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It's not necessary that we have a huge disagreement, althogh I think there is something we disagree on with the underlying phenomenon.
This is kind of what I'm trying to examine. We live in a causal universe, I don't think there is such a thing as spontaneous belief. trivially if you were separated from humans at birth and never encountered someone of the opposite sex then I don't think you could develop a belief that you should be categorized on a binary you couldn't know exists. I do think that people exposed to no pro-trans material can still develop something that kind or sort of looks like trans because gender is a salient category and identity formation has some failure modes. I don't think this is a born this way thing, I think it's still social even if that doesn't make it a choice.
Corn/maize naturally developed through evolution in nature and this development tells us something about the corn we've bred/engineered to be giant and calorie dense. But it can't explain everything about our modern corn or our corn syrup products. They're something new of our creation and have tons of down stream implications that may end up being very harmful to society. It might be totally natural for identity formation to go awry sometimes and leave someone in a strange maize level trans predicament. But now that we have the meme we're seeing the corn syrupification of gender nonconforming identities, purified and mass produced.
Sure, but that seems like a rather pedantic point to make in this context. If someone says they like eating tasty food because it's a natural spontaneous desire, and you say they actually like eating food because of government propaganda, then on the face of it your explanation is a lot less correct than theirs, regardless of what philosophical hangups you might have about the concept of spontaneity.
I believe I recall from some of your previous posts that you endorse HBD. So presumably you think some people are born some way.
Someone who criticized HBD by saying "well if you kept someone locked in an empty room from birth and never taught them anything then they would turn out to be really stupid, so it's actually all environmental in the end" would be missing the point. We're all in agreement that the outside environment is important and has a big influence. It's the innate disposition of individuals to respond differently to the same environmental stimulus that's in question.
I would describe my position by saying that I endorse an HBD-type view for gender identity and sexual orientation rather than a purely social constructionist view, that's all.
I pushed back in that way because you didn't engage with the mechanism explanation I put forward. I was trying to describe a mechanism that would apply to both the environment with and without trans messaging. I describe how it could come about naturally here:
and you accused me of not describing that instead opting for putting everything under a low resolution "spontaneity" bucket. So I assumed you have some kind of weird philosophical attachment to spontaneity or did not read my post. I considered the weird philosophical attachment to it the more charitable read.
Bringing HBD in will probably just confuse stuff. I fully admit that people can be born with different characteristics. One of those characteristics could even be predisposition to hardening identities in a trans-like way. But I'm talking about the identity formation itself.
I don't think people have fully built mental skylines from the moment of birth that they then explore like one would an ancient ruin to find buried truth. I think identities are the structures we build on the inbuilt landscape. Someone who loves the Dallas Cowboys and has Dallas Cowboys supporter as a major part of their identity probably had a kind of mental landscape with territory ripe for structures like football fan that in a different time and culture or even just if different life situations occurred could have hosted different identity structures. Certainly one could imagine if the fan was born in New York rather than Dallas at least the team would probably have been different.
People go around building things in their identity skyline in response to environmental factors, not directly consciously. Embarrassingly as a young kid for some reason I had built something like a "picky eater" identity structure. I identified with my picky eating, most likely in response to my parents trying to get me to eat something I for some fickle reason didn't want to eat. This identity seemed useful to me at the time, like a crude shack one might build hastily in minecraft as night falls. I've since dismantled it for good reason but I remember how hard it was to part with, how it was reinforced by others affirming it, even if doing so exasperatedly.
I think I could have built the trans structure in my head if things had gone differently. That's kind of what fascinates me about this subject and what I have a hard time getting across. I think my latent identity landscape was ripe for it. If a few different environmental factors had gone differently, if I had started down that path and been affirmed, I can see it and that terrifies me. In a no longer trans naive world where we have people surveying every young mind looking for places to construct that identity and handing out blue prints and construction advice. I don't think it's good to discriminate against people who have built the trans identity structure, but I do think it's a bad idea to encourage others to build it. It seems like a bad use of that identity space.
What terrifies me more is how often I've heard this.
It mostly confuses me. Like, unless you strapped me down to a dildo machine that boofed me with oestrogen and sissy-hypno at 120 decibels on shrooms, I struggle to think of any situation where I'd want to be the other sex, or even simply have sex with men.
If my medical malpractice gets me locked away in prison, I'm going to be sitting in the corner jerking off rather than being tempted by a bussy. Or a skirt.
For example, when I was growing up I was a noodle-armed nerd whose hobbies were reading and needlework. I liked (but never tried to wear) dresses, almost all my favourite characters were female, and I hated sports. The thought crossed my mind many times that I would have been happier if I'd been born as a woman, and I am very, very grateful that nobody was around to tell me "maybe you were".
@dovetailing put it well:
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I wouldn't expect you to be able to empathize with it, any more than... well... with people who want to have sex with men.
I can't be certain, but I strongly suspect that the vast majority of men saying this have at least a touch of autogynephilia. The sense of "it could have been me" is less "I, as a perfectly ordinary man, could have become socially hypnotized into wanting to be a women" and more "What if that part of me that already -- at least somewhat -- wanted to be a woman had been socially encouraged, been amplified, been given a (positive-valence) identity category; what if I'd been encouraged to indulge in this, been offered "specialness" and affirmation and a ready-made memeplex, all when I was young and socially and emotionally vulnerable? Then I could see myself having gone down that path."
It's so common because some degree of autogynephilia is probably about as common as homosexuality among men. (I remember -- I think it was in Men Trapped in Men's Bodies? -- seeing a reported study estimate of 1-3% of men for erotic cross-dressing alone, and that's almost certainly a substantial underestimate of the fraction of men with any amount of AGP.)
While I can't empathize with either gay or trans people (in the strict definition of empathy), I certainly sympathize with the latter and mildly envy the former.
You know how, for many men, the ideal girl is "one of the guys"? Well, gay men are living the dream in some ways, such as showing up to a random park or club and being nigh-guaranteed a quick fuck in a toilet stall. Straight men have to work for it.
Ah, women, can't live with them, can't live without them.
As for trans people, particularly the ones with body dysmorphia/gender dysphoria, I happen to be a transhumanist and so approve on principle of any change or improvement one might desire to the prison of one's flesh. I mean, I'm not a 6'9" 42069 IQ ubérmensch, so there's room for improvement within mere biology.
But that doesn't mean that the universe, or the rest of us, are obliged to indulge your desires, especially when it comes to how we accept your self-expression. Trans people, I'll consider them women/men when they are biologically indistinguishable from the average natal man/individual of their desired sex. Until then, well, I'll shake my head and use preferred pronouns mostly because I'm polite.
That is a cheque that medical science as it exists today simply can't cash. No amount of hormones, surgery or makeup will get you there. I still sympathize and empathize with them simply not being happy in their bodies, I think the correct solution is to change the body, when that's feasible.
You are allowed to dream. So do I. But the universe isn't obligated to make it come true, or easily. Simple self-identification is suitable only for football clubs.
As for AGPs? I agree that they're a large fraction, potentially even a majority. I have even less desire to indulge them, but I hardly think they're wrong for being sexually aroused by the idea of femininity.
This is essentially where I'm at with the Trans movement. I don't think it's wrong to want to be the other gender, and I feel that society should potentially be open to recognizing that. However, I think that modern surgical interventions fall way short of making somebody the other gender, and incur significant morbidity for essentially no gainful reason. I firmly believe that gender reassignment surgery will be viewed as akin to lobotomy in 50 years.
Hell if we all decided tomorrow that people wearing blue hats are men, and people wearing pink hats are women, implicitly, I'd have no problem with somebody deciding to switch hats.
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I don't think this is disagreement with my above post? (I mean, I do disagree on a value-level with the transhumanism, but that's another kettle of fish and not relevant here.)
Maybe I wasn't totally clear -- I was saying that your confusion about apparently normal men saying "it could have been me" mostly boils down to the fact that you can't empathize with those people on the subject because most of them have AGP. Despite the stereotype, most such people are normal men in almost all other respects except having, or at one point having had, a recurring desire to be female, and a lot of them are horrified that someone just like them could be ushered down what they see as a self-destructive path.
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It's a bit hard to write a response to this because there's already so much we agree on:
But I still feel like I have to take issue with the account you write here (since you posted it twice I'm assuming that you think this is basically a correct story of the etiology of transsexuality):
My understanding of your general theory is that people undergo certain formative experiences, and some people process these experiences in such a way that leads them to adopt a trans identity. It's possible that the difference between people who process the experiences in a trans-way vs a non-trans-way is biological in nature. Correct me if I'm wrong.
My preferred theory on the other hand is as follows: some men (I'm focusing on MTFs/autogynephiles to keep things simple) start out with some sort of natural desire/sensation that is explicitly related to gender or being trans in some way - it could be a simple desire to "become a woman", it could be bodily dysphoria, it could be a general feeling of having a more "female" brain, etc. In the right environment, where being recognized as trans and undergoing medical transition is presented as a viable possibility, some of these men will choose to undergo transition. That's how I would describe the biology/environment interaction here.
Crucially I think these desires/sensations are pre-reflective. They operate at a level prior to what I would normally think of as identity formation.
I don't think that the concept of a "natural desire" is at all objectionable here. Hopefully we can agree that the majority of men naturally experience the desire to have sex with women. Analogously, some men naturally experience the desire to be women. They see what the women are up to and they think "yeah, that seems like a better deal to me". It's really quite straightforward.
I really have to insist on this point that there is something in the individual himself that points him in the direction of wanting to be a woman, rather than individuals being neutral receptacles for formative experiences and just having different "processing styles". I don't think you can fully understand the trans phenomenon without this crucial piece of the puzzle. To my mind it's the theory that best explains the internal phenomenology of what the desires actually feel like, as well as other aspects of the phenomenon like its surprising popularity, its cross-cultural appeal, etc.
I think I mostly agree with you, but I do want to emphasize that
is not the only difference in outcome between the "pro-trans" and "trans naive" environments being discussed.
Having the ready-made answers, social encouragement, etc. on offer can not just affect what sorts of actionable options they have available, but also the trajectory of the desires themselves.
As an example let's take the POV of a teenage boy with autogynephilia. Our protagonist finds that he has a recurring desire to be female. Sometimes (maybe most of the time, maybe not) this desire and fantasy is associated with sexual arousal. This is confusing and weird, what is he to make of this?
In an environment without the "trans" meme and social encouragement thereof, this remains a private quirk and fantasy. He knows that he can no more become female than he can become a bird or acquire superpowers (random side note: was Animorphs especially appealing to boys with autogynephilia? I strongly suspect so...). Maybe it wanes naturally over the course of years, or maybe his desire is an inner demon that he struggles with from time to time, or maybe it's just a recurring fantasy his whole life which he occasionally indulges in -- depending on the strength of his desire and his attitude toward it. A lot of things are possible, but probably he lives life as a normal man and most things are fine. (Of course there is the chance that he develops some delusions based on his desires and fantasies -- especially if they are unusually strong or he indulges them unusually much -- but this is not a very likely outcome.)
In an environment where the "trans" meme is present and positively reinforced, he is encouraged to interpret his desires as evidence (or even proof) of identity as a "trans girl". A ready-made, positive-valence identity that fits his experience, at a time when he's naturally (like most teens) going to be confused about his identity and place in the world? It's like catnip. He starts thinking of himself as trans. He talks about it on the internet. Maybe he tells his best friends and they affirm it, or maybe his new best friends are the people who affirm it. He indulges his fantasy, because it's just part of who he is. Maybe he even encourages it, as its presence is proof of his new identity. His ways of thinking of himself get solidified: "I am a trans girl": now each of his desires and every trait that is not stereotypically male is proof of that. He develops a female persona and acts it out; maybe he really believes the propaganda that, deep down, he is a girl, not just wants to be one. Now his identity is all bound up in this: he becomes more and more unsatisfied with the stubborn truth that he is not, in fact, a girl; that his body is stubbornly male. As an adult, maybe he does try to force his fantasy to become reality with hormones and surgery (of course this doesn't actually work, but maybe if he is lucky he can convince himself it does) -- or maybe he just ends up with a weird self-identification and way more unhappy with his life than if he'd never gone down that path.
Regardless of whether our protagonist ultimately undergoes medical transition, his whole life can be dramatically impacted by this difference in his environment.
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There shouldn't be able to be an innate "simple desire to become a woman," unless you think we come with innate, from the womb, knowledge of what the two genders are. At some point we figure out what genders are, and such desires would only make sense at that point.
Of course, at that point, we could have innate tendencies that predispose us to manifest certain desires or identities.
Do you think people can be innately straight? I do. It’s like that.
It do be that way -- what if everyone is innately straight, and some butterfly stimulus turns the odd one gay?
Sure, that could be the case. It’s not my preferred theory, but I won’t rule it out.
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