Do you believe your gender is determined primarily by what you identify as? || Do you believe your race is determined primarily by what you identify as?
- Yes | Yes8%
- Yes | No19.9%
- No | Yes4.3%
- No | No67.9%
4,349 votesFinal results
38
9
47
Conversation
Replying to
Yes/no seems right to me, if you mean something like sincere identification. Gender concepts rely more on internal traits a person can identify in themselves, whereas racial concepts rely more on external facts (e.g. history) that you can lack even with sincere identification.
3
7
Replying to
The distinction between concepts that rely mostly on internally identifiable features vs. those that don’t? Another example might be the property of having a headache vs. the property of having malaria.
2
4
I agree that there's a coherent distinction here, but what's the main reason that gender falls into the first category and race into the second, rather than (for example) being the other way round?
2
6
It could just be a total accident, but I suspect the role race concepts play makes it useful for them to depend slightly more on external traits. I think we want to know if someone has been affected by them or someone in their family being identifiable as a member of the group.
2
Gender feels often *more* externally noticeable than race does; as in I have a much higher accuracy at knowing if someone is male or female than knowing if someone is hispanic or white, for example.
I don't think I'm saying anything inconsistent with that. I'm not claiming that to be a certain race or gender you need to look a certain way. Someone could sincerely identify as a race and have the relevant historical properties regardless of how they look.
2