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Emile comments on Transsexuals and otherkin - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (114)
It may still be worth taking those "making shit up" seriously; among the possible social norms:
A: people are treated as belonging to the gender that matches their visible hardware (the traditional default)
B: people are treated as belonging to the gender they choose
C: people are treated as belonging to the gender that best matches their internal experiences
... I see no reason to prefer C; A and B are simpler to enforce, and C doesn't even seem to lead to greater happiness than B. C may be result in more "authenticity" than B, but then A even more so.
... so I'm seconding Yvain: the question of "Which internal experience do they have?", even if interesting, doesn't tell us the answer to the original question. (Well, I'm extrapolating Yvain's position)
Okay, time for me to ditch Postel's law because it's generating nonsence like if I get clustered with ciswomen then I can't be a man but if lucidfox gets clustered with cismen she's a woman anyway.
Reasons for C > B:
I agree - after writing my comment, reading the other bits of the thread made me think that "matches internal experience" probably correlates with "won't regret transition". It can be worth having norms that reduce the incidence of people making choices they'll regret later on.
The best approach to the problem might be to look at the experiences of those that have transitioned, and see which factors predict a greater improvement in happiness - at least, that would seem more conclusive to me than reasoning about subjective experience and emotion being more or less like that of the destination gender (though as you say, that has it's importance too).
(By the way, I'm not sure I see what Postel's law has to do with this - "whooosh", as they say)
You're brilliant. Bask in your elevated status.
Criteria I use to say someone is trans (therefore brave and awesome to transition) or not (therefore deluded and stupid) are much stricter when applied to me.
You seem to have conflated two different questions here. The original question was about how people should be treated, not whether people should (be allowed to) transition. B seems like an obviously correct answer to the original question, to me.