For curious readers: Most of the vast "comment graveyard" are dozens of copies of the same two or three comments.
(For future reference: parent of this is from the same person who's spamming LW with infinitely many copies of the same comments, and says "Which keep getting deleted by the mods for no good reason.")
The actual truth: the good reason why the mods keep deleting these comments is that the person posting them has been banned and banned and banned again from LW, for abusive behaviour stretching back over a timespan of years.
I don't think it's too controversial to propose that at least some of the transgender self-reports might result from the same mechanism as cisgender self-reports. Again, the idea is that there is some 'self-reporting algorithm', that takes some input that we don't yet know about, and outputs a gender category, and that both cisgender people and transgender people have this
I claim that this is knowably false. Rather than there are being any sort of gender-identity switch or self-reporting mechanism in the brain, there are two distinct classes of psycholo...
I was familiar with this.
Yup. This is a case (I can think of one more, but I'll let that be someone else's crusade) where we have the correct theory in the psychology literature, and all the nice smart socially-liberal people have heard of the theory, but they think to themselves, "Oh, but only bad outgroup people could believe something crazy like that; it's just some guy's theory; it probably isn't actually true."
Surprise! Everyone is lying! Everyone is lying because telling the truth would be politically inconvenient!
I find the first etiology similar to my model. [...] Writing things like "behaviorally-masculine girls" just sounds like paraphrase to me.
Similar, but the key difference is that I claim that there's no atomic "identity": whether a very behaviorally-masculine girl grows up to identify as a "butch lesbian" or "trans man" is mostly going to depend on the details of her/his cultural environment and the incentives she/he faces.
Do you have thoughts on Thoughts on The Blanchard/Bailey Distinction?
I do find your confidence surprising
I agree that I probably look insanely confident! What's going on her...
Gah. Given we can't even measure or answer "is this what it's like to be another human?", let's not bring political/social identity into this forum.
"Politics is the mind-killer" was a good try, but it turns out to not be an evolutionarily stable strategy: if the people with good epistemology stay away from anything that looks too "political", all communities end up getting dominated by people with bad epistemologies who aren't afraid of getting political. We need a discipline of "defensive politics": clever strategies and social technologies to keep communities and institutions focused on their original purpose (in our case, advancing the art of human rationality), even as they recruit newcomers who (like all humans) have their own goals only partially aligned with the community's goals.
"no agrees with or cares".
The content of your posts has NOTHING TO DO WITH WHY THEY ARE BANNED. once again. You are banned for life from lesswrong for attempting to manipulate the upvote and downvote system accounts lookup-->lookup70 are all banned for being sockpuppets for voting up your own posts and voting down people who disagree with you. The downvoting system is currently suspended BECAUSE OF YOU AND NOTHING ELSE.
You are not a rationalist. You are an idiot who unfortunately has access to the internet.
I DON'T CARE WHAT THE CONTENT OF YOUR COMMENTS ARE YOU ARE BANNED FOR ATTEMPTED MANIPULATION OF THE VOTING SYSTEM.
I read the article twice, but I have to admit that I have no idea what it is talking about. I do understand which tribal affiliation one signals by upvoting it, but I fail to extract the factual statements that I could either agree or disagree with.
The article starts with a hypothesis that "at least some of the transgender self-reports might result from the same mechanism as cisgender self-reports". Okay, so this tries to compare some X to Y, except that I have no idea what either of them means. Maybe I am dense, but taking myself as an example o...
I think this topic is really only as political as you make it.
I did in fact decide not to reply to the grandparent because I estimated that it would cause less harm in this respect than replying. This article is intended to be a contribution to the philosophy of gender identity in the style of EY's executable philosophy, and it is more directly a reply to lucidfox's Gender Identity and Rationality. This topic was perfectly acceptable in 2010.
some people whose opinions seem worth listening to
Worth listening to?—of course. Worth believing after looking at the rest of the available evidence? My claim is, "No, this theory looks really solid and explains so much of what I see in myself and what I see in other people that I trust it more than any particular contradictory self-report; psychology is about invalidating people's identities."
You might disagree. Most trans women might disagree. And that's okay! It's okay for my world-model to not agree with your world-model!
That would make sense, but in that I case I wonder which characteristics constitute the "masculinity" or "feminity", and what is their relative weight in the set. Again, to use myself as an example, I don't like drinking beer, and I don't like watching football or hockey -- and I wonder how many masculinity points did I lose by that: 1% or 20%? On the other hand, how many masculinity points do I get for being good at math, or being a computer programmer, or enjoying rationality?
I think that while many people would in general agree that ...
As I understand it, there is a phenomenon among transgender people where no matter what they do they can't help but ask themselves the question, "Am I really an [insert self-reported gender category here]?"
The obvious answer is "No". In fact this experience seems suspiciously like trying to make oneself belief that one believes one's gender to be X.
...Humans universally make inferences about their typicality with respect to their self-reported gender. Check Google Scholar for 'self-perceived gender typicality' for further reading. So
As I understand it, there is a phenomenon among transgender people where no matter what they do they can't help but ask themselves the question, "Am I really an [insert self-reported gender category here]?"
The obvious answer is "No". In fact this experience seems suspiciously like trying to make oneself belief that one believes one's gender to be X.
...Humans universally make inferences about their typicality with respect to their self-reported gender. Check Google Scholar for 'self-perceived gender typicality' for further reading. So
As I understand it, there is a phenomenon among transgender people where no matter what they do they can't help but ask themselves the question, "Am I really an [insert self-reported gender category here]?"
The obvious answer is "No". In fact this experience seems suspiciously like trying to make oneself belief that one believes one's gender to be X.
...Humans universally make inferences about their typicality with respect to their self-reported gender. Check Google Scholar for 'self-perceived gender typicality' for further reading. So
As I understand it, there is a phenomenon among transgender people where no matter what they do they can't help but ask themselves the question, "Am I really an [insert self-reported gender category here]?"
The obvious answer is "No". In fact this experience seems suspiciously like trying to make oneself belief that one believes one's gender to be X.
...Humans universally make inferences about their typicality with respect to their self-reported gender. Check Google Scholar for 'self-perceived gender typicality' for further reading. So
As I understand it, there is a phenomenon among transgender people where no matter what they do they can't help but ask themselves the question, "Am I really an [insert self-reported gender category here]?"
The obvious answer is "No". In fact this experience seems suspiciously like trying to make oneself belief that one believes one's gender to be X.
...Humans universally make inferences about their typicality with respect to their self-reported gender. Check Google Scholar for 'self-perceived gender typicality' for further reading. So
As I understand it, there is a phenomenon among transgender people where no matter what they do they can't help but ask themselves the question, "Am I really an [insert self-reported gender category here]?"
The obvious answer is "No". In fact this experience seems suspiciously like trying to make oneself belief that one believes one's gender to be X.
...Humans universally make inferences about their typicality with respect to their self-reported gender. Check Google Scholar for 'self-perceived gender typicality' for further reading. So
As I understand it, there is a phenomenon among transgender people where no matter what they do they can't help but ask themselves the question, "Am I really an [insert self-reported gender category here]?"
The obvious answer is "No". In fact this experience seems suspiciously like trying to make oneself belief that one believes one's gender to be X.
...Humans universally make inferences about their typicality with respect to their self-reported gender. Check Google Scholar for 'self-perceived gender typicality' for further reading. So
As I understand it, there is a phenomenon among transgender people where no matter what they do they can't help but ask themselves the question, "Am I really an [insert self-reported gender category here]?"
The obvious answer is "No". In fact this experience seems suspiciously like trying to make oneself belief that one believes one's gender to be X.
...Humans universally make inferences about their typicality with respect to their self-reported gender. Check Google Scholar for 'self-perceived gender typicality' for further reading. So
As I understand it, there is a phenomenon among transgender people where no matter what they do they can't help but ask themselves the question, "Am I really an [insert self-reported gender category here]?"
The obvious answer is "No". In fact this experience seems suspiciously like trying to make oneself belief that one believes one's gender to be X.
...Humans universally make inferences about their typicality with respect to their self-reported gender. Check Google Scholar for 'self-perceived gender typicality' for further reading. So
BANNED FOREVER. BANNED FOREVER.
DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU ARE THE NEXT GHANDI AND THE NEXT EINSTEIN TOGETHER. THERE IS AN ENTIRE INTERNET. HANG OUT ANYWHERE BUT HERE.
384 USELESS FUCKING POSTS. FUCK OFF. NO ONE LIKES A TROLL. YOU DON'T HAVE ANYTHING GOOD TO SAY. I BET ALL YOUR PRINCETON FRIENDS THINK YOU ARE GREAT IN BED. OH WAIT NRX, PROBABLY CAN'T GET LAID OR I WOULDN'T BE HAVING THIS PROBLEM.
DON'T WASTE MY FUCKING TIME.
BANNED FOREVER. BANNED FOREVER.
DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU ARE THE NEXT GHANDI AND THE NEXT EINSTEIN TOGETHER. THERE IS AN ENTIRE INTERNET. HANG OUT ANYWHERE BUT HERE.
384 USELESS FUCKING POSTS. FUCK OFF. NO ONE LIKES A TROLL. YOU DON'T HAVE ANYTHING GOOD TO SAY. I BET ALL YOUR PRINCETON FRIENDS THINK YOU ARE GREAT IN BED. OH WAIT NRX, PROBABLY CAN'T GET LAID OR I WOULDN'T BE HAVING THIS PROBLEM.
DON'T WASTE MY FUCKING TIME.
BANNED FOREVER. BANNED FOREVER.
DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU ARE THE NEXT GHANDI AND THE NEXT EINSTEIN TOGETHER. THERE IS AN ENTIRE INTERNET. HANG OUT ANYWHERE BUT HERE.
384 USELESS FUCKING POSTS. FUCK OFF. NO ONE LIKES A TROLL. YOU DON'T HAVE ANYTHING GOOD TO SAY. I BET ALL YOUR PRINCETON FRIENDS THINK YOU ARE GREAT IN BED. OH WAIT NRX, PROBABLY CAN'T GET LAID OR I WOULDN'T BE HAVING THIS PROBLEM.
DON'T WASTE MY FUCKING TIME.
BANNED FOREVER. BANNED FOREVER.
DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU ARE THE NEXT GHANDI AND THE NEXT EINSTEIN TOGETHER. THERE IS AN ENTIRE INTERNET. HANG OUT ANYWHERE BUT HERE.
384 USELESS FUCKING POSTS. FUCK OFF. NO ONE LIKES A TROLL. YOU DON'T HAVE ANYTHING GOOD TO SAY. I BET ALL YOUR PRINCETON FRIENDS THINK YOU ARE GREAT IN BED. OH WAIT NRX, PROBABLY CAN'T GET LAID OR I WOULDN'T BE HAVING THIS PROBLEM.
DON'T WASTE MY FUCKING TIME.
we don't have a word for people who ... don't believe they are avatars of a god either
Humanity did reasonably well for millennia without the need for such a word.
And also without (to pick a few kinda-random examples) "topologist", "neoreactionary", "rationalist". Should we throw those words away too?
My understanding is that this account of things is vigorously contested by at least some people whose opinions seem worth listening to, including a lot of trans women.
Yes, people tend to vigorously contest things that threaten their identity. This tends to have no relation to the truth of those things.
What work is the word "really" actually doing here?
How about referring to the cluster structure of gender space. Of course, then we'd reach the conclusion that there are only two genders, and the traditional assignment is people to them is the correct one.
As I understand it, there is a phenomenon among transgender people where no matter what they do they can't help but ask themselves the question, "Am I really an [insert self-reported gender category here]?"
The obvious answer is "No". In fact this experience seems suspiciously like trying to make oneself belief that one believes one's gender to be X.
...Humans universally make inferences about their typicality with respect to their self-reported gender. Check Google Scholar for 'self-perceived gender typicality' for further reading. So
Sorry, if you start dissociating words from their common meanings, don't be surprised if the result are applied in ways that don't necessarily agree with the conclusions you want.
I'm just applying the logic the OP applies to terms like "man" and "woman" to "human". If you find the results absurd the problem is likely in the OP. Heck some "people" are questioning their own humanity.
I think this topic is really only as political as you make it.
I did in fact decide not to reply to the grandparent because I estimated that it would cause less harm in this respect than replying. This article is intended to be a contribution to the philosophy of gender identity in the style of EY's executable philosophy, and it is more directly a reply to lucidfox's Gender Identity and Rationality. This topic was perfectly acceptable in 2010.
This is an excellent summary of my argument! Thank you so much for compressing this into a soundbite!
As I understand it, there is a phenomenon among transgender people where no matter what they do they can't help but ask themselves the question, "Am I really an [insert self-reported gender category here]?" In the past, a few people have called for a LessWrong-style dissolution of this question. This is how I approach the problem.
There are two caveats which I must address in the beginning.
The first caveat has to do with hypotheses about the etiology of the transgender condition. There are many possible causes of gender identity self-reports, but I don't think it's too controversial to propose that at least some of the transgender self-reports might result from the same mechanism as cisgender self-reports. Again, the idea is that there is some 'self-reporting algorithm', that takes some input that we don't yet know about, and outputs a gender category, and that both cisgender people and transgender people have this. It's not hard to come up with just-so stories about why having such an algorithm and caring about its output might have been adaptive. This is, however, an assumption. In theory, the self-reports from transgender people could have a cause separate from the self-reports of cisgender people, but it's not what I expect.
The second caveat has to do with essentialism. In the past calls for an article like this one, I saw people point out that we reason about gender as if it is an essence, and that any dissolution would have to avoid this mistake. But there's a difference between describing an algorithm that produces a category which feels like an essence, and providing an essentialist explanation. My dissolution will talk about essences because the human mind reasons with them, but my dissolution itself will not be essentialist in nature.
Humans universally make inferences about their typicality with respect to their self-reported gender. Check Google Scholar for 'self-perceived gender typicality' for further reading. So when I refer to a transman, by my model, I mean, "A human whose self-reporting algorithm returns the gender category 'male', but whose self-perceived gender typicality checker returns 'Highly atypical!'"
And the word 'human' at the beginning of that sentence is important. I do not mean "A human that is secretly, essentially a girl," or "A human that is secretly, essentially a boy,"; I just mean a human. I postulate that there are not boy typicality checkers and girl typicality checkers; there are typicality checkers that take an arbitrary gender category as input and return a measure of that human's self-perceived typicality with regard to the category.
So when a transwoman looks in the mirror and feels atypical because of a typicality inference from the width of her hips, I believe that this is not a fundamentally transgender experience, not different in kind, but only in degree, from a ciswoman who listens to herself speak and feels atypical because of a typicality inference from the pitch of her voice.
Fortunately, society's treatment of transgender people has come around to something like this in recent decades; our therapy proceeds by helping transgender people become more typical instances of their self-report algorithm's output.
Many of the typical traits are quite tangible: behavior, personality, appearance. It is easier to make tangible things more typical, because they're right there for you to hold; you aren't confused about them. But I often hear reports of transgender people left with a nagging doubt, a lingering question of "Am I really an X?, which feels far more slippery and about which they confess themselves quite confused.
To get at this question, I sometimes see transgender people try to simulate the subjective experience of a typical instance of the self-report algorithm's output. They ask questions like, "Does it feel the same to be me as it does to be a 'real X'?" And I think this is the heart of the confusion.
For when they simulate the subjective experience of a 'real X', there is a striking dissimilarity between themselves and the simulation, because a 'real X' lacks a pervasive sense of distress originating from self-perceived atypicality.
But what I just described in the previous sentence is itself a typicality inference, which means that this simulation itself causes distress from atypicality, which is used to justify future inferences of self-perceived atypicality!
I expected this to take more than one go-around.
Let's review something Eliezer wrote in Fake Causality:
One of the primary inspirations for Bayesian networks was noticing the problem of double-counting evidence if inference resonates between an effect and a cause. For example, let's say that I get a bit of unreliable information that the sidewalk is wet. This should make me think it's more likely to be raining. But, if it's more likely to be raining, doesn't that make it more likely that the sidewalk is wet? And wouldn't that make it more likely that the sidewalk is slippery? But if the sidewalk is slippery, it's probably wet; and then I should again raise my probability that it's raining...
If you didn't have an explicit awareness that you have a general human algorithm that checks the arbitrary self-report against the perceived typicality, but rather you believed that this was some kind of special, transgender-specific self-doubt, then your typicality checker would never be able to mark its own distress signal as 'Typical!', and it would oscillate between judging the subjective experience as atypical, outputting a distress signal in response, judging its own distress signal as atypical, sending a distress signal about that, etc.
And this double-counting is not anything like hair length or voice pitch, or even more slippery stuff like 'being empathetic'; it's very slippery, and no matter how many other ways you would have made yourself more typical, even though those changes would have soothed you, there would have been this separate and additional lingering doubt, a doubt that can only be annihilated by understanding the deep reasons that the tangible interventions worked, and how your mind runs skew to reality.
And that's it. For me at least, this adds up to normality. There is no unbridgeable gap between the point at which you are a non-X and the point at which you become an X. Now you can just go back to making yourself as typical as you want to be, or anything else that you want to be.