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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34906 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Speaking personally, I have no redneg identity whatsoever. Although born as male, I feel neither as a nam nor as a namow, much like atheists who no longer feel as a believer.

That's just normal, it doesn't set you apart from the general public. It's only unusual in that most people who encounter the concept of gender identity aren't introspective enough to think about whether they actually have an internal sense of such a thing and don't have enough contrarian tendencies to call bullshit. To quote a comment I made a year ago:

The concept of "cis gender identity" wasn't created because anyone investigated whether such a thing actually existed and found that it did, it was created by trans activists as a deliberate mirror-image of their model of transgenderism. Someone who believed in the concept hard enough and was introspective about it would probably notice that he doesn't actually have any internal sense of what his "gender identity" is and decide that makes him "non-binary" or something, when really it just makes him normal. Or look until he interpreted random noise as a sign of some gender identity or other. After all, as the British charity Mermaids has taught us (and taught the organizations like schools and police that have taken their training), not being Barbie or GI Joe means you're towards the middle of the "gender spectrum", and by the way gender dysphoria can present as any and all problems you might have.

It's only unusual in that most people who encounter the concept of gender identity aren't introspective enough to think about whether they actually have an internal sense of such a thing and don't have enough contrarian tendencies to call bullshit.

I mean, I could try to steel man the concept.

If you're a typical person, you probably have a good sense of where your body is in 3d-space. Even if you're not looking, if you're in a familiar environment you can reach your hand towards different objects like furniture and have reasonably good odds of getting within the ball park of those objects. This capacity to have a sense of where your body is and how it's moving in 3d-space is called proprioception.

Most people have an accurate proprioception about the world. But some people don't. One example is amputees, who sometimes experience phantom limbs which can include a proprioception that they have an arm somewhere in 3d-space that they do not.

It is possible that some people have genital-related proprioception disorders that make them feel like they have "phantom genitals" that they do not have. On this model, one form of gender dysphoria would be "phantom cross-sex genital proprioception" and cis people would be those who have correctly functioning "genital proprioception."

In this situation, the idea that one's proprioception is an "identity" would be a simplification used for others. After all, how do you explain the idea of "phantom genitals" to other people who haven't experienced this thing?

(Even if I allow for the possibility that this covers one kind of gender dysphoria, I tend to think there are many different kinds. Basically, being trans can be described behaviorally as seeking out cross-sex hormones, "cross-sex" cosmetic surgery and attempting to live a cross-sex social role. There are probably several causes of this kind of behavior.)

I find this comment extremely interesting - I actually am not a typical person with regards to proprioception. Specifically, in this domain, I am blind and have no sense of proprioception at all. I completely lack any sense of where my physical body is located in space, though I do still have a sense of touch and can get some approximation from that.

And for the record, not having any actual genital proprioception whatsoever didn't have any impact on my gender identity as far as I can tell. I remain cis, even though I actually do not have correctly functioning genital proprioception and hence would fall outside that category in your proposed classification (though I am of course aware that I am an extreme edge case).

Hm, what does that mean, exactly? If the proprioception information wasn't finding its way to your brain, [maybe i'm wrong but i doubt it] you wouldn't really be able to move in a coordinated way at all, or be able to walk. I guess by 'lack any sense' you mean a relative lack?

I have no conscious sense of proprioception and cannot tell where parts of my body are in the absence of other perceptions like touch or sight, and based on the accidents/mistakes I make, it seems that my subconscious also lacks this information. My brain is capable of processing a lot of this information visually - I'm ok as long as I can visually see my body, and I can vaguely approximate the location of a limb based on movement ( but not for long or consistently, any incidental movement induced by the environment doesn't get accounted for and throws me off balance). I have a lot of trouble performing certain body movements and I can't actually write or draw beyond a child's level, because slight shifts in the position of my elbow mean that I can't co-ordinate properly when it is out of sight and have to rely entirely on my wrists.

Okay, thanks, suppose my guess was wrong.

Most of the focus is on social stuff like "misgendering" though. Which combined with the "everyone has a deeply-rooted gender identity but cis people are just fortunate enough to match it" model makes some predictions that are noticeably false. For instance it seems pretty common for trans activists to try to use "How would you feel if people were referring to you with the wrong pronoun all the time?" as an argument. This makes sense from their perspective but doesn't really work because normal people don't care that much, certainly not enough to become suicidal or the like. Women on the internet sometimes correct people who assume they're men, but it's not a big deal. At worst someone might take it as an insult (e.g. in cultures where calling a man a woman is a way to call him a coward who is failing to live up to his martial responsibilities as a man, or feminists who think assuming people are men is reflective of sexism).

If someone could press a button saying "everyone calls you the wrong pronoun for the rest of your life but you get $5,000", I think most would be happy to take that option. (Provided this was some sort of mystical change that didn't have side-effects like messing up your romantic life or making your friends think you've gone crazy.) Indeed, even "everyone thinks you're the opposite sex" wouldn't be a big deal if it wasn't for side-effects like messing with your romantic life, and of course nontransitioning trans people don't have those side effects (on the contrary, quite a few trans people end up blowing up their marriages). Which doesn't fit with the "cis people are mirror images of trans people" model, since gender identity is presented as being more important than that.

Yes, I remember wondering if I was non-binary when I was about 25, simply because I didn't have this sense of "gender identity" that trans people apparently had. I just have my biological sex, which manifests in various ways and interacts with society in various ways. I'm comfortable my male sex organs/secondary sexual features in the same way I'm comfortable being tall, having two eyeballs, having feet etc. - they're familiar and useful (because women's sex organs/secondary sexual features are an awful lot of work/money: tampons, bras, wiping the right way, periods, back pain etc.).

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