#60. Gender is Pecking Order [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

Gender is pecking order

Gender, social status, and testosterone are clearly interrelated, but exactly how requires clarification when the very nature of gender is in question, as now. One possibility is that the male pecking order sits directly atop the female pecking order, and there is no barrier between. Thus, a male who falls low enough in the male pecking order will undergo a reversal in gender identification from male to female (and maybe keep on going down) and a female who rises high enough in the female pecking order will likewise undergo a reversal in gender identification from female to male (and maybe keep on going up). The entire structure could be called "the" pecking order, with the statistical median of the status ranks, and possibly the ranked testosterone levels, always dividing females from males, at least in terms of gendered social signaling. This could be an example of what is called an exact theory replacing its approximate counterpart. In this case, the corresponding approximate theory would be the gender binary. ("You are either a man or a woman.")

Recent history of trans

Since the early sixties, we have seen a trend of increasing media exposure of trans and non-binary individuals, and this was also a period of ever-increasing human population numbers. I conjecture that the latter trend caused the former. The population trend may have produced an upward trend in the average population density at which people are living, suburban expansion notwithstanding. This may have caused an increasing incidence of aggressive one-on-one interactions among humans due to the Calhoun effect, which is much discussed in these pages. (See post #37.) Aggressive, one-on-one interactions are well known to change the social status of the combatants, the winner enjoying increased status (i.e., a higher ranking in the pecking order) and the loser suffering reduced status. Overall, population density increases can thus be expected to increase the amount of traffic on the social ladder, both upward and downward, leading to increasing numbers of individuals crossing the median and becoming trans or nonbinary. The increasing numbers of trans and nonbinary individuals in society was then faithfully reflected in the content of the news stories of the day. QED.

Trans and development

By the status-is-gender theory, the occurrence of trans and binary individuals should run in families, since a large part of social status is hereditary, although it is not necessarily determined directly by the genome. Status may be influenced by multimodal acquisition of a status "calibration" from caregivers early in life that is synaptically mediated yet resistant to change after a critical period is past. A similar and well established phenomenon would be the early maladaptive schema, and this may amount to the same thing by a different name if status defaults to maximal at birth and is then adaptively reduced by experience.

Trans not genetically determined

Consistent with this, PLOS blogger R. Lewis, who has a PhD in genetics, found remarkably little evidence of a direct genetic causation in transgenderism. Moreover, out of 58 studies on "transgender" listed on clinicaltrials.gov, nothing worth mentioning was found about genetics. This could be an instance of the filing-drawer effect (negative results not published but left to languish in the filing cabinet).

Tangent: how pecking-order dynamics may lead to dispersal

02-29-2020: I am indebted to Jordan Peterson for turning me on to the pecking-order idea. It can explain aspects of dispersalism, as follows: If people have no emotional memory of their social wins and losses, we would expect their distribution on the social ladder to be Gaussian (aka, a bell curve). However, if a win or loss leaves you with an emotional residue of optimism or pessimism (and, of course, it does), a positive feedback can set in if conflicts are coming faster than the emotional fallout from each can dissipate, so that the more you lose, the greater your pessimism, and the more likely you are to lose in the future. Moreover, the more you win, the greater your optimism, and the more likely you are to win in the future. <08-29-2020: Following Peterson, this emotional fallout effect may be due to prolonged up- and down-regulations of serotonin concentrations in the brain.> This dynamic then splits the population into a bi-modal social distribution of oppressors and oppressed, and the latter soon join some refugee stream, resulting in dispersal. The frequency of conflicts could be measuring population density, and the conflicts would not necessarily be over resources, but over proxies for these such as land or jobs. With the addition of these ideas, the splitting and separation of overcrowded rodent populations in the behavioral-sink phase of a Calhoun experiment is explained. To connect these ideas with my earlier idea of the sadness cycle, I conjecture that sadness and its attendant social signaling expresses anger colored by pessimism about winning, whereas contempt and its social signaling expresses anger colored by optimism about winning.

A false-flag strategy?

20-08-2020: Another idea about trans is that it is a false-flag strategy used by low-status males and females to reproduce without punishment. Pair a gay woman with a trans woman and you have a potentially fertile couple able to fool the oppressors until the deed is done. Likewise a gay man and a trans man.

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