ciphergoth comments on My Way - Less Wrong

31 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 April 2009 01:25AM

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Comment author: ciphergoth 17 April 2009 04:21:45PM 3 points [-]

Do you know very many transsexuals?

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 April 2009 07:00:09PM 4 points [-]

Surprisingly many.

Comment author: ciphergoth 18 April 2009 11:24:48AM 4 points [-]

If you don't mind my asking, how do you perceive them wrt to

I have never known a man with a true female side, and I have never known a woman with a true male side, either as authors or in real life.

Comment author: AnneC 19 April 2009 01:02:41AM 8 points [-]

Data point: I am physically (and I am figuring, genotypically) female but have never felt that I have an "internal feminine identity" of any kind. I used to think the whole idea of such an internal identity was a socially-imposed myth. It was not until I encountered trans women / trans men who very, very clearly had an internal identification that strongly differed from their sex phenotype that it became evident to me that some people (and possibly most cisgendered persons, even) really and truly did have an internal gender "sense".

Comment author: SoullessAutomaton 19 April 2009 09:54:22AM *  2 points [-]

Data point: I am physically (and I am figuring, genotypically) female but have never felt that I have an "internal feminine identity" of any kind.

For opposite values of sex and gender, the same goes for me. To the extent that I do conform to certain masculine stereotypes I don't view them as critical to my identity, just another semi-arbitrary socially constructed category that I belong to.

In my case, I had (often vastly) reduced exposure to most of the transmission vectors I would expect social gender identity memes to have. Out of curiousity, if it's not too personal, was your childhood particularly atypical in exposure to type of social environments/mass media/&c.?

Comment author: ciphergoth 19 April 2009 11:59:45AM 1 point [-]

The thing I've heard said about it is "if you're cisgendered, you're as aware of your own gender as a fish is of water" (where cisgendered == not transgendered). I don't know how you'd measure whether that was so.

Comment author: gjm 19 April 2009 10:46:51AM 2 points [-]

Perhaps not so surprisingly, given that (anecdotally and handwavily, I confess) MtF transsexualism appears to be associated with something like +1 s.d. of intelligence. I've heard super-duper-handwavy explanations along the lines of "male-sized brain with female-style connectivity" but don't know whether there's any truth to them.

And of course there are obvious reasons why open transsexualism might be strongly associated with openness to unconventional ideas and tolerance for the idea of self-modification, both on the part of the individual concerned and of those he/she socializes with. So someone who hangs out with transhumanists might reasonably expect to know a greater-than-average proportion of transsexual people.

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