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Jiro comments on Stupid Questions July 2015 - Less Wrong
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How do you reconcile being transgender with the fact that a lot of our sexual roles are culture-specific? For instance, imagine a MTF who wants to wear a dress. You can't tell this person "stop wearing dresses"; their desire to do so cannot be changed by society telling them no. Yet if they lived in another culture that didn't have dresses at all even for women, we know that when society told them not to wear a dress they would have eagerly gone along with it.
That's a common trans-exclusionary-radical-feminist argument. Wrong because:
1) Would you feel uncomfortable wearing a swastika? Would that send the right message about you? In India swastika is a holy symbol, not a Nazi symbol, the meaning is arbitrary. "Dress" means "I'm feminine" in our culture. It's part of our language.
Suppose in Atlantis, the mouth-sound "love" happens to mean hate and the mouth sound "hate" happens to mean love. It's still acceptable for an English speaking person to want to mouth-sound "I love you" and not "I hate you" even though the meanings of the mouth-sounds are cultural.
2) Things need not be biological to be okay. Culture-induced preferences are valid. (Though, in this case, I think gender expression is probably biological).
But I normally understand "I'm feminine" to mean "I want to do (list of things)". If someone wants to do those things because doing those things is feminine, they seem to be saying "I want to do these things because it means something which in turn means that I want to do these things"--it's circular.
"I want to do a list of things" includes "I want the people around me to perceive me in a certain way" and "I want to perceive myself a certain way"- which is generally a big drive for clothing, adornments, and body-modification in general.
To you really think it's not about self identity?
I'm not sure I understand the concept of "self identity as X" that is independent of wanting to do any particular things that X do. If there was such a thing, it would be meaningful to say "I'm feminine but I don't want to do any feminine things" which I'm pretty sure would not be accepted very much. And I can't think of any other cases when we accept that., either.
(I suppose "being treated by others as X" isn't the same as wanting to do X-type things yourself, but it doesn't seem to me that that is what is being talked about. And it's not that differtent anyway.)
Consider X = "medical doctor".
A medical student is not a doctor, and knows they are not a doctor. But they want to be a doctor; that's why they are a medical student. Like most people in societies that have doctors, the medical student has a node in their mental map for "being a doctor", which seems separate from nodes such as "having high social status" and "helping sick people" and "earning more money than a janitor does" and "wearing a white coat".
Sociologists call this "reification": taking a bag of properties and treating them as a real thing. A reified social category such as "doctor" is more than just a shorthand for an arbitrary bag of properties. It represents an actual cluster in social thingspace: there are people whom everyone agrees are doctors. (There are also people who are akin to doctors, but aren't doctors, such as nurses. There are also people whom some think of as being doctors, and others think of as being fake doctors, such as chiropractors.)
But even though "doctor" is a social classification that people basically (collectively) made up, it's one that almost everyone has a remarkable amount of agreement on.
And people can be right or wrong about it. Someone who is a doctor can think "I am a doctor" and be thinking something correct. A medical student can think "I want to be a doctor". A doctor might find herself thinking, "I am a doctor, but people don't act toward me the way they act towards other doctors, because they are weirded out by the idea of a black woman being a doctor. Their immediate (and erroneous) impression of me is that I am a physician's assistant or something. I want to be treated as the doctor that I am."
But being a doctor still has a core definition. You're not a doctor if you don't treat sick people or have the ability to treat sick people. There are also peripheral aspects such as how others treat you, or things that most doctors do without this being part of the definition of doctor, but being a doctor is not entirely about those peripheral things. Transsgender (at least in the absence of SRS) doesn't seem to be that way
Or to put it another way, nobody says "I'm a transphysician. I feel like and identify with being a doctor. I want to wear a white coat and have people put "MD" after my name. This makes me a doctor, even though I don't know how to treat sick people."
But a lot of people want the status benefits of being a doctor without having to do the hard work of going throw med school or even knowing how to heal people. Come to think of it, this isn't a bad analogy of transwomen. A man want the status and attention that women get, especially in nerd or SJW circles. Furthermore, these days by declaring himself a "transwoman" he even becomes more special then ordinary women.
The parallel for a transdoctor would be transmother, not transwoman.
Sorry, the analogy isn't that close. I was just trying to get at the idea of there being a "doctor" node which is different from any one particular property of doctors, because it's a socially defined cluster, not a natural kind.
Nurses also know how to treat sick people and treat sick people. That doesn't seem to be primarily what being a doctor is about.
If treating people is a necessary but not sufficient condition, that is enough for my point.
No human society is (yet) post-gender. There are always a set of socially recognized marks of gender presentation, and people will seek to express their gender identity according to the customs of the particular culture and/or subculture they feel they belong to.
Transgenderism is self-identification within a culture, and choosing which groups to identify with. There's not really reconciliation necessary, and although for those of us who regard it [ETA] as problematic [/ETA] including anything unnecessary in your identity at all it may be irksome, it shouldn't be treated any more irksome than non-transgender people choosing to go along with their "default" social identity. (Although personally there's a vague sense that somebody who has considered their identity so much should -know better-, I also know better than to presume that other people's preferences match my own.)
An obvious hypothesis is that trans women follow culture-specific roles (such as wearing dresses) for the same reason cis women follow culture-specific roles.
This would mean that whatever makes us follow culture-specific roles isn't extremely stupid, so it interprets 'women should wear dresses' correctly, rather than 'you shouldn't wear dresses'.
From what I've read, being transgender isn't about clothes and stuff at all, or not mainly anyway. It seems that people are born with a 'body map' in their brains that sometimes doesn't correspond with their actual body, so that they feel there are parts missing that should be there, and other parts that feel like they've been sewn on by Dr. Frankenstein. Of course people who feel like that would want to dress the way that in their culture corresponds with the sex they feel they really are.
This is a rather dubious explanation. Firstly because it seems unlikely that such a process would mess up only the sexual characteristics that happen to be in the brain. Secondly, many of the high profile "transgendereds" claiming that appear to have been perfectly happy in the bodies they were born with until in became fashionable to declare oneself "transgender".
I don't know (don't know of, even) any high-profile transgender people. One of my husbands friends is transgender, but she doesn't like to talk about it, so I don't really know why she had years of hormone treatments (still has, I suppose; you have to take them indefinitely, don't you?) and traveled to Thailand to have major surgery. All I know is that it must have been very important to her to do all that; it's not something you do on a whim! And she's a perfectly normal woman now, not flamboyant at all. Heck, she doesn't even wear skirts most of the time. She still works at the same IT job, and is still as nerdy as before. She just feels more at home in her body, and has become less shy I think (I didn't know her that well before).
For me, the 'body map' explanation I've read about makes perfect sense. In fact, it's the only explanation that makes sense to me. Why else go through years of trouble with hormones and major surgery? Of your private parts? When you could cross-dress instead?
There are also people who have the same sort of feeling about other body parts. That's got to suck even worse; at least transsexuals are starting to become accepted now.
Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner.
Chelsea/Bradley Manning
Martin/Martine Rothblatt, Larry/Lana Wachovski.
Never heard of her, or the other ones you and Stingray have mentioned. Yeah, I am living under a rock (not watching TV/reading the newspaper). I find I'm happier that way.
Yet, you somehow know that transgenderism is the fashionable cause du jour.
Wendy/Walter Carlos
Examples?
Look here.
I know there are high-profile transgender people. I was enquiring about your claim that they were
For two of the examples you linked to this is contradicted by the person's own account. (The third link is just to a picture.)
Their behavior during this period suggests otherwise.
Here's a clue for you: people lie, especially these kinds of publicity hounds are notorious for rewriting their past if it will give them current publicity.
And the absence of sabotage proves the existence of a fifth column. Kthxbye.
I don't see the relevance of the linked article. In this case, a better analogy to your argument is "we have evidence of him attempting sabotage, but he says he isn't a traitor so he can't be a traitor".
Well, if you insist on trying to pass non sequiturs off as arguments, goodby.
Plus 3 gratituitous downvotes on unrelated comments of mine. Ptui.
When I wasn't exposed to more transgender people and viewpoints, I didn't pay attention and connect the dots I had that pointed at my not being cis, since I'm non-binary with relatively mild dysphoria. So, I'm planning on getting top surgery in a year or two, and wouldn't have if I hadn't introspected and found myself to be not cis. This could be seen as being perfectly happy in the body I was born with until it became fashionable to be transgender, but the connotations are very different.
So why should I prefer your explanation to mine? Especially since mine makes much more sense from a biological point of view and doesn't require a free-floating XML tag (whether one is "really not cis").
I'm not exactly sure what your explanation is. That transgenderism is status-seeking? In that case, I suppose I'd ask about the existence of transgender people pre-SJ...?
In any case, I disagree with your assessment of cis-ness as unconnected to any real thing (that is what you're saying, no?). Hmm... maybe I'd put it akin to being a goth. Many non-goths would feel uncomfortable if suddenly they were forced to go about their lives clearly dressed as such. It communicates membership of a group they don't identify with.
Does that clarify anything?
Well let's take a look at that shall we. Hey, it appears that they were almost non-existent and largely confined to the subcultures that were the predecessors of SJ.
What about hijras, fa'afafines and the like?
I suppose that wasn't a good example, then. Of course, my answer is that their greater non-existence was because it was socially unacceptable to be transgender.
So those are like two side of a coin, no? I say that it was socially unacceptable and less so now, so more realize it and come forth, while you say it was sometimes high-status then and more so now, so more say they are this made-up thing. Why do you prefer your explanation, which necessitates a lot of people lying?
Your explanation necessitates even more people lying. The difference is that it is more socially acceptable to assert that people lied in the past than to admit that someone currently around is lying, which is the only reason your claim even sounds vaguely reasonable.
I'm not sure I follow. Is the logic that my claim necessitates more lying because people lied about not being transgender in the past (or as I would put it, were unaware or in the closet)? The fact of it being more widely low-status in the past explains that in my explanation as well as yours. Furthermore, if that is what you mean, then do you not also think that the higher amount of openly gay people these days is similar?
I've read that too. Is there evidence?
No, alas, I don't know of any official studies or anything, I've just read stories by transsexual people saying that's how they feel.