What it actually is is a matter of social role-filling and self-perception.
This is even more true about being a messiah or a famous rock star.
Do you think something in that is delusional, on a par with thinking you're both Jesus and John Lennon?
Yes, your asserting a definition that fails to cut reality at the joints (or at least is worse at it then the traditional definition) and then insisting that everyone else adopt it.
In terms of this model, it's clear enough (I think) what someone means when despite having a Y chromosome they say "I am a woman". They mean: "I am much more comfortable thinking of myself as female than as male; I wish to occupy a female role in society, to use a traditionally female name, etc.". This would make little sense if "female" meant "possessed of a uterus" or "having two X chromosomes", but (see above) that isn't what it means in this context.
I could just as easily steelman the Jesus and John Lennon guy as saying "I am much more comfortable thinking of myself as a son of God and famous rock star than as a typical human."
Namely: in almost all contexts treating someone as a woman despite their male-typical anatomy and chromosomes is easy and harmless
Not when they insist on say playing in women's sports and using women's bathrooms.
and empirically it makes these people much less likely to kill themselves.
No, empirically playing along with their delusions doesn't actually reduce their chances of killing themselves.
That is even more true about being a messiah or a famous rock star.
But not about being a specific messiah or a specific famous rock star. If everyone treats me as a messiah then I am, I suppose, a messiah in some sense. But that doesn't make me Jesus.
a definition that fails to cut reality at the joints (or at least is worse at it than the traditional definition)
Would you like to justify that?
you're asserting a definition [...] and then insisting that everyone else adopt it.
It appears to me that I am doing the exact opposite. I am describing a d...
There are some long lists of false beliefs that programmers hold. isn't because programmers are especially likely to be more wrong than anyone else, it's just that programming offers a better opportunity than most people get to find out how incomplete their model of the world is.
I'm posting about this here, not just because this information has a decent chance of being both entertaining and useful, but because LWers try to figure things out from relatively simple principles-- who knows what simplifying assumptions might be tripping us up?
The classic (and I think the first) was about names. There have been a few more lists created since then.
Time. And time zones. Crowd-sourced time errors.
Addresses. Possibly more about addresses. I haven't compared the lists.
Gender. This is so short I assume it's seriously incomplete.
Networks. Weirdly, there is no list of falsehoods programmers believe about html (or at least a fast search didn't turn anything up). Don't trust the words in the url.
Distributed computing Build systems.
Poem about character conversion.
I got started on the subject because of this about testing your code, which was posted by Andrew Ducker.