this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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I didn't say tradwife, I said wife. Wife is a gender identity, and it's also a social role. Things can be both and you can't take them away from people who want them.
We're clearly not going to come to any meaningful consensus. So I don't think continuing to argue is in either of our interests. I would always refer to terms like wife and husband as an expression of gender identity rather than the gender identity itself. But if you define things differently that's fine. My education is in neuroscience so I think of gender as being hard wired into our brains and universal across cultures. Any chosen labels I would regard as expressions of gender rather than Inherently part of it. And something I'll gladly leave to psychologists and anthropologists.
The obvious sensitive period for the development of gender identity is the round of synaptic pruning around 18 months after birth. Gender is way too complex and malleable to be structured by proliferation and migration. It's structured by synaptic pruning, which mostly occurs after birth.
Interesting, everything I've read has indicated that it's largely set due to testosterone concentration prior to the development of the gonads in utero. I'd be interested to read some of the research about the association with synaptic pruning though, if you have a couple of links? It makes sense that children would begin recognising it then, because it's about that time they start developing a concept of self.
Have a read of Infants' Intermodal Knowledge About Gender (Poulin-Dubois, 1994) and Patterns of Gender Development (Martin & Ruble, 2010). Infants can't recognise gender in others or in themselves. Toddlers at 18 months can.
The way I see it, gender is probably like phoneme recognition. Infants can recognise the phonemes of all languages. During synaptic pruning, they specialise into the phonemes of the languages spoken in their home. Gender identity needs to specialise for the culture it's developed in, just like phoneme recognition. People need to develop a culturally appropriate identification with masculinity/femininity/other so they can achieve social status and attract a good mate. Identifying with trucks and baseball won't help men's fitness in feudal Japan. Calligraphy skills won't help men's fitness in 20th century America. Gender identity needs to be adaptive and context-responsive.