults pay more attention to a female child crying than a male child crying, and typically respond by giving the female child more attention than the male for crying. I mean this stuff is observable everywhere, any time, and social experiments have been done on it - women crying and looking distressed tends to illicit feelings and actions of protectiveness in onlookers of both sexes; men crying - not nearly as much and tends to be seen as a detrimental weakness in men. People on trans forums report that taking estrogen often helps them cry more, and people who take testosterone tend to lose the cry trigger, or at least find it diminished. There's a biological feedback loop here, occurring more often in one sex because it benefits them socially and less often in the other because it doesn't benefit them as much socially.
My point is, someone out there would probably react to that and claim it's sexist to say "women cry more" but it's quite observable in real life, and there is almost always a reason for why things are the way they are. I may not personally like the explanation evolutionary science might offer for why things are the way they are, or that women might use crying to their benefit, and I have the additional bias of not wanting to inhabit a woman's body, but I'd rather go with the idea that the reason we have these ancient traits are because they are the successful products of natural selection, than this idea that everyone is actually the same and men and women aren't really all that different psychologically. If I had to pick one fact that I learned about life from being myself, it's that men and women have psychological differences, on the whole. My whole life's experience screams it. I get that one life experience and the field of psychology are pretty lacking, yes; but then we could go with statistics gathered about the various behaviors and preferences of men and women and these do definitely point to differences between them. Psychology as a field is somewhat problematic in approach, imo, but if treated properly and experiments are done scientifically and of appropriate sample size, it's the best thing we have to explain these things. What's the alternative to science if you want rational answers...?
Some people seem to think that psychology itself is just evil because once upon a time 'psychologists' said gay people were mentally ill, etc. but we've moved on from that now and people are studying these things in much more appropriate ways. I still do think there is much work to be done on psychology, particularly in how trans people are viewed and treated by the medical profession, but at least they're on the right track instead of locking us up in asylums and using us to test the latest anti-deviance device.
I see no especial evil in evolutionary psychology, provided it follows the proper scientific method and remembers that theory does not equal fact, and that this is one branch of speculative science, like in some aspects of astronomy speculating what's out there in other galaxies or beyond the range of human sight, that we cannot have the definite and absolute answers for. Have bona fide evolutionary psychologists been out there telling people cis women and trans folk just suck or something? If so I haven't heard about it. But I would always expect idiots online or in the media to use whatever 'evidence' they might think they have to justify silly claims. That's a given. I understand that sure, a subject that posits that men and women have differences, or that there are differences between races, for example, is going to raise the hackles because we're in the midst of cultural forces remembering World War Two, and trying to crush the genders together and say
no, there are no differences (while sometimes being quite hypocritical about this assertion and not even realizing it), but ultimately the way forward has to be to explore these differences, not run from them. I mean they
are there. We wouldn't have a forum or a discussion to have, or the word transgender if there were not differences... and those biological and psychological differences came to be
somehow.
Unintentional text wall there. My bad. Anyway, my background is in science, so... yea. I'm interested to know why evolutionary psychology itself is a bad thing. Evolutionary science isn't seen as bad, psychology itself I wouldn't say is a bad thing compared to the taboo of analyzing one's own mental state that preceded the likes of Freud and therefore never explained various human behaviors. I mean if it wasn't for psychology and the initial advent of psychoanalysis, flawed as they are, I doubt that trans people would be in a position now to be heard, treated and integrated into society at all.
