[The full post is ~5300 words and way way too long for the Motte's 20k character limit but I'm posting as much as I can fit.]
If you've ever been curious about the etymology of cis and trans as prefixes, just know they're Latin for "the same side of" and "the other side of", respectively. These prefixes are widely used in organic chemistry to distinguish between molecules that have the exact same atoms with a different spatial arrangement. Notice, for example, how in the cis isomer below on the left, chlorine atoms are oriented toward the "same side" as each other, but on the "other side" of each other in the trans isomer.
[chlorine on hydrogen action too hot for the motte]
The dashed line is just me simplifying the geometric comparison plane (the E-Z convention is much more precise in this respect), but regardless, this is meant only to illustrate how talk of cis or trans is necessarily one of *relative positioning. *A single solitary point floating in space cannot be described as the same or other "side" of anything when there is nothing else to contrast it against.
Now this is just organic chemistry, not real life, but the cis/trans convention is applied consistently elsewhere. In the context relevant to this post, "sex" and "gender" are the two anchor points --- the two chlorine atoms in the dichloroethene molecule of life --- and their relative resonance/dissonance relative to each other is the very definition of cis/trans gender identity. To avoid any ambiguity, I use sex to refer to one's biological role in reproduction (strictly binary), while gender is the fuzzy spectrum of sex-based societal expectations about how one is supposed to act. If your sex and gender identity "align", then you are considered cis; if they don't, then you are trans. Same side versus other side.
But what does it mean for sex and gender identity to "align"? There is an obvious answer to this question, but it is peculiarly difficult to encounter it transparently out in the wild. For reasons outlined below, I will argue that the elusiveness is completely intentional.
More than two years ago I wrote a post that got me put on a watch list, called Do Trans People Exist?. The question mark was barely a hedge and the theory I outlined remains straightforward:
I'm starting to think that trans people do not exist. What I mean by this is that I'm finding myself drawn towards an alternative theory that when someone identifies as trans, they've fallen prey to a gender conformity system that is too rigid.
Two years on and I maintain my assertion remains trivially true. One change I would make is avoiding the "fallen prey" language because I have no idea whether the rigidity is nascent to and incubated by the trans community (for whatever reasons), or if it's just an enduring consequence of society's extant gender conformity system (no matter how much liberal society tells itself otherwise). If you disagree with my assertion, it's actually super-duper easy to refute it; all anyone needs to do is offer up a coherent description of either cis or trans gender identity void of any reference to gender stereotypes. But I'd be asking for the impossible here, because the essence of these concepts is to describe the resonance or dissonance that exists between one's biological reality (sex) and the accordant societal expectations imposed (gender). Unless you internalize or assimilate society's gender expectations, unless you accede to them and capitulate that they're worth respecting and paying attention to as a guiding lodestar, concepts like "gender dysphoria" are fundamentally moot. A single point cannot resonate or clash with itself, as these dynamics necessitate interaction between distinct elements.
The position I'm arguing is nothing new. The Oxford philosopher Rebecca Reilly-Cooper had already established the incoherencies inherent within this framework conclusively and with impeccable clarity in this lecture she gave way back in 2016 (website form). It's wild how her arguments remain perfectly relevant today, and if anyone has attempted a refutation I have not encountered it. And yet this remains a controversial position to stake, but not because it's wrong. Rather, I believe, it's because of how insulting it is to be accused of reifying any system of stereotypes nowadays.
In case it needs to be said, stereotypes can occasionally offer useful shortcuts, but their inherent overgeneralization risks flattening reality into inaccuracy. The major risk relevant to this discussion is when stereotypes crystallize into concrete expectations, suffocating individual expression with either forced conformity due to perceived group membership, or feelings of alienation due to perceived incongruence. The indignation to my position is also understandable given how the foundational ethos of the queer liberation movement was a rejection of gender normativity's constraints.
You're not obligated to take my word for this, but I do tend to feel an immense discomfort whenever I hold a position that is purportedly controversial, and yet I'm unable to steelman any plausible refutations --- a sense of "I must be missing something, it can't be this obvious" type deal. I did try to bridge the chasm of inscrutability when I wrote What Boston Can Teach Us About What a Woman Is. My plea to everyone was to jettison the ambiguous semantic topography within this topic and replace it with concrete specifics:
To the extent that woman is a cluster of traits, I struggle to contemplate a scenario where communicating the cluster is a more efficient or more thoughtful method of communication than just communicating the specific pertinent trait. Just tell me what you want me to know directly. Use other words if need be.
Because right now it's a complete fucking riddle to me if someone discloses that they "identify as a woman" or whatever. What, exactly, am I supposed to do with this new information? Suggesting that stereotypes are the referent is met with umbrage and steadfast denials, but if not that, then what? Over the years I've tried earnestly to learn by asking questions and seeking out resources, and what I've repeatedly experienced is a marked reluctance to offer up anything more than the vaguest of details.
The ambiguity I'm referring to isn't absolute, however, and there are two notable exceptions worth briefly addressing: body modifications and preferred pronouns.
Sex does not only determine whether an individual produces large or small gametes --- an entire armory of secondary characteristics comes along for the ride, whether you like it or not. If a female happens to be distressed by their breasts and wants them removed, you could describe this scenario in two very different ways. One is that this person "identifies as a man" and their (very obviously female) breasts serve as a distressing monument that something is "off". The other way is that this person is simply distressed by their breasts, full stop, without any of the gender-related accoutrements. [These two options are not necessarily exhaustive, and I'm open to other potential interpretations.]
Is there any difference between these two approaches? The first framework adds a multitude of vexing, unanswerable questions (Does comfort with one's secondary sex characteristics require some sort of "affirmation gene" that trans people unfortunately lack? Is the problem some sort of mind/body misalignment? If so, why address one side of that equation only? Etc.) within an already overcomplicated framework. The other concern here is if the gender identity becomes prescriptive, where an individual pursues a body modification not for whatever inherent qualities it may have, but rather because of some felt obligation to "complete the set" for what their particular identity is supposed to look like.
The second framework (the one eschewing the gender identity component) would not dismiss the individual's concerns and would be part of a panoply of well-established phenomena of individuals inconsolably distressed with their body, such as body integrity dysphoria (BID), anorexia, or muscle dysphoria. The general remedies here tend to be a combination of counseling and medication to deal with the distress directly, and only in rare circumstances is permanent alteration even considered. I imagine there is some consternation that I've compared gender dysphoria with BID, but I see no reason to believe they are qualitatively different and welcome anyone to demonstrate otherwise. Regardless, I subscribe to maximum individual autonomy on these matters, and so it's not any of my business what people choose to do with their bodies. The point here is that preferences about one's body (either aesthetic or functional) exist without a reliance on paradigm shifts of one's "internal sense of self". If someone wants to, for example, bulk up and build muscle, they can just do it; it's nonsensical to say they first need to "identify" as their chosen aspiration before any changes can occur.
The other exception to the ambiguity around what gender identity* means* is pronoun preference. Chalk it up to [whatever]-privilege, but I concede I do not understand the fixation on pronouns. The closest parallel I can think of are nickname preferences, but unlike nicknames, pronouns almost never come up in two-party conversations, so it's difficult to see why they would be any more consequential. I personally accommodate pronoun preferences out of politeness (and I suspect almost everyone else does as well), the exact same way I would accommodate nicknames out of politeness. If I happen to refer to my friend using frog/frogs pronouns, it's not because I believe they're actually a frog; I'm just trying to be nice and avoid getting yelled at. Regardless of the intent behind them, pronoun preferences are a facile and woefully incomplete account for what we're warned are suicidal levels of distress around one's incongruent gender identity, so this can't be the whole story.
So on one extreme you have potentially invasive body modifications that are at least commensurate with the seriousness of the distress expressed, and on the other side you have the equivalent of a nickname preference that is relatively facile to accommodate. In between these two pillars, however, is a conspicuous vacuum of silence. My conclusion is that this missing middle is really just gendered stereotypes, but nobody wants to admit something so laughably antiquated out loud.
Well, almost nobody.
I've had this post sitting in my drafts for months largely because of an ever-present concern that I was unfairly shining a spotlight on the craziest examples from the trans-affirming community. My perennial goal with any subject is to avoid weakmanning, but with this issue I have no idea how to draw the contours and discern what arguments are representative and thus fair game to critique.
The lack of contours means I can't prove this next part conclusively, but I noticed a shift over time regarding which talking points were most common. The perennial challenge for this camp remains the logical impossibility of harmonizing the twin snakes of "trans people don't owe you passing" and "trans people will literally kill themselves if they don't pass". At least as late as 2018, there was more of an apparent comfort with leaning more toward openly reifying gendered roles and expectations. For example, in this Aeon magazine dialogue between trans philosopher Sophie Grace Chappell and gender-critical feminist Holly Lawford-Smith, Chappell uses the word script in her responses a whopping forty-one times.
But by far the most jaw-dropping example of this comfort comes from a lecture by Dr. Diane Ehrensaft, currently the head psychologist for the UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals' gender clinic. When a parent asked how to know if a baby is trans, Dr. Ehrensaft literally said that a baby throwing out a barrette is a "gender signal" the baby might not really be a girl, the same way another baby opening their onesie is a signal they might be a girl. Seriously, watch this shit.
This is such a blatantly asinine thing to say that it depresses me to no end that the auditorium didn't erupt in raucous laughter at her answer. I don't even know how to respond to it. Maybe it bears repeating that babies are dumb. At any given moment, the entirety of a baby's cognitive load is already stressed over having to decide between shitting and vomiting. Dr. Ehrensaft conjures up this tale about how dumb babies are able to divinate the eternal message that "dresses are for women" out of thin air (or maybe directly from Allah), and that same dumb baby also has the ingenuity to cleverly repurpose their onesie into a jury-rigged "dress". I'm not claiming that it's impossible for young children to notice and even mirror societal expectations, including gender-related ones. Indeed, research indicates wisps of this awareness can start manifesting very early on, with children reaching "peak rigidity in their gender stereotypes at age 5 to 6" followed by a dramatic and continuing increase in flexibility. But it remains a jaw-dropping level of projection and tea leaf--reading on display here by Dr. Ehrensaft; the simple explanation that a baby might open their onesie because they're a dumb baby is apparently not worth consideration.
Dr. Ehrensaft is illustrative of the intellectual rigor that is apparently expected from the lead mental health professional in charge of the well-being of an entire clinic's worth of young patients. Matt Osborne wrote a devastating piece about her very long history of dangerous quackery. My mind was blown when I found out that Dr. Ehrensaft happened to be at the scene in 1992 desperately trying to whitewash the Daycare Satanic Panic and the unconscionable misery the "recovered memory" movement caused. In response to some highly suggestive interviews by therapists, preschool children alleged bizarre and horrific sexual abuse by staff involving drills, flying witches, underground tunnels, and hot-air balloons. The notorious McMartin case resulted in no convictions, with all charges finally dropped in 1990 after seven years of prosecutions. Two years later in an aftermath report of the similar Presidio case, Dr. Ehrensaft notes how the children's abuse narratives often contained fantasy elements, such as devilish pranks and hidden skeletons. This should normally be grounds for skepticism, but Dr. Ehrensaft stridently refuses to question the veracity of the accounts, and explains away the outlandish aspects as simply the result of trauma management --- the kids were using imaginative fears as a protective barrier for their (according to Dr. Ehrensaft) unquestionably real trauma. Given her general credulity, it's no surprise why her writing on the topic of gender identity is a murky soup of pseudo-religious nonsense about "gender ghosts" and "gender angels".
What exactly is the explanation for trans-affirming professionals like Chappell and Ehrensaft explicitly encouraging the necessity of adhering to gender scripts? Were they misled? Did they get the wrong bulletin? How? Why aren't their professional peers correcting them on such an elementary and foundational error? So many questions.
You can't keep drawing from the well of gender stereotypes so blatantly without anyone noticing. My general impression of the field is people realized how idiotic they sounded when their talking points were solidly anchored upon the veneration of (purportedly antiquated) gender roles and gender scripts. The response to this inescapable criticism has largely been to subtly pivot into the realm of empty rhetoric. But because of the necessity to cling onto strands of the initial assertions (for reasons I'll explain further), the result is a strenuous ballet of either constantly leaping between the two positions, or uncomfortably trying to straddle both.
Dr. Ehrensaft gives us an example of the vacuous. Her onesie/barrette poem of an answer above is from a video uploaded in 2018, but here's how her website explains gender nowadays, except with one particular word switched out:
This core aspect of one's identity comes from within each of us. Flibberdibber identity is an inherent aspect of a person's make-up. Individuals do not choose their flibberdibber, nor can they be made to change it. However, the words someone uses to communicate their flibberdibber identity may change over time; naming one's flibberdibber can be a complex and evolving matter. Because we are provided with limited language for flibberdibber, it may take a person quite some time to discover, or create, the language that best communicates their internal experience. Likewise, as language evolves, a person's name for their flibberdibber may also evolve. This does not mean their flibberdibber has changed, but rather that the words for it are shifting.
Can anyone reading this tell me what flibberdibber is beyond that it's something inexplicably very important?
It's probably too much to expect philosophy to throw us a lifeline here, but even with those low standards, the response from the trans-inclusionary philosophers has been a complete fucking mess and followed a similarly strenuous pivot. For example, in the 2018 paper Real Talk on the Metaphysics of Gender, Yale philosopher Robin Dembroff argues for a more "inclusive" understanding of gender. But in doing so, Dembroff explicitly acknowledges the glaring contradiction between decrying a category as oppressively exclusionary while simultaneously petitioning to be included within it. The apparent solution on page 44 to this conundrum is rather. . . something:
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Notes -
If youre familiar with brain-teasers, theres a certain gimmick where a puzzle isnt uniquely solvable until you get told that it is, usually by someone being said to know something or through a subtle use of the definite article. The joke in the tweet has this, too. It could be any sort of social conservatism, until the last line tells you its about race.
What in the last line tells you that it's about race?
The joke is saying theres this opinion that conservatives have thats getting censored, and they dont want to admit that opinion. Getting censored applies to all social conservatism pretty evenly. Progressives accusing conservatives of secretly holding some opinion can apply to all of it, but applies most commonly to race. The last line is saying that we should have enough information now to know which one was meant. So the author thinks only one thing meets the previous conditions sufficiently. And race meets them the most, so it can only be that.
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My personal take on this is we're dealing with several similar looking but substantially different phenomenon. I do think that there are actual deep-rooted innate brain-body mismatches, and transition is certainly an option those people should have.
But I agree with the OP largely here was well. I simply can't see the current in-vogue model of gender, politics and personality traits being healthy. Because I don't believe it is at all. And I do think it can trigger something that approaches and looks like gender dysphoria....but it also probably could be treated with therapy that acknowledged these pressures in the first place. But it's getting people to acknowledge these pressures that's the tricky bit. It breaks Kayfabe hard.
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It's... probably worth bringing up the shrink's viewpoint on this matter, since I think there's a meaningful difference here. I don't have huge insight for the sort of people who write or read the DSM at length, but from my understanding the point of the framework isn't to measure whether people have certain traits and slot them into a diagnosis, but to determine whether those traits are interfering with normal functioning at life, work, social behavior, and health.
This is most obvious with anorexia: this condition is not determined by merely being afraid of gaining weight or wanting a merely below-normal weight, but that the client has severe enough issues that this results in significant interference with normal functioning. Muscle dysphorics are not merely people who want to bulk up, but instead put wide swathes of their life as second in importance. And, in most cases of muscle dysphoria and anorexia, there's never really 'enough', at least at a level a human can survive; those who are relatively healthy tend to be so only due to outside pressures they can't avoid. Assisting one of these individuals to achieve their target physiology isn't really a solution that reduces interference with normal functioning.
((Though the classical form of BID, as auto-amputation-focused, is an exception on both counts: there's at least some anecdotal evidence of BID sufferers not relapsing with a new fixation after their desired amputation, and having moderately reasonable functioning outside of the missing arm or leg. Though it's not clear how true these anecdotes are, and the more you get away from simple amputation the less good the evidence gets. Stalking Cat is sometimes discussed as an unusual BID case, and I'll defend him as being oppressed by the FDA, but if you consider him in that framework he very clearly wasn't going to ever be done in any modern tech.))
Where gender identity disorder falls here is controversial, to say the least. Social conservatives often point to low rates of satisfaction and happiness and high rates of suicidal ideation or regret after surgery or transition, while trans advocates point to the exact reverse, and the whole matter just seems to me like another reason to be suspicious of any significant poll- or poll-like data. Even under that, there are serious value questions about the relative importance of reproductive capability (or, say, the increased ovarian cancer risks from testosterone supplementation) against suicide rates (or, say, the health downsides of having intact gonads, for a real fun philosophical question).
But these are ultimately questions of fact, that could at least in theory be discussed and analyzed on that metric even if no one seems to have both the ability and interest in doing so seriously.
I acknowledge I elided the distinction between a simple preference versus something that interferes with normal living but I don't see why that matters here. All I'm saying is that we have a bunch of conditions that are broadly categorized under the same "unhappiness with one's body" umbrella and there's a wide variance with how much they interfere with everyday living. My argument doesn't hinge on putting "gender identity" in one bucket versus another.
Apologies, should have been more clear. I think my point is less about a distinction between "preference" and "interference", and more that when putting all of these conditions on an "interference" scale, the proposed solutions of physical modification are clearly non-functional and sometimes even non-survivable for muscle dysphoria and anorexia, partly because of the common-mode behaviors, and partly because of underlying physical limitations to the human body and current medical science.
Ah that makes more sense, I misunderstood
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As I said a few days ago, the transgender philosophy begins wherever they are and ends wherever they want to be. Applying it to uses outside that scope throws up unanswered questions and contradictions because it wasn't made for more general uses and so it fails in other applications. It was constructed to serve their immediate ends and no more.
Looking at it like this brings the matter into focus. It's a medical condition only as long as it needs to be to access medical resources. In scenarios where access to medical resources isn't required, guess what? It's no longer a medical condition. When it suits to be a psychological condition, or a linguistic label, or a particular aesthetic, those are the things transgenderism will be - until it no longer suits. The details aren't vague so much as they're ephemeral. The consistent quality is the self-servingness and self-justification.
You're a defence lawyer, you must be familiar with this tactic. I assume the difference is that in the legal realm you don't tie yourself in knots puzzling how to make sense of these competing claims. "I was at home that night... What I mean is that I had at some point been home that night... I mean, I didn't say whose home I was at that night... What I mean is I was batting in a baseball game... ... So, uh, can I go home now?"
They're not the other sex. They want to be the other sex. The entirity of transgenderism is the struggle to resist the unfortunate and persistent reality that they cannot be the other sex. And if in a biopunk future they somehow could, they'd still have not-been and be relegated to arriviste status. In the absence of full transexualism the very best a transgender can achieve is to be transgender. This could have been tolerable, but the more rhetoric they deployed the more holes were revealed until there's more hole than there is doughnut. There are male men and female women, and there is masculinity and femininity. Outside of the truly rare edge case congenital medical conditions I don't see which complex meanings can't be rendered legible with these simple terms. The transgender philosophy and lexicon renders these meanings less legible, and I suspect it's by design to construct a means to an otherwise impossible end.
I am not sure how much this would matter. Imagine if winding up in the body you would have had if you'd been born the other sex, or just a lab-grown body indistinguishable from the real thing, cost you around three months' wages for the median worker. This wouldn't be a trivial expense by any means, but it would be within the reach of average, determined people. Now you've got Mike, who's always felt that he was a woman and ever since he was 13 he's been saving up for this. He finally plunks down close to twenty grand of his hard-earned cash age 21, and gets his lab-grown body. There's some adjusting to do, and some learning, but is Mary (formerly Mike) a "real woman"? He's lived twenty-one years of his life as a man...but now, Mary's body is indistinguishable from that of a natal female. Mary's brain might be a little bit different. But if this was possible in 2200, and we dumped Mary into a time machine to the present day, we would just think that Mary was a little weird and call it a day.
Is Mary's behavior likely to be so different that it'll make her stand out, and people would "clock" her as one of the Labgrown?
Also: why isn't the transgender movement pumping its fundraising efforts into this type of research? Yes, it might still be a century away, but still. Progress in this area could be incredibly valuable for lots of things, not just trans stuff.
I mean. I think that the current state of trans healthcare/medicine is roughly analogous to WWI-era plastic surgery. Pumping research dollars into it now would result in only slight/incremental improvements unless we get an Alexander Fleming (which we might) or we pump a LOT of research dollars into it. An alliance between biomedical engineers and the trans movement seems like it could be vastly beneficial to healthcare in general...lab-grown skin could help burn victims. Lab-grown ears and noses could benefit people who have been disfigured. I'll agree that lab-grown organs aren't something we might see in our lifetime...but still. It could be very helpful.
Ultimately I think that after 20 or 30 years we'll wind up with a de facto third and fourth gender, shading into 'trans man' and 'trans woman'. Transmen will be mostly treated as men; trans women, not so much; puberty does cause irreversible changes and any physical weakness trans guys have as a result of not having gone through male puberty just gets rounded off to 'that's just a small, weak-looking dude'.
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In practical terms it wouldn't matter. In philosophical terms there will remain a meaningful and distinguishing difference from the fact that they haven't always been women. They would enjoy full licence to roam the bailey, but the motte of womanhood will remain inviolate. Even with a "blank" body grown from the embryo up from their own stem cells the implanted brain-mind-self would remain trans in the definitive sense of the prefix. Only a man could undergo such a process whereby he became a woman.
Kind of gross but interesting thought experiment: what if Mike had undergone this procedure age 14, at his insistence: his UMC parents believed he was trans, and bought him a lab-grown body. What if Mike was 10? Five? Two years old? An infant? I suppose that the distinction here is 'how much gendered socialization do you have; how many gendered memories do you have'.
Also: what if Mike undergoes this procedure on his 18th birthday, lives as a woman for 30 years, and then decides he wants to be a man again? Is he a dude that lived 30 years as a woman?
I know - this is kind of getting Ship of Theseus-y here.
It's getting more "categories are made for man", IMO. At some point you'd expect these changes to start dissolving the gender binary altogether, or at least make it inapplicable.
Yeah - we'd have a sex binary, and different rules and roles based on things like physical strength and pregnancy, but I'm not sure how much of a gender binary we'd have if the average person could change sexes for real with the current equivalent of $20k.
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Yes and why people can't see this strange to me. One day about 'born in the wrong body', another day queer theory transgression. But the reality model doesn't allow both, either gender identity is an essential attribute or it's something that you can choose, that changes, you can't have both. So many contradictions, sex and gender norms need to be thrown off, yet it's sex appearance and gender stereotypes that define the desire for, and results of, transition. You can't pathologise it, yet you treat it with powerful medical interventions. Trans people are unsafe while violence towards woman occurs at womans rights events. And of course, the persistent motte and bailey. It's about all this other stuff except when people point out the flaws and then it's just extreme gender dysphoria (with no other possible solution).
But why don't more people voice their distaste with this incoherent babble? I can think of the following groups:
**General apathy.
I appreciate this stance, it's where I sit on a number of other important issues such as the environment.
**Both sides
It's too complicated to understand and is just another culture war issue so the truth is somewhere halfway between but I can't be bothered finding out where it sits.
**Progress junkies
I must have socially liberal progress, even if I have push it out to some trans-human utopia. I don't care about the details. Trans woman are woman!
**Resigned
Yes it's nonsense but it's just the way the world is moving. Nothing stands still.
**Eugenicists
Well less people can't hurt the environment really. If some people want to opt-out of reproduction all the power to them.
**Third wave feminists
Social engineering is coming for you, ah ha ha....
**Religious fanatics
All kneel for the sacred caste
**Transhumanists
You are correct that it's a wedge issue, and we're impatiently waiting on the other side of the wedge. Morphological freedom soon!
**Likewise, gender abolitionists
Yeah many trans people are surprisingly gender essentialist, but once the body is cosmetic their opinion won't matter, the ensuing social drift will be unstoppable.
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I don't clearly see the option that seems most likely to me: the deep desire to be seen as "cool" or "intelligent". These people will switch to whatever reddit/the paper/hollywood tells them is the new truth, no matter what it is.
And the one that kills me the most is:
t: "I'm a woman born in a man's body!"
t: :does something very masculine:
p: "Uh, that didn't seem very lady like"...
t: "You just have a wrong stereotype about what women are really like!"
... At which point I'm asking myself how anyone can "feel like a woman" if a woman can be literally anything. Maybe this holds for men as well and they actually just feel like a non-stereotypical man?
That's a suberb example of the equivocation that comes up!
And yes, cool or progressive or transgressive are great motivators. Particularly for young people.
The obvious ones that I missed above as well are the 'go along to get along' or the 'follow the tribe' people. Ie "What do I think about it? Hang on, I'll just go get my blue tribe manual and find out".
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Are different people saying these different things? Or have you actually seen a single individual with two clearly contradictory viewpoints?
That's anti-natalism, not eugenics. And I seriously doubt that anyone is pro-trans because of anti-natalism.
Well, yes actually - these ideas appear all the time together.
Take these two paragraphs from a youth website (https://headspace.org.au/explore-topics/for-young-people/gender-identity/)
The first paragraph includes gender-fluid and non-binary. These are ideas from queer theory, that we can choose our gender or that it's a changeable construct. No-one is arguing that there is an internal brain construct which corresponds to them.
Then the next paragraphs are the born in the wrong body narrative.
These ideas of gender identity are internally inconsistent and often individuals, especially youth, will quote from both belief systems. You might say that youth often can get complex ideas wrong and I'd agree, therein lies a glaring ethical issue around consent.
But it's not just youth, even adults betray this confusion. They don't notice the narrative shifts.
As to your latter point, yes agreed more so anti-natalism or population control. I put this in as a provocation, but it is something I've thought about. When you consider that many people who transition are autistic it does have a eugenics edge to it.
Where do you stand on this issue out of interest?
As far as I can tell, the first paragraph is not claiming that people can choose their gender. I can see someone claiming that they are non-binary or gender-fluid, but that they are not choosing to be that way, that it's just the way they are. This seems internally consistent to me. (I myself am very sceptical of non-binary and gender-fluid identifications, but more open to binary trans people.)
Isn't the claim from the first paragraph that "Gender identity" is "part of your sense of self" the same as "the born in the wrong body narrative"? Or was your "internal brain construct" meant to be something physical that might actually be detected on a brain scan, not just a subjective "sense" or "feeling"? I've seen the brain scan arguments, and I agree that they're inconsistent with the more subjective self-ID narrative.
See the bit in parentheses above. In general, I see little need for metaphysical discussion of what it means to be a certain gender. If someone identifies as trans and it makes them happy, I'll respect their wishes. They're not asking for much.
My overall views on trans stuff are more complicated than that. I've been thinking of writing a long post about it.
NB and gender fluid mean a range of things to different people but in addition to change do sometimes imply a choice (choose to identity with etc). At the queer theory end gender is just a performance and so people can choose to transgress their assigned gender etc. (Eg genderqueer) I would argue this filters down through a lot of 'folk' sentiment around this issue. But in any case, just the change element is problematic when thinking about the construct of gender identity.
Yes, 'internal brain construct', which is implied in the born in the wrong body narrative (alternatively it is spoken about as a kind of Cartesian 'soul', part of someone, but not part of their body). This is the justification for serious medical intervention. Gender identity theory implicitly posits a construct within us that we can know about, and that can differ from the gender ascribed to our sex. A lot of the self-ID gender as you call it, easily fits within our prior understanding of gender as a biopsychosocial complex that may vary widely among individuals, is dependent on cultural context and that may change over time. This kind of gender does not justify radical intervention/surgeries because other modalities could be brought to bear in treatment, and subjective self-awareness may easily shift over time (e.g. tomboys may always have non-conforming elements but they don't always eschew all aspects of femininity and many end up having children/being mothers). So it become a kind of motte and bailey with the strong argument justifying intervention, but when pressed around a lack of scientific evidence for this 'blue brain/pink brain' retreating to gender identity simply being a self awareness of one's gender. Actually commonly gender is discussed almost as a lifestyle option these days.
I'm also very skeptical of nb and gender-fluid narratives because I think they betray a fundamental misunderstanding of gender in relation to the self. Speaking of myself, my experience is commonly very non-binary, I would describe it as the default self-space we all occupy -- I think much of the current moment is an over-identification with identity (and related obsessive psychologies) brought about by the disembodied internet. By the by, basing categorisation on biological sex, ironically, allows for more flexible gender expression because the category is not tied to the expression -- no social proof is required of sex, manly women are women though they may trigger some confusion in the gender space due to our correlated markers of appearance. Gender identity on the other hand, ties identity to expression, appearance and sex stereotypes -- people experience dissonance with their gendered expression and appearance in relation to sex norms and stereotypes. You can see this by the stereo-typical androgenous appearance of non-binary -- the social proof is androgenous hair cuts, piercing, etc.
As to 'I see little need for metaphysical discussion of what it means to be a certain gender. If someone identifies as trans and it makes them happy, I'll respect their wishes', I don't honestly know how to respond to that. I don't want to impute onto you, but this just reeks of a kind of lazy philosophical relativism which will lead us to 'no good place'. The rationale of course is that these ideas are now being spread in schools as 'truth' and that a rapidly rising number of children and adolescents with confused ideas about gender are altering their bodies. Many of these people, who have gender dysphoria, would have desisted if allowed to go through natal puberty, many of them would have turned out to be gay. Yes I get adults should be able to do things to their own bodies, but the issue has long since passed that. The philosophical issues are in some ways side-tracks (gender is complex after all and philosophy is hard), but we follow them because there are actual activists spreading inconsistent ideas that create confusion around sex and gender. Can I provoke you into putting your ideas down -- I'm curious how people square the circle of child-safeguarding and the risk of social contagion/sociogenic trans.
Apologies for the late reply.
I agree that social contagion/ROGD is a real thing. The denial of this phenomenon by trans activists is one of their more ridiculous stances: they are essentially asserting that teenagers are not susceptible to fads and peer pressure and general social reinforcement, which is of course absurd. Though I want to note that, as with other mass psychogenic disorders, those with ROGD are not faking it or doing it for attention, etc.
I think there exist some people who are, for lack of a better term, "really" trans. They experience intense dysphoria which is alleviated by transitioning. These are the sorts of people who identified as trans long before it became fashionable. The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in interwar Germany performed experimental sex reassignment surgery "in response to the ardent requests of patients". I vaguely recall reading about a trans woman who requested a legal sex change from the German emperor (before the war) and was obliged. I couldn't find any sources on that, but I did find this.
The distinction I draw here is similar to, but IMO not quite the same as, transmedicalists/truscum vs transtrenders/tucutes.
Ideally, we would identify who is really-trans and who is suffering from social contagion/ROGD. The latter would be made to wait it out and the former would be given treatment as soon as possible. Some people on this website have expressed the view that they are fine with adults doing what they want but that they object to any kind of treatment for minors. But if you accept that really-trans adults exist, then it naturally follows that really-trans minors exist too. Going through the puberty of their birth sex is extremely distressing for them and it also makes it permanently harder to pass, so we would want to provide them with treatment sooner rather than later.
Here's my practical policy proposal. There should be paediatric psychiatrists who specialize in treating trans patients, to whom any children or adolescents claiming dysphoria would be referred. They would approach the case with a degree of scepticism, acknowledging that really-trans people exist but so does ROGD, and with their experience, they should be able to tell the two apart. I think this is feasible. After all, wasn't the existence of ROGD first postulated by a psychiatrist?
My proposal is not a compromise between two sides, rather, it is the policy that maximizes everyone's welfare, derived from first principles. I think it would have been arrived at eventually by the medical profession had trans stuff not become so politicized. As is, anything may happen, though I still hope it will become the standard. In any case, I am very annoyed by the politicization and the dishonesty coming from both sides of the transgender debate.
(Aside: Why do those who disagree that really-trans people exist, those who believe everyone claiming to be trans is delusional or has an extreme fetish, etc., care about ROGD? Shouldn't they advocate treating all trans people the same – ostracizing them, forcing them to desist, or what have you? Why does the aetiology or time of onset of the perversion matter?)
So I agree that there should be some restrictions, especially relating to children and adolescents, and I fully support debate on what the optimal policy is. My comment about "metaphysical discussion" was in reference to, for example, the incessant questioning of "what is a woman?" by anti-trans activists. The question has no practical implications, it is pure posturing.
Thanks for your response and no worries about delay. My response is rather long and a bit ranty. Apologies if it seems didactic but was exploring some ideas.
I actually agree with quite a lot of your framing. In terms of treatment I view it largely as a medical issue, or more broadly, public health. I accept there is a proportion of people with gender dysphoria who very persistently want to identify as the opposite sex and that one of the options available for such people will be transitioning.
But although I agree with the open-ended treatment model you propose I am skeptical that it's possible to reliably identify 'true-trans', especially when you shift the diagnosis to younger people. I just don't think it's possible to reliably determine prior to puberty, or even in adolescence for that matter, what the life outcomes of that child are, and the ethical bar for early puberty intervention is so high (infertility and loss of sexual function) that I favour a ban (with exceptions in rare cases) on puberty blockers in the interests of public health. They are after all being used experimentally as an off label treatment. Broadly it might be possible to score for transition suitability on a risk-based assessment but there also needs to be enough history to determine that transition is the best option and so it can't be rushed in my view.
The argument to push treatment to pre-puberty would make sense if it were definitively diagnosible like heart disease but it's actually a poor idea with our current lack of understanding because it doubles down on treatment consequences while at the same time forestalling the window for diagnosis and therapeutic alternatives.
Also, the rationale to aid passing is an implicit acknowledgement that people who transition and don't pass don't actually resolve their dysphoria. I have a speculative suspicion that part of the drive towards early use of puberty blockers are reports from those who transitioned but still haven't resolved their dysphoria--"If only I had passed, then I wouldn't be dysphoric still"?
Anyway aside from this suspicion, the limited research on treatment with puberty blockers shows mixed outcomes so I don't think it's the silver bullet. I think this end of treatment under a passing rationale also segues from a medicalist to a trans-humanist paradigm.
Overall there needs to be much greater research into this issue. As you've alluded it's actually a grouping of different types under the umbrella 'trans' yet we talk as if it's all the same. As you acknowledge the transcum/ transtrender split isn't sufficient. Transvestites, transsexuals prominent in the past is a different thing than the modern gender dysphoria (as we've seen with the change in gender ratio). Transexuals as studied by Blanchard, which included autogynephiles (undeniable fetishism at play here in my view, whether you like the term) and androphilic men are a different beast to a young girl feeling gender dysphoric or a vulnerable, terminally online person imbibing trans messaging from a young age.
In addition to the medical frame and trying to identify any biological differences around gender non-conformity (being an effeminate gay male for example), we need to have two other frames to understand this issue in my view.
The first (articulated by Helen Joyce) is that trans is best thought of as a culture bound syndrome, that is, the experience of a set of internal experiences and suffering is mediated and interpreted within the current cultural settings. Gender dysphoria is at heart the description of an internal sense, but unavoidably the way we describe our experiences has cultural input. You can chart the rise and fall of many conditions (not just psychological), where what changed wasn't the underlying aetiology but the cultural setting where 'symptoms' are expressed. So hysteria was a notable condition of the past but doesn't exist now, carpal tunnel syndrome seems to have been largely a fad. It's possible that for some people the underlying cognitive complex of conditions like anorexia and ocd (to be sure longstanding behaviors over history) are being reinterpreted within the lens of gender dysphoria. It's clear that there is some overlap in these conditions for people who present at gender clinics. Similarly generalized anxiety around puberty may manifest as GD. Many different mental health indicators (self harm, depression) have shown a sharp rise for young people in recent years, particularly young women. Is it really hard to believe that this isn't some manifestation of a social unease of the moment but exhibiting in different forms due to the complex of interactive effects?
This brings us to the second frame which is really just a wider view of the previous point. This is trans as a sociogenic meme, or social contagion. This is where we are now. Culture has created an idea of trans, as a progressive, transcendent human rights issue and the cultural forces now permeate sufficiently that we may just be sending kids down the trans train without there needing to be any careful medical scrutiny. Some people may start choose trans, ie a lifestyle option. Parents may influence their child to actualise themselves as progressives
Anyway Ive blathered long enough. I only put in the more general, speculative points to show that trans may indicate a particular cultural moment, as part of a broader meaning crisis and so solutions will have to be at that level also.
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Your post describes an extreme level of cynicism that I also happen to share. Very well put. You've established a coherent and plausible explanation for the constant...weirdness in this discourse. But even if I share your cynicism, I still find it worthwhile to take the high-road approach and assume the very very best before I knock it down.
How much more would they need to do before the principle of charity finally runs out on them?
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One post I've always puzzled over: Ozy's Cis By Default.
I've never felt like I'm a man, nor have I ever felt like I'm a woman. Some would have it that since I don't identify as a man or a woman, that must mean I identify as agender! But that sounds just as silly to me as identifying as either a man or woman: I don't identify as anything. The only time I think of it is probably in the context of trans discussions, and I always come to the same conclusion: a shrug. Perhaps gender agnosticism? Of course, if a medical professional asks my sex, I say a man, but that's about communicating a constellation of physical traits to others to make interfacing with the world more convenient, not how I identify my self in my inner monologue. If tomorrow I woke up as a woman, I am pretty confident that my primary reaction would only be "damn, this is going to be a lot of obnoxious paperwork to deal with."
And so I'm Ozy's "cis by default." And if someone (cis or trans) wants to say they identify as something, my reaction is... okay, sure, I guess that's neat. I'd file away in my head that that person likes to be labeled as a Woman or Man or whatever, politely humor that label, and get on with my life. It's no different than someone saying that they're a proud Catalonian or a brony or a Yankees fan.
What I struggle with is that I get the sense that that's something many trans activists aren't okay with: there's a demand that gender be recognized as having some deep metaphysical reality (trans women are women!). And so when Ozy says
I say... yes, please do. Because as far as I can tell, it's either completely undefinable or the desire to act out the opposite gender role, with the same person switching between those two options depending on what's rhetorically convenient at the moment.
And it makes me sad, because I've always wanted to see gender roles become less rigid, not more. What I fear is that people who deviate from increasingly narrow gender roles are going to be funneled into an increasingly narrow gender role of the opposite sex, which is every bit as much oppressive as a father who berates his son for playing with dolls.
I’ve always found myself puzzled by “feeling like a woman” and I am one. What does a gender feel like? None of my identities feel like anything. I just exist and do things. I just get on with living. I don’t spend all day thinking about gender or race or anything else. I just am.
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Hm. That post really explained things for me, and made it much easier for me to support friends who were coming down with a sudden case of estrogen.
I read it as two axes: preference for masculine or feminine roles vs. strength of that preference. High-masc, high-strength, born a woman? Trans man. High-strength, but people already treat you as the role you prefer? “Cis.” The regions with low strength, then, would be “cis by default.”
@ymeskhout, under this reading, “agender” would be strong preference for, uh, neither gender role. I don’t think that’s a contradiction. It is foreign to my experience, sure. But so are lots of things. People get really excited about sports, and by God, I feel nothing. Does that mean they’re faking for attention, social signaling, adopting a rhetorical motte-and-bailey? Or does it mean they just feel something I…don’t?
I’m in that region. Gender politics are stupid, and gender feels made-up. People shouldn’t be treated differently by their sex, so there shouldn’t be a need for “gender” as social role. I’d be a “gender abolitionist” if TERFs hadn’t made the term a political marker.
Rationally, I prefer being a man, but I really lack a visceral response to the thought of inhabiting a female body. I’d do it if I could switch back. Some people report, no, that sounds awful, and they have zero interest in switching. I don’t get it, but okay.
Same for this phenomenon of gender “euphoria.” Not something I was familiar with. Then I started to get more into firearms. They’re loud, fun, dangerous machinery. They’re also male-coded as hell, and most of the women in my life wanted nothing to do with them. But when I was engaged in this stereotypical, pointless, masculine hobby…I understood.
Does that mean women who get a kick out of shooting guns are experiencing gender dysphoria at that moment?
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The problem with Ozy's argument is that it's pure question begging. It boils down to flatly asserting that some people absolutely 100% experience this super deep "internal gender feeling" and if you don't well then that just means you're "cis by default" and you'll never understand what this (absolutely not made up!) experience feels like. It's completely unfalsifiable; the argument defines refutation as literally impossible. And even within this rubric, Ozy runs into other problems once they realize that "not having internal gender feeling" applies to cis people and also to this other (absolutely not made up) class of people called agender. Does this mean that cis people are just agender? No, absolutely not, because Ozy asserts "of course agender people are not cis." How do we know that's true? It just is! Agender people will tell you as much!
How do any of these flat-out assertions help convey any insight or information? It's indistinguishable from religious awakening stories about how you can believe in god if only you'd open your heart and pray.
I've said before that my response to "what if you woke up as a woman?" would be "am I hot?" because that would be far far more consequential on whether I would enjoy the experience or not. If yes, then goddamn that would be such an enlightening scenario to experience. I have no interest in dicks now but hell I might even fuck a dude just to see what the hype is all about.
I too feel absolutely nothing about sports, but there's nothing inscrutable about a sports fan experience to me. I can understand "excitement" and "emotional investment" and "suspense" and then draw parallels from there, and crucially I can make predictions (Bob will be sad if his team loses). There are no equivalent parallels available to describe the alleged "gender identity incongruence" (or as I argued in the OP, there are no ways to describe it that don't sound idiotic and regressive) but Ozy uses this inability to convey this experience to double down on the entire enterprise by claiming that some people are just incapable of understanding.
Interestingly enough, I don't know if you noticed the contradiction in your post about "gender euphoria". I too share a love for firearms and yes, that hobby is indeed male-coded as hell. You know what else is male-coded as hell? Sports! If firearm enthusiasm can give you gender euphoria, would it not follow that the absence of sports enthusiasm would give you gender dysphoria? The lack of consistency there indicates that the euphoria might not necessarily be predicated on how congruent your enthusiasm is with accepted gender conventions.
(funny enough, transwomen have been a ridiculously disproportionate portion of my shooting range partners)
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Why shouldn't they? Isn't the fact that one half of the population can impregnate the other a germane fact to relations between the sexes? Isn't the fact that the average member of one sex is physically stronger than 99% of members of the other sex also a germane fact?
I know a person who (I think last year) came out as a trans woman. She's privately admitted to a closer friend than me that she has never experienced anything resembling gender dysphoria. However, she claims to experience "gender euphoria" when wearing women's clothes. In the past, if a male person experienced great pleasure wearing women's clothes, but did not experience gender dysphoria and had no desire to medically transition, we would just call them a crossdresser or transvestite. (Which is fine, there's nothing wrong with that.)
Alternatively, "gender euphoria" might be a euphemism for the sexual arousal experienced by autogynephiliacs.
Either way, I think this person has mistakenly come to believe that these things are a package deal: if you're male and you enjoy (or derive sexual excitement from) wearing women's clothes, ipso facto you're a trans woman. But you could always just be a male crossdresser, there's really nothing wrong with that, it doesn't make you any less "valid" a person.
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My complaint, though, isn't related to people being different or having psychological states that are alien to me: of course they do. It's the insistence that it's some kind of inherent part of "identity," whatever that is, even if it's conceded that some people are lacking in this part of it.
Going with my Yankee example, suppose someone existed (let's call him Jim) who insisted it was his fundamental identity, and he felt that he should always be referred to as Yankee Jim and wouldn't feel secure in his body until he got the Yankee emblem tattooed all over his body. My response would be... Well, sure. Yankee Jim he is. I'd support funding the tattoos with public funds, if studies showed that that intervention was the most effective intervention to prevent suicide or resolve mental issues. I accord the same exact sympathy and respect to him that I do to trans people (the sympathy and respect any human being suffering should receive).
But my sense is that at least some trans advocates would take offense to this analogy, because gender identity is more "real" than Yankee identity.
I'm not sure how a concrete biological basis for trans-ness would affect my viewpoint. I don't think it should: a biological basis could result in a greater likelihood to have dysphoria without indicating the reality of gender identity, and in itself it's not enough. E.g. it's possible for Yankee dysphoria to also have some biological factors that increases its likelihood. But I imagine I would change my opinion depending on the strength of the evidence for a biological basis and its mechanism.
I am totally game for this pro Yankee Jim world.
For me that's... sorta the whole point. Every identity is aspirationally valid. Trans rights are just a stepping stone for getting to the point where people will accept a friend who wants to be a hippopotamus when they grow up.
I don't know... I'm sure some Trans advocates would take offense to this analogy but.
I don't respect them? I dunno. There are always some people with bad takes. But in my experience trans people are at least more likely to be friend to all weirdos, what with being transgressive weirdos themselves.
I agree more trans people than cis straight people would embrace this world, which speaks well of them in my book.
Trans-advocates, however, are a wider group than trans people, and the majority of trans-advocates are cis and straight. Particularly, I know that if I posted this opinion on social media, it would absolutely be a bunch of cis, straight people jumping down my throat calling it out as trans-phobic instead of engaging in the argument. It's not how individual trans people respond to thought experiments, but more how the broader culture takes trans people and uses them to enforce existing gender roles.
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I never understood why anyone finds Ozy's post in any way illuminating:
Ozy doesn't break stride when coming across this apparent contradiction. If you're not ok with the hypothetical, you're "plain old cis". If you are, you are "cis by default". Or maybe you are agender? Who knows let's move on. This is what I meant by "argument by assertion".
Agree. Put it in the same category as everything else I've ever read by her (them?).
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I agree, that seems nonsensical to me. I am very happy being a man. If I woke up in the body of a woman, I highly doubt that I would transition, it seems like a bum deal. I'd probably be sad about some things, in the same way I'd imagine I would be sad if I got into a traumatic car accident, or in the way I am factually sad that I can't do things I once did when I was younger. But I'd much prefer having a functional female body to a malformed male one.
Of course, my assumption above is that I would wake up as a woman approximately equivalent to myself in fitness/attractiveness/etc plus/minus gender bonuses/penalties. Perhaps my intuition would be different if I woke up a as a radically different kind of woman. Which is my intuition overall, I'm less attached to my gender than I am to status. I would trade male status for female status, but I would not trade male status for female inferiority, or vice versa.
Yeah, ditto. Given the current state of technology, I'd make for an extremely ugly transwoman given my current male body and bald head. That combined with the complete lack of articulable benefits (see OP) are more than enough to make this an obvious decision. But if I somehow hypothetically woke up as a female with near-equivalent status/benefits to what I currently enjoy now as a male, part of me would be thrilled at the unique perspective on the human condition I'd have access to. For the same reasons as before, I'd like make for an ugly transman in that hypothetical scenario (testosterone makes it much much easier to pass) and I wouldn't be able to articulate any reasons for the transition.
Phalloplasty is an absolute horror show. Deformed donor sites, high potential for infection and even gangrene, the need for erectile appliances. And certainly no sexual sensation. Even reading about phalloplasty is revolting to me.
I'm a man, and if by some unfortunate circumstance I found myself dickless, I would certainly not attempt phalloplasty. It would just be making a bad situation far, far worse.
I cannot fathom the state of mind of the people that have a desire for phalloplasty. I have to wonder if it's ever been attempted on a man who lost his penis.
Yeah, I completely do not understand it. It seems like if anything, even a high-quality phalloplasty "penis" would just be a constant reminder of all the other things you can never have, no matter how much cash you sink into it. I once attended a queer-friendly amateur porn festival and one of the entries involved a transman with a hormonally-enlarged clitoris "fucking" a tiny fleshlight all while saying things like "yeah take that big dick yeah". I was deeply disturbed by the delusion on display (and also by the tiny fleshlight).
Is there a story behind how you ended up at a queer amateur porn festival? And what was disturbing about the tiny fleshlight? Normally the packaging on those is the sketchy part, at least if it's in japanese...
Humpfest is always a damn good time and it's not so much a porn festival rather than a collection of sketch comedy skits with nudity. The part I found disturbing was likely not noticed by others, but a tiny fleshlight necessarily implies mimicking tiny genitals which...do I need to complete that?
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This reminds me of the old athiest argument of, "you are a [Christian]/[Muslim]/[Bhuddist] primarily because of where or to whom you were born." I would suspect however, that most religious people are not convinced by this line of argument because they are, to use your verbiage, "real [Christians]." A "[Christian] by default" is someone who just hasn't encountered that argument, and upon realizing he is just conforming, would immediately renounce his religion.
The few Christians I've discussed this kind of reasoning with, have all asserted that even in alternate realities, they would have come to follow Christ anyways. This was enough to convince me that they were "real," and satisfied my curiosity.
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I think that the way you feel may be a normal response to the world you were raised in, but I suspect it is an indication that that world is pretty unhealthy. It seems like a symptom of a profound alienation. Historically, male or female would be a genuinely meaningful category that placed certain rights and obligations on you. I'm not sure that the elimination of that has been psychologically good.
I can relate. I don't feel an automatic urge to identify as a Citizen of my country. It's just something I happened to be born with and while I appreciate the huge benefits it provides me with, I don't feel responsible for the actions of my native country or a strong sense of association with other nominal Citizens. But that's probably a really bad thing. Citizens of a healthy nations automatically partake in the daily plebiscite. I should feel a strong alliance with my nations and my fellows. And most of all, it would be great if my country applied some meaningful obligations on me.
Why though? How has the reduction of the strictness of roles that modernity has brought on improved things for people?
I think the nuance here is drawing the meaning more from the specific relevant traits rather than assuming the entire category. I've been involved in fairly tepid scenarios where an amount of physical violence was about to become very necessary and the people you'd want to step up (read: those physically capable of doling out the violence) generally meet their obligation.
You can observe this even in an ideal citizenship scenario. We're not going to expect equal obligations from everyone just because they're a citizen. Rather, we do indeed take into account each citizen's capabilities for what they can contribute (e.g. only men are drafted into military service, but even within the broad 'men' category, we make exceptions for the very young and the very old).
So the distinction I would offer would be "I am stepping up to potentially dole out violence, because I have the physical traits capable of doling out violence" rather than "...because I am a man."
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It allows people to choose how they want to live their lives. Many will make bad choices, many will be less happy than they otherwise would be, but one of my basic values is liberty/self determination. You may not value this as highly, in which case you would prefer stricter gender roles.
Women's lives used to be extremely constrained, with no opportunity to explore their potential. That's no way to treat half the world's humans.
Totally fair.
I don't, and so yes, I do.
But there's more to said about it. I, like everyone born in America, was raised to believe that freedom and self-actualization were great things to have. My default starting point agreed with you exactly. It's only over time that I've come to question it. I said:
I think that my question already kind of accepts that we have more freedom to determine the course of our lives. I just question how much that is actually worth. I live in a wealthy blue bubble. The people I have known in my life have more freedom and ability to self determine than almost anyone on the planet, and yet most of them are not very happy. Happy isn't the be all end all, but I'm not sure they are very fulfilled either, and that is the end all.
Now I think that the good life would be to live in a small village, raised by a shoemaker to make shoes, and to make shoes for people who need those shoes. That sounds more fulfilling. I know that comes from a place of incredible privilege to be able to want that, but I do.
A yearning for the meaning provided by being someone raised to make shoes for a town that needs shoes is probably behind the obsession to make and purchase expensive artisanal good that all of the hipsters in my circles have. But it can't be the same because the artisanal shoes aren't needed the same way, and also you have to be essentially independently wealthy to afford the lifestyle of making shoes for hipsters or of buying those shoes.
But putting away the shoe fantasy. The reality is that suicide is up, sadness is up. The people I know don't seem to enjoy their freedom all that much. With all of this freedom and actualization around me, why do I end up spending so much time with people who complain about everything? Everyone seems to know the answer. It sucks living in an atomized, commercialized society. We want to be part of something. Or, from a more leftist perspective "late capitalism is bad". Fair enough that seems to be true.
I'm not sure that end result can be avoided if liberty/self determination are put as highest goals. I recognize this is probable well mined already on the motte.
What are your thoughts? If liberty/self determination are making you feel really fulfilled and happy and super interested to hear about it. I don't feel like I hear that very often here, or in my real life, honestly.
Do you believe the small village shoemakers never whinge, gripe and complain or never have any causes to?
Fair. I'm sure they did. But they didn't kill themselves very often and generally succeeded in reproducing their lifestyle to the next generation.
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I'm not going to assert that men or women had a great deal of liberty in the past, but there were still a much larger range of options open for men than women. Are you really going to argue that men and women had equal opportunity to higher education, the professions, property ownership, and elected office before the mid-Twentieth Century?
Yes, it's very nice that women didn't have to go to war and were allowed to donate their time to social movements, but they were the property of their fathers and husbands and had nothing of their own. That is the life of a child, not an adult.
Your points are very well articulated, and I wish you were around when our friendly neighborhood pedofascist was here telling us that females being anything but livestock is a historical aberration.
It's kind of ironic that a lot of leftists argue that throughout history women have basically been chattel and had no rights (and this was a bad thing) and a lot of rightists argue that throughout history women have basically been chattel and had no rights (and this was a good thing). Both of them have a very simplified view of history and sex relations, of course.
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Perhaps another way of phrasing this is that if you look at the set of humans throughout history, the ones who have traditionally been able to self-actualize have been men. This does not mean all men were in this position, but woman were much more limited in their opportunities to do so. There was a ceiling that men could surpass and women could not. Pointing out that many men were stuck in their position doesn't contradict that.
The original prompt for this discussion (and the context for my comment) was "How has the reduction of the strictness of roles that modernity has brought on improved things for people?" My answer to that was that is has removed the ceiling for women. I can now go to University, pursue my chosen profession, control my own finances, etc. 19th century me would not have had these options.
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Such a description exists and used to be in vogue, though it seemingly no longer is.
The two points of comparison are both allegedly biological: (1) reproductive sex (i.e what gametes one produces), and (2) mental sex. The claim is that there exists a sexually bimodal distribution of mental traits that is mediated primarily by biology (i.e. it's not primarily driven by gender stereotypes) and that usually correlates strongly with reproductive sex. A trans person is someone whose mental traits break from this typical correlation, i.e., their mental traits fall in the opposite mode of the bimodal sexual distribution.
I don't know whether this framework is accurate, but it's at least plausible and coherent.
Rebecca Reilly Cooper addressed this in her presentation and I agree with her arguments. The analogy is that while the average man is much taller than the average woman, this doesn't mean that very tall women are therefore men. The logic with this model is so illogical and convoluted that I don't know how to describe it, maybe question begging? It doesn't make sense to create a category on one thing (sex) only to then question someone's membership within that category because they happen to be an outlier on a secondary characteristic.
As I note above, I am not actually arguing this on the object level, I am simply pointing out that there exist definitions of what it means to be "trans" that are not in any way dependent on stereotypes or cultural "gender roles" and can be based purely on objective factors. Whether these definitions are particularly useful is another question.
I saw the note that you were not arguing at the object level, I was addressing whether the framework was coherent on its face or even if it's distinguishable from the gender stereotype framework. I don't believe that gender stereotypes are arbitrary or unmoored from reality (they actually tend to be very accurate). So for the same reasons you'd encounter bimodal distribution in mental traits, you'd encounter one for gender stereotypes as well. I don't see how it's possible for either framework to be "objective"; you have to make some discretionary decision about which mental traits to consider and then make some decision about how far of an outlier you need before the category can flip.
I'm not saying the choice of traits is objective, I'm saying it's possible to choose objectively measurable traits that are not based on stereotypes or culturally contingent facts.
The objective threshold would be "if the traits are more similar to the modal member of the opposite sex than the modal member of the same sex."
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In my experience that isnt true at all. Trans men and trans women almost always exhibit (mostly) the mental traits associated with their birth sex.
What they do have is an intense discomfort with having both these mental traits and physical traits (or possibly just intense discomfort that happened to focus on this).
Yes, but the idea is that this is at least a falsifiable hypothesis.
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That may be true, but I'm not trying to argue the object level point. I'm just saying that there exist definitions "trans" that wouldn't run afoul of ymeskhout's objections.
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I agree with (1) but wouldn't (2) still tie back to gender stereotypes? At least for the context of OP's point.
If mental sex exists as a biological reality, then it would refer to a fact about normal biological development independent of culture or stereotypes. It would be no more of a stereotype than statements like "men are stronger than women" or "women have larger breasts than men." The fact that these statements are not true 100% of the time doesn't make them stereotypes.
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Perhaps, but you can argue that gender stereotypes are simply how the innate characteristics of men and women exhibit themselves within a culture. This is unlikely to be entirely true, but also unlikely to be entirely false.
I don't think I agree with that definition of "stereotype." A stereotype is something that is associated with a category in a contingent rather than an innate or necessary way. For example, "black people have darker skin than white people" is not a stereotype because it's an innate or intrinsic fact about the differences between black and white people. The statement "black people are better dancers than white people" is a stereotype (even if it's true) because it's a culturally contingent fact rather than an innate property of the categories.
I always took “stereotype” as more a widespread belief of something associated with a category, with more than a whiff of unfairness or injustice implied.
I don’t think that contradicts what I said, though. As I said, it’s unlikely to be all intrinsic, but it’s also unlikely to be all contingent either.
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True, but the term is also used inconsistently. Women are innately physically weaker than men (the average man is stronger and faster than 99% of women), and yet insulting a man by saying "you hit/throw/punch like a girl" is widely considered offensive because it's a sexist stereotype - even though the relative physical weakness of women is innate, not contingent.
I don't think it's offensive because it's a stereotype, it's offensive because it's using the word "girl" as an insult.
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I agree, though I think the word is useful as the interaction between biology and culture, but it's been taken over and has to die. Ironically the use of gender as a direct synonym of sex as used in forms (originally because sex was thought to be too affronting) has aided the simple-minded adoption of the new gender (identity) as being a fixed essence. In one version of the game, gender becomes the stable category and sex the arbitrary one.
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I agree. I think it's coherent to use "gender" to refer to a role or set of expectations, but that necessarily only exists in other people's perception of you. You can certainly change perceptions, but that's something that needs to be demonstrated, not demanded.
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I've been working on doing this, more and more. I genuinely don't care about gender identity anymore and reference biological sex, in regards to matters of segregation and institutional privileges for females. Recently, I've started getting pushback from trans activists that now claim that transgender women are actually females now because they posses secondary sex characteristics of females. It's completely dishonest, but they're sticking to it.
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I’m a trans person and I’m honestly tired of how politicised this condition has become. I’m going all-in on the hypothesis that’s it’s a physical condition caused by an endocrine abnormality. I highly recommend reading this post or any of Dr Powers’ posts on his subreddit.
All of this philosophising on the nature of transgenderism is like trying to psychoanalyse the cause of stomach ulcers (which is something clinicians did until they were revealed to be caused by bacteria). There’s clearly something physically abnormal with transgender people and their brains, and one of the manifestations of that is gender dysphoria and behaviour atypical of the patient’s birth sex.
I don’t care one iota about my “gender identity”, following any gender scripts, or whether my interests are typical for men or women. I don’t “identify as a woman”, whatever that means. I would vastly prefer if pro-trans clinicians focused on actual clinical markers like improper methylation of testosterone, or the extremely high rates of PCOS in trans male patients, or MTHFR mutations. This is the kind of scientific research that would actually help our understanding of transgender people.
Instead we have this focus on babies turning their onesie into a dress. Anybody on both sides can write a lengthy essay full of navel gazing on the sociological basis of gendered behaviour that supports their pet theory, and turn being trans into a moral problem. You can debate endlessly about what is a woman, which is a philosophical problem. Or you can do DNA testing on trans patients and discover rates of certain mutations far in excess of the normal population, examine aromatase and sex hormone production, and look at correlations between gender dysphoria and other physical conditions.
Seems to be like the latter is far more useful. Plus, no one can have a political argument over DNA methylation patterns.
This was the existing accommodation and understanding of trans-sexuals. But the progressive social engineers, legal activists (out of a job after successful gay marriage laws) and the queer activists (a golem of post-modernism and a broken academia) took over (over-reached) and now 'the machine' has taken over. Now we've got social media disembodiment and cult dynamics, an acquiescent media, rogue pharma and surgeons and a cultural fashion that morphed into winning the culture war through hegemony. Self-ID now let's weird criminal males transfer to women's prisons.
The level of philosophy is just to satisfy oneself that one is not a bigot and that gender ideology is actually incoherent. Of course no one on the peak-trans side really cares about these ideas, it's about cultural power.
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100% on board. There exists a legitimate issue or collection of medical issues that cause distress in people related to hormones or brains or something sex related. It would be great if we could diagnose and treat these people in ways that decrease their distress.
There also exists a bunch of political nonsense about gender identities and sexualities and expressing yourself via some public identity that everyone you meet needs to know about, aknowledge, and treat you specially based on. Within this ideology, "trans" has become a cool trendy thing to identify as regardless of whether or not someone has the above condition.
Better science and unbiased application of it would allow us to accurately identify the former, give the appropriate treatment, while separately identifying the latter and... probably also giving them treatment based on their issues. Most trans-identifying people have some sort of distress that caused them to feel discomfort, even if it's not actual gender dysphoria, and if we had a clear and definitive understanding of real transgenderism we could rule it out for people who don't have it and then probe further to diagnosing and treating their actual condition (frequently autism, but not always) and get better treatment rather than using "trans" as a thought terminating cliche and sending them down the wrong treatment path.
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A bona fide medical condition implies a cure, which is really hard to imagine the medical community accepting to say nothing of the trans community itself… or the political mess this would cause with insurance. I believe we will be waiting a while.
Does cancer have a cure?
Different cancers have treatments of varying efficacy. The difference of course is that we don’t have cancer advocacy, cancer pride, cancer parades, cancer lifestyle TV shows, de facto mandatory inclusion quotas for people of cancer in every form of media, constitutional protection at large, and the White House hoisting a Cancer flag in lieu of the American flag as cause celebre.
Uh, yes, we do.
Cancer awareness? They even have different coloured ribbons for different types of cancer, just like the various pride flags!
Examples from the first page of the Google search results for "cancer parade":
http://bravothree.com/news/join-bravo-three-making-strides-san-diego-breast-cancer-walk-oct-19th/attachment/susan-g-komen-race-for-the-cure-st-louis/
https://cyprus-mail.com/2021/09/22/torch-race-to-mark-2021-breast-cancer-march/
https://spectrumnews1.com/ky/louisville/news/2023/05/05/oaks-survivors-parade
I'm not sure what trans "lifestyle TV shows" you have in mind, but surely you are not suggesting that there are no TV shows or movies where cancer is a major plot point.
Are you implying that trans or other LGBT people have to be included in every TV show or movie? Because I am pretty sure there have been very popular TV shows or movies produced even in the past couple of years without any LGBT characters. There are certainly many that do have LGBT characters, but, as I said above, there are also many featuring cancer.
Maybe not "constitutional", but apparently laws protecting people with cancer from discrimination do exist.
Close enough. This is apparently an established yearly tradition now, even Trump did it.
Also, as far as I can tell, the pride flag was hoisted alongside two American flags, not in lieu of them.
P.S.: Your claim that a "bona fide medical condition implies a cure" is clearly false. There are many incurable conditions whose management is purely symptomatic.
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I was reacting to the statement that a medical condition implies a cure. It may imply that there could be one but it doesn't imply that there is.
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We've touched on it before but if it's a endocrine disorder and a simple and effective way to correct that disorder is found what are your thoughts on correction vs transition? I understand that it, as with all conditions that effect one's self conception, is touchy but I'm not actually sure how you'd answer it.
I’m fine with both transition and correction being available. I doubt there will be a 100% effective way to correct gender dysphoria at any age - from Dr. Power’s preliminary research, T suppression in potential FtMs works only if started in early adolescence (and there’s currently no pathway for MtFs), and the individuals still remain gender non-conforming.
I’m favouring the “mosaic brain” hypothesis of gender dysphoria where certain brain structures are improperly feminised/masculinised to varying degree, starting in the womb. So if you wanted to be sure to prevent gender dysphoria, you’d have to start monitoring foetal conditions. This is actually a promising path, there’s potential evidence that ties folate supplementation to increased estradiol production in the womb in certain mothers, which would be linked to increased rates of autism and gender variance. I wouldn’t have any opposition to this kind of “prevention”.
In my case I feel like trying to correct gender dysphoria at puberty might have already been too late - by the time male puberty arrived, my brain had developed enough to feel incredibly not only emotionally traumatised but intellectually against the very concept of growing up to be male. So transitioning needs to remain an option for those that wouldn’t be able to get the endocrine abnormalities treated in time.
As an aside, I find the idea of being unwillingly born into a sex that defines so much of your life, socially and physically, with no choice to opt out or change or try other options, to be morally abhorrent and the equivalent to a dystopian caste system. While dysphoria is an unfortunate condition, I’m actually very grateful for having had the opportunity to explore possibilities beyond straight and cis-gendered norms, and I think gender variance is a net positive for the world - the ideal human takes the best of both masculine and feminine traits, rather than rigidly adhere to either box.
I addressed this in my post at length. It sounds like the issue you have is with the societal expectations so I don't understand how transition "solves" the issue. How is your position distinguished from how Iran deals with gender noncomformity?
I can’t change society or social expectations for men, but by transitioning I can be perceived and treated as a woman and that certainly solves my problem. Plus, it alleviates my physical dysphoria - a topic which you didn’t really address in your post. Even in a perfect pansexual non-gendered utopia, the latter would still remain - I’m not transitioning because I want to wear a dress or put on make-up or any other superficial trappings of femininity. I’m transitioning because being physically male is psychologically painful for me and I couldn’t stand any further masculinisation. Now of course there’s social benefits which are a motivating factor, but again, I can’t change society, I can only change myself.
Some trans activists do encourage gender stereotypes - I assume this is why you brought up Iran’s approach, which has no room for gender non-conformity (or homosexuality) and just allows you to transition between two rigid boxes. I am very much against that, I believe you should be able to pick and choose which aspects of femininity and masculinity you want both in yourself and in a partner. I don’t even want to be a feminine woman; so I fail to see how my transitioning is enforcing gender roles.
I don't claim to have any unique insights into physical gender dysphoria, so there's not much more for me to say except to acknowledge the distress is real and to advocate treating the condition the same we treat other types of physical dysphoria. I've already conceded that body modifications are not necessarily reliant on stereotypes.
You're right that our ability to change society and its gendered expectations is virtually nil. But what you described as the equivalent of a "dystopian caste system" wasn't the caste system itself, but rather the inability to change castes (Imagine if we applied that standard to actual dystopian caste systems, like India's, where the first line of criticism is decrying the inability for Untouchables to self-identify as Brahmins).
Based on how you describe "opting out" of sex, it sounds like you're using 'sex' to mean 'gender role' rather than referring to gamete size like I am. Correct me if I'm wrong but if so then I would be very curious to know what exactly you mean when you say that you had "no choice to opt out or change or try other [gender role] options". What exactly did you want but were unable to have prior to transitioning? What exactly were you able to gain only after transitioning? I'm very curious to know!
While I am certainly unhappy about the enforcement of gender roles, I’m also unhappy about being born into a physical sex without having the ability to change it. There’s a number of physical differences between men and women, the biggest being the reproductive system and physical characteristics.
My primary motivation for transitioning was purely physical dysphoria; HRT is a tremendous help and it does let me be closer to the opposite sex hormonally and physically, even if it’s not magic. I assume you’re more interested in the non-physical motivations though?
So the biggest one would be relationships. I wasn’t comfortable dating gay men or masculine-attracted bisexual men; many didn’t understand my dysphoria and were attracted to parts of me I hated. I disliked the general “vibes” of the gay dating scene, the focus on casual sex and the lack of desire for romance and long-term commitment.
But as a trans woman, I’ve dated feminine-attracted bisexual men and get treated completely differently. I’ll admit I do enjoy the gender roles when it comes to relationships; I like masculine men who know how to flirt and seduce me, who take me out on dates, make me feel safe and protected, find me attractive as a feminine person, and want to have sex with me the way a straight man wants to have sex with a woman.
I did try to have that without transitioning, but it felt like swimming against the current; I actually was dating feminine attracted bisexual men before as a youth and discovered the gender roles I liked that way. But as a man, I felt inadequate, and knew the kind of man I wanted would be wayyy more attracted to me in if I was a woman.
I also like getting gendered female, and avoiding getting male stereotypes assigned to me; no one asks me to lift heavy objects, or assumes I have any interest in sports, cars, fighting, women, or other stereotypically manly things. Lazy perhaps, but a plus for me.
Ok? I'm unhappy that we can't fly, that we age, and that we can't eat and talk at the same time. In the context of decrying the sex-change limitation as "morally abhorrent and the equivalent to a dystopian caste system" you make it sound like an artificial man-made limitation rather than just a reflection of reality's limitation. I find this particular thread confusing.
I appreciate the insight into your experience here. I had a trans friend describe her motivation for physical transition as an exercise in signaling — the equivalent of a hat that says "please be patient I have autism" but for her it communicates something like "speak to me in a softer and less rowdy tone". It sounds very similar to what you're describing here. There are gender roles that you find yourself drawn to, but they're not adequately communicated to others if you presented as a man. Accordingly, your feminine appearance serves as a billboard-size instruction manual to others on how you prefer to be interacted with in the context of relationships.
Is that a fair paraphrasing? As a masculine presenting male, I can still empathize with this experience and the difficulties it may generate because I also prefer typical gender role dynamics. I enjoy being assertive and dominant in my dating relationships and tend to date feminine women. It's very easy to advertise my preferred approach given the way I look. I imagine if my preferences were more submissive I'd probably would want it reflected in my expression somehow (though that wouldn't explain to me wanting/needing to identify as a completely different gender).
Well, humans being upset that they couldn’t fly is what led to the invention of the airplane. And you should rightly be upset at ageing, there’s far too many people many excuses for what’s the #1 killer out there; if it can be even just slowed down, the quality of life of many would significantly improve. I find ageing abhorrent and cruel in the same way I find forced gender roles and sexual biology to be.
Fairly spot on assessment to be honest.
There’s no “rational” psychological motivation for the physical gender dysphoria, it’s more of a neurological/endocrinological problem from what I’ve been researching. There it’s more of a visceral reaction of disgust towards your own body; like if you saw yourself as physically deformed.
But on the social side, you can imagine that being a feminine male is inferior to being a normal woman, both in terms of personal safety, how others treat you, your dating options, and the very way you have sex. A lot of the thoughts can be “ah, if only I was a real woman, I wouldn’t have X issue”.
I don’t personally “identify” as a woman, I just like it when I happen to pass well enough that people assume I’m one. As I’ve said before, I don’t care about whatever an internal sense of gender identity means.
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Your comparison's rhetorical force depends on the reality of actual caste systems, which are cruel and unjust specifically because they are essentially arbitrary - there are no meaningful physical differences between a Brahmin and an Untouchable, I very much doubt one could identify one on sight, or from an X-ray, or a skeletal record. This is, to put it mildly, not the case with sex. It's not like Bob and Alice are functionally physically identical aside from their chromosomes, but we're arbitrarily choosing to treat them completely differently on the basis of chromosomes alone. Bob and Alice's bodies are completely different, both qualitatively and quantitatively, and we treat them differently on that basis.
(Or to put it another way: if the average Untouchable could physically overpower and forcibly impregnate 99% of Brahmins against their will, while no Untouchable ever had to fear becoming impregnated and no Brahmin can impregnate someone else, I think segregating Untouchables and Brahmins in certain contexts would be perfectly reasonable.)
I mean, yes, Bob didn't choose to be born male. He also didn't choose to be born a human, and yet no one would seriously entertain his desire to be treated as something other than that.
So given that we can't change our sexes (and this is unlikely to become a possibility in your or my lifetimes), complaining about this "dystopian caste system" seems a bit like complaining about the laws of gravity. Yeah it sucks that if you fall off a tall building you'll go splat when you hit the bottom, but complaining about it won't change it. Or as Monty Python would say, it's meaningless to say that Loretta has the "right" to have babies when he physically can't.
Complaining about the state of nature won’t change it, but humans have over and over been able to overcome what was previously an inevitable law of nature. You don’t have to splat when you jump from a tall building if you have a parachute (although BASE jumping is still very dangerous). Women don’t have to fear becoming pregnant against their will to the same degree when there’s birth control (obviously this doesn’t help with the trauma of being raped, I’ve been sexually assaulted by a male myself and it’s an awful experience regardless of the pregnancy risk). With regards to gender and sex, we’re not all the way there yet, but I’m grateful that HRT exists and I can bypass some of my male biology.
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I would be all in favour of your proposal. Do you know who wouldn't? The loudest trans activists out there.
Twenty years ago, gender dysphoria was understood as a rare and unfortunate medical condition which caused intense distress among those suffering from it, who deserved respect and compassion. Nowadays, trans is seen as something wholly unrelated to any medical condition (never mind a psychological disorder) and to suggest that only people who have been formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria by a qualified mental health professional are "really" trans is a form of essentialist gatekeeping. Hence all the navel-gazing about what a woman "really" is: if it was put down to a simple binary choice "do you have gender dysphoria yes/no", then some of the most vocal trans people out there would be forced to concede that they aren't really trans at all. On some level they must know that they would not pass a diagnostic test for gender dysphoria with flying pink-and-blue colours: they don't have stereotypically feminine/masculine interests, they don't experience distress looking at their naked bodies in the mirror, they haven't undergone gender reassignment surgery (nor have they any desire to), in many cases they aren't taking hormones and have no plans to. All they really want is to be treated socially as a woman, and perhaps gain access to women-only spaces.
I think saying "instead of navel-gazing about what a woman really is, we ought to be investigating the underlying biochemistry behind gender dysphoria" is sort of missing the point. The current state of the discourse (and, more importantly, the current state of legislation) in the Anglosphere admits no intrinsic relationship between the transgender community and gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria is now a condition incidentally suffered by some, but far from all, trans people, where before it was treated (more properly, in my view) as a rule-in criteria for membership of the group: being a trans person without gender dysphoria would be like being a vegetarian who eats meat. Before we can even begin to shift focus towards investigating the neural substrates of this medical condition, we need to roll back ten years of dualist nonsense about an "internally felt sense of gender identity" and acknowledge that self-ID, wherever implemented, is a fantastically ill-thought-out piece of legislation.
Unfortunately vocal anti-trans activists are just as bad as the vocal trans activists you described. A relatively moderate trans medicalist perspective as you described would be just as vilified by either side.
Also, I’m not necessarily in favour of strict gatekeeping of trans identity when it comes to medical treatment, especially for adults, for the same reasons I’m not in favour of strict gatekeeping for ADHD. You’re incentivising whoever is most motivated to get through the gatekeepers, and those aren’t necessarily the ones that would benefit the most from the treatment. See this excellent post by Scott Alexander.
Although in the case of the trans activists you mentioned, it wouldn’t be a problem as they’re not interested in medically transitioning at all, so removing gatekeeping when it comes to HRT and surgery would have no effect on them. If you’re not actually dysphoric and pursue transition, it will give you reverse gender dysphoria - so having the gatekeeping be the medical treatment itself is self-correcting to some extent.
I am a transmedicalist. Unfortunately, if you ask me to choose between the virulent insane pro-trans group and the virulent insane anti-trans group, I’m going to pick the virulent insane anti-trans group, because that at least returns us to a more coherent system of social organisation. Anything to avoid the mangling of language, and generating the group of acquaintances I have with neopronouns and genders listed as anything from “genderfluid” to “centipede”. (I also happen to really hate the weird contracted cutesy names people of this persuasion tend to pick for themselves. It sounds extraordinarily fake and performative.)
Which is really unfortunate, because I think the actual medical condition extreme-distress-with-birth-body people do exist, and we should be sympathetic and accommodative towards them (within reasonable limits, and assuming that they are also reasonable and accommodative towards society).
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I agree with Yassine that adults can do whatever they want with their own bodies. I suspect that I'm far more of a bodily autonomy absolutist than the average person, and if an adult male wants to have their penis fashioned into a crude neovagina, then that's their business, more power to them, and the fact that they haven't been diagnosed with gender dysphoria should be no object (although I don't think the state should pay for the procedure, any more than they should pay for boob jobs or whatever the Bogdanoffs did to their faces). In the context of adults who want to take hormones and undergo gender reassignment surgery, I don't think there's any real ethical dilemma: adults are allowed to make choices about their own bodies, even ones they may later come to regret. The burden of proof is much higher for children and teens, for obvious reasons.
Do you think there should be legal gatekeeping? That is, should anyone be entitled to change the sex on their birth cert or driver's license, or only people who can demonstrate that they suffer from gender dysphoria?
I am generally in agreement with you, but I have had scenarios thrown in my face that I don't know how to answer. I would like to hear your opinion.
You and I both say that it's an adult's personal business what they want to do with their bodies, but when does it become someone else's business? When they want you to call them a specific pronoun? What about if you're hooking up with them? What about if you're in a long term relationship with them? Do you think that it's a man's business if his wife is actually an mtf, or is that solely the wife's business? What about if an mtf goes out to a bar looking for a man to bang, would the fact that they're not really a woman be the one night stand partners business? I don't know the answer. I love to think of things as people's personal business, I really do, but then there are all these edge cases that everyone I know wants to have encroach all the time.
None of these scenarios need to be thought of as unique to the trans experience. What if someone wants you to call them a specific nickname and you don't? What if someone wants you to refer to them as Doctor and you don't? What if you go home with someone thinking you're about to have sex but they introduce their husband and try to rope you into a threesome? What if you meet someone from an online dating app and they look nothing like their photos? Etc etc.
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My comment was about medical transition specifically, and I agree that numerous other components of trans activism do not fall under "it's my body and I can do with it as I please". Nonetheless, I'll try to answer your question.
I completely agree with Jordan Peterson that no one should be legally compelled to address someone by their preferred pronoun. Knowingly failing to do so may be rude, but it isn't "hateful". I try to use people's preferred pronouns as a courtesy, but fortunately it doesn't come up very often.
If you go home with someone and discover that their genitalia are different from what you had presumed, you are perfectly entitled to leave. Doing so does not make you transphobic or bigoted one iota. When trans rights activists accuse people of not being "straight" but simply having a "genital preference" my response is yeschad.jpg - that's what a sexuality is. It's perhaps a little dishonest for the trans person in question not to disclose it upfront, although on the other hand I don't think people should be socially expected to disclose every potentially germane fact about their bodies to a prospective one-night stand e.g. that one episode of Friends where Chandler dates a girl with a wooden leg. I don't think people with prosthetics should be expected to disclose that upfront up everyone they're interested in going to bed with, even though many people are (understandably!) put off by prosthetics.
What if you can't tell visually? I've heard that surgeries of this sort these days produce a very realistic looking vagina, even if it doesn't feel realistic, such that you may only know by actually sticking your penis in. And even then, many people may not even know what a fake vagina feels like, they may assume something else is up.
I am very sceptical.
Even in the unlikely event that their neovagina didn't tip you off (visually or tactilely*), a hundred other things would. The width of their shoulders, the narrowness of their hips - there are loads of cues which are difficult enough to mask with clothing and makeup, and effectively impossible to mask in the nip. The likelihood of you going to bed with someone without realising they're a trans woman is so low as to be functionally nil. It's not a possibility that you should devote any time or energy into avoiding.
*Or even (and I feel kind of dirty even pointing this out) olfactorily.
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How do you demonstrate that you suffer from gender dysphoria though? I guess it could be accessible to anyone who has transitioned for more than X time. But what’s the real point of having your gender marked on your driver’s license or birth certificate? On the driver’s license it should be obvious from the picture, and if it’s not, what is adding F/M going to do?
Mostly, I’m generally against dividing and discriminating anything by sex - it’s just as discriminatory as dividing by race or other physical characteristics, although I am aware of the impractical reality of removing some gender based discrimination (e.g. prisons). To me, any solution is a compromise until we reach a transhuman utopia where bodies can be changed at will and sex stops mattering. Probably won’t happen in my life time, but advances can still be made in that direction.
Diagnosis by a qualified mental health professional. "Gender dysphoria" is a condition in the DSM with clearly defined diagnostic criteria, just like major depression or schizophrenia. I think there would be far less kerfuffle about e.g. trans women in women's prisons if the person in question could demonstrate that a psychologist trained in gender issues believed they met the diagnostic criteria for said condition. It would head off a lot (but by no means all) of accusations of the person being a Karen White- or Jessica Yaniv-style malingerer.
(Yes, there will be false negatives. Yes, there will be false positives. This is still a better arrangement than self-ID. Policy debates should not appear one-sided.)
I used to think this, but not anymore. The physical differences between any two people of different races are almost exclusively slight and a matter of degree, and I cannot envision any scenario in which direct racial segregation is actually warranted based on these physical differences. The physical differences between the sexes, on the other hand, are huge, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Anyone claiming that men aren't faster, stronger and more resilient than women (for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with socialization) is either being dishonest or wilfully ignorant, deliberately ignoring the evidence of their own eyes - precisely why trans women competing in female sports events is so contentious (and why it's so telling that there's no symmetrical controversy about trans men competing in male sports). We are a sexually dimorphic species in which one half has legitimate cause to fear being forcibly impregnated by a member of the other half. This is never going away in our lifetimes - it is a state of affairs with no analogue in the differences between people of different races, heights, weights, eye colours etc. Up until about five minutes ago, female prisoners could be confident that, no matter how unpleasant their incarceration might be, they did not have to fear being forcibly penetrated (or even impregnated) by a fellow inmate's penis: self-ID has robbed them of that certainty. Maybe you don't understand why a woman who had been raped by a male person would feel uncomfortable (or even triggered) by a gynecological exam conducted by a male person, but I do understand, and I think this kind of sex discrimination is perfectly reasonable.
Well, yeah. It's called politics.
This might be an incomplete solution, or at least complete only to the extent that the education or self-selection of gender-specialist psychiatrists aren’t actively trying to wave as many through as possible. But it’s still better than self-ID.
Yes, it's a "garbage in, garbage out" situation, where the strength of the proposal depends entirely on employing psychologists who can approach claims of gender distress with a sceptical eye and not automatically rubber-stamp each and every such claimant. The more progressive-minded the psychologist in question, the higher the rate of false positives. Nonetheless, imperfect gatekeeping which only keeps out the really overt bad actors is better than no gatekeeping at all.
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I read the full post and enjoyed it, but my understanding is that culture war posts go in the culture war thread.
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