Although I object against the name “cis by default”. To explain why, to me this seems like the natural categories:
1) people not identifying with a gender 2a) people identifying with a gender that matches their sex 2b) people identifying with a gender that does not match their sex
However, calling X an “Y by default” suggests that the categories go:
1) cis 1a) cis by default (a special subset of cis) 2) trans
That seems obviously wrong. Not identifying with a gender is not a special case of identifying with the gender. (Well, only in the sense that “zero is a special case of a number, so e.g. a non-king is just a special kind of king who happens to own zero kingdoms”. But when someone insists on using that, it seems obvious that their goal is to cleverly divert debate from the differences between the kings and the peasants.)
Furthermore, looking at the poll at the linked article, there are more people in the “cis by default” category than in the “cis by not-default”. Although that is obviously not a representative sample of the population. But anyway, calling non-X an “X by default” is forcing a connotation—specifically the connotation is that “cis” (which is silently equivocated with “cis by not-default”) are the majority of the population (which was not proven yet), and more importantly, that anyone who is not a “trans” is a “cis” (silently equivocated with “cis by not-default”).
Returning to the original article, it says that “trans people identify with their gender for the same reasons cis people do”, which connotationally means “everyone does exactly the same thing, so there is nothing to explain here”.
But if we use “cis by default” and “cis by not-default” as separate categories, the same statement becomes “trans people identify with their gender for the same reasons as cis-by-not-default people do”, which as far as I know may be perfectly true, but still leaves open the—in my opinion interesting—question of “so, why exactly do they both do that?”.
To related this to the previous debates, maybe Gram_Stone and Zack_M_Davis are both right—maybe the inner motives of trans people and cis-by-not-default people are the same, and they both happen to be of two kinds which I will very simply call (1) overdose by sexual hormones, and (2) enjoyment of role-playing the gender.
It’s not clear to me whether the most natural way of dividing cases up is (1) as you’ve done, by what gender if any people “identify with” in a sense that implies caring deeply about it, or (2) as is implicit in the term “cis by default”, by what gender if any people “identify with” in the weaker sense of using it to choose their preferred pronouns, typical habits of dress, etc.
I am inclined to prefer #2, not least because this sort of “identification” is more observable than the one needed for #1.
In particular, I don’t think we have the information needed to be sure of whether “cis by default” people differ from “cis not-by-default” people (a) in really truly not being deeply attached to their gender or (b) in not being aware of how deeply attached to their gender they are or—most likely, I think—a mixture of (a) and (b). Introspection is unreliable, and I suspect some people who feel “cis by default” would, if they suddenly woke up in a differently-shaped body, find themselves more upset than they’d have predicted.
(I’m pretty much cis-by-default myself. I would not expect to be greatly upset if I woke up in a differently-shaped body—aside from issues involving other people’s reactions—but I am not at all confident about that expectation. Maybe if it actually happened I’d feel mutilated and deformed and distressingly weird.)
If the question is “how will the society react to X”, then it makes sense to put people strongly identifying with their biological sex to the same basket as people not really caring about their gender—both of them will follow the rules of the society.
If the question is “what specific mechanism makes people identify strongly with a gender, then it makes sense to put people strongly identifying with a gender (either corresponding to their biological sex, or the opposite one) in the same basket.
This article speculated about “self-reporting algorithm”, so the latter seems more relevant here.
Introspection is unreliable, and I suspect some people who feel “cis by default” would, if they suddenly woke up in a differently-shaped body, find themselves more upset than they’d have predicted.
I agree that instrospection is unreliable, but isn’t this a double standard? We should “listen and believe” to people reporting about their experiences and feelings… unless those reports contradict the official theory, and those people don’t belong to any officialy recognized protected groups.
So when a guy says “I feel I would rather be a woman”, it’s “yes, and everyone should respect how you feel”, while when a guy says “I feel like I don’t care about being a man or a woman”, it’s “nah, you probably don’t know what you are talking about”.
This article speculated about “self-reporting algorithm”, so the latter seems more relevant here.
Well, the term “cis by default” was not created in response to this article, and is used in other contexts, so if you’re going to
object against the name “cis by default”
then it seems like you need better reasons than that the name wasn’t coined with this thread in mind. No?
isn’t this a double standard?
I don’t think so, but it’s not 100% clear to me what you’re saying is a double standard or who you’re saying is applying that double standard. The thing I’m being doubtful about here is not anyone’s “experiences and feelings”, it’s their (and my) extrapolation on the basis of those experiences and feelings to what they would experience and feel in hypothetical situations where, e.g., their body suddenly changed.
(Perhaps what you are saying about yourself doesn’t involve any such extrapolation, in which case I may have misunderstood you. The reason why I think being “cis by default” generally does involve extrapolation is that when I call myself cis by default part of what I mean is “it seems to me that if I found myself in a different body I wouldn’t be deeply upset by that, which differs from the self-reports of trans people who say they are deeply upset by finding themselves in the wrong sort of body”.)
My own position, which seems coherent enough to me, is as follows:
If someone cares strongly about whether they’re regarded as male, female, or something else, then in the absence of strong special reasons for doing otherwise we should go along with that preference.
If, for instance, they take on the considerable social cost of telling everyone that they want to be known by a new name, addressed with non-standard pronouns, etc., that is good evidence that they care strongly.
If someone doesn’t much care, we should go along with whatever’s easiest.
If, for instance, they generally live according to societal expectations of the gender that matches their outward appearance at birth, that suggests that either (a) they don’t much care or (b) they do care and what they want is to be considered to belong to that gender; either way the “obvious” thing will work well.
The question “but what gender is this person really?” has either no definite answer or, if we pick a particular social context, a socially-determined answer.
As regards our own social context, we all get to influence what that socially-determined answer will be. I personally think a society in which the answer to “what gender are you?” is, barring strong special reasons to the contrary, determined by a person’s own strong preferences when they exist, is better than most alternatives.
If someone says they’re “cis by default” then I, by default, believe them. (Provisionally, because this is among other things a statement about how they’d feel in some hypothetical circumstance, and that’s the kind of thing it’s easy to be wrong about.) But any argument that takes as a premise something like “so-and-so many percent of the population are cis by default and wouldn’t care if their bodies suddenly changed sex” is assuming more than we actually know.
If someone who appears (say) male by all other usual criteria says they’re “really” a woman, I don’t think “believe” is the right word for what I do in response, although “disbelieve” would be much worse. Rather, I don’t think this is the sort of thing there’s some kind of objective fact of the matter about; we get to choose how we classify people, and I’m happy to do that classifying—for most purposes—in ways that are strongly influenced by people’s expressed gender identity.
I generally agree with what you said. My position is:
It is meaningful to ask “what exactly makes some people identify strongly with a gender”, because not everyone does that.
It doesn’t seem a priori implausible that there could be two (or more) separate mechanisms achieving similar effects. I mean, we already know that some people want to cross-dress without changing their identity, some people want to change their identity without having surgery, and some people want surgery. So it seems plausible that at least these different groups have different reasons for wanting what they want.
Seems to me the political motivation behind this article is to make trans people feel… uhm… less unusual, by saying “the feelings you have, they are exactly the same feelings that cis people have (except that in your case it happens to be a different gender)”. There is a good point here, but it is misleading without saying that actually many cis people don’t have such feelings, even if most probably do.
(And, uhm, the “politics is the mind-killer” aspect of the topic is that it feels difficult to me to make these points without seeming like I hate trans people or something. That is, here is an article containing a misleading statement, which is cheap to upvote, and costly to argue against. So I wonder if most other readers don’t have a similar objection, or they just realized it is smarter to ignore the whole topic.)
The number of upvotes your original comment got suggests that there may well be other readers with a similar objection. (Though of course it might just be Eugine’s socks.) FWIW I haven’t at all got the impression from what you’ve written here that you hate trans people or (would) treat them badly or anything like that.
it is misleading without saying that actually many cis people don’t have such feelings
The difficulty here (and maybe I haven’t been clear enough in expressing it) is that you aren’t comparing like with like. The strong feeling (at least some) trans people report is a dysphoria that (so they say it seems to them) arises from being in the “wrong” sort of body, and there’s no reason to expect equally strong feelings to arise from being in the “right” sort of body. It’s more the mechanism than the feelings that’s claimed to be the same here.
Imagine that some people report having terrible vertigo, and other people say “ha, you’re just making it up”. And then the following proposal is made: your brain gets information about orientation and movement and so on from various sources, one of which is your inner ear; sometimes your inner ear can report different things from those other sources, and that’s when you get vertigo. So vertigo is a thing that arises from a mechanism present in everyone; what’s different about vertigo sufferers is that mismatch. (Of course there are plenty of ways in which vertigo is disanalogous to transness...)
It wouldn’t be much of an objection to this account of things to say “But a lot of people without vertigo don’t have any particularly strong feelings of having-the-right-balance; we just go about our lives and don’t notice it at all”. Because the point isn’t that everyone has strong feelings about it all the time, it’s that everyone’s brain is considering these things all the time and when that goes wrong you get those strong and unpleasant feelings.
If someone cares strongly about whether they’re regarded as male, female, or something else, then in the absence of strong special reasons for doing otherwise we should go along with that preference.
If, for instance, they take on the considerable social cost of telling everyone that they want to be known by a new name, addressed with non-standard pronouns, etc., that is good evidence that they care strongly.
Except we don’t, and can’t, apply that logic in any other situation, otherwise we’d find ourselves going out of our way to accommodate every nutcase and everyone who finds it convenient to pretend to be a nutcase.
If someone who appears (say) male by all other usual criteria says they’re “really” a woman, I don’t think “believe” is the right word for what I do in response, although “disbelieve” would be much worse. Rather, I don’t think this is the sort of thing there’s some kind of objective fact of the matter about; we get to choose how we classify people, and I’m happy to do that classifying—for most purposes—in ways that are strongly influenced by people’s expressed gender identity.
What about someone who insists that Jesus talked to him? Or the classic reductio ad absurdum of someone who insists he (or it?) is an attack helicopter?
Some people, for whatever reason, find themselves with a strong conviction that they should be, or that they really are, of a different gender from the one their body-type seems to indicate. Those people are called “trans”, short for “transgender”, for kinda obvious reasons. Most people don’t. Those people are called “cis”, because traditionally when an opposite of “trans” is needed “cis” is it. (Cisalpine. Cismontane. Cis fats.)
Do please explain what in the foregoing paragraph depends on “feminism” in any sense that anyone could object to, or requires “irrationalism”.
That seems like it. Thanks!
Although I object against the name “cis by default”. To explain why, to me this seems like the natural categories:
1) people not identifying with a gender
2a) people identifying with a gender that matches their sex
2b) people identifying with a gender that does not match their sex
However, calling X an “Y by default” suggests that the categories go:
1) cis
1a) cis by default (a special subset of cis)
2) trans
That seems obviously wrong. Not identifying with a gender is not a special case of identifying with the gender. (Well, only in the sense that “zero is a special case of a number, so e.g. a non-king is just a special kind of king who happens to own zero kingdoms”. But when someone insists on using that, it seems obvious that their goal is to cleverly divert debate from the differences between the kings and the peasants.)
Furthermore, looking at the poll at the linked article, there are more people in the “cis by default” category than in the “cis by not-default”. Although that is obviously not a representative sample of the population. But anyway, calling non-X an “X by default” is forcing a connotation—specifically the connotation is that “cis” (which is silently equivocated with “cis by not-default”) are the majority of the population (which was not proven yet), and more importantly, that anyone who is not a “trans” is a “cis” (silently equivocated with “cis by not-default”).
Returning to the original article, it says that “trans people identify with their gender for the same reasons cis people do”, which connotationally means “everyone does exactly the same thing, so there is nothing to explain here”.
But if we use “cis by default” and “cis by not-default” as separate categories, the same statement becomes “trans people identify with their gender for the same reasons as cis-by-not-default people do”, which as far as I know may be perfectly true, but still leaves open the—in my opinion interesting—question of “so, why exactly do they both do that?”.
To related this to the previous debates, maybe Gram_Stone and Zack_M_Davis are both right—maybe the inner motives of trans people and cis-by-not-default people are the same, and they both happen to be of two kinds which I will very simply call (1) overdose by sexual hormones, and (2) enjoyment of role-playing the gender.
It’s not clear to me whether the most natural way of dividing cases up is (1) as you’ve done, by what gender if any people “identify with” in a sense that implies caring deeply about it, or (2) as is implicit in the term “cis by default”, by what gender if any people “identify with” in the weaker sense of using it to choose their preferred pronouns, typical habits of dress, etc.
I am inclined to prefer #2, not least because this sort of “identification” is more observable than the one needed for #1.
In particular, I don’t think we have the information needed to be sure of whether “cis by default” people differ from “cis not-by-default” people (a) in really truly not being deeply attached to their gender or (b) in not being aware of how deeply attached to their gender they are or—most likely, I think—a mixture of (a) and (b). Introspection is unreliable, and I suspect some people who feel “cis by default” would, if they suddenly woke up in a differently-shaped body, find themselves more upset than they’d have predicted.
(I’m pretty much cis-by-default myself. I would not expect to be greatly upset if I woke up in a differently-shaped body—aside from issues involving other people’s reactions—but I am not at all confident about that expectation. Maybe if it actually happened I’d feel mutilated and deformed and distressingly weird.)
I guess it depends on what specific question is one trying to answer.
If the question is “how will the society react to X”, then it makes sense to put people strongly identifying with their biological sex to the same basket as people not really caring about their gender—both of them will follow the rules of the society.
If the question is “what specific mechanism makes people identify strongly with a gender, then it makes sense to put people strongly identifying with a gender (either corresponding to their biological sex, or the opposite one) in the same basket.
This article speculated about “self-reporting algorithm”, so the latter seems more relevant here.
I agree that instrospection is unreliable, but isn’t this a double standard? We should “listen and believe” to people reporting about their experiences and feelings… unless those reports contradict the official theory, and those people don’t belong to any officialy recognized protected groups.
So when a guy says “I feel I would rather be a woman”, it’s “yes, and everyone should respect how you feel”, while when a guy says “I feel like I don’t care about being a man or a woman”, it’s “nah, you probably don’t know what you are talking about”.
Well, the term “cis by default” was not created in response to this article, and is used in other contexts, so if you’re going to
then it seems like you need better reasons than that the name wasn’t coined with this thread in mind. No?
I don’t think so, but it’s not 100% clear to me what you’re saying is a double standard or who you’re saying is applying that double standard. The thing I’m being doubtful about here is not anyone’s “experiences and feelings”, it’s their (and my) extrapolation on the basis of those experiences and feelings to what they would experience and feel in hypothetical situations where, e.g., their body suddenly changed.
(Perhaps what you are saying about yourself doesn’t involve any such extrapolation, in which case I may have misunderstood you. The reason why I think being “cis by default” generally does involve extrapolation is that when I call myself cis by default part of what I mean is “it seems to me that if I found myself in a different body I wouldn’t be deeply upset by that, which differs from the self-reports of trans people who say they are deeply upset by finding themselves in the wrong sort of body”.)
My own position, which seems coherent enough to me, is as follows:
If someone cares strongly about whether they’re regarded as male, female, or something else, then in the absence of strong special reasons for doing otherwise we should go along with that preference.
If, for instance, they take on the considerable social cost of telling everyone that they want to be known by a new name, addressed with non-standard pronouns, etc., that is good evidence that they care strongly.
If someone doesn’t much care, we should go along with whatever’s easiest.
If, for instance, they generally live according to societal expectations of the gender that matches their outward appearance at birth, that suggests that either (a) they don’t much care or (b) they do care and what they want is to be considered to belong to that gender; either way the “obvious” thing will work well.
The question “but what gender is this person really?” has either no definite answer or, if we pick a particular social context, a socially-determined answer.
As regards our own social context, we all get to influence what that socially-determined answer will be. I personally think a society in which the answer to “what gender are you?” is, barring strong special reasons to the contrary, determined by a person’s own strong preferences when they exist, is better than most alternatives.
If someone says they’re “cis by default” then I, by default, believe them. (Provisionally, because this is among other things a statement about how they’d feel in some hypothetical circumstance, and that’s the kind of thing it’s easy to be wrong about.) But any argument that takes as a premise something like “so-and-so many percent of the population are cis by default and wouldn’t care if their bodies suddenly changed sex” is assuming more than we actually know.
If someone who appears (say) male by all other usual criteria says they’re “really” a woman, I don’t think “believe” is the right word for what I do in response, although “disbelieve” would be much worse. Rather, I don’t think this is the sort of thing there’s some kind of objective fact of the matter about; we get to choose how we classify people, and I’m happy to do that classifying—for most purposes—in ways that are strongly influenced by people’s expressed gender identity.
Do you see a double standard anywhere in that?
I generally agree with what you said. My position is:
It is meaningful to ask “what exactly makes some people identify strongly with a gender”, because not everyone does that.
It doesn’t seem a priori implausible that there could be two (or more) separate mechanisms achieving similar effects. I mean, we already know that some people want to cross-dress without changing their identity, some people want to change their identity without having surgery, and some people want surgery. So it seems plausible that at least these different groups have different reasons for wanting what they want.
Seems to me the political motivation behind this article is to make trans people feel… uhm… less unusual, by saying “the feelings you have, they are exactly the same feelings that cis people have (except that in your case it happens to be a different gender)”. There is a good point here, but it is misleading without saying that actually many cis people don’t have such feelings, even if most probably do.
(And, uhm, the “politics is the mind-killer” aspect of the topic is that it feels difficult to me to make these points without seeming like I hate trans people or something. That is, here is an article containing a misleading statement, which is cheap to upvote, and costly to argue against. So I wonder if most other readers don’t have a similar objection, or they just realized it is smarter to ignore the whole topic.)
The number of upvotes your original comment got suggests that there may well be other readers with a similar objection. (Though of course it might just be Eugine’s socks.) FWIW I haven’t at all got the impression from what you’ve written here that you hate trans people or (would) treat them badly or anything like that.
The difficulty here (and maybe I haven’t been clear enough in expressing it) is that you aren’t comparing like with like. The strong feeling (at least some) trans people report is a dysphoria that (so they say it seems to them) arises from being in the “wrong” sort of body, and there’s no reason to expect equally strong feelings to arise from being in the “right” sort of body. It’s more the mechanism than the feelings that’s claimed to be the same here.
Imagine that some people report having terrible vertigo, and other people say “ha, you’re just making it up”. And then the following proposal is made: your brain gets information about orientation and movement and so on from various sources, one of which is your inner ear; sometimes your inner ear can report different things from those other sources, and that’s when you get vertigo. So vertigo is a thing that arises from a mechanism present in everyone; what’s different about vertigo sufferers is that mismatch. (Of course there are plenty of ways in which vertigo is disanalogous to transness...)
It wouldn’t be much of an objection to this account of things to say “But a lot of people without vertigo don’t have any particularly strong feelings of having-the-right-balance; we just go about our lives and don’t notice it at all”. Because the point isn’t that everyone has strong feelings about it all the time, it’s that everyone’s brain is considering these things all the time and when that goes wrong you get those strong and unpleasant feelings.
Except we don’t, and can’t, apply that logic in any other situation, otherwise we’d find ourselves going out of our way to accommodate every nutcase and everyone who finds it convenient to pretend to be a nutcase.
What about someone who insists that Jesus talked to him? Or the classic reductio ad absurdum of someone who insists he (or it?) is an attack helicopter?
BANNED FOREVER.
Go away. This is pointless. No one wants you here. This forum is not for you.
a
What is Feminism doing here? What are we, the Rationalists, or the Irrationalists?
Some people, for whatever reason, find themselves with a strong conviction that they should be, or that they really are, of a different gender from the one their body-type seems to indicate. Those people are called “trans”, short for “transgender”, for kinda obvious reasons. Most people don’t. Those people are called “cis”, because traditionally when an opposite of “trans” is needed “cis” is it. (Cisalpine. Cismontane. Cis fats.)
Do please explain what in the foregoing paragraph depends on “feminism” in any sense that anyone could object to, or requires “irrationalism”.
You know, we don’t have a word for people who aren’t schizophrenics or say don’t believe they are avatars of a god either.
BANNED FOREVER.
Go away. This is pointless. No one wants you here. This forum is not for you.
a
FWIW I think I would—but I also would if I woke up bald, or three inches taller.