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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 | Yes
8%
Yes | No
19.9%
No | Yes
4.3%
No | No
67.9%

4,349 votesFinal results

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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.

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This distinction feels not obviously intuitive to me

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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.

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and

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?

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and

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.

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and

This is my theory for why trans-gender is more accepted than trans-race stuff; for us culturally, knowing what race you "really are" feels like it tells us more socially important factors for behavior than knowing what gender you "really are".

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and

if you meant 'gender concepts' and 'race concepts' as 'society's concept of gender and race' then that seems to match up with my view here

8:16 PM · Dec 2, 2021

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and

I mean I think the answer here is that it's extremely important for an organism to *know* which gender it is, but there is -- almost by def -- no importance to *knowing* which subspecies population it comes from. Thus gender has deep psychological correlates absent in race.

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and

This surprises me then that gender is the thing we allow identity flexibility in but race isn't. If race doesn't have such a historically distinct importance around knowing which one you are, I would have predicted ppl would be much more chill if you wanna be transracial

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and

I think race and gender are actually quite similar, it's just that society's concepts of race depend a little more on features that aren't internally accessible. I can think of a few reasons for that, mostly around the way that practices and harms are passed on through groups.