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Armok_GoB comments on Transsexuals and otherkin - Less Wrong Discussion
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One possible view is that the entire notion of "X identity" is broken, and things like "gender" and "species" are simply not applicable to minds. Anyone who thinks they got a "female mind" are wrong, regardless of if their body are male or female, because such a thing dosn't exist.
Another thing one could argue for is that there are no qualitative differences, but that there are objective classifications based on statistical correlation between physical and mental traits. This seems to agree with your intuitions: In a Turing test you can probably distinguish females and males in which case most transsexuals hopefully come out as the gender they consider themselves do be, otherkin that are not brain damaged come out as humans on account on being able to read or type in the first place, and fae is inapplicable because you cant find any real fae to run the test with.
A third view is that identity is just a set of suggestively named tags a mind can apply to itself, and every mind if free to chose what it wants. By this view "goth", "plumber", "female", "gay", "brony", "ratioanlist" and "black" are all the exact same type of label, and a pink-skinned person with a male body in white clothes who likes females, have never watched my little pony, and cant fix a leak if her life depended on it are able to call herself all those things and should be able to expect evrypony to treat her like it. While this is counter-intuitive and has obvious drawbacks, there are strong social reasons to consider this view.
I use all these definitions in different kinds of situations depending on context, and probably end up confusing them quite a bit. Having different words for them would probably be useful.
For practical purposes, assuming the first interpretation when someone says "identity" naively, and then using somehting like "apparent identity" (hard to find somehting politically correct there) for the turing test one and "presented identity" for the labels one might work. More suggestions on that welcome.
Do you have a theory of gender? I'd more or less thought that gender was something people made up, but this doesn't match well with transgender people who are desperately unhappy until they have a public gender which matches what they believe themselves to be.
At this point, I accept that I don't know what's going on with gender.
Gender is somehting people "made up". So is digital currency. Being made up does not make things less real.
I'm not sure what you mean by "theory of gender", I tend to take everything on a case-by-case basis for each individual. Personally, I do not consider myself to have any gender identity and ashamedly admit to having a hard time empathizing with considering such issues to be important or relevant in either direction due to the concept seeming alien to me, but I see that lots of people do so so I try to do so despite having a hard time with it.
For those situations where gender does matter, I tend to treat it not like a spectrum from male to female, or even some multidimensional space, but as a complex data structure where people get to put lists of arbitrary strings with conditionals into all the fields such as "what types of noun do you like to have * with?", "what pronoun would you like to be refereed to with?", "what types of accessories would you like to wear?", etc. If you want to be a typical macho male except on Mondays when you're a nerdy girl that must always be referred to with royal you, that's a perfectly valid gender identity. I'd come up with somehting a lot stranger but it could go on arbitrarily long so I wont bother.
I think this resembles some kinds of postmodernism but I'm not sure and it's irrelevant anyway.
You aren't looking into the black box. It's good policy to say "Eh, people know best" and treating them as whatever they say they are. But how do I figure out what pronouns I want in the first place?
How is that relevant?
The actual answer is that I have a black box intuition that correlates with the black box in your head, neither of which are interesting enough to bother dissecting. It's classified as part of the English language.
So yea, I'm just pragmatic and not very curious on this one.
Jamie comes up to you and says: "Hey, I know people have been calling me 'she', but I have this feeling of repugnance to it and I'm happy when they call me 'he'. I think I'd like to be called 'he', but I'm not sure - and maybe gender-neutral is better after all. It's not like I can try each for six months, because in this society saying you want your pronouns changed is hard, gets you stared at, called slurs, and possibly killed. Plus, women categorize me as one of them and men don't, and it takes a long time to change this subconscious classification, so you can't do that all the time. So what pronouns should I pick?"
What do you tell Jamie? What if you are Jamie?
"Test it out for 6 months with those people who won't mind "flipfloping", such as me, your own inner monologue, your closest friends and family, etc. then if you like it you can do it openly for the rest of the world as well."
I can't imagine being Jamie well, unless I also imagine considering females inferior and repugnant and frame it as an insult, at which point the mindset would be so different from me that the question is pointless. (Also, even imagining such a thing as a hypothetical sets of very unpleasant anti-bigotry fail-safes and alarms.)
I don't see any special mystery here. Some people are also unhappy until they "find God". Other people earnestly believe that their arm is missing. Human brains can act in all sorts of ways! You could go LW-extreme and say that delusions are always bad (i.e. a man who thinks he's a woman isn't any better than a man who believes in god, no matter the emotional implications of either belief). Or you could apply the reasoning Yvain used in his "diseased thinking" post, and ask whether society is better off accepting this or that deviation from the mean, or trying to "cure" it.
The neurology involved in finding god is very real and useful and happiness-inducing. It is also completely independent of the actual existence of a god to be found. (It's actually better for people who try to find or have found god to become atheists. Once you know how god works, you can have more of it.)
Believing in the existence of god, or that your arm is missing, involve wrong beliefs. The ideal (possibly forbidden by brain bugs) resolutions are learning that god isn't a dude in the sky but a perfectly ordinary oxytocin-secreting circuit, and that your arm works and you can use it. I'm not seeing the analogy to gender and species. If told "The reason you go around saying you're trans is a bug in your brain similar to believing your arm is missing.", I expect most transpeople would be able to believe it, in the sense of exhibiting verbal behavior like "Yeah, I was wrong." rather than "No, actually it's my daughter's brain. The spirits spoke to me in my heart.". Yet they wouldn't stop being miserable.
One of my husband's friends is a transsexual. I haven't actually talked a lot with her about it (because she didn't want to, being fed up with everyone wanting to talk about it all the time), but I gather that (with her at least, and with many if not most others) it's really just a question of body image. That is, it isn't a question of 'identity', it's just that they feel like their body is wrong, that they have parts that shouldn't be there and are missing parts that should. The right analogy isn't with 'otherkin' (I didn't even know those existed!), but with those people that feel like their arm or leg doesn't belong to them, and go to great lengths to have the 'extra' body part amputated.
The dangers of N=1 studies. I've met people for whom it was almost entirely a question of body image, and people for whom it was almost entirely a question of social perception - if they were exiled to a desert island forever, they would feel very little gender dysphoria, the problems start when people start saying "You're such a beautiful girl!" instead of "You're such a strong boy!".
Transpeople with that "I should have this disability" disorder confirm that the dysphoria induced by extra limbs or senses are similar to the dysphoria induced by having a wrongly sexed body, so you're right.
Like these guys.
N.B. I may be mindkilled on some or all of this topic. Please salt liberally.
You have just described the entirety of tumblr's "social justice" culture (note: link is to a satire). The assumption there is that identifying as any label makes it automatically valid; doubly so if it's not a mainstream identity, triply so if it lets you claim you're not as well treated as normal cis white males with wealthy parents. As a result, you get people who misuse terms that actual groups use (i.e. "trigger", originally meant for PTSD flashback and/or epilepsy inducing content, has now been watered down through misuse into the much vaguer idea of "it squicks/disappoints/annoys me", rather than "it causes me serious physical/psychological harm"). And then there's things like transabled and the aforementioned otherkin/soulbond/etc. classifications, which... well, I honestly have no idea if they're jokes or a real thing sometimes.
As a result, anyone who so much as misuses the terminology people choose for themselves (even if they were never told it existed) is dogpiled by insults about how one is bigoted, ableist, privileged, etc..
As an example of how deep the rabbit hole goes, there's the attempt at an inclusive gender checkbox form, which...
Apparently each of these checkboxes corresponds to a distinct gender identity with an actual community around it. Is this actually best for serving the interests of everyone who wants a "nonstandard" option on that list? I get that humans are diverse, but those are some pretty fine distinctions to insist on making. (What's the difference between agender and genderless?)
So here's what I'm trying to say.
While social justice as an abstract concept is something that is needed, insofar as an umbrella term for things like disability rights, feminism, etc., in practice, it seems to be enforced by shrews who think that they are special snowflakes and lash out if any of their odd identities is attacked.
And if you want to make "let anyone identify as anything they want" a thing, you're going to have to explain that to people who have been hurt by things like this: why they're supposed to yield to the kid who thinks she's a transsexual transethnic otherkin, doesn't have enough spoons (energy) to argue and/or is "triggered" by aforementioned argument (yet stays up until 3 in the morning yelling at people on the internet).
I'm still working on detoxifying myself from attempting to label everything I "am", so as to stack the SJ "oppression" bonuses like some bizarre twisted version of a puzzle game. At least I didn't end up writing much of that down, or otherwise I'd have a hell of a time taking it back. As it is, I'm still attempting and failing to internalize keeping one's identity small, so...
edits: because there's no preview button
Lately, I've been feeling very sympathetic towards just such a view on identity. Given the human society's inherent unpleasant tendencies, some way of peacefully enforcing universal freedom of identity and tolerance of it would really turn things around. Ah, wouldn't it be nice if e.g. depressive alcoholic white males could just form a Gay Dwarf Fortress and live in a community that suited them perfectly, instead of harming themselves and others within the present society's narrow confines? :D
But seriously, I like this idea.
Yea, hehe.
Distinguish based on what attributes, exactly? Can you suggest contents for such a test?
Take 1000 typical males, 1000 typical females, 1000 transexual males, 1000 transexual females, 1000 typical males tasked to pretend they are female and 1000 typical females tasked to pretend they are male. Then you let each of these talk anonymously over text chat with 100 randomly chosen of the others and assign probabilities of them being in each of these categories. Then you run statistics to determine the general ability to distinguish each of the categories from each of the others.
I'd expect that {typical!male, trans!male, and troll!male} would be almost complexity distinguishable from {typical!female, trans!female, and troll!female}, that it often would be possible to distinguish typical!X from trans!X, but that trans!X are very rarely mistaken for troll!X... this matrix of possibilities is kinda huge so I wont bother filling it out more unless you specifically request it since you probably get my point by now.
Ignoring for a minute that such a test would be infeasible to realistically implement (good luck getting so many trans volunteers), it is loaded with cultural assumptions, a vague definition of "typical", and it ignores such issues as experience in the target gender role, skill in the language of the test, and culture-specific stereotypes and presuppositions.
Presumably all those things should be as randomized as possible.
There is an expression in Russian net folklore: "average temperature per hospital". This is, in effect, what you'd be measuring here.
Well, no, you'd be measuring how people come across to other people, which is an important aspect of gender but far from the most important. Still, I'd find the results of such an experiment quite interesting and informative.
I' not sure what that means and Google isn't being helpful.
It means taking averages over such an extremely diverse sample that the results end up having no real meaning - like literal average temperature per hospital, which includes sampling over corpses in the morgue and severe fever sufferers. So if the average temperature hospital 1 turns out to be 0.1 degrees higher than in hospital 2, it tells us nothing about the relative distribution of patient traits in each hospital.
That's your hypothesis over the results, not inherent in the testing procedure. If that is the case it would show up as a specific result not be mistake for somehting else.
I'd say there being very clear trends is orders of magnitude more probable.
The way I described the experiment means the raw data would be very rich, and you should be able to see very clear things like some people being better at distinguishing than others, people being better at distinguishing between people who are otherwise similar to their culture, some people being better at pretending than others, some of the "typicals" being a lot more or less typical than others, etc. There's lots of redundancy.
That expression would require less explanation if it were "average body temperature in a hospital".
Somehow the Russian version is more suggestive of that, without explicitly saying "body temperature". Languages are funny that way.
I suspect that you're vastly underestimating how similar people are.
My guess is that people's guesses will be essentially random, except possibly for the trolls (because they're trying, and so will be portraying caricatures of the opposite sex instead of actual people).
I know that I personally have never so far been able to tell men from women over a purely text channel without having been told explicitly, which I assume would be off limits. Though now I think of it that's not entirely true; I would guess from lesswrong demographics that you, Armok, are male. ('course, if you happened to be female that would prove my point nicely.)
I have. There are text analyzers which give statistical likelihoods on the gender of the author of a given piece of writing. They generally give fairly wide confidence margins, but their algorithms are pretty simple and they don't apply a lot of heuristics that humans can use. Even the best gender analyzer can only guess with limited confidence, but a person's writing style offers considerably more than zero information about their gender.
It wouldn't be off limits, and you're supposed to specifically be fishing for their gender and they're supposed to be cooperative except for the trolls.