I mean I think you sort of hit the nail on the head without realizing it: gender identity is performative. It’s made of words and language and left brain narrative and logical structures. Really, I think the whole point of identity is communicable legibility, both with yourself and with others. It’s the cluster of nodes in your mental neural network that most tightly correspond with your concept of yourself, based on how you see yourself reflected in the world around you.
But all of that is just words and language, it’s all describing what you feel, it’s not the actual felt senses, just the labels for them. When someone says “I feel like I’m really a woman” that’s all felt sense stuff which is likely to be complicated and multidimensional, and the collapse of that high dimensional feeling into a low dimension phrase makes it hard to know exactly what they’re feeling beyond that it roughly circles their concept of womanhood.
Similarly I think, the Blanchardian model also does a similar dimensional collapse, but it’s doing on a second dimensional collapse over the the claim that they feel like they’re really a woman, into something purely sexual. I don’t think the sexology model that treats the desire to have reproductive sex as logically prior to everything else a human values, is a particularly accurate, useful, or predictive model of the vast majority of human behavior.
But that still leaves the question: what is actually being conveyed the the phrase “I feel like I’m really a woman”? Like, what are the actual nodes on the graph of feelings and preverbal sensations connected to? What does it even mean to feel like a woman? Or a man for that matter? Or anything else, really? If I say “I feel like an old tree” what am I conveying about my phenomenal experience?
One potential place to look for the answer has to do with empathy and “mirror neurons”. If we assume that a mind builds a self model (an identity) the same way it builds everything else (and via occam’s razor, we have no reason to think it wouldn’t), then “things that feel like me” are just things that relate more closely in their network graph to their self node. Under this model, someone reporting that they feel more like a woman than like a man, is reporting that their “empathic connectivity” (in the sense of producing more node activations) is higher for women than for men, their self concept activates more strongly when they are around “other women” than when they are around “other men”. Similarly we can model dysphoria as something like a contradictory cluster of nodes, which when activated (for example by someone calling you a man when that concept is weakly or negatively correlated with your self node) produces disharmony or destructive interference patterns within the contradictory portion of the graph.
However, under this model, someone’s felt sense concept of gender would likely start developing before they had words for it, and because of how everyone is taught to override and suppress their felt sense in places it seems to contradict reality, this feeling ends up repressed beneath whatever socially constructed identity their parents enforced on them. By the time they begin to make sense of the feelings, the closest they can come to conveying how they feel under the binary paradigm of our culture is to just say they feel like the opposite sex. That’s partly what it seems like Zack is complaining about, like, if your model of yourself is non-normative in any way, you’re expected to collapse it into legible normativity at some defensible schelling point. However if your model of yourself just doesn’t neatly fit somewhere around that schelling point, you’re left isolated and feeling attacked by all sides just for trying to accurately report your experiences.
I transitioned basically as soon as I could legally get hormones, and I’ve identified all sorts of ways over the years: as femboy, trans woman, nonbinary amab, mentally intersex, genderqueer, a spaceship, a glitch in the spacetime continuum, slime...and as I’ve gotten older and settled into my body and my sense of myself, a lot of that has just sort of...stopped mattering? I know who I am and what I am, even if I don’t have the words for it. I know what ways of being bring me joy, what styles and modes of interaction I like, and how I want to be treated by others. I have an identity, but it’s not exactly a gender identity. It includes things that could probably be traditionally called gender (like wearing dresses and makeup) but also things that really...just don’t fit into that category at all (like DJing, LSD, and rocket stage separations), and I don’t have a line in my head for where things start being specifically about gender, there’s just me and how I feel about myself. If I find a way of being I like better than one of my current ways of being, I change, if I try something and decide I don’t like it, I stop.
I think this is partly what Paul Graham gets at with advice to “keep your identity small”, the more locked into a particular way of being I am, the less awareness I’ll have of other ways of being I might like more. I’m not just a woman, or just a man, I’m not even a person. I am whatever I say I am, I’m whatever feels fun and interesting and comfortable, I contain multitudes.
I mean I think you sort of hit the nail on the head without realizing it: gender identity is performative. It’s made of words and language and left brain narrative and logical structures. Really, I think the whole point of identity is communicable legibility, both with yourself and with others. It’s the cluster of nodes in your mental neural network that most tightly correspond with your concept of yourself, based on how you see yourself reflected in the world around you.
But all of that is just words and language, it’s all describing what you feel, it’s not the actual felt senses, just the labels for them. When someone says “I feel like I’m really a woman” that’s all felt sense stuff which is likely to be complicated and multidimensional, and the collapse of that high dimensional feeling into a low dimension phrase makes it hard to know exactly what they’re feeling beyond that it roughly circles their concept of womanhood.
Similarly I think, the Blanchardian model also does a similar dimensional collapse, but it’s doing on a second dimensional collapse over the the claim that they feel like they’re really a woman, into something purely sexual. I don’t think the sexology model that treats the desire to have reproductive sex as logically prior to everything else a human values, is a particularly accurate, useful, or predictive model of the vast majority of human behavior.
But that still leaves the question: what is actually being conveyed the the phrase “I feel like I’m really a woman”? Like, what are the actual nodes on the graph of feelings and preverbal sensations connected to? What does it even mean to feel like a woman? Or a man for that matter? Or anything else, really? If I say “I feel like an old tree” what am I conveying about my phenomenal experience?
One potential place to look for the answer has to do with empathy and “mirror neurons”. If we assume that a mind builds a self model (an identity) the same way it builds everything else (and via occam’s razor, we have no reason to think it wouldn’t), then “things that feel like me” are just things that relate more closely in their network graph to their self node. Under this model, someone reporting that they feel more like a woman than like a man, is reporting that their “empathic connectivity” (in the sense of producing more node activations) is higher for women than for men, their self concept activates more strongly when they are around “other women” than when they are around “other men”. Similarly we can model dysphoria as something like a contradictory cluster of nodes, which when activated (for example by someone calling you a man when that concept is weakly or negatively correlated with your self node) produces disharmony or destructive interference patterns within the contradictory portion of the graph.
However, under this model, someone’s felt sense concept of gender would likely start developing before they had words for it, and because of how everyone is taught to override and suppress their felt sense in places it seems to contradict reality, this feeling ends up repressed beneath whatever socially constructed identity their parents enforced on them. By the time they begin to make sense of the feelings, the closest they can come to conveying how they feel under the binary paradigm of our culture is to just say they feel like the opposite sex. That’s partly what it seems like Zack is complaining about, like, if your model of yourself is non-normative in any way, you’re expected to collapse it into legible normativity at some defensible schelling point. However if your model of yourself just doesn’t neatly fit somewhere around that schelling point, you’re left isolated and feeling attacked by all sides just for trying to accurately report your experiences.
I transitioned basically as soon as I could legally get hormones, and I’ve identified all sorts of ways over the years: as femboy, trans woman, nonbinary amab, mentally intersex, genderqueer, a spaceship, a glitch in the spacetime continuum, slime...and as I’ve gotten older and settled into my body and my sense of myself, a lot of that has just sort of...stopped mattering? I know who I am and what I am, even if I don’t have the words for it. I know what ways of being bring me joy, what styles and modes of interaction I like, and how I want to be treated by others. I have an identity, but it’s not exactly a gender identity. It includes things that could probably be traditionally called gender (like wearing dresses and makeup) but also things that really...just don’t fit into that category at all (like DJing, LSD, and rocket stage separations), and I don’t have a line in my head for where things start being specifically about gender, there’s just me and how I feel about myself. If I find a way of being I like better than one of my current ways of being, I change, if I try something and decide I don’t like it, I stop.
I think this is partly what Paul Graham gets at with advice to “keep your identity small”, the more locked into a particular way of being I am, the less awareness I’ll have of other ways of being I might like more. I’m not just a woman, or just a man, I’m not even a person. I am whatever I say I am, I’m whatever feels fun and interesting and comfortable, I contain multitudes.