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sixes_and_sevens comments on Transsexuals and otherkin - Less Wrong Discussion
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This is a surprisingly interesting question that I will probably now fail to do justice to.
If one of my male work colleagues expressed a desire to be a woman, and went through the process of trying to authentically look and behave like one, it would be weird, but it wouldn't be unprecedented. I have other work colleagues who are female. They communicate, socialise and locomote in essentially the same fashion. In the grand scheme of things it wouldn't be that much of a difference. Society would not collapse if every Steve became a Stacey and every Stacey became a Steve.
If one of my work colleagues expressed a desire to be a zebra, and went through the process of trying to authentically look and behave like one, that would be a problem. My workplace makes no accomodation for zebras. They'd have trouble with both the stairs and the lift. They couldn't read the employee handbook. They don't have knowledge of technical infrastructure, and even if they did, they lack the faculties for me to ask them to help me fix a server.
Zebras are not people. We can't collaborate with them as entities of legally equal status for mutual benefit. We don't even collaborate with them as entities of legally unequal status because they're not all that useful. Our society has no zebras in it.
If you say "I'm a zebra on the inside" while chilling with a Frappé in Starbucks, wearing shoes and telling the time and distinguishing human facial features, you're not performing zebrahood in the same way a transsexual performs another gender. You're just someone who says they're a zebra. Society doesn't have a way to accept that sort of person.
Consider other examples: a furry who wants to be a human/tiger hybrid, rather than an actual wolf, a dragon otherkin, and an elf otherkin. All of those are things that could be a part of society, but aren't yet.
If one of your co-workers comes to work wearing their dragon mask and a business suit, lives in a basement apartment and sleeps on their collection of coins, will society collapse?
If one of your co-workers begins modifying their body to become a human-tiger hybrid, will society collapse?
If one of your co-workers insists that you share in their belief that they have elven heritage, rather than being from Spokane, will society collapse?
I think that there will be a lot of obstacles to full acceptance of those, primarily because people are primarily wired to understand human faces, and also resist status ploys. Fursuits can be expressive, but not that expressive. Modifying the structure of your face to be less like the human average typically makes you look uglier (though there are a number of modifications that can make it cuter while moving away from the human average). If someone wants to be treated like elves or dragons are in mythological settings, while possessing none of the traits that made elves or dragons treated that way, that's a recipe for being mocked.
I think this is exactly right. To extend it a little, I think there is a plausible biological explanation for why someone with male genitalia would have a feminine mind. Some women have high testosterone levels and some men have low testosterone levels, those things exist on a continuum so we should expect some outliers who genuinely feel like they should be the other sex.
It also seems rather obvious that many transgender people (at least male to female) are actually fetishists who find feminization sexy. Basically, this should be considered an extreme form of transvestism rather than actual transsexualism. For example, a pretty high percentage of male to female transsexuals identify as "lesbian", compared to ~2% of women. To me this seems more like a particularly strong form of a fairly common fetish rather than a genuine "wrong body" situation.
Maybe it's just that another trait, like having-a-weird-brain or accepting-queerness, causes both transitioning and identifying as lesbian.
How would one even generate the fetish hypothesis in the first place, without an history of psychanalysts attributing every quirk to sexual perversion?
Estimates for the percentage of male to female transsexuals who are attracted exclusively to women range from as low as 20% to as high as 70%. That isn't something that can be explained away. If all male to female transsexuals were genuinely "women in a man's body", the percentage would be closer to the ~2% of women who call themselves lesbian. So, at minimum, attraction to women is an order of magnitude higher than the generic hypothesis (trapped in a man's body) would predict.
I never heard a psychologist attribute transsexualism to perversion. I'm aware that they used to consider it a mental disorder, years ago, but that is unrelated to why I came to believe in a different explanation.
Dan Savage mentioned in a couple of columns that 100% of the male to female transsexuals he knows who transitioned as adults were hetero men who became lesbian women. He also mentioned that all of the ones who transitioned as adolescents or children were attracted to men. My explanation (some fraction of male to female transsexuals are genuinely female-minded and a large fraction are male-minded but pursue transsexualism because of a fetish) fits the data very well. The adolescent transitioners who generally become "hetero" women are generally the (trapped in a boy's body) type, and the adult transitioners, who generally become "lesbians" tend to be the fetishists. Again, no value judgment is implied by describing them as fetishists.
ETA: minor edit for clarity
I meant that there's a global brain-weirdness trait that causes deviations from the norm in more than one way. So a transwoman's attraction to women may well be caused by the normal-sexuality module (which causes both cisness and heterosexuality) breaking down, rather than by her heterosexuality module working correctly.
It used to be the standard explanation, which I conjecture came from psychoanalysis's bad habit to say "sexual perversion!" to just about everything. Young male-liking transwomen were classified as gay men, and old female-liking transwomen were classified as autogynephilic men.
Seriously though, you independently generated the autogynephilia hypothesis? If you did, that's pretty strong evidence for it. I agree there's a gap between young-transition and old-transition women, though I've seen Dan Savage spout some serious bullshit before so maybe we're seeing a pattern that isn't there.
A single-cluster explanation is that if you're a transwoman who likes men, you have to accept you're queer in the first place (a bi or gay man). This makes it easier to accept you're trans. Whereas if you're a lesbian (or asexual?) transwoman, you have to accept both transsexuality and homosexuality at once, which takes longer.
If there are multiple clusters, I would expect them to be similar among MTFs and FTMs, because of the other similarities (e.g. number of transpeople in each). Is there any evidence of autoandrophilia?
Also, while there seems to be evidence for the multiple-cluster hypothesis, what makes you think that old straight transwomen are motivated by a sexual fetish?
It's consistent with my (admittedly anecdotal) observations as well.
FTMs seem to be generally attracted to women. Savage also claimed that most FTMs are attracted to women. There also seems to be fewer FTM than MTF. This seems to support the view that most FTMs are male-minded and not fetishists.
Okay, but why a fetish?
I was about to reply exactly that, thank you for phrasing it in a better way than I would have.