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NancyLebovitz comments on Transsexuals and otherkin - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.