First off, I'd like to point out that The Second Sex was written in 1949, before the Women's Liberation Movement of the early 60's. I'm sure it inspired some women, like my mother, to go back to college to finish her degree (she married at 19) so she could become a teacher and have her own income. So my generation (boomer) learned that we could become anything we want and all choices were open to us. It basically comes down to having financial freedom to make choices as we see fit (i.e. leaving a bad marriage, start a business, stay home to raise your child, etc.). This, to me anyway, has nothing to do with notion that you can actually change your biological sex. Because you can't function as the opposite sex and this is the reality. So it appears that there are psychological issues going on whereby a person cannot accept the reality of their healthy, functioning body. Those issues are what needs to be addressed, IMHO.
The older anthropological literature is good. One is generally looking at smaller scale societies. I think scholarship was more rigorous. There was more than one way to skin a cat or organize task production sequences or kinship, but women cross-culturally know/knew who and what they are and were. Arguing the tails seems preemptively to appropriate the obviously truthful and cross-culturally descriptive category, to me. Woman. Women. Something i am. Whether post-menopausal women in some cultures could join men’s since they were no longer constricted regarding child bearing years did not make them any different in the basic sense of biological and woman within their society. Whether Agta females with infants cold hunt efficiently (though not with toddlers) did not make their self-perception change, I imagine. Sex roles do vary cross-culturally and are not ingrained by sex. But men and women are real in language and category cross-languagely. Through Life history stages. Forget the thin volume (Whyte [who authored articles with Brudner]), multiple authors, cross-cultural data, maybe old HRAF files, found most women in small scale societies would have been considered to have a similar status to men, but not the same. So co-equal or egalitarian in anthropological usage (intellectual not sub). It has been too long since I was competent and familiar with the literature. Geez. So much rereading to do. Thanks for your post. Just musings of a 60 something.
First off, I'd like to point out that The Second Sex was written in 1949, before the Women's Liberation Movement of the early 60's. I'm sure it inspired some women, like my mother, to go back to college to finish her degree (she married at 19) so she could become a teacher and have her own income. So my generation (boomer) learned that we could become anything we want and all choices were open to us. It basically comes down to having financial freedom to make choices as we see fit (i.e. leaving a bad marriage, start a business, stay home to raise your child, etc.). This, to me anyway, has nothing to do with notion that you can actually change your biological sex. Because you can't function as the opposite sex and this is the reality. So it appears that there are psychological issues going on whereby a person cannot accept the reality of their healthy, functioning body. Those issues are what needs to be addressed, IMHO.
The older anthropological literature is good. One is generally looking at smaller scale societies. I think scholarship was more rigorous. There was more than one way to skin a cat or organize task production sequences or kinship, but women cross-culturally know/knew who and what they are and were. Arguing the tails seems preemptively to appropriate the obviously truthful and cross-culturally descriptive category, to me. Woman. Women. Something i am. Whether post-menopausal women in some cultures could join men’s since they were no longer constricted regarding child bearing years did not make them any different in the basic sense of biological and woman within their society. Whether Agta females with infants cold hunt efficiently (though not with toddlers) did not make their self-perception change, I imagine. Sex roles do vary cross-culturally and are not ingrained by sex. But men and women are real in language and category cross-languagely. Through Life history stages. Forget the thin volume (Whyte [who authored articles with Brudner]), multiple authors, cross-cultural data, maybe old HRAF files, found most women in small scale societies would have been considered to have a similar status to men, but not the same. So co-equal or egalitarian in anthropological usage (intellectual not sub). It has been too long since I was competent and familiar with the literature. Geez. So much rereading to do. Thanks for your post. Just musings of a 60 something.