Rationality Quotes December 2013

Cyan

Rationality quotes time!

The usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Rationality quotes time!

The usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

flipped the secondary sexual characteristics in my brain

This is a potentially valid but minority interpretation of the statement "X is trans.", held by no trans people I have discussed the subject with (and it tends to come up, eventually, across a sample size of a dozen middling-to-close friends). The more common one, which all trans people I know hold, is "At some point during my development I gained a strong repulsion from the particular cultural bundle labeled with the gender which matches the dominant one for my sex." Generally this is also a strong attraction to the other major gender bundle, but sometimes the trans person finds that bundle equally off-putting and rejects both, and others exchange between the two regularly or hold themselves to be both.

Also, the poor coding practices which evolution uses make this more, not less, likely to occur. Most people who study trans issues, history, etc. agree that there were probably high rates of 'masked' trans people in the past, who kept their personal identification preferences secret.

"At some point during my development I gained a strong repulsion from the particular cultural bundle labeled with the gender which matches the dominant one for my sex."

There was once an old Saturday Night Live skit about nationality-change operations. But given your explanation, wouldn't that imply that some people might actually think of themselves as a different nationality than the one they were born into? It's certainly a cultural bundle, after all. Why don't we see that?

4A1987dM12y

But that's way too broad IMO. I mean, I have an Y chromosome. I have male genitalia and no desire to ever change this. (I also happen to have quite a few traits that are way more common among males than among females, e.g. being about 1.88 m (6'2") tall, having a baritone vocal range, having quite a lot of terminal facial and body hair, and being sexually attracted to women.) I find calling myself male a quite reasonable way of summarizing that info. But I find claims that all this means that my long hair/dislike of football/low aggressiveness/finding it easier to befriend women than men/etc.¹ are somehow suboptimal or make my maleness any less valid to be preposterous and/or offensive. ("So I guess your wooden leg makes you a table." -- Frank Zappa) IOW I do have “a strong repulsion from the particular cultural bundle labeled with the gender which matches the dominant one for my sex”. But I don't see any particular need to throw the baby away with the bath water and stop calling myself a man. (As for neurological differences, I haven't got a brain scan in the couple few decades, but FWIW my girlfriend is a heterosexual female neurologist.) And I think that once one knows all this about me, there's no question left to ask whether I actually am a man. ---------------------------------------- 1. For something more quantitative and less stereotypical, I score slightly above median on both the masculinity and the femininity scales of the BSRI, and slightly higher on the latter than on the former.