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army1987 comments on Rationality Quotes December 2013 - Less Wrong
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But that's way too broad IMO.
I mean, I have an Y chromosome. I have male genitalia and no desire to ever change this. (I also happen to have quite a few traits that are way more common among males than among females, e.g. being about 1.88 m (6'2") tall, having a baritone vocal range, having quite a lot of terminal facial and body hair, and being sexually attracted to women.) I find calling myself male a quite reasonable way of summarizing that info.
But I find claims that all this means that my long hair/dislike of football/low aggressiveness/finding it easier to befriend women than men/etc.¹ are somehow suboptimal or make my maleness any less valid to be preposterous and/or offensive. ("So I guess your wooden leg makes you a table." -- Frank Zappa) IOW I do have “a strong repulsion from the particular cultural bundle labeled with the gender which matches the dominant one for my sex”. But I don't see any particular need to throw the baby away with the bath water and stop calling myself a man.
(As for neurological differences, I haven't got a brain scan in the couple few decades, but FWIW my girlfriend is a heterosexual female neurologist.)
And I think that once one knows all this about me, there's no question left to ask whether I actually am a man.
Like you, I have a Y chromosome and male genitalia and some traits that are more common among males than females, as well as some traits that are more common among females than males (such as being sexually attracted to men). And, sure, calling myself male is a fine way of summarizing that info, and nobody seems to object.
And I am entirely comfortable describing myself as male and being described that way. I'm comfortable playing a male social role, in other words. It sounds like you are, as well.
By contrast, I have friends who, like you and me, have a Y chromosome and male genitalia and etc. and etc. But they are not comfortable playing a male social role.
So there seems to be a difference between you and me, on the one hand, and my friends, on the other. Consequently, it seems useful to have language that lets us talk about that difference.
Some of those friends refer to themselves as "trans women". I see no reason not to use that language to refer to them.
Presumably they are also uncomfortable having male physiology? Otherwise why do such people seek to change it? It seems a drastic step to take if the only motivation is to join the other social club.
The trans people I know vary widely in terms of whether they seek to alter their sexual physiology. Some do, some don't, some do in principle but don't consider the options provided by current technology good enough for the benefits to outweigh the cost.
But that aside, yeah, agreed. That, too, is a difference for which it is sometimes useful to have language.
Speaking more generally here... presumably that depends a lot on how much we perceive membership in the other "social club" to depend on physiological markers, and the advantages we perceive in such membership. (Just to be clear, I'm not talking here about trans folk, but about people who seek to change their physiology in pursuit of social mobility, which is a whole different thing.)
This is why it's usually said that sex is biological, but gender is socio-cultural. Gender ideals and gender roles can change a lot from one culture to another. You might be a seemingly effeminate man in one place, and yet find that you're entirely normal in another place. It's complete delusion to think white North American cultural roles correspond to some Deep Time-driven neurological or evolutionary factor in some special way nobody else on the planet has access to.
Imagine being told that 90% of the planet's men are less masculine than the median! Does that make the statistician in you perk up his ears and start screaming bloody murder, or what!?
Than the median man, or than the median person?
Either way. It doesn't really matter. An extreme spread between the median and mean, or between the supposed population median and the apparent sample median, indicates that somebody didn't do their sampling right at some point. Or in other words, they sampled WEIRDoes again instead of global humanity in general.
(I had misread "less masculine" as "more masculine".)
I don't entertain ideas about my gender identity at all, and don't understand people who do. Perhaps as a small child I might have done that, but don't remember a single instance.
This might make me jump to the conclusion that gender identity isn't important to me, but I think it's just as possible that being a man is invisible to me, since there's no cognitive dissonance whatsoever. Listing characteristics that are important for being a man would be quite difficult for me.
I could list many things that women usually do that I dislike, but I can think of many other reasons other than femininity for why I dislike them.
I don't consider your IOW to be accurate; rejecting the masculine stereotypes is not the same as rejecting the cultural bundle labeled 'man', though obviously it's similar. Most trans men I know are fairly femme, and most trans women fairly butch.
How so? I don't suppose you consider stuff like height or vocal range as cultural, do you?
You're rejecting the subbundle "Manly Man" without rejecting the rest of the bundle. You still, most likely, take up as much space as you need when in a space with other people, without questioning whether that is fair. You still probably make insulting cracks at your friends when hanging out, though they're jokes, not serious. Your Adam's apple doesn't feel like an out-of-place tumor, nor does your penis (dysphoria). And you don't get the gender-swapped equivalent of this (direct quote from a trans guy):
I intend to ask my other trans friends (who I can contact) in the next day or two. Clearly there is an element of having the wrong XML tag, but I strongly expect that there are other elements that cause that. And even if there aren't, this isn't a wrong question; being referred to correctly is important to them.
Also, in his words:
How do I take less space than I need? The fact that I'm physically big is hardly cultural. (I do think that that's unfortunate when I am in a limited space with someone else, but there's little I can do about that.)
Yeah, sometimes I do, but it's not like women never do.
That's hardly cultural.
I actually usually do. (There are exceptions.)
Women, generally, take up as little space as they can manage. It is not comfortable to sit with your arms held in past your sides and your ankles crossed, yet this is the default position most women will assume when sitting anywhere public. There is the baseline assumption that for 1 pie= the space of a room with 20 people, they deserve less than 1/20th of the pie; any space they take up is intrusive and taking any more pie than they need to not starve is wrong, even if others need no pie.
Generally they don't. It's rare, and women who do with any regularity are partially breaking from the bundle. Which happens, of course; people hold to the bundles to different degrees.
Also,
The feeling of those body parts being part of you is entirely mental and heavily associated with the bundles 'man' and 'woman'. So you should not expect those sensations (or the reverse 'breasts feel like tumors' and 'vagina feels like a wound') to co-occur with the bundle 'man' (or the reverse with 'woman').