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
One of these etiologies is indeed a brain intersex condition (sufficiently behaviorally-masculine girls or behaviorally-feminine boys, who are a better fit for the gender role of the other anatomical sex).
The other etiology, far more common in natal males than females, is actually more like a sexual orientation (termed autogynephilia, “love of oneself as a woman”) than a gender identity: we used to call these people “transvestites”, men who derived emotional comfort and sexual pleasure from pretending to be women (and who sometimes availed themselves of feminizing hormones), but who typically didn’t insist that they were literally an instance of the same natural category as biologically-female people.
That explanation seems too simple to explain the broad range and variety of gender identities we see in the wild. Remember, gender is a performance with lots of nuanced moving parts, of which exponentially many possible combinations exist. It seems trivially fallacious to limit a discussion of gender identity to only people who express strong feelings of having mismatching biology.
In the absence of a more complicated theory that makes sufficiently more precise predictions, simple theories are better than pretending not to have a theory. (In order to function in the world and get along with other humans, your brain is going to be constantly making predictions about human behavior in accordance with some implicit theory of human psychology, even if the part of you that talks doesn’t realize this.)
the broad range and variety of gender identities we see in the wild
I agree that we see a very broad range of self-reported gender identities in the wild! However, as an aspiring epistemic rationalist, I consider self-reports of gender identities to be merely a kind of behavior that needs to be explained; I don’t consider myself obligated to model other people the way they want me to model them. Psychology is about invalidating people’s identities.
True, but only if they accurately model the data. If the data don’t match with predictions made by the theory (hypothesis, actually), it’s not reality that’s flawed.
[not] obligated to model other people the way they want me to model them
In the absence of other evidence, you have no reason to do otherwise. You still have to match the data. Until you (or somebody else) find a way to get better data than self-reports, that’s what you’ve got to use. If your claim is only for two specific cases, it only applies to those cases. But it is wrong to assert that there are only two cases just because that’s all you understand.
I find the first etiology similar to my model. Did you mean to imply this similarity by use of the word ‘indeed’? I can see how one might interpret my model as an algorithm that outputs a little ‘gender token’ black box that directly causes the self-reports, but I really didn’t mean to propose anything besides “Once gendered behavior has been determined, however that occurs, cisgender males don’t say “I’m a boy!” for cognitive reasons that are substantially different from the reasons that transgender males say “I’m a boy!” ” Writing things like “behaviorally-masculine girls” just sounds like paraphrase to me. Should it not? On the other hand, as I understand it, the second etiology substantially departs from this. In that case it is proposed that transgender people that transition later in life perform similar behaviors for entirely different cognitive reasons.
I’ll reiterate that I admit to the plausibility of other causes of self-report. I do find your confidence surprising, however. I realize the visible controversy is not much evidence that you’re wrong, because we would expect controversy either way. Do you have thoughts on Thoughts on The Blanchard/Bailey Distinction? I’d just like to read them if they exist.
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 agree that I probably look insanely confident! What’s going on here—
(personal explanation of why I’m investing so much effort into being such an asshole screaming bloody murder about this at every possible opportunity follows; if you’re just interested in the science, read the science; don’t pay attention to me)
—is that I spent ten years having (mild, manageable) gender problems, all the while thinking, “Oh, but this is just autogynephilia; that can’t be the same as actually being trans, because every time I use that word in public, _everyonesays_ ‘That’s completely unsupported transphobic nonsense’, so I must just be some weird non-trans outlier; oh, well.”
… and then, I moved to Berkeley. I met a lot of trans women, who seem a lot like me along many dimensions. People who noticed the pattern started to tell me that they thought I was probably trans.
And I was like, “I agree that it seems plausible that I have a similar underlying psychological condition, and I’m definitely very jealous of all of our friends who get their own breasts and get refered to as she, but my thing looks pretty obviously related to my paraphilic sexuality and it’s not at all obvious to me that full-time social transition is the best quality-of-life intervention when you take into account the serious costs and limitations of the existing technology. After all, I am biologically male and have received male socialization and you can use these facts to make probabilistic inferences about my psychology; I don’t expect anyone to pretend not to notice. If some actual biologically-female women don’t want people like me in their spaces, that seems like a legimate desire that I want to respect, even if other people make different choices.”
And a lot of people are like, “Oh, that’s just internalized transphobia; you’re obviously a trans woman; we already know that transitioning is the correct quality-of-life intervention. Don’t worry about invading women’s spaces; Society has decided that you have a right to be a woman if you want.”
And I’m like, “Okay, it’s certainly possible that you’re right about the optimal social conventions and quality-of-life interventions surrounding late-onset gender dysphoria in males, but how do you know? Where is the careful cost-benefit calculation that people are using to make these enormous life- and society-altering decisions?”
And no one knows. No one is in control. It’s all just memetics and primate signaling games, just like Robin Hanson was trying to tell me for the past ten years, and I verbally agreed, but I didn’t see it.
I trusted the Berkeley rationalist community. I trusted that social reality mostly made sense. I was wrong.
Surprise! Everyone is lying! Everyone is lying because telling the truth would be politically inconvenient!
Good post. I’ve actually seen claims that the description of male homosexuality has been similarly politicized—that the old Graeco-Roman/Mediterranean model of a unusually-feminine “bottom” and a unusually-masculine “top” actually gets closer to the facts in many cases: in this view, modern “egalitarian” gay relationships are arguably a positive development from a pure socialization POV, but they aren’t quite “natural” in the sense of being what the psychology tends to. Oh, and the reason that model is politically inconvenient is the deeply-uncomfortable fact that hyper-masculinized “top” behavior can shade relatively-easily into actual sexual abuse, as seen in the historical ‘pederasty’. (Of course, relative ease is far from implying such abusive behavior as common in absolute terms. But it still counts as a source of unwelcome political controversy!)
“Once gendered behavior has been determined, however that occurs, cisgender males don’t say “I’m a boy!” for cognitive reasons that are substantially different from the reasons that transgender males say “I’m a boy!”
Except “cisgender” boys don’t generally engage in questioning “am I really a boy”.
“Once gendered behavior has been determined, however that occurs, cisgender males don’t say “I’m a boy!” for cognitive reasons that are substantially different from the reasons that transgender males say “I’m a boy!”
Except “cisgender” boys don’t generally engage in questioning “am I really a boy”.
THIS USER IS BANNED FOR ENDLESSLY POSTING THE SAME POST EVEN THOUGH THEY HAVE BEEN ADMIN REMOVED AND BANNED. THIS POST STANDS AS A FUCK OFF TO THE USER. I DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THIS SHIT. FUCK OFF.
NO ONE HERE AGREES WITH THIS TROLL AND NO ONE CARES.
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 psychological conditions that motivate the development of a “gender identity” inconsistent with anatomic sex.
One of these etiologies is indeed a brain intersex condition (sufficiently behaviorally-masculine girls or behaviorally-feminine boys, who are a better fit for the gender role of the other anatomical sex).
The other etiology, far more common in natal males than females, is actually more like a sexual orientation (termed autogynephilia, “love of oneself as a woman”) than a gender identity: we used to call these people “transvestites”, men who derived emotional comfort and sexual pleasure from pretending to be women (and who sometimes availed themselves of feminizing hormones), but who typically didn’t insist that they were literally an instance of the same natural category as biologically-female people.
That explanation seems too simple to explain the broad range and variety of gender identities we see in the wild. Remember, gender is a performance with lots of nuanced moving parts, of which exponentially many possible combinations exist. It seems trivially fallacious to limit a discussion of gender identity to only people who express strong feelings of having mismatching biology.
In the absence of a more complicated theory that makes sufficiently more precise predictions, simple theories are better than pretending not to have a theory. (In order to function in the world and get along with other humans, your brain is going to be constantly making predictions about human behavior in accordance with some implicit theory of human psychology, even if the part of you that talks doesn’t realize this.)
I agree that we see a very broad range of self-reported gender identities in the wild! However, as an aspiring epistemic rationalist, I consider self-reports of gender identities to be merely a kind of behavior that needs to be explained; I don’t consider myself obligated to model other people the way they want me to model them. Psychology is about invalidating people’s identities.
True, but only if they accurately model the data. If the data don’t match with predictions made by the theory (hypothesis, actually), it’s not reality that’s flawed.
In the absence of other evidence, you have no reason to do otherwise. You still have to match the data. Until you (or somebody else) find a way to get better data than self-reports, that’s what you’ve got to use. If your claim is only for two specific cases, it only applies to those cases. But it is wrong to assert that there are only two cases just because that’s all you understand.
I was familiar with this.
I find the first etiology similar to my model. Did you mean to imply this similarity by use of the word ‘indeed’? I can see how one might interpret my model as an algorithm that outputs a little ‘gender token’ black box that directly causes the self-reports, but I really didn’t mean to propose anything besides “Once gendered behavior has been determined, however that occurs, cisgender males don’t say “I’m a boy!” for cognitive reasons that are substantially different from the reasons that transgender males say “I’m a boy!” ” Writing things like “behaviorally-masculine girls” just sounds like paraphrase to me. Should it not? On the other hand, as I understand it, the second etiology substantially departs from this. In that case it is proposed that transgender people that transition later in life perform similar behaviors for entirely different cognitive reasons.
I’ll reiterate that I admit to the plausibility of other causes of self-report. I do find your confidence surprising, however. I realize the visible controversy is not much evidence that you’re wrong, because we would expect controversy either way. Do you have thoughts on Thoughts on The Blanchard/Bailey Distinction? I’d just like to read them if they exist.
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!
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.
My reply.
I agree that I probably look insanely confident! What’s going on here—
(personal explanation of why I’m investing so much effort into being such an asshole screaming bloody murder about this at every possible opportunity follows; if you’re just interested in the science, read the science; don’t pay attention to me)
—is that I spent ten years having (mild, manageable) gender problems, all the while thinking, “Oh, but this is just autogynephilia; that can’t be the same as actually being trans, because every time I use that word in public, _everyone says_ ‘That’s completely unsupported transphobic nonsense’, so I must just be some weird non-trans outlier; oh, well.”
… and then, I moved to Berkeley. I met a lot of trans women, who seem a lot like me along many dimensions. People who noticed the pattern started to tell me that they thought I was probably trans.
And I was like, “I agree that it seems plausible that I have a similar underlying psychological condition, and I’m definitely very jealous of all of our friends who get their own breasts and get refered to as she, but my thing looks pretty obviously related to my paraphilic sexuality and it’s not at all obvious to me that full-time social transition is the best quality-of-life intervention when you take into account the serious costs and limitations of the existing technology. After all, I am biologically male and have received male socialization and you can use these facts to make probabilistic inferences about my psychology; I don’t expect anyone to pretend not to notice. If some actual biologically-female women don’t want people like me in their spaces, that seems like a legimate desire that I want to respect, even if other people make different choices.”
And a lot of people are like, “Oh, that’s just internalized transphobia; you’re obviously a trans woman; we already know that transitioning is the correct quality-of-life intervention. Don’t worry about invading women’s spaces; Society has decided that you have a right to be a woman if you want.”
And I’m like, “Okay, it’s certainly possible that you’re right about the optimal social conventions and quality-of-life interventions surrounding late-onset gender dysphoria in males, but how do you know? Where is the careful cost-benefit calculation that people are using to make these enormous life- and society-altering decisions?”
And no one knows. No one is in control. It’s all just memetics and primate signaling games, just like Robin Hanson was trying to tell me for the past ten years, and I verbally agreed, but I didn’t see it.
I trusted the Berkeley rationalist community. I trusted that social reality mostly made sense. I was wrong.
I still want to at least experiment with the same drugs everyone else is on. But I have no trust anymore.
Good post. I’ve actually seen claims that the description of male homosexuality has been similarly politicized—that the old Graeco-Roman/Mediterranean model of a unusually-feminine “bottom” and a unusually-masculine “top” actually gets closer to the facts in many cases: in this view, modern “egalitarian” gay relationships are arguably a positive development from a pure socialization POV, but they aren’t quite “natural” in the sense of being what the psychology tends to. Oh, and the reason that model is politically inconvenient is the deeply-uncomfortable fact that hyper-masculinized “top” behavior can shade relatively-easily into actual sexual abuse, as seen in the historical ‘pederasty’. (Of course, relative ease is far from implying such abusive behavior as common in absolute terms. But it still counts as a source of unwelcome political controversy!)
Except “cisgender” boys don’t generally engage in questioning “am I really a boy”.
BANNED FOREVER.
Go away. This is pointless. No one wants you here. This forum is not for you.
a
Except “cisgender” boys don’t generally engage in questioning “am I really a boy”.
THIS USER IS BANNED FOR ENDLESSLY POSTING THE SAME POST EVEN THOUGH THEY HAVE BEEN ADMIN REMOVED AND BANNED. THIS POST STANDS AS A FUCK OFF TO THE USER. I DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THIS SHIT. FUCK OFF.
NO ONE HERE AGREES WITH THIS TROLL AND NO ONE CARES.