Comment author: MichaelAnissimov 20 November 2014 09:09:26AM 1 point [-]

Yes. In communities where the strength of the family is irrelevant and the only focus is on the self, such behaviors are common. These communities are slowly being replaced by others due to their failure to reproduce.

Comment author: KaceyNow 20 November 2014 06:35:05PM 8 points [-]

I don't know which communities you're talking about, but anecdotally I have to say I've found trans bars and support groups to have a much broader range in race, class, and origin than any other places I typically go.

Also, low testosterone you describe in that paragraph is not implicated as a cause of transgender behavior, with people generally being in the typical range for their birth sex before transition, which includes outliers with very high testosterone levels. Giving people additional testosterone has been tried and not been found to "cure" transgender behavior.

Relying on made-up facts for an entire paragraph of your purpose statement is not very encouraging.

Comment author: VAuroch 19 October 2014 07:08:43PM 0 points [-]

Well, obviously it's far more complicated than one bit; like most brain features, it's built into the structure of the brain in a somewhat or totally distributed fashion, and through some developmental quirk, some or all of that structure develops in a way inappropriate to their DNA and physical layout. The more complex it is, the more I would expect genderqueer and nonbinary people to be common from increasingly nonstandard configurations of whatever that structure looks like as opposed to fairly limited values it could take on (at least the two).

Most trans people I know felt extremely uncomfortable with their sexual characteristics and assigned gender before ever hearing of the concept of a transsexual person; my ex-boyfriend jokes that he really should have figured it out sooner, given how he would devour literally any media that had crossdressing main characters, and he was raised heavily-Orthodox Jewish where the concept was not at all available. This is a pretty significant obstacle to it being a memetic phenomenon in all/most cases.

I would agree that it's to some degree a memetic fad in the case of nonbinary/genderqueer people; definitely a number of people I know slide around somewhat on the gender spectrum in what seems to be a semi-deliberate act of protest against restrictive gender norms rather than particular pain at being called the gender they were raised as. But there are also nonbinary people whose beliefs are much more deeply held, and who feel intense, crippling emotional pain (i.e. are triggered) when referred to as their raised gender rather than their chosen gender. Generally these people find the opposite binary painful to a significantly lesser extent, which supports the idea that they might be physiologically/neurologically indistinguishable from binary trans people, but they're definitely distinct from the weaker category of nonbinary identification. This is probably a necessary stopping point on the path to the inevitable death of socially-constructed gender.

In short, I think your position, while more reasonable than my past one, is mixing up a couple different phenomena and missing some data, and drawing broad, false conclusions as a result.

Comment author: KaceyNow 19 October 2014 08:36:54PM 0 points [-]

I read an article once about the hijra, a third gender in India. What surprised me at the time was that some hijra were adamant that they were not transgender in the western sense, seeing it as foreign and strange, whereas others would have preferred a binary transgender identity had it been available in their culture. So some strongly viewed hijra as what they really wanted to be, but others saw it only as a consolation prize because their culture didn't include the concept of transitioning to the other binary gender.

I walked away from this thinking that the cultural component of gender can't be overlooked. Gender is ultimately a compromise between the individual and categories provided by the culture. I can even imagine, that if one had two very different cultures and were able to completely replicate a particular infant, atom for atom, it's possible in one culture they would identify as male, and in the other as female.

Comment author: Anatoly_Vorobey 19 October 2014 06:02:40AM 5 points [-]

Hmm, "delusional" is a bit underspecified.

How about "There's no solid evidence for a gender bit in the brain. While many or most transgender people feel something, explaining that feeling as "I'm an X brain trapped in a non-X body" is essentially a memetic phenomenon. Additionally, genderqueer and non-binary persons are typically participants in a memetic fad."

I think that's what I believe; summarizing this as "trans people are delusional" seems harsh and uncharitable to me, but I can see how someone might say that's exactly what it is. If you think now that the above is obviously wrong, I'm very interested in arguments/evidence.

Comment author: KaceyNow 19 October 2014 08:15:38PM *  1 point [-]

Humans are made of both biological and memetic (social) stuff, though. It's famously difficult to ascribe any particular behavior to just one or the other -- the old nature/nurture debate being one aspect of that -- but even if you could, you can't necessarily describe one side of that as more "real" than the other side -- I am both my flesh and its neural activation patterns. One reason I believe most transgender people describe a purely physical (brain) basis is that using the language of desire is severely socially proscribed: it's not viewed as OK to merely say "I want to be a man/woman" the same way someone can say "I want to be an architect", although in both cases a person may simply be looking around at the various roles their society has on offer and finding some desirable than others.

This phenomenon isn't limited to transgender people; even 15 years ago gays and lesbians were viewed more negatively by society, and magazines would run articles about "the gay gene," despite the lack of evidence for its existence. Nowadays, in a much more tolerant culture, you can find people who say that they "choose to be gay." A similar evolution in transgender self-description could happen if society becomes more tolerant.

So, I think this is actually evidence simply that behaviors or accomplishments viewed as highly unusual (either positive or negative) are often ascribed to a physical basis, whereas anything perceived as being in the normal range of human behavior in the culture is seen simply as the individual's choice or self expression. This doesn't actually tell you anything about the cause of the action or desire -- we can't do the kind of experiments that would be necessary to find that out. For all we know, desiring to be a particular gender, or desiring to have a particular occupation are similar mixes of built-in brain organization, body chemistry, psychological imprinting, culture, and both conscious and subconscious weighing given the individual's other abilities and limitations.

Comment author: Leonhart 04 September 2014 08:35:16PM 11 points [-]

Learning to lucid dream, from everything I've read on the subject, involves progressively defeating whatever mechanism usually provides amnesia on waking. Having too much access to memories of nonexistent events seems an epistemically unsafe thing. I have one or two memories from a lifetime of dreaming, and I cannot distinguish them from life memories by any individual texture or quality; only by the fact that they don't cohere with my other memories. This scared me greatly.

Comment author: KaceyNow 06 September 2014 05:01:11AM 1 point [-]

Improving dream recall isn't necessarily important for lucid dreaming -- I practiced lucid dreaming for some years without any explicit attention to it. I can imagine ways it would be helpful: analyzing your dreams will help you recognize when you are dreaming, plus there's not much point to a lucid dream if you don't remember it.

My fears are more on the opposite side of things; some people advocate lucid dreaming methods where you slip directly from wake to lucid dream, but this requires passing through some rather terrifying states of consciousness I can't bring myself to intentionally experience.