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.)
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Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson.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.

"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."

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.

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.

I don't entertain ideas about my gender identity at all, and don't understand people who do. Perhaps as a small child I might have done that, but don't remember a single instance.

This might make me jump to the conclusion that gender identity isn't important to me, but I think it's just as possible that being a man is invisible to me, since there's no cognitive dissonance whatsoever. Listing characteristics that are important for being a man would be quite difficult for me.

I could list many things that women usually do that I dislike, but I can think of many other reasons other than femininity for why I dislike them.

0VAuroch12y

I don't consider your IOW to be accurate; rejecting the masculine stereotypes is not the same as rejecting the cultural bundle labeled 'man', though obviously it's similar. Most trans men I know are fairly femme, and most trans women fairly butch.

4[anonymous]12y

This is why it's usually said that sex is biological, but gender is socio-cultural. Gender ideals and gender roles can change a lot from one culture to another. You might be a seemingly effeminate man in one place, and yet find that you're entirely normal in another place. It's complete delusion to think white North American cultural roles correspond to some Deep Time-driven neurological or evolutionary factor in some special way nobody else on the planet has access to. Imagine being told that 90% of the planet's men are less masculine than the median! Does that make the statistician in you perk up his ears and start screaming bloody murder, or what!?