Gender Identity and Rationality
post by lucidfox · 2010-12-01T16:32:25.785Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 114 commentsContents
114 comments
Not sure if I would be better off posting this on the main page instead, but since it's almost entirely about my personal experiences, here it goes.
Two years ago, I underwent a radical change in my worldview. A series of events caused me to completely re-evaluate my beliefs in everything related to gender, sexuality, tolerance, and diversity -- which in turn caused a cascade that made me rethink my stance on many other topics.
Coincidentally, the same events caused me to also rethink the way I thought of myself. This was, as it turned out, not very good. It still makes it difficult for me to untangle various consequences, correlated but potentially not directly bound by a cause-effect relation.
To be more blunt: being biologically male, I confessed to someone online about things that things that "men weren't supposed to do": my dissatisfaction with my body, my wish to have a female body, persistent fantasies of a sex change, desires to shave my body, grow long hair and wear women's clothes, and so on and so forth. She listened, and then asked, "Maybe you're transsexual?"
Back then, it would never even occur to me to think of that -- and my first gut response, which I'm not proud of, was denying association with "those freaks". As I understand now, I was relying on a cached thought, and it limited the scope of my reasoning. She used simple intuitive reasoning to arrive at the hypothesis based on what I revealed to her; I didn't know the hypothesis was even there, as I knew nothing about gender identity.
In the events that unfolded, I integrated myself into some LGBT communities and learned about all kinds of people, including those who didn't fit into notions of the gender binary at all. I've learned to view gender as a multidimensional space with two big clusters, rather than as a boolean flag. It felt incredibly heartwarming to be able to mentally call myself by a female name, to go by it on the Internet, to talk to like-minded people who had similar experiences and feelings, and to be referred by the pronoun "she" -- which at first bugged me, because I somehow felt I had "no moral right" or had to "earn that privilege", but quickly I got at ease with it, and soon it just felt ordinary, and like the only acceptable thing to do, the only way of presentation that felt right.
(I'm compressing and simplifying here for the sake of readability -- I'm skipping over the brief period after that conversation when I thought of myself as genderless, not yet ready to accept a fully female gender identity, and carried out thought experiments with imaginary conversations between my "male" and "female selves", before deciding that there was no male self to begin with after all.)
Nowadays, gender-wise, I address people the way they wish to be address. I also have some pretty strong opinions on the legal concept of gender, which I won't voice here. And I've learned a lot, and was able to drive my introspection deeper than I ever managed before... But that's not really relevant.
And yet... And yet.
As gleefully as I embraced a female role, feeling on the way to fulfilling my dream, I couldn't get out the nagging feeling of being somehow "fake". I kept thinking that I don't always "think like a real woman would", and I've had days of odd apathy when I didn't care about anything, including my gender presentation. Some cases happened even before my gender "awakening", and at those days, I felt empty and genderless, a drained shell of a person.
How, in all honesty, can I know if I'm "really a woman on the inside"? What does that even mean? I can speak in terms of desired behavior, in terms of the way I'm seen socially, from the outside. But how can I compare my subjective experience to those of different men and women, without getting into their heads? All I have is empathic inference, which works by building crude, approximate models of other people inside my head, and is so full of ill-defined biases that I have a suspicion I shouldn't rely on it at all and don't say things like "well, a man's subjective experience is way off for me, but a woman's subjective experience only weakly fits".
And yet... transpeople report "feeling like" their claimed gender. I prefer to work with more unambiguous subjective feelings -- like feeling I have a wrong body -- but I have caught myself thinking at different times, "This day I felt like a woman, and that day I didn't feel like a woman, but more like... nothing at all. And that other day my mind was occupied with completely different matters, like writing a Less Wrong post." It helps sometmes to visualize my brain as a system of connected logical components, with an "introspection center" as a separate component, but that doesn't bring me close to solving the mystery.
I want to be seen as a woman, and nothing else. I take steps to ensure that it happens. If I could start from a clean slate, magically get an unambiguously female body, and live somewhere where nobody would know about my past male life, perhaps that would be the end of it -- there would be no need for me to worry about it anymore. But as things stand, my introspection center keeps generating those nagging thoughts: "What if I'm merely a pretender, a man who merely thinks he's a woman, but isn't?" One friend of mine postulated that "wanting to be a gender is the same as being it"; but is it really that simple?
The sheer number of converging testimonies between myself and transpeople I've met and talked to would seem to rule that out. "If I'm fake, then they're fake too, and surely that sounds extremely unlikely." But while discovering similarities makes me generically happy, every deviation from the mean -- for example, I consciously discovered my gender identity at 21, a relatively late age -- stings painfully and brings up the uncertainty again. Could this be a case of failing to properly assign Bayesian weights, of giving evidence less significance than counterevidence? But every time I discovered a piece of counterevidence, my mind interpreted it as a breach of my mental defenses and tried to route around it, in other words, rationalize it away.
Maybe I could just tell myself, "Shut up and live the way you want to."
And yet...
I caught myself in thinking that I really, deeply didn't want to go back, to the point that I didn't want to accept the conclusion "I'm really a man and an impostor", even that time when it looked like evidence weighted that way. (It's no longer the case now that I've learned more facts, but the point still stands.) It was an unthinkable thought, and still is. Even now, I fail to apply the Litany of Tarski. "If I'm really a man, then I desire to bel--" Wait, doesn't compute. If that were true, it would cause my whole system of values to collapse, and it feels like stating an incoherent statement, like "If sexism is morally and scientifically justified, then..." It feels like it would cause my entire system of values to collapse, and I can't bring myself to think that -- but isn't that the danger of "already knowing the answer", rationalizing, etc.?
It also bugs me, I guess, that despite relying on rational reasoning in so many aspects of my daily life, with this one case, about an aspect of myself, I'm relying on some subjective, vague "gut feeling". Granted, I try to approach it in a rational way: someone used my revelations to locate a hypothesis, I found it likely based on the evidence and accepted it, then started updating... or did I? Would I really be able to change my belief even in principle? And even then, the root cause, the very root cause, comes from feelings of uneasiness with my assigned gender role that I cannot rationally explain -- they're just there, in the same way that my consciousness is "just there".
So...
When I heard about p-zombies, I immediately drew parallels. I asked myself if "fake transpeople" were even a coherent concept. Would it be possible to imagine two people who behave identically (and true to themselves, not acting), except one has "real" subjective feelings of gender and the other doesn't? After applying an appropriately tweaked anti-zombie argument, it seems to me that the answer is no, but it's also prossible that the question is too ill-defined for any answer to make sense.
The way it stands now, the so-called gender identity disorder isn't really something that is truly diagnosed, because it's based on self-reporting; you cannot look into someone's head and say "you're definitely transsexual" without their conscious understanding of themselves and their consent. So it seems to me outside the domain of psychiatry in the first place. I've heard some transpeople voice hope that there could be a device that could scan the part of the brain responsible for gender identity and say "yes, this one is definitely trans" and "no, this one definitely isn't". But to me, the prospect of such a device horrifies me even in principle. What if the device conflicts their self-reporting? (I suspect I'm anxious about the possibility of it filtering me, specifically.) What should we consider more reliable -- the machine or self-reporting? On one hand, we know how filled human brains are with cognitive biases, but on the other hand, it seems to me like a truism that "you are the final authority in your own self-identification."
Maybe it's a question of definitions, like the question about a tree making a sound, and the final answer depends on how exactly we define "gender identity". Or maybe -- this thought occurred to me right now -- my decision agent has a gender identity while my introspection center (which operates entirely on abstract knowledge rather than social conventions) doesn't, and that's the cause of the confusion that I get from looking at things in both a gendered and genderless way, in the same way as if I would be able to switch at will between a timed view from inside the timeline and a timeless view of the entire 4D spacetime at once. In any case, so far, for those two years since the realization I've stuck with the identity and role that I at least believe is the only one I won't regret assuming.
114 comments
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comment by Alicorn · 2010-12-01T19:09:11.533Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It's saddening to me that people who don't fit in their assigned gender have to defend their typicality relative to the other gender, and cisfolk basically don't. Someone who was just like me mentally, but was born with male genitals and brought up as a male, would probably report this kind of discomfort; there are plenty of ways in which I am non-stereotypical. And yet as a person physically and socially female from birth, I don't stick out like a sore thumb; people (least of all me) do not seem to wonder if maybe I'm really a guy on the inside; no one wonders if I'm overcompensating for something should I spin around in a twirly skirt. I'm within tolerances for my assigned gender, basically. It is an unfairly distributed cis privilege that I have, that this is all the analysis anyone requires of me.
Lucidfox, you sound like you are within tolerances for femininity. Be welcome. Help yourself to your name and your pronouns and whatever bodily interventions are medically available to you.
Replies from: None, lucidfox↑ comment by lucidfox · 2010-12-01T19:34:04.364Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I don't really have to defend it when dealing in contexts of interaction where I'm not judged based on my appearance. When talking over a medium where I'm not seen, such as text chat, or voice chat, or phone (my voice is slanted enough towards the feminine range that I'm often mistaken for my mother), when I say I'm a woman, everyone just seems to go along with it without questioning - except in communities that are supremely male-dominated and prejudiced enough to think that no woman would ever want to set foot there, in which case every woman gets skeptic trollposts, not just me.
I've even received my share of stereotypically sexist comments, like "Get sand out of your vagina" or "Is it that time of the month for you?" My conjecture is that those who say that seek assurance of their hasty generalizations of all women and ignore all evidence to the contrary. Perhaps they'd be surprised to learn what I actually have between my legs.
And thanks for your assuring words!
comment by TheOtherDave · 2010-12-01T17:23:59.276Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
This sounds a lot like my experience of coming out in my late teens/early 20s.
I ultimately short-circuited it by deciding that introspection about how to label my sexual identity wasn't getting me anywhere, and in particular that trying to constrain my behavior based on my model of the behaviors most closely associated with a particular label was downright insane... I did better to actually look at the behaviors I actually wanted to perform, establish whether those preferences were stable, and then (optionally) pick the label that most closely matched those behaviors.
To couch this in the language of cognitive bias, I think there's a kind of anchoring effect going on here... you've latched onto some specific attributes associated with categories like "trans" and "male" and "female" and etc. (in much the same way that I did with "gay" and "straight" and "bi" and etc.), and it is skewing your judgments.
That said, I do recognize that "what kinds of people do I want to have sex with?" isn't quite the same sort of question as "what kind of person am I?", but I suspect similar issues are in play. You might find it valuable to temporarily call a halt on trying to label yourself at all, and instead concentrate on how you want to behave and what kinds of experiences you want to have.
In other words, I suspect that questions like: Do I want to engage with the world as a woman? Do I want to be thought of as a woman? Do I want to look like a woman? Do I want to inhabit a stereotypically female body? Etc. Etc. Etc. might be more useful to you, at least for a while, than questions like Am I really a woman? Am I really transgendered? Etc.
Another way of getting at this, I suppose, is to suggest that you taboo "transgender" and see what you end up with.
Replies from: arethusa, lucidfox, jsalvatier↑ comment by arethusa · 2011-02-13T07:19:18.277Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Thank you!
Both to you TheOtherDave and lucidfox for this great article which has addressed so many of my own doubts regarding my gender identity.
From what I've suspected and have learned from lucidfox's article is that I myself have learned to restrain myself due to my own transphobia. Not that I hate trans people, au contraire, I love my girls, but I've feared to be thought of as a freak, ultimately, being afraid to be me; even though one of my earliest memories is confessing to my mother I had wanted to be a woman, crying -- no -- weeping when told that such thing was not possible even after having pressed if there wasn't some sort of surgery or if God would make things right in the New World.
I am no longer religious. But the reason I share is because even for someone who as long as she can remember has felt inadequate in the body she was born in, the social construct and taboos can still be so strong that they can make you question and invalidate your own sense of being.
Much like lucidfox, I've also ran the "fake or not" argument in my head countless times, and much like her I also consciously rediscovered my gender identity at 21 after years of nearly successful hiding of my "terrible secret longings" from everyone, even myself.
Replies from: TheOtherDave, MugaSofer↑ comment by TheOtherDave · 2011-02-13T15:16:26.480Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Hey, being oneself can be scary. For a lot of people, the evasive maneuvers we learn as kids depend on giving bits of ourselves up in response to threats; giving those strategies up and reclaiming those bits of ourselves can feel like walking defenseless into enemy territory.
But it can be helpful to be aware of that, acknowledge it, and acknowledge that sometimes as adults we have more and better options.
Good luck on your journey.
↑ comment by MugaSofer · 2012-11-06T11:24:11.054Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
crying -- no -- weeping when told that such thing was not possible even after having pressed if there wasn't some sort of surgery or if God would make things right in the New World.
Well, there is definitely such a thing as gender-reassignment surgery. I can't speak for conditions in the afterlife, but it's not an uncommon idea that you're sexless in heaven.
↑ comment by lucidfox · 2010-12-01T17:54:19.661Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I thought about these questions thoroughly before, and the answer to the first three is a resounding yes, otherwise I wouldn't be presenting as a woman now in the first place.
As for the fourth one, that depends on what we mean by "stereotypically". If I were to design myself a body closely reflecting my inner self (I don't say ideal, because I don't think there's a single optimized appearance for me), it definitely wouldn't be oversexualized, and maybe I'd downplay some stereotypically feminine characteristics - for example, settle on below-average breasts, and remain tall, although perhaps not as tall as I'm now.
Replies from: TheOtherDave↑ comment by TheOtherDave · 2010-12-01T18:05:11.778Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
(nods) You're answering the question I meant; I used "stereotypically female" as shorthand, rather than getting into a whole discussion of what counts as a female body.
And in retrospect, yeah, I was restating things I could probably have inferred from your post were already clear to you. Sorry about that.
↑ comment by jsalvatier · 2010-12-01T17:30:30.305Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I don't have an relevant experience, but I was thinking something along these lines as well. You put it very well.
comment by Paul Crowley (ciphergoth) · 2010-12-02T08:19:08.661Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I have longed for a Less-Wrong style discussion of transsexuality. It appears to me that practically all discussion of this assumes that there is such a thing as inherent gender and that it can differ from that suggested by the arrangement of your genitals at birth. I would love to hear an account of the subject that gets away from that kind of essentialism, and provides an account of what transsexuality is that taboos all mention of sex and gender, and replaces the symbol with the substance.
Replies from: Chroma, None, lucidfox↑ comment by Chroma · 2010-12-02T16:47:26.331Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I think it's helpful to consider transsexuality as cosmetic surgery. It's another case of "I'm unhappy with certain aspects of my body and I want to change them." Currently, doctors in the US won't perform this cosmetic surgery unless you convince them you're an X trapped in a Y's body.
The cosmetic surgery viewpoint goes beyond binary sex choices of male and female. Given better technology, in the future one could choose to be a blue-haired futanari catgirl. Why? Not to fit some story about finally becoming one's true gender, but simply because it could be fun.
Replies from: lucidfox, TheOtherDave↑ comment by lucidfox · 2010-12-02T19:24:07.290Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
So you'd give the claim "I need to reshape my body into a catgirl/elf/dragon to achieve true happiness" the same credence as "I need to reshape my body into the other sex to achieve true happiness"?
Today's society gives one of those statements less credence than the other. Do you think it's a bad thing?
Replies from: Chroma↑ comment by Chroma · 2010-12-03T04:00:54.451Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I hate to sound callous, but I don't really care why people want to change their bodies. I am simply glad for them when they feel better about themselves afterwards.
To respond to your question: Yes that's a bad thing, but I can extrapolate the moral trajectory. In the past, more people disliked transsexuals and total body revision wasn't even on the map. Today, transsexuals are making inroads and some fringe people are speculating about more extreme modifications.
There are other times where I disagree with society giving different amounts of approval to things. For example, more people are for medicinal marijuana than for completely legalizing it.
Replies from: sketerpot↑ comment by sketerpot · 2010-12-11T21:43:40.265Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I hate to sound callous, but I don't really care why people want to change their bodies. I am simply glad for them when they feel better about themselves afterwards.
I'm at a loss for how such an open-minded and kind statement could be interpreted as callous. It just sounds like the obvious Right Thing. Am I missing something here?
Replies from: AdeleneDawner↑ comment by AdeleneDawner · 2011-10-23T21:27:08.320Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It could, but hopefully in the context of LW wouldn't, be interpreted as 'the fact that you're distressed doesn't matter; your preference for a certain kind of body is no more significant than $LowStatusGroup's similar and low-status preference'.
↑ comment by TheOtherDave · 2010-12-02T17:09:10.978Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Sure. Although I think it's worth distinguishing among different sorts of fun, here.
There is the fun that comes from not having other people infer things about me that aren't true from my body, for example.
There is the fun that comes from having people infer things about me that aren't true.
There is the fun that comes from novelty.
There is the fun that comes from pleasure -- that is, if my new body can experience more pleasure than my old one, that might be fun even when it isn't novel.
There are many others.
I'm not sure it makes sense to lump all of these together.
(Caveat: I am talking about colloquial fun here, not Fun. I don't know that they're different in this case, I'm just not really considering the latter at all.)
↑ comment by [deleted] · 2010-12-03T06:44:51.737Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It appears to me that practically all discussion of this assumes that there is such a thing as inherent gender and that it can differ from that suggested by the arrangement of your genitals at birth.
Is it not a common right-wing point of view that transsexuality is a sexual fetish, and that the dichotomy between sex (biological) and gender (social) is a left-wing fiction? This is frequently part of a package of views that is more focused on criticism of homosexuality and feminism, but I remember encountering critics of transsexuality that were gay or gay-sympathetic. I wasn't able to find anything like that the past half-hour, though.
Replies from: David_Gerard, saturn↑ comment by David_Gerard · 2010-12-03T10:40:14.165Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Julie Bindel is the motherlode. Lesbian, essentialist view of femaleness and famously despises transsexuals.
Replies from: lucidfox↑ comment by lucidfox · 2010-12-03T10:52:09.467Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Ergo: politics is the mind killer.
If we abstract away from political agenda and evaluate hypotheses in their own right, the claim "transsexuality is a sexual fetish" is trivially disproven by the sheer number and range of available testimonies. There are even asexual transsexuals.
↑ comment by saturn · 2010-12-04T06:12:32.126Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I remember encountering critics of transsexuality that were gay or gay-sympathetic. I wasn't able to find anything like that the past half-hour, though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transphobia#Transphobia_in_the_lesbian.2C_gay_and_bisexual_community
↑ comment by lucidfox · 2010-12-02T08:36:43.535Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I have long thought along the same vein simply because this is what everyone asserts, and in fact it could be the conflict between that belief and my rationalist principles that caused me mental discomfort - way before I discovered Less Wrong.
The problem, as it often is, in the matter of definitions. How do we define this "inherent gender"? Can it change later in life? If someone discovered their gender identity at a later age, does that mean that previously to that they behaved according to a "non-inherent gender" but were somehow consciously unaware of this? Can we build a brain scanner that detects it in a quantifiable way, and can we be sure that it will always match self-reporting? And most importantly, if we do that, can we be sure of 100% correlation between that characteristic and the expected utility of various options of gender presentation?
Replies from: ciphergoth↑ comment by Paul Crowley (ciphergoth) · 2010-12-02T09:19:53.720Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I'm not sure the right approach involves trying to clarify this idea of "inherent gender". I think I'd rather treat it the way Yvain treats "disease" here: look for the various characteristics people track using gender terms and address them separately.
Replies from: lucidfoxcomment by Eliezer Yudkowsky (Eliezer_Yudkowsky) · 2010-12-02T10:18:41.756Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Maybe it's a question of definitions, like the question about a tree making a sound
First thought that occurred to me while reading. If you know who you are apart from categorizations, why does it make so much difference whether it fits into a particular category? If someone told me that I wasn't really male, but fleem, and had been fleem all along, I would still be me.
Replies from: cousin_it, lucidfox↑ comment by cousin_it · 2010-12-02T11:28:57.544Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
What if someone told you that you weren't really smart, but fleem?
(I guess the virtuous response would be to ignore it anyway, but... it's hard...)
Replies from: sketerpot↑ comment by sketerpot · 2010-12-11T21:48:31.985Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
What would that mean? If you taboo "intelligence", I'm not sure what difference it would make if you were fleem rather than smart; the results seem awfully hard to distinguish. As long as a cat catches mice, does it matter what color the cat is?
↑ comment by lucidfox · 2010-12-02T10:26:55.317Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Makes sense, but "fleem" is not a socially recognized category.
Actually, let's do a thought experiment. Assume you have arrived on the planet Blorg III, where the society is binary partitioned into the categories of "fleem" and "floom", each defined by a code of behavior with some margins of tolerance. You could present yourself outside them if you felt it better matched your real preferences, but you would suffer social repercussions for that.
What would you do? Weigh the expected utility of each choice of presentation?
Replies from: None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2010-12-03T12:04:11.767Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Is it your view that "male" and "female" are defined by a code of behavior and nothing more?
Replies from: lucidfox↑ comment by lucidfox · 2010-12-03T13:59:47.889Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
In the strictly public, social sense? By appearance and code of behavior. Not even genitals, unless you ask everyone you talk to what they have between their legs.
For the sake of argument, let's presume that in the thought experiment above, one can make oneself look like a fleem or a floom, by some kind of disguise device or simply by wearing the right clothes.
Replies from: David_Gerard, None↑ comment by David_Gerard · 2010-12-03T16:07:05.144Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
For added veracity, do you need to add at this point the small but nontrivial possibility of severe social penalty, up to and including death, for being discovered to be floom while appearing fleem or vice-versa?
↑ comment by [deleted] · 2010-12-03T20:24:29.575Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Is the strictly public social sense the only sense in which you wish to be female?
I can think of three definitions of female:
- Social consensus. If you are perceived as female.
- Biology. If you were born with female parts.
- Self-reporting. If you claim to be female.
It's interesting to me that these tests give the same result in the vast majority of cases. It suggests that there's a fact of the matter about who is male and who is female, at least as much as there's a fact of the matter about where California stops and the Pacific begins.
Replies from: David_Gerard, saturn, lucidfox↑ comment by David_Gerard · 2010-12-03T20:52:45.094Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
This is a point at which to take care of the difference between "very common" and "normative", where the non-normative element is systematically suppressed. c.f. surgical gendering of intersexed children at birth, or even those whose penis had been burnt off by a circumcision needle. And there are no homosexuals in Iran.
Replies from: None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2010-12-03T22:03:15.933Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I'm skeptical that there is an important difference between "very common" and "normal." Maybe I don't know what you mean by "normative." I understand it to be a useful word that emphasizes that a what-should-be opinion is not a what-is opinion.
Replies from: None, David_Gerard↑ comment by [deleted] · 2011-10-23T04:35:49.316Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Most humans alive today live in a society shaped by reading and writing.
Writing has only been invented a handful of times, and spread by diffusion from there.
Are the small minority of humans alive today whose lives are wholly unaffected by reading and writing irrelevant, when the question being asked is whether writing is a fundamental element of human behavior?*
--
*No, because the spread of writing is a recent phenomenon compared to the time there've been humans, and most human societies didn't come up with it, meaning the current distribution of writing across human societies is the tip of the proverbial iceberg -- more obvious, but less important to understanding the actual thing in its entirety.
↑ comment by David_Gerard · 2010-12-03T22:04:11.460Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
If you follow the link I put there explaining what I was talking about, you may be enlightened.
Replies from: None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2010-12-03T22:06:06.389Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
way ahead of you
Replies from: David_Gerard↑ comment by David_Gerard · 2010-12-03T22:13:12.345Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
"Normative" means "relating to an ideal standard or model". In the social context, this means the ideal is socially enforced.
"Normal" is often used with the same meaning. Hence the gay rights slogan "Heterosexuality isn't normal, just common." (With a bonus double meaning on "common.")
Replies from: None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2010-12-03T22:40:31.999Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
All right. Evaluating the difference between "very common" and "normative" in this instance, I arrive at the following: it is very common for my three tests for femaleness to give the same result. And this is not the result of social enforcement. Were you saying the opposite, that this is the result of social enforcement?
Replies from: David_Gerard↑ comment by David_Gerard · 2010-12-03T22:50:00.538Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It's very common, but it's not universal, and it appears more universal than it would if people weren't actively trying to make it seem so.
Replies from: None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2010-12-03T23:44:10.092Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Botched circumcisions and hermaphrodites are rare, As-Nature-Made-Him-style experiments rarer. Which people are actively trying to make the coincidence of my 3 tests seem more universal, and what are they doing to make it seem so?
Replies from: None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2011-10-23T04:38:39.658Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Crossdressers, transgender people of various stripes, etc may not be all that abundant in a strictly numerical sense, but we are damn near guarunteed to throw an exception to your criteria every time you ask one of us.
Your criteria account perfectly for the majority, up until they encounter an admitted exception and then almost invariably fail. Those exceptions aren't noise in the dataset -- they're a sign that you're ignoring the points that don't neatly fit your aesthetically-pleasing line.
↑ comment by saturn · 2010-12-04T05:05:03.594Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
A great deal of effort goes into making sure (1) and (3) match. Clothing, hairstyles, perfumes, pigments applied to face and nails, jewelry, bags, gaits, eyewear etc. are carefully categorized as male or female. So I would not say they are really independent tests.
Replies from: None, lucidfox↑ comment by [deleted] · 2010-12-04T16:44:14.206Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
They are independent tests in the sense that there are people who fail one and pass the other. It's exactly my point that nevertheless passing one test is correlated with passing another.
It seems to me that the social consensus that "women paint their nails and men don't," for example, arose organically and not as the result of careful categorization. Maybe I don't understand what you mean by careful categorization.
Replies from: saturn↑ comment by saturn · 2010-12-04T18:41:20.246Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
My point is that if you group these tests into pairs, (1 and 2) and (2 and 3) seem to correlate without much help but (1 and 3) is different, it has a suspiciously large amount of human effort invested in strengthening the correlation.
Replies from: None↑ comment by lucidfox · 2010-12-04T05:30:30.579Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Clothing, hairstyles, perfumes, pigments applied to face and nails, jewelry, bags, gaits, eyewear etc. are carefully categorized as male or female.
Carefully? More like recklessly. And categorizing (on the level of social norms) aspects of social behavior as unambiguously belonging to one gender is usually a bad idea, because it singles out all the intermediate cases.
Replies from: saturn↑ comment by lucidfox · 2010-12-03T20:34:09.546Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I think it's logically incoherent for me to wish I was born with female parts, though. If someone otherwise like me was found at birth to have female genitals, that hypothetical infant would grow into a very different person by now because of different experiences. Likewise for any other birth differences that could cause a butterfly effect.
I'd like to have a vagina now, but it's not that high on my priorities. I'm relatively happy with a penis, but I'm unhappy with quite a few other masculine traits in my body. Chest, hips, body hair, etc.
comment by [deleted] · 2010-12-01T20:24:11.852Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Cis people often don't "feel like their gender" every day, or every minute of every day. I've momentarily "forgotten" I'm a woman, while I'm doing something else. It's just that we don't have to think about it so much because other people take it for granted that we are gender we say we are. I wouldn't take it as a sign that you're "not the real thing."
comment by jsalvatier · 2010-12-01T17:01:54.299Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Interesting throughout.
I'll only add some Tarskis':
If I'm psychologically different from typical men, I desire to believe I am psychologically different from typical men. If I'm psychologically different from typical women, I desire to believe I am psychologically different from typical women. If I would be happier thinking of myself female, I desire to believe I would be happier thinking of myself as female. If I would be happier acting culturally female, I desire to believe I would be happier acting culturally female.
Replies from: red75, lucidfox↑ comment by red75 · 2010-12-01T22:05:03.379Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I see two overlapping problems with application of litany of Tarski in this context.
First. Litany should be relatively short for practical reasons, and as such its statement is simplification of real state of affairs when it is applied to complex system such as human and his/her social interactions. Thus litany implicitly suggest to believe in this simplified version, even if it was supposed to represent some complex mental image. And that leads us to
Second. Beliefs about oneself is tricky thing, as if they aren't compartmentalized (and we don't want them to be compartmentalized), then they shape our behavior.
Thus I think that in this case litany of Tarski implicitly suggest to become a simplified version of a person one thinks oneself is. And it doesn't seem too good.
I'm apparently awkward in social interactions (karma and even this post is evidence for this), so I'd rather abstain from suggesting alternative way of dealing with problems mentioned in top post.
↑ comment by lucidfox · 2010-12-01T17:14:45.317Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Those are really insightful and comforting!
I'm pretty much sure about 1, 3 and 4, but not so much about 2.
From my observations, if by "typical women" we mean a complete statistical average, then yes, I'm psychologically different if only by my tendencies towards introspection and rational thought, but the same can be said of virtually all Less Wrong residents. I feel a strong mental resonance with intelligent educated women, especially of my age range, and far more often than not find myself agreeing on beliefs (various aspects of feminism, for instance). I'm also statistically atypical in that I identify as a lesbian (I'm glad to have a girlfriend who regards me as, well, her girlfriend).
It probably wouldn't be too much of a stretch to hypothesize that LGBT people are more introspective on average than the general population, if only because they somehow had to arrive at their conclusions.
Replies from: None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2010-12-01T18:01:36.638Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It's interesting to me that you identify as lesbian, given that you say you came to the realisation of your trans status relatively late, as of the trans people I know (I know quite a few as my wife is very involved in LGBT politics) the straight- or bi-identifying ones realised they were trans relatively early, while the lesbian-identifying ones many seem to have realised in their twenties (in at least two cases I can think of, after getting married - luckily in both cases to bisexual women).
Maybe it's partly your sexual orientation that was/is clouding the issue for you? If before transitioning you felt like (or thought you felt like) a straight man, is it possible that you are somehow thinking, at least in part, "I can't be a woman because I am attracted to women"?
Either way, whether you're 'really' trans or not has no real meaning - there is no 'real' you, as opposed to an 'unreal' one, as you, like all human beings, are a mass of different, often conflicting, drives. And likewise, there is no platonic essence of transsexuality/transgenderism against which you can be judged. And both 'you' and 'transsexuality' are at least in part cultural constructs which only exist in relation to the culture you're in.
Live the way you want to . You're no more an impostor than anyone else. If you don't feel inside the way (some, vocal, online, out) other trans people do, so what? What difference does - or should - that actually make to you or them? Your only question should be "does this behaviour allow me to live a life closer to the life I want?"
And it's fairly clear that in the case of 'behaving as if female and being treated as such' the answer is yes. Don't let other issues cloud that.
Replies from: lucidfox, None↑ comment by lucidfox · 2010-12-01T18:11:58.763Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I never had any issues with being a woman who is attracted to women, except for the fear of rejection by a lesbian. ("What if she considers me a man and singles me out immediately before even getting a chance to know me?")
But yes, I used to consider myself a straight man before. Reflecting back, it seems that I used to single out the entire LGBT umbrella as "weirdoes" ("thanks" in part to indoctrination by pop culture and conservative parents), and it was thus difficult for me to think of myself in any LGBT category. Perhaps it's easier to switch to one "weird" category (a transgendered straight woman) from another "weird" category (if you thought of yourself as a gay man before), than it is from a "normal" category to a "doubly weird" category.
It was perhaps also difficult to take the first step: once I got the guts to do one small thing that I "wasn't supposed to do" but could easily hide (in my case, shaving my legs), the rest of my restraint of actions and thought cascaded on its own, unstoppable from that point, like an avalanche.
Replies from: TheOtherDave↑ comment by TheOtherDave · 2010-12-01T19:07:06.515Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
(nods) Yeah; giving up the invisible knapsack the second time around is often easier than the first time.
That said, I could see it working either way - if identifying as a woman causes your understanding of your expected sexual preference to shift from preferring women to preferring men, then continuing to prefer women would be a second switch, as you describe; if it doesn't, then it wouldn't be.
Presumably that would depend a lot on how strongly "being a woman" and "being attracted to men" are implicitly associated in your mind.
A similar effect occurs in the reverse direction, I think, when gay men are expected to be effeminate, or lesbians to be masculine. As gender identity and sexual preference become less tightly linked, I expect you see less of this.
Replies from: lucidfox↑ comment by lucidfox · 2010-12-01T19:21:46.633Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Presumably that would depend a lot on how strongly "being a woman" and "being attracted to men" are implicitly associated in your mind.
That's a tough one. My first impulse would be to say "not tied at all", given that generally I interact with people without making implicit assumptions about their sexual orientation.
But. I rationally know, of course, that straight people are statistically an overwhelming majority. So in the absence of other information, when interacting with anyone, I should assign them a large prior probability of being straight. Yet I behave without making any predictions.
I wonder if this means I consciously choose to discard the available information and fall back to fifty-fifty, or whether I keep the information, but the decisions I make do not depend on it.
Replies from: Kingreaper, TheOtherDave↑ comment by Kingreaper · 2010-12-01T20:43:11.250Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
What sort of decisions do you make that could, rationally, depend on it?
I mean, someone's sexual orientation is generally only relevant when setting them up with someone, and in such cases it would seem very weird not to find out their orientation as soon as possible.
EDIT (I originally included "trying to date/seduce them" but in such a case their orientation is only a small part of the story. If it's easy to find out, do so, if not, then find out whether they fancy you, and the rest of their orientation is irrelevant.)
Replies from: TheOtherDave↑ comment by TheOtherDave · 2010-12-01T21:59:27.174Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I can't speak for lucidfox, but to pick a recent example of my own: a friend of mine, a gay man, recently asked for introductions to friends of friends who might be worth approaching as potential dates.
So I started thinking about people I knew who seemed like potential good matches for him, and realized that a difficulty here was not knowing the sexual preferences of the people I know.
I don't think it was especially weird for me not to have previously found that out about everyone I might someday consider setting my friend up with, nor especially weird for me not to have immediately asked them all (say, via a bulk email or something).
Replies from: Kingreaper↑ comment by Kingreaper · 2010-12-01T22:32:09.485Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Why would you ask them all?
Presumably, you'd have a good filter on which friends you thought might be worth his time, ie. similar enough interests etc.; if they were interested.
At which point, you need only ask those guys.
Replies from: TheOtherDave↑ comment by TheOtherDave · 2010-12-01T23:04:55.079Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Yeah; which is ultimately what I did. But it was a situation where I became very aware of the differences between the cultural norm (roughly, that everyone is implicitly assumed straight until explicitly declared otherwise) and my own defaults.
Replies from: Kingreaper↑ comment by Kingreaper · 2010-12-02T09:29:33.661Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
So, you actually did do what I thought would be the sensible thing to do, and asked the people you were considering setting up.
I'm now confused; because your first reply to me seemed to indicate that you felt that was a bad idea somehow?
Did I perhaps present it in such a way that I appeared to be advocating a different course of action?
Replies from: TheOtherDave↑ comment by TheOtherDave · 2010-12-02T13:31:54.538Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
(nods) Yeah, pretty much.
Initially, I thought what you had in mind was a scenario where I'm trying to set up two people, and therefore just need to know the sexual preferences of those two people.
I was contrasting that with a scenario where I'm trying to set up a known person with someone in a relatively large class, and therefore need to know the sexual preferences of everyone in that class (either that, or need to live in a culture where it's socially acceptable to proceed as though someone's sexual preference is unknown, which is why I say that the experience demonstrated that I don't live in such a culture).
It's similar to the difference between having cached the size of a directory in an operating system, vs calculating it on demand. If I'm just looking at one directory and can calculate the size relatively quickly, it makes no difference at all. If I'm trying to sort a hundred directories by size, it suddenly makes a huge difference. The difference in scale creates a qualitative difference in user experience... and reveals that the user's expectation is that the size is cached, even though in the one-directory case that expectation does not lead to measurable differences.
All that said, I agree with you that we're not saying anything particularly different at this point.
Replies from: Kingreaper↑ comment by Kingreaper · 2010-12-02T15:32:03.595Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
either that, or need to live in a culture where it's socially acceptable to proceed as though someone's sexual preference is unknown, which is why I say that the experience demonstrated that I don't live in such a culture
Ah, yes, this is a relevant point I was missing.
Within my present social sphere proceeding as though someone's sexual preference is unknown, and inquiring into it, is entirely acceptable. But this is due to the subcultures I'm embedded in*, and I was forgetting that the mainstream culture is less permissive re: such inquiries.
(*primarily the lgbT, fetish, geek and polyamorous groupings)
Replies from: TheOtherDave↑ comment by TheOtherDave · 2010-12-02T16:12:31.712Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
(nods) I often have to explicitly remind myself that certain possibilities that are highly available for me (e.g., that someone is in a triad) are not even promoted for consideration in mainstream culture (e.g., when I'm at work).
I remember once commenting to a coworker that I was startled to realize, when a mutual coworker showed up at a party of mine with his girlfriend, that his girlfriend was married to the boyfriend of another guest at the party. Small world, and all.
You could almost hear the needle skipping as they struggled to make sense of that, after which they said "Well, that sounds awkward," and it took me a while to realize they'd assumed the spouses were ignorant of the situation.
When we finally cleared up each other's misunderstandings, we were rather symmetrically appalled at one another's cultural norms
Incidentally, if you're in the New England or Bay areas, we likely have friends in common.
Replies from: Kingreaper↑ comment by Kingreaper · 2010-12-03T12:10:15.816Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
As it happens, I'm in England Classic, so probably not.
Interesting anecdote however; has been added to my mental directory of small-talk anecdotes for discussions that involve (or that I want to involve) polyamory/relationships.
↑ comment by TheOtherDave · 2010-12-01T19:37:47.900Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Yeah, I observe myself doing something similar.
In my own case it started out as a kind of a political stance -- roughly speaking, as a way of treating straight people as actually having a sexual orientation, rather than as the unmarked case -- and turned into a habit of thought without my quite meaning for it to.
In my case I'm fairly certain that I don't discard the information... that is, I'm fairly certain that if you did an IAT on me around gender and sexuality you'd find I expect opposite-sex attraction much more than I expect same-sex attraction... but rather that I've trained myself to behave, as you say, in ways that don't depend on it.
↑ comment by [deleted] · 2010-12-01T23:56:28.848Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Either way, whether you're 'really' trans or not has no real meaning - there is no 'real' you, as opposed to an 'unreal' one, as you, like all human beings, are a mass of different, often conflicting, drives. And likewise, there is no platonic essence of transsexuality/transgenderism against which you can be judged. And both 'you' and 'transsexuality' are at least in part cultural constructs which only exist in relation to the culture you're in.
Upvoted for this.
comment by [deleted] · 2010-12-01T23:45:23.106Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
@OP: I don't quite see a reason to fret this much over the social construct of gender. "Real woman". Sure there is a typical female brain that lo and behold is probably different in basic quantifiable ways from your brain, I'm also willing to bet that your subjective experience probably isn't exactly like the experience of having that brain. Its possible your brain is basically identical to the average male brain, but more likely it isn't and is perhaps in "objective" ways more similar to the female average brain.
What does this have to do with choosing a social role or building an identity? You might be surprised but there are plenty of proud owners of XXs that identify as women but are due to biological reasons very atypical in mind for that cultural group. Why should a transsexual person feel bad for being somewhat of a outlier in his chosen social role?
Being a transhumanist self modification in certain limits seems something I might term a right, so even if the social role necessitates certain adaptations (which I'm not convinced modern "womanhood" does) they are surely a triviality and one shouldn't feel bad for changing them or wanting to change them.
Its the brain modification aspect that is tricky. What if I'm convinced that my mind isn't right for the role I desire? If I felt that like I have the wrong body, would that include my mind?
comment by ata · 2011-06-30T22:44:43.331Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Huh, I wonder how I missed this post the first time around; I was already questioning my gender when it was posted. (It sounds like I'm in the same boat you were in two years ago; 21, biologically male, feel like I'm almost definitely trans (several other similar details too), but still have a lot of "And yet..."s.)
The way it stands now, the so-called gender identity disorder isn't really something that is truly diagnosed, because it's based on self-reporting; you cannot look into someone's head and say "you're definitely transsexual" without their conscious understanding of themselves and their consent. So it seems to me outside the domain of psychiatry in the first place. I've heard some transpeople voice hope that there could be a device that could scan the part of the brain responsible for gender identity and say "yes, this one is definitely trans" and "no, this one definitely isn't". But to me, the prospect of such a device horrifies me even in principle. What if the device conflicts their self-reporting? (I suspect I'm anxious about the possibility of it filtering me, specifically.) What should we consider more reliable -- the machine or self-reporting?
This prospect actually isn't only hypothetical; there's been some research showing measurable differences in pre-transition trans people's biology, including brain structures that actually appear to resemble those of the sex associated with their self-identified gender. This is quite interesting, and if true, suggests that genders (not just sexes) are more like natural categories than I previously thought. I'm looking forward to seeing more research done on this. And although I definitely wouldn't advocate replacing self-reporting with brain scanning unless we had a comprehensively worked-out theory of how gender identity actually worked and we could actually predict people's eventual gender identities and outcomes better than they subjectively could, it would at least be good in the meantime if it became possible to probabilistically screen children for likely transsexuality so that puberty could be delayed if necessary.
Anyway, I considered such a device as a thought experiment during my own questioning, and I noticed that I too would be hoping that it would say "Yeah, you're definitely trans" and would feel despondent if it said I had to remain male. But that kind of gives the game away, doesn't it? I can't think of any instance where a non-trans person would be wishing or hoping they were trans (at least after reading as much about it as I have now); it's not a life that anyone would wish upon themselves. I intercepted some other motivated reasoning during my questioning, but all of it was along similar lines — "I hope I don't conclude I'm not trans, because then I won't get to be a girl, and I really want to be a girl." I'm not saying I'd embrace motivated reasoning in this case, but this case is unusual in that observing that you're engaging in motivated reasoning toward a particular conclusion is actually at least some evidence for that conclusion. (Makes it hard to know how much to update by, though.)
Replies from: MixedNuts, Throway, Pavitra↑ comment by MixedNuts · 2011-07-01T06:47:57.168Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Actually, a bunch of brain things we thought sorted between men and women turned out to sort between attraction to men and to women, so they won't distinguish a straight transwoman from a cis gay man.
Also, there are quite a bunch of people who transition, then go back, so "it's not a life anyone would wish upon themselves" won't work. I'd much rather trust the brain scanner if it's at all trustworthy (and has a genderqueer slot, thank you very much). If it says "Nope, you're a girl"... well, I'll be seriously disappointed, but I'd make the best of it and be a dyke or something.
↑ comment by Throway · 2011-10-23T03:42:38.416Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
When I was 19 or 20, I seriously considered whether I was transgender, but eventually concluded that I'm cismale. I considered myself attracted-to-women at the time (though on reflection I'm slightly bi-curious, even now I mostly think of myself as straight). I was very worried about deciding incorrectly in either direction and afterward, about possibly having decided incorrectly. I'm still fairly confident though. Thought I'd post this because I imagine most stories are shared by people who did decide they were transgender. Hypothetically though, the amount of utilons you'd have to pay me to permanently transition (with no hypothetical changes to actual me or reality), while quite large, is probably substantially lower than for most cispeople.
Replies from: ata↑ comment by ata · 2011-10-23T03:50:21.472Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
If you don't mind me asking, what were the observations that lead you to locate and consider that hypothesis in the first place, and how did you come to reject it?
For my part, I've been trying always to hug the query as tightly as possible; when I can get myself to stop thinking abstractly and verbally about whether or not I'm "transgender" and instead wonder perceptually and at the object level about individual, separable questions such as "Have I ever been happy about becoming more masculine?" (if not, I don't have to, whether or not I am "transgender"), "Do I feel more comfortable being referred to and addressed as male or female?" (if the latter, I can continue going by my new name and pronouns, whether or not I am "transgender"), "Am I happy about the changes I'm undergoing/anticipating; do I feel better overall?" (~7 weeks HRT so far; if so, I can continue as long as it continues to enhappy me, whether or not blahblahblah), "Do I prefer speaking in a female voice?" (since voice feminization is just a matter of training anyway and doesn't remove manvoice, I am free to develop a female speaking (and preferably singing) voice and use it as much or as little as I find I want to), etc., the answers are always pretty unambiguous, particularly since I would have no problem with myself turning out to be genderfluid (which I had assumed I'd be for a long while, though I didn't learn the word until this year) or bigender or otherwise nonbinary. But apparently I'm not, at least given what I know so far; not since I started letting myself think about such things have I woken up feeling any desire to be or present as more male that day than I have to, never have I felt like tying back (let alone cutting off) my long beautiful hair since I got it permanently straightened (it has more of a scruffy-male-hobo look when it's not straightened), ne'er since I got my current one pair of girl jeans have I felt like wearing guy clothes, except when going out (I'm not able to pass yet), and I always change back as soon as I get back home, and the feeling is just kind of like "Well, why the hell wouldn't I?". Same with things like body hair, once I got rid of it for the first time, I've never felt the need to consider whether I want to let it grow back, it doesn't even feel like a question. And as for HRT itself, at this point I don't think I could stop if I tried, I don't think I could even try to stop if I tried, because I just don't have any desire to at any level. My understanding is that cis males generally would not appreciate the breast growth and diminished sex drive.
How far would you have gotten using a process like that?
Replies from: Throway↑ comment by Throway · 2011-10-23T05:37:20.352Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Evidence leading to hypothesis:
Strongest evidence was a desire to have no facial hair. I'm also intrigued by the idea of having no body hair. Today I consider these to be cosmetic body modifications which I may eventually pay to have, finances permitting.
As a teenager, I sometimes fantasized being a girl; I considered this weak evidence because I found it plausible that doing so as much as I did was within the range of typical variation for cismales. Also I found it annoying to have "dangly bits", but I concluded that the main consideration seemed to be convenience. I'm weakly convinced that bottom surgery is minus-EV with respect to convenience, though it's possible for technology to improve. Medium-sized boobs instead would probably be more inconvenient. Small boobs instead would probably be less inconvenient; I suspect they might be more fun than no boobs. And they don't seem /that/ inconvenient; I should mention that my male bits also don't seem /that/ inconvenient to me now.
The rest of this comment will be far more articulate than my thinking at the time, but I think it's close enough.
I think my feelings can be decomposed to two orthogonal categories: Munchkinism, and desire to be androgynous.
Transgender is a particularly conspicuous cluster in hypothesis-space. But my explanation is also simple, and fits well. I'm bothered that I can't come up with any really strong predictions to distinguish Transgender versus "Androgyny" (defined as shorthand for "desire to be androgynous"), and also that I have no sense of the ratio Pr(Transgender) : Pr("Androgyny"). Even my rather low level of body dysphoria is not that great for distinguishing. I think this is because the Transgender cluster is spacious enough that it approaches really damn close to "Androgyny".
Come to think of it, I wonder if Munchkinism influenced the conclusion. You'd expect Transgender-or-not to almost completely outweigh it in a utility calculation, but hmm... (Munchkinism, or at least my brand of it, loves being a guy: tall, big hands (which conflicts with "Androgyny", at least in my case), fast metabolism at certain ages (actually I'm only somewhat confident about that being preferable), also privilege (which doesn't seem to show up much in my deliberations, but maybe it does and I haven't noticed).
edit:
I'm satisfied with my current voice (ofc Munchkinisim would love more control over voice). That does seem to distinguish my Transgender and "Androgyny" hypotheses. I felt a significant burst of relief from having that articulated. Thank you very much.
Replies from: ata↑ comment by ata · 2011-10-23T06:54:40.316Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I try not to think (primarily) in terms of convenience, because from everything I've heard, it seems like adult cases of gender dysphoria don't go away and only get worse over time, eventually outweighing almost anything else. Conditional on the hypothesis that I do in fact have a transgender brain, I'd expect that if I decided to avoid transitioning now for instrumental reasons, I'd only end up regretting it later.
I did have some thoughts along those lines… e.g. at one point I was mildly wishing to be taller (I'm 5'6") for social impressiveness reasons, though now I'm quite happy about my height and my generally not-very-masculine build. And when I was just starting to seriously wonder about this, or possibly even before then, I already had a general sense that I'd probably want to transition at some point, but I hoped I could put it off until after the singularity and put it out of my mind until then. Of course, that didn't work out, it didn't go away and after a few months it got to the point where I was almost constantly preoccupied by it. At that point the instrumental considerations didn't seem that compelling.
Anyway, given my current state of information I'm still satisfied that I'm making the right decision at the moment, but thanks for sharing your experience!
↑ comment by Pavitra · 2011-07-15T08:53:50.347Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
(It sounds like I'm in the same boat you were in two years ago; 21, biologically male, feel like I'm almost definitely trans (several other similar details too), but still have a lot of "And yet..."s.)
Indeed, I have the uncanny sense that I'm reading something by my future self.
comment by Emile · 2010-12-01T21:07:58.162Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Your story (and TheOtherDave's) reminds me of that of Jennifer Diane Reitz.
On one excursion to nowhere in particular, the purpose of which was to fill time absent from my father’s sight, I ran into two other transsexuals. [...]
Candice and Joy were out shopping, and stopped to talk with me. They somehow knew that I was a lost soul, and offered to talk with me. They invited me to their home.
They lived together because they were a couple, self defining as lesbians. This was a stunning revelation to me. It was something that opened vistas of wonder to my soul.
When I was first facing transition, I had only one book, Jan Morris’s ‘Conundrum’, and a few snatches of televised information as my entire basis for understanding my plight. I just assumed that I would become a heterosexual woman out the other side, a proper Suzy Homemaker with husband and adopted baby. This was certainly what my doctors seemed to desire me to be, and I dearly wanted to please my doctors, because they held my very life in their hands. I was willing to do anything, be anything, to earn my passage to womanhood. I had little concept of even what that meant exactly, only that that was clearly my goal.
Certainly nothing would stop me in my quest. Not even the truth. My first, early, evaluations by a psychologist indicated that I had a "masculine oriented mentation", and would not be a safe candidate for surgery. I was "penile fixated". This was news to me. So I had hit the books at my college library, to find out how on earth such a conclusion could possibly be reached. What learned shocked me. The tests I had been given, the Rorschach Ink Blot Test, as well as other visual tests involving pictures of people and scenes, were not grounded in any rational science. In fact, they are essentially arbitrary, culturally based catalogs of expected interpretations, based on a laughable model of what it means to be female or male of mind.
The rest is well worth reading (though I wouldn't be surprised if you already had).
(By the way, Jenny writes several excellent webcomics, and has been seen on OvercomingBias/LessWrong).
comment by lucidfox · 2022-07-05T17:49:21.798Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
OP here. In case you've found this post via Google (as I did unexpectedly, having found my own post when searching for something different) and are wondering how I'm faring now, rest easy: I transitioned years ago, and now live a much, much happier life now than I did when I wrote this post. I live as a woman, I've become a lot more social and (IMO) a lot less socially awkward, friends and strangers don't even realize I'm trans (or if any do, they aren't showing it and aren't treating me any differently).
I didn't regret my transition even once.
My views on gender identity have become more nuanced since I wrote this post. My 2010 self overcomplicated things when they didn't need to be this complicated. "Feeling X on the inside" may well be an untestable proposition, but quality of life and positive impressions by other people are definitely facts about the real, observable world.
I see now that my fear that my belief was irrational — that nothing could convince me I was wrong about my gender identity — was unfounded. If I had regretted my transition and detransitioned, that would have been the evidence that my initial judgment was wrong. Instead, in hindsight, the hypothesis has stood the test of time, and transition was one of the best, most life-improving decisions I've ever made.
If anyone who once commented on this post is reading this: thank you all for your support and encouragement!
comment by Kingreaper · 2010-12-01T18:09:37.458Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I consciously discovered my gender identity at 21
I'm 22 and still struggling with the question of my gender identity*. I've realised that I'd be happier living as a female if I could just switch, effortlessly, but I'm not sure if I'm willing to deal with all the social repercussions.
*(I've wished I was female intermittently since childhood, but never really thought more of it until recently; when a friend I'd known for ages, who had presented as male, began her transition)
And I know that I'm, in many ways, more masculine-minded than I'd like.
Actually, that brings to mind a question I've been wanting to ask someone I don't know IRL: if you have begun taking hormones, how much have you found them to affect your thinking?
Replies from: None, lucidfox↑ comment by [deleted] · 2011-10-23T05:15:41.953Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Actually, that brings to mind a question I've been wanting to ask someone I don't know IRL: if you have begun taking hormones, how much have you found them to affect your thinking?
I started estrogen and androgen blockers just about five years ago, and have varied my dose and delivery method several times. Prepare for anecdata!
-Starting estrogen and spiro together was intense. I got very moody for a little while -- I've been diagnosed with mood disorders years prior to transitioning, so it wasn't anything new, but the frequency and severity of outbursts spiked for a little bit. My emotions didn't actually feel stronger per se -- once the initial spell wore off, I wound up describing it as a matter of nuance. It's like learning to see new colors, new shades of distinction, between what were formerly a lot more discrete reference cases. The result was an easing of some forms of tension -- it took the edge off my temper and left me a lot more calm and able to exercise rationality than I'd ever been.
Speaking of nuances: colors felt a little brighter, the world was just a touch more vivid (I'm autistic and schizotypal so it's always been pretty vivid, but this added something), my sense of smell began to rival that of my mother (who's one of the most olfactorily-sensitive humans I'd ever met up to that point) whereas before it'd merely been "okay", my hearing picked up and my synaesthesia changed a bit. Emotion just became generally easier to process, and easier to experience -- unless I was dealing with peak stress loads (unfortunately not uncommon with my life history), I might be more prone to exuberance or sadness but I also had a lot more reflective coherence about what they were, and could ride them out more easily.
The first time I had to go off (poor/uninsured), I got filled with endless, spikey, manic energy. It lasted a couple weeks before I was able to buy some more pills and resolve the shortage. My dreams the night after going back on were horrific nightmares.
-Upping the dose later made me even calmer, and more clearheaded. At my peak oral dose I noticed that the coolheadedness had a tendency to slide into depression, but a) I've always been somewhat prone to depression and b) my life became a surreal mess around that time, so it's hard to know what to make of it all. I actually got an emotional "period"; at the far end of it I was even more levelheaded and indeed, somewhat flat of affect until directly engaged. At the near end of it, I was moody, shy and prone to volatile affectional feelings (my boyfriend at the time said I turned into a raging flirt around that time of the month).
-Going on progesterone a couple years ago removed the period and changed the texture of things yet again. For about a year, I was either calm and flat or sensuous and moody -- I'd cry tears of joy at the drop of a hat, or spontaneously when having a tense moment, but it wasn't sobbing or crying fits. It was basically the more-nuanced, this-will-pass-even-though-it's-really-big-right-now thing I had early on taken to the 9th degree, with the emotions ratcheted up. It made reading books and watching movies really fun, and it shifted my interests somewhat toward sensory/experiential stuff. Eventually I replaced that with medproxyprogesterone due to cost -- this made me so depressed I couldn't stand to take it. Now I take neither of them, and the effects have passed.
-Injectable estrogen, the main distinguishing factor was dosage. At 5mg/week, I became seriously depressed, anhedonic, unmotivated and low-energy. This was reduced to 3mg per week a couple months later, which restored my mood stability, hedonic and adrenaline responses. Since then I've been more recognizably myself -- occasionally moody or loopy, vulnerable to stress, but often calm and buzzy and pleasant so long as things are going even vaguely well.
↑ comment by lucidfox · 2010-12-01T18:21:13.953Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Actually, that brings to mind a question I've been wanting to ask someone I don't know IRL: if you have begun taking hormones, how much have you found them to affect your thinking?
I sought answers to that question before and I heard conflicting accounts, from zero changes to significant, but it's important here to account for a causation bias. HRT often coincides with publicly coming out, which in many people can cause a rush of euphoria and a feeling of freedom while some inhibitions evaporate. In other words, many of the changing mental modes may have nothing to do with hormones at all; I've never taken hormones so far and yet I feel like a very different person from lucidfox[2008] thanks to my shifted system of values.
The way I see it, given that puberty didn't manage to shake my core identity and shape me into someone who isn't me, then it's highly unlikely that hormones will.
Replies from: falenas108, Kingreaper↑ comment by falenas108 · 2010-12-02T11:09:12.894Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I sought answers to that question before and I heard conflicting accounts
I think I can explain why that might be the case. Testosterone is the "male" hormone; estrogen is the "female" hormone. However, both guys and girls have some amount both hormones. It could be that those who are transgendered tend to have more of the hormone associated with the opposite sex, so adding more of that hormone would not do as much.
Replies from: lucidfox, None↑ comment by lucidfox · 2010-12-02T11:17:24.237Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It could be that those who are transgendered tend to have more of the hormone associated with the opposite sex, so adding more of that hormone would not do as much.
The question is about the percentage of transpeople with originally raised hormone levels - otherwise it's a hasty generalization. Surely if this was really the case, they'd display physical differences from their biological sex all along - for example, transwomen would look more feminine then cis men even before any hormone therapy?
Replies from: falenas108↑ comment by falenas108 · 2010-12-02T22:01:08.168Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I think you're right, that probably would be the case. I'm not sure about looking more feminine, but there would definitely be other characteristics that would be different.
This has already been shown in other areas, such as the digit ratio and gay men performing closer to females on certain physical and mental tests.
However, I don't know if there are any studies like this done for transgendered people.
Replies from: HughRistik, lucidfox↑ comment by HughRistik · 2010-12-03T08:31:53.934Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
On gender-related interests, a study by Richard Lippa found that trans people scored in between cis men and women for gender-related traits (i.e. GD, or "gender diagnosticity" of interests or occupational preferences).
In general, these contrasts show that M-to-F transsexuals scored similarly to gay men on all measures except for self-ascribed femininity, which was considerably higher for transsexuals. In contrast, F-to-M transsexuals were significantly more masculine than lesbian women on all measures except for instrumentality and expressiveness.
↑ comment by lucidfox · 2010-12-03T02:29:18.603Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The digit ratio study is generally regarded among transpeople as "a load of bollocks", and that's putting it relatively nicely. There are a lot of problems about it, and I know people who angsted about not matching its conclusions before stopping caring.
Replies from: HughRistik, None↑ comment by HughRistik · 2010-12-03T08:40:35.374Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
What are the problems with digit ratio research?
From Gender, Nature, and Nurture by Richard Lippa:
Research has tried to infer people's exposure to prenatal testosterone levels indirectly by measuring body characteristics thought to be related to prenatal testosterone. One such characteristic is the ratio of the lengths of the second and fourth digits of the hand (i.e., the index finger and the ring finger; Manning et al., 2000). Women tend to have shorter ring fingers relative to their index fingers, whereas men tend to have longer ring fingers relative to their index fingers. Index-to-ring-finger length ratios correlate with people's occupational choices, fertility levels, dominance, and sexual orientations (Lippa, 2003a; Manning, Scutt, Wilson, & Lewis-Jones, 1998; Williams et al., 2000). These findings suggest that prenatal testosterone levels are linked to adult gender-related behaviors.
The Wikipedia article on digit ratio also cites a ton of research showing correlates.
Replies from: None, lucidfox↑ comment by [deleted] · 2011-10-23T04:47:33.996Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Well, my digit ratio should have me squarely in the cisgendered heterosexual male category.
I'm trans, female identified in day to day life, queer (not especially picky about gender of partners, even less picky about what they have in their pants)... it's one anecdote, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that the digit length criteria failed bigtime where I'm concerned.
↑ comment by lucidfox · 2010-12-03T08:58:12.032Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I myself lack the experience to present a coherent argument against it, but ask any trans community and you'll get dozens of replies.
There are some objections that I can present on the fly, though. For one, there is no evidence that sex hormone level or this unobservable "brain gender" is the most important factor contributing to digit ratio. The very Wikipedia article you linked claims, among other things, that there is more ethnic variation than gender variation.
And while this is not an argument against the validity of the research, we must be wary of drawing backward inference between observable physical phenomena and correlated social phenomena. As I mentioned, I know transpeople who were depressed when their digit ratio "didn't match the expectation", irrational as it may be. It should be considered, at best, weak evidence.
↑ comment by [deleted] · 2011-10-23T04:42:45.177Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I think (she said, speaking as a transgendered person) that the angst has a lot to do with a more pervasive sense of self-doubt among many trans people. When you have to do something fairly subversive and controversial just to feel like yourself, and can expect an enormous amount of social pressure (ranging from passive-aggressive to literally life-threatening), and you've spent most of your life likely to have no coherent idea of other people like you...yeah, it's kind of tempting to search out validation in those ways. I think this is why some trans people would love to have a diagnostic test for it -- strikes me as a bit self-defeating though.
↑ comment by [deleted] · 2011-10-23T04:50:39.484Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I'm trans, identify as female (technically also genderqueer/third-gender in some contexts, but it's more an internal thing of anthropological significance than something I display), have been on hormone therapy for a number of years, and it's only in the last year that my T levels dropped from "high even for a cis male" to "really low even for a cis female." In other words I spent literally my entire pospubescent life up until recently with very high testosterone. So I doubt it's that.
↑ comment by Kingreaper · 2010-12-02T09:37:11.402Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
That's good information, however it does give me one slight niggle.
The way I see it, given that puberty didn't manage to shake my core identity and shape me into someone who isn't me, then it's highly unlikely that hormones will.
I suspect that puberty did shake my core identity and shape me into someone who isn't me (as I was prior to puberty). But as you point out, when the hormonal influx coincides with other life-changing events, I shouldn't assume it was the hormones influence.
I'm attempting to improve my luminosity at present, so hopefully my next hormonal change I'll document properly :-)
comment by Voltairina · 2012-03-08T09:31:55.368Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Replies from: Kaj_Sotala↑ comment by Kaj_Sotala · 2012-03-08T11:37:06.809Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
This comment would be considerably easier to read with some paragraph breaks.
Replies from: Voltairina↑ comment by Voltairina · 2012-03-08T11:53:45.106Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Ok. [edit]
comment by TheRev · 2011-01-10T11:48:01.402Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
A couple of years ago, I happened to take a very interesting grad-level anthropology course entitled simply "Masculinity" at the same time that I was having some perfectly normal doubts about my sexuality. Most of my time in the course was spent butting heads with the professor who felt that most of evolutionary psychology consisted of a way to roll us back to the dark ages on issues of sexual equality, but long story short, I came out the other end doubting whether not just gender (the cultural aspect), but sex (the biological aspect) was just a made up social construct. During the semester, we studied many cases of non-dichotomous sex and gender, such as the Bugis tribe in Indonesia for instance, recognize three sexes, and five genders, including an androgynous priestly class. I realized that even defining gender in a strictly biologic sense is somewhat problematic, given the unexpectedly high proportion of people with three sex chromosomes (XXX, XXY, or XYY), or ambiguous or dual genitalia. I only wish I had thought of linking zombies to the arguments back then like you did. The whole topic is ripe for discussion, and I would love to see more.
comment by [deleted] · 2010-12-01T23:36:42.508Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Being a materialist and accepting Darwinian thought all the while trying to be as rational as possible will lead you to realize that many many rationalizations we accept for what are considered "correct" or "common" values are false. Some outrageously false. I think I'm not overstepping in saying that either a majority of or a large minority of LW posters would agree with this.
I can understand a change in values following a updated world view. But please remember is does not translate into should. Sure scrap some values, after introspection, that you consider proxy values, but ultimate values are arbitrary so be wary of changing your value system (but don't be too wary of changing behaviour to what you deem best serves those values). Only you can decide what are proxy and what are primary values. However It is much better to accept "evil" facts and plan accordingly to achieve "good" aims than to fail at achieving "good" aims because your map doesn't match the territory. And don't forget things that might absent "evil" facts seem to bring good utility might in their light bring negative utility due to conflict with other values.
I suppose accepting "evil" facts as truth does come at a handicap in debating. Agitating for a policy because you genuinely believe that everyone would want it if they would understand it, is much easier than pushing argument you know is false for a policy that just serves your own values. But I don't think LW is about being wrong when its good for you.
I hope people understand that criticism of poor rationalizations on LW (at least I hope this site is the exception :) ) are mostly not attacks on the values that are perhaps "served" by the argument but just part of the process of rationality training.
comment by MugaSofer · 2012-11-06T11:10:41.508Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
If that were true, it would cause my whole system of values to collapse, and it feels like stating an incoherent statement, like "If sexism is morally and scientifically justified, then..."
Really? That doesn't seem incoherent, just incredibly unlikely. Could you elaborate what you mean by "sexism"?
EDIT:
you cannot look into someone's head and say "you're definitely transsexual"
Perhaps someday: transexual differences caught on brain scan - New Scientist
What if the device conflicts their self-reporting? (I suspect I'm anxious about the possibility of it filtering me, specifically.) What should we consider more reliable -- the machine or self-reporting?
Well, I personally would be fine with a non-transexual (by this defenition) getting reassignment surgery and living under a new name ... but I don't think it should be covered by medical insurance, for example. It should be cosmetic lifestyle choice, like a piercing only more so.
comment by Pavitra · 2011-07-15T19:07:53.889Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Disclaimer: in large part, I am trying to persuade myself.
Even now, I fail to apply the Litany of Tarski. "If I'm really a man, then I desire to bel--" Wait, doesn't compute.
I feel similarly, and I begin to suspect that my brain is treating it like a moral, rather than empirical, proposition. Consider: "If I am evil, then I wish to believe I am evil"? No. It should read: "If I am evil, then I wish to fix that problem."
How then can Tarski apply to a morally-charged proposition? It's probably better not to go around thinking things like "I am an evil person", since such beliefs tend to be self-fulfilling. But I think there's some room to think things like "In certain respects, I have been behaving as though I were evil." By treating the situation in terms of individual symptoms, rather than underlying traits, it becomes much easier to make the world into what you choose. Don't say, "am I really a good person?" but rather "I would like to stop kicking puppies".
Obviously, gender isn't actually a moral proposition. But if you alieve that it is, it might be useful to treat it like one.
Replies from: MugaSofer↑ comment by MugaSofer · 2012-11-07T10:12:21.542Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
If I am evil, then I wish to believe that I am evil, so that I will know to fix that problem.
It helps to consider the evil individual who doesn't know they're evil. They wont become good, will they? Because they don't know to try.
Replies from: Kindly↑ comment by Kindly · 2012-11-07T14:20:41.059Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
If I am evil, then I wish to believe that I am evil. I don't wish to believe that I am evil. Therefore I am not evil.
Replies from: MugaSofer↑ comment by MugaSofer · 2012-11-08T08:48:20.098Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Edit: why all the downvotes?
Because that's not what I meant and everyone knows it.
I do wish to believe that I am evil, conditional on my being evil. If I turn out not to be evil, I wish to know that, and if I turn out not to be good, I wish to know that too. Litany of Tarski.
Replies from: Kindlycomment by CaveJohnson · 2011-10-18T16:10:12.008Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
LGBT
You shouldn't use that acronym. Many activists use that as a sort of cover for their implicit transphobia, GLB(ISGD)Q is preferable.
Replies from: Richard_KennawayGLB(ISGD)Q stands for: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, (Intersex, Sex and/or Gender Diverse), Queer. The letter 'T' for 'transgender' is often used in this acronym, but as an umbrella term it is incorrect and offensive to many people who don't consider themselves 'transgender'. They may be 'trans', or' transsexual', or 'transexed' or 'intersex' or 'androgynous' or without sex or gender, or many other terms. Intersex, Sex and Gender Diverse as an umbrella term is much more inclusive.
↑ comment by Richard_Kennaway · 2011-10-18T18:46:39.719Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Are you this person or this one?
Replies from: None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2011-10-18T21:28:54.590Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Thanks for bringing attention to that I didn't at realize it was made up and not a legitimate variation since there are a whole bunch of such acronyms (FABGLITTER, QUILTBAG, LGBTQetc, LGBTQQ, SGL, GLBTA). As an outsider It can be hard to tell apart splitters from someone just feeling slightly trollific (down voted the grandfather accordingly).
Replies from: Richard_Kennaway↑ comment by Richard_Kennaway · 2011-10-19T06:49:43.156Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Actually, as far as I can tell the person writing at the second link I gave is completely serious. But I think it almost certain that CaveJohnson is the author at the first link.
Replies from: None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2011-10-19T20:17:04.690Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Why do you think so? Perhaps he is just a reader of the blog.
Replies from: Richard_Kennaway↑ comment by Richard_Kennaway · 2011-10-20T07:13:51.458Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
The original posting had troll written all over it, and OneSTDV talks about posting that quote as a troll. CaveJohnson's views on other issues, as far as they are apparent from his brief presence here so far, are consonant with those of OneSTDV. That evidence is enough for me.
Another detail I didn't notice before is that OneSTDV posted about posting it as a troll on the very same day that CaveJohnson posted it here.
Replies from: None↑ comment by [deleted] · 2011-10-20T10:48:19.471Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Clearly OneSTDV was trying to encourage people to troll in that post. I don't see how much this differs from the "reader of the blog" hypothesis. Unless there are stylistic similarities in the way they write. As to opinions, reading through CaveJohnsons comments I agree with about 7/8ths, but you are right that there is a marked focus on HBD related issues in his posting history. The name he picked and a few of the earlier comments indicated he may have started out as a role-playing account.
If I had to bet I would say he is a DL of a LWer used for stating politically incorrect or dangerous opinions (ala Quirrell) who reads OneSTDV.
Edit: Googling the blog It seems OneSTDV thinks the drug war is eugenic while CaveJohnson wishes to relax drug laws.