anaisnein said: the concept of natural, non-socialization-driven self-sorting by gender assumes that, in the absence of all socialization, gender would still be a thing (and one that generally aligns with what we’ll postulate are the two major reproductive apparatus types or clusters thereof). and I don’t find that intuitively obvious. and studies about babies gravitating to faces vs mobiles or whatever don’t seem to make a dent in how not at all intuitive it is.
I’m not sure how we could test this, given that human babies aren’t capable of independent development, so we can’t just dump a bunch of them in the wilderness somewhere and see what happens, nor do we have any truly blank slate adults to look after them.
My intuition is the opposite - it seems pretty absurd that sexual dimorphism would apply so clearly and visibly to the rest of our bodies yet have no impact whatsoever on personality distribution or what people are attracted to, especially given how complicated heterosexuality is.
And like, to rub this in, noticing that as many as 1 in 5 women may have PCOS (and thus elevated androgens) depending on the cutoff level just makes this seem more sensible to me, not less, because you can have a sterile XY female with sufficient androgen insensitivity, so obviously the process is complicated and not just a binary switch, leaving room for lots of variation while still clustering.
do rates of PCOS differ by field?
I would love to know this and rates of bisexualism/etc by field. I suspect they do, but I have a sample size of like, two.
