Look for female role models and characters, wherever you can. My daughter is dinosaur-mad. The Usborne Big Book of Big Dinosaurs includes little cartoon palaeontologists—and she was delighted some were women. “I like the girl dinosaur scientist!” And then she came out with “When I was a three I wanted to be a princess, but now I am a five I want to be a dinosaur scientist.” I CLAIM VICTORY. (so far.)
I suspect the problem there is that children are natural Platonic essentialists and categorise everything they can. (That big list of cognitive biases? Little kids show all of them, all of the time.) Particularly by gender. “Is that a boy toy or a girl toy?” It really helps that I have her mother (a monster truck pagan who knows everything and can do everything) to point at: “What would mummy think?” So having female examples on hand seems to have helped here. So I have this little girl who likes princesses and trains and My Little Pony and dinosaurs and Hello Kitty and space and is mad for anything pink and plays swordfighting with toy LARP swords. And her very favourite day out is the Natural History Museum.
This isn’t a how-to, but I thought you might find these articles cute:
Linky- Story of how parents of toddler boys keep their kids from playing rought with the author’s toddler girl, because “you have to be gentle with girls”.
Linky- Dad tired all video game heroes are male. Reprograms Zelda to make Link a female for little daughter.
Linky- Video- A What Would You Do? episode, where you see how people in a costume store react when a little boy (actor) wants to dress as a princess, and a little girl (actress) wants to dress as Spiderman for Halloween
I can see the point the author is trying to make in the story about having to be gentle with girls, but I think I’d be conflicted about it if I had a son. Later in life there are severe social and legal consequences for a man that is too rough with women and I’d hate to set my kid up for failure.
I realize there is a difference between “playing rough” and abuse but there can be grey areas at the border. There are many situations were I would physically subdue a man (both playful and serious) but not a woman, partly for fear of causing harm but mainly because of the social blowback and potential for getting arrested.
I might be overly sensitive to this line of thinking because I have a military background, but I think teaching a son that he should behave as if girls and boys are the same physically is sub-optimal (in terms of setting him up for success and long-term hapiness).
Dad tired all video game heroes are male. Reprograms Zelda to make Link a female for little daughter.
It’s actually kind of remarkable how gender-neutral Link is in The Wind Waker, the game he reprogrammed. The storyline, the dialogue, even Link’s sound effects work equally well for all major genders.
We’re into holiday season again, so here’s a link to a post I made a year ago, that includes, among other things, NOT always commenting on “How cute” all your little nieces (and nephews) are.
I remember this post well, thanks for reminding me. I’ve already been conditioning myself to focus on the right things by complimenting the hard work that goes into her lifting her head or briefly controlling her hands, even though she doesn’t have any idea what I’m saying yet.
It’s frustratingly difficult to buy any clothes for baby girls that aren’t completely pink.
It’s frustratingly difficult to buy any clothes for baby girls that aren’t completely pink.
Aren’t babies kind of shaped alike? Surely there exist inoffensive onesies in pastel green or whatever, even if they are not officially intended for girls.
They exist, but it’s like this: you walk into the store. To your left, there are forty pink dresses and onesies with Cutest Princess or somesuch printed on them. To your right, there are forty blue onesies and overall combos, often with anthropomorphic male animals printed on them. In the middle, there are three yellow or green onesies.
On top of that, well-meaning relatives send us boxes of the pink dresses.
When I dress her, I avoid the overtly feminine outfits. But then I worry that I’m committing an entirely new mistake. I imagine my daughter telling me how confused she felt that her father seemed reluctant to cast her as a girl. “Did you wish I was a boy, Daddy?” There don’t seem to be many trivially obvious correct choices in parenting.
Actually, this seems a lot less disturbing to me than if, say, there were many different colors for boy clothes, but only pink clothing for girls. If you wouldn’t feel obliged to avoid dressing a baby boy in blue, why feel obliged to avoid dressing a baby girl in pink? None of this has the moral that gender differences in general should be downplayed; it’s when you start saying that male-is-default or ‘people can be nerds but girls have to be girls’ that you have a problem. In general, I think the mode of thought to be fought is that males are colorless and women have color; or to put it another way, the deadly thought is that there are all sorts of different people in the world like doctors, soldiers, mathematicians, and women. I do sometimes refer in my writing to a subgroup of people called “females”; but I refer to another subgroup, “males”, about equally often. (Actually, I usually call them “women” and “males” but that’s because if you say “men”, males assume you’re talking about people.)
Other. (See, postmodernism being good for something.) “Despite originally being a philosophical concept, othering has political, economic, social and psychological connotations and implications.” Othering on the Geek Feminism wiki. See also grunch.
Actually, this seems a lot less disturbing to me than if, say, there were many different colours for boy clothes, but only pink clothing for girls. If you wouldn’t feel obliged to avoid dressing a baby boy in blue, why feel obliged to avoid dressing a baby girl in pink?
I think clothing of both genders gets more varied with age, but faster for males, at least at first. I note that women actually come out ahead, with both pants and dresses, yet young boys wear noticeably more varied outfits. Clearly it clearly varies a lot with age.
It’s less the colors available to the kid and more the way the outside world responds to the kid in those colors, I think.
I’ve seen there be much more color variation among boys clothes, yes, but more importantly, a toddler wearing pink is gendered by others as female, and talked to as if female, and all other colors are generally talked to as if male. Occasionally yellow is gendered female too.
I have no experience in raising kids, but maybe the important part is having a wide range of outfits—have an overtly feminine outfit, but also a blue onesie with a tiger, and two or three green/yellow ones.
I’m coming from the perspective of a daughter who was and is pretty gender non-conforming, so my advice may not be useful generally, but I hope it helps anyway.
I think other commenters have talked about not saying “Girls do this” and “Girls don’t do that”, and an important aspect of that is to not be inherently dismissive of feminine/masculine attributes as whole. If she ends up being the only geek-ish type girl she knows, it becomes easy to dismiss the “feminine” interests of her peers as lesser compared to her own. So, expose her to media with significant female characters, but not just those who resemble her or share her interests. Actually, come to think of it, expose her to real women with varied interests, to avoid the whole categorising thing as much as possible.
Regarding clothes,which is an area in which I have frustrated both my parents very much, follow her lead where possible from young. If you have an occasion where a dress is required because of formality but she’s clearly upset/angry at wearing a dress, see if there’s an appropriate alternative. Whatever the outcome, don’t make it feel like it’s her fault for being uncomfortable in dresses. Also, children can change rather quickly, so remember that both the little girl who loves MLP and the little girl who loves Star Wars may not stay that way when they grow up.
I’d just like to add that I sincerely respect you for choosing to ask for this advice at all, since most parents never bother.
To clarify: you want to avoid to gender-stereotype your child? Specific advice for starters: the LGBT/Queer-scene tries to do some of that, so draw on their resources:
I want to avoid harm and let my daughter have the happiest possible life. If avoiding gender-stereotyping her will accomplish those things, then I want to do that. Thanks for the resources!
I’m also somewhat interested (if all goes according to plan, I have 50% chances of having an infant daughter too in the next couple of years; I already have a son).
I am, however, not particularly interested in avoiding gender stereotypes for my children like some in this subthread seem to advocate; sure there are some gender stereotypes I want to avoid (women should shut up and be stay-at-home wives etc.), but I don’t see anything wrong with the idea that men and women are different in our society, and have different social roles, etc. I’d probably be more likely to discourage my son from crying, and my daughter from swearing or hitting.
Of course, I won’t freak out if my son wants to play with dolls or my daughter wants to play with guns or if they turn out to be gay or transsexual or even heavens forbid Christian.
I do however want to correct any biases I might have about how women perceive things in society, so am looking forward to the next posts in this sequence.
Until the child tells you their gender identity, don’t assume it matches their body, and even after then don’t police it. Any sentence that begins with a paraphrase of “girls do” (talk politely, their homework,...) or “girls don’t” (wear spiderman suits, climb trees,...) is nearly certainly sexist, wrong, and harmful. Learn the standard ways that parents treat children differently by gender (assuming girls are upset where they’d assume boys are angry, for example) and proactively refuse to do, or permit them done by other adults.
Until the child tells you their gender identity, don’t assume it matches their body
I’ll disagree with that one—it seems such an assumption is more than 99.9% likely to be true; and we assume less likely things all the time. Being aware of transsexuality and of the problems transfolk deal with should be enough until you have particular reasons to believe your child may identify with a different gender.
it seems such an assumption is more than 99.9% likely to be true
I think 99.5% is probably a reasonable upper bound on how confident you should be (with 0.5% of that being a Gettier case). Physical intersexuality of various sorts has an incident of about 1%, I have read, and in the absence of studies on the subject I’m inclined to deploy an ignorance prior about the mature gender identification of a random intersexed person. Garden-variety transfolk only cut this probability from there.
I’d think a parent would be aware of physical intersexuality, so I’m not sure that’s relevant in this thread’s context; physically ambiguous sex would certainly be a reason to be cautious about assuming gender! I’m having a hell of a time finding consistent prevalence data for psychological transsexuality, though; estimates seem to vary from 1 in 21000 to around one in 500 (taking the low estimate in the latter because it seems to be running on MtF numbers, which appear to skew a bit higher).
I’d think a parent would be aware of physical intersexuality
This is not reliably true. I have a friend who is a genetic chimera (fraternal twins, fused early enough in development to turn into one basically normal-shaped person). She was considered anatomically male and normal at birth and well past, and didn’t find out she had female organs too until her twenties, when they finally did an ultrasound to track down her irregular abdominal cramping, then did genetic tests to explain why there was a uterus in there. This gave her a relatively socially acceptable excuse to assume a female social role.
I generally try to use probability when interacting with people. I know they are not as likely to jump of a bridge as to cross it. Amazingly it seems to help me have good relations with them. Incredible I know. I hear statistical reasoning about humans is evil though so maybe I shouldn’t be sharing this advice.
In certain cases, it’s evil (i.e. there should be an ethical injunction against it) because, due to corrupted mindware, certain people tend to overdo it (e.g., if they know that black people have a lower average IQ than white people, they’ll consider a black person significantly stupider than a white person in the same situation even though the evidence race provides about intelligence is likely almost completely screened off by information about what they say, wear, and do).
“Being an asshole” is a description of effects, not causes. In this case, the person’s assholy behavior might result from being insecure and angry, scapegoating other races for their insecurity and anger, having false beliefs about them, and responding to confusion with denial rather than doubt.
Are the specific examples that JulianMorrison gave things that are statistically true about girls versus boys. Is it statistically true that girls don’t climb trees? (I’m a girl, and tree climbing is awesome!)
Also, there’s a difference between what you’re talking about (using probability to predict behaviour when you know nothing else about others) and ways to raise children, since parents in part determine the future behaviour of their children. Even if it is statistically true, right now, that girls don’t wear Spider-Man suits as often as boys, and get upset rather than angry, I don’t think those states are the ideal world states. Treating your children like these stereotypes are true might be a self fulfilling prophecy.
Note that there are some examples that I think would be true. I do think that, on average, girls are more likely to get upset than angry when in a situation of conflict. But not always: I get upset more often, my brother gets angry, my sister gets angry, my dad gets upset. I do think that the average boy, if given a Barbie, is more likely to re-enact battles with it than dress it. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good parenting strategy to yell at your son because he’s an outlier who likes to dress Barbies. (From a purely predictive view, you could probably make a boy happier by giving him something other than a Barbie for his birthday, but that’s if you’re not the parent and your actions aren’t influencing his future preferences.)
Until the child tells you their gender identity, don’t assume it matches their body
learn the standard ways that parents treat children differently by gender (assuming girls are upset where they’d assume boys are angry, for example) and proactively refuse to do, or permit them done by other adults.
I also disagree with the first paragraph. If I have a daughter someday, I’m not going to treat her as gender-neutral-it’s too much work and probably wouldn’t work. I guess I just think that the examples in the second group aren’t “gender identity” examples. At most they’re gender stereotypes. I will treat my daughter as a girl, unless she tells me not to, but I’ll happily climb trees with her, I wouldn’t tell her to be polite because “girls are polite” (boys should be too!) and I won’t encourage or expect her to be upset rather than angry.
BTW, by “assuming girls are upset where they’d assume boys are angry” I am referring to unconscious fact judgements about infants too young to verbalize the problem. (Cite: “pink brain blue brain” by Lise Eliot). Macho emotions are attributed to babies in who appear male and gentle ones to babies who appear female. Since baby sex is almost unmarked, that means going by the colour of the clothes. (And google “baby Storm” for an example of adults panicking and pillorying the parents if the cues that allow them to gender the baby are intentionally witheld.)
When in a situation of conflict:
Upset: assume you’re the one in the wrong, blame yourself, not try to defend yourself, cry. (Or some but not all of these elements.)
Angry: Assume you’re right, blame the other person, argue back, yell. Or some but not all of these elements.
Obviously it depends on context. Some people have a very strong tendency to get upset, whereas others will sometimes be upset and sometimes be angry. I’m pretty strongly skewed towards getting upset; I don’t like the experience of anger; but in a conflict with family members, I will frequently behave more angrily than upset.
There’s not as much reason to pay attention to statistical reasoning when we have insight into causal mechanisms. Particularly when our knowledge of the causal mechanisms suggests that the statistical results are very susceptible to misleading interpretations.
There’s not as much reason to pay attention to statistical reasoning when we have insight into causal mechanisms. Particularly when our knowledge of the causal mechanisms suggests that the statistical results are very susceptible to misleading interpretations.
Incidentally we have essentially perfect insight into the causal mechanisms of what makes a number prime, and yet this sort of reasoning is spectacularly successful:
Cramer’s random model of the primes asserts, roughly speaking, that the primes behave as if every large integer n had an independent probability of 1 / log(n) of being prime (as predicted by the prime number theorem).
I dislike this emphasis on gender identity. I haven’t seen enough non-anecdotal evidence of this to be >0.8 confident, but my model predicts that this strategy wouldn’t achieve all that much, and has much more risk of being damaging (due to biases and two-steps-removed complications) than a strategy of behaving as non-sexist as possible (and ‘teaching’ this to the child, but that is most effective by example during childhood AFAIK).
You have an implicit assumption: that there are actions that you can take which assume that gender identity matches body, that do not enforce stereotypes and which cannot be co-opted to enforce stereotypes.
There is strong evidence to suggest that that is not true, within the current social landscape.
They might be full blown trans, whether the kind that’s so intense it forces people to transition despite all the grief they get, or the kinds that are less intense or more messy (and probably loads more common, like bisexual is more common than gay).
They might want to pick and mix their gender presentation or have a non-traditional way of expressing their identity. Like being a “tomboy” or a boy who likes dresses.
They will learn to behave in a non-assuming, non-policing way themselves.
“Until the child tells you their gender identity”, I said—you wait in a state of openness to all alternatives, and they tell you. A child is not cis until proven trans. It’s “no data”. They will say.
Yes, ultimately, this is not enforcing stereotypes. But that phrase primes you for vastly underestimating the scope of what you need to do. Like, it primes you to think in terms of “offer Jane a dinosaur as well as a Barbie” rather than “do not assume that Cody would prefer jeans rather than a skirt”.
Children raised to assume they have control of their gender presentation and the right to assert their gender identity, will not be inclined to make assumptions about, or tease and ostracise, other people’s gender.
I asked how it helps. When I meet someone who appears male, I assume they identify as male, and if they don’t then they tell me so. If I treated everyone I met as of indeterminate gender … I would be ignoring people’s established gender far more than accommodating people’s insecurities. Besides, I’m going to have to name the kid at some point.
Giving your boy a skirt is implicitly teaching him that wearing one does not signal gender. I may personally be fine with them wearing underpants on their head, but I don’t teach them to go to school like that.
I’m still unclear as to why ignoring the biological gender of your child will help them be more tolerant in later life.
I’m still unclear as to why ignoring the biological gender of your child will help them be more tolerant in later life.
Solving this type of problem is one reason that I advocate differentiating gender and biological sex. Once that distinction is made, I think many of these problems are analytically clearer.
FWIW, I think JulianMorrison is using “gender” when “sex” is meant in at least some of the comments.
When somebody’s born, they don’t identify as a gender. By the time they reach talking infancy, they do and will tell you. They will probably want to adopt gendered clothing and behaviours. Those might, or might not match their anatomy. If they pick cross-gendered ones, that might last, or it might go away, or it might turn into gay/lesbian identity. If you aren’t being pushy about any of this, they will find their own level. I am not proposing “never permit them a gender”, I am proposing “never assign them a gender, coercively”.
Unfortunately with strangers, I have less evidence about their genders than I might like. That is because people don’t feel very free to express cross-gender presentation, and in fact it takes such an immense crushing need that people dare the taunts, for them to even be visible. So there are lots of tans women walking around looking like men, and there are lots of trans men walking around looking like women. And it is because of dismissive attitudes like yours about the skirt, which easily translate into ridicule and ostracism. A boy in skirt is not like a boy with underpants on his head, he’s like a girl in jeans. That used to be scandalous. But we accepted it more readily, because dressing “like a girl” is seen as degrading while dressing “like a man” was seen as upgrading.
You are strawmanning “ignoring the biological gender” (and building upon an assumption that isn’t true; biology isn’t gender, it isn’t even oversimplified binary sex—but that’s a story for another day). I am not suggesting “ignoring” it, I am suggesting “not treating it as the thing that determines gender”.
A boy in skirt is not like a boy with underpants on his head, he’s like a girl in jeans. That used to be scandalous.
Once, yes, and it was once possible for women to dress “as men” and be assumed to be “effeminate” men. (Google “sweet polly oliver”.) However, for various reasons this is no longer the case, whereas it is still so for men.
I am not suggesting “ignoring” it, I am suggesting “not treating it as the thing that determines gender”.
Are you saying gender identity is not determined by biology? Because I have some transsexuals who would like to talk to you. (Obviously much of the trappings we assign to gender can and should be ignored.)
EDIT:
If they pick cross-gendered ones, that might last, or it might go away, or it might turn into gay/lesbian identity.
Are you saying gender identity is not determined by biology? Because I have some transsexuals who would like to talk to you.
The etiology of trans is unknown. There are suggestions that hormones in the womb may play a part, with the brain and body controlled by hormone flushes at different times, resulting in something like “intersex of the brain”. But what I meant was more simply, that social categorization of bodies as “male or female” doesn’t determine their gender identity. Bear in mind I say social categorization here, because society looks at some things (penis length, particularly) and not at others (brains, particularly) about the body to put people into categories.
And no, I meant cross-gendered in the specific sense of “person socially assigned gender A in clothes socially assigned gender B”.
BTW: trans being inborn and immutable is a political thing. It is easier to get rights if your discriminated-against attribute is “not your fault” so you can’t be “blamed” for it. This doesn’t affect the rightness of the cause, only the ease of implementing it in the face of religious (sin focused) transphobia.
BTW: trans being inborn and immutable is a political thing. It is easier to get rights if your discriminated-against attribute is “not your fault” so you can’t be “blamed” for it.
Ok, so you admit your movement is willing to lie, BS and corrupt social science for “the greater good”. Given that, why should I believe any of the empirical claims your movement makes?
So, this is the sort of thing that’s true for almost any advocacy group: They will present the evidence that helps them and not present the evidence that doesn’t. That means that for any political advocacy or organization you need to look at the evidence with that in mind and judge it carefully and accordingly. This makes the groups under discussion no different than any other similar group.
There is a difference between selectively presenting true evidence (or at least evidence they believe to be true) and telling things you know to be false.
Valid point in this context. I’m not sure if Julian was claiming to present things that are known to be false, although the wording of the comment certainly could be interpreted that way.
Wasn’t he basically just saying that these kinds of statements radically lower his epistemic confidence in empirical claims the movement makes which are politically convenient?
Wasn’t he basically just saying that these kinds of statements radically lower his epistemic confidence in empirical claims the movement makes which are politically convenient?
Well, there’s the connotative issue involved. But my point is that he seems to be making a strange adjustment here: Making a radical adjustment to one group when it should apply to all political groups. Moreover, the comment struck me (and it is possible that I’ve misinterpreted it here) as essentially dismissing any claims made rather than doing what one should actually do in such contexts- carefully examine the claims, and look for omitted evidence.
The interesting question is what measures will pay off best in the long run.
Actually lying about the science might blow up later. On the other hand, saying that we don’t know what causes gender dysmorphia, but it begins very young, is not a matter of choice, and gets relieved by living as the gender that feels right to the dysmorphic person—and living in that way is not harmful-- is harder to say forcefully than to say “born that way”.
Yeah, if I’m talking to someone from who I can assume rationality, I’ll say all that (and that the sexist gender beliefs and patriarchal power structures that prevent trans people just flipping across in high school like it was a mere incidental fact, like hair colour, should be destroyed anyway for over-determined reasons). But I have no intention to give truth to enemies. Enemy is defined as: a person whose unshakeable beliefs harm the people I care about. If a lie makes them back off, lying is good.
Once your cause has embraced the dark arts how can you be sure what you’re doing is actually saving people from hurting? Are you sure the evidence for this belief, or the evidence that convinced you to join that cause in the first place wasn’t just another ‘pious lie’?
We’re willing to do any damn thing to find a sense of closure, of vindication. We don’t actually care to reduce evil, since we’re subconsciously quite aware that it would require us to take unacceptable measures. To enforce a ruthless order and violate the sanctity of the individual, to disarm the weak and make them submit to their fate. Many here have been hinting darkly at this for a long time. The reactionaries are completely correct in their bleak worldview. There is no deliverance. Good intentions are a self-righteous delusion, in a sense. Suffering can only be minimized by monstrous and inhuman policies. Someone will always scream and scream behind locks, walls and chains, behind a facade of normality. Finding happiness in slavery is the best that most people can count on.
I think the former paragraphs here presume that politics is the domain of deluded do-gooders, rather than people (including those at the bottom of the heap) fighting self-consciously for their interests (or the interests of a broader alliance, TDT and all that.) It doesn’t strike me as hypocrisy to throw one’s enemies into the gulag, or to decieve them in warfare, even as you attempt to avoid the gulag and see through deceptions yourself.
… because you don’t, as a rule, choose your own neurophysiology. Certain structures in transsexuals’ brains are closer to the form they take in cisgendered members of the sex they identify with than the sex they appear to be.
… because you don’t, as a rule, choose your own neurophysiology.
Become a taxi driver and grow your hippocampus. The boundary between what you can change and what you can’t is not as clear as you seem to think.
Certain structures in transsexuals’ brains are closer to the form they take in cisgendered members of the sex they identify with than the sex they appear to be.
Become a taxi driver and grow your hippocampus. The boundary between what you can change and what you can’t is not as clear as you seem to think.
As I have said elsewhere, there is a sliding scale involved. This is decidedly towards the “unchosen” end, and considering that transsexuals report having changed their lifestyle as a result of preexisting problems, it seems reasonable to call this one for the “nature” side.
… because you don’t, as a rule, choose your own neurophysiology.
You have some control over it. Everything you do and every thought you have affects your neurophysiology. How much control you have over it is an interesting question, which can’t be answered simply by pointing to differences on brain scans.
There’s a sliding scale. At one end, we have things like frontal lobes. At the other, we have imagination. This is the kind of structure that doesn’t alter without external stimuli, and even then it’s bloody hard.
If you take physicalism seriously, every experience can be expected to show up eventually, on sufficiently advanced brain scans. That has no bearing on what is a choice and what is not. Choices and non-choices will both have physical correlates.
And no it doesn’t, there are brain areas that are statistically different in the small population of trans brains donated to science, but there is no brain scan for trans and it would be useless anyway, because if you experience yourself as trans and the scan says “nope” it’s the scan that’s wrong. The individual is the sole authority and the diagnosis is by telling a shrink what you experience.
The fact that we cannot currently diagnose gender dysphoria [EDIT: in a living subject] with a brain scan does not change the fact that it is caused by a neurological disorder, and as such is biological, not a choice.
if you experience yourself as trans and the scan says “nope” it’s the scan that’s wrong. The individual is the sole authority and the diagnosis is by telling a shrink what you experience.
Are you saying that cisgendered people should be eligible for gender reassignment surgery and so on, or that any brain-scan based test will be imperfect?
I am saying that a trans person can only be diagnosed by saying “I experience myself as [fill in the blank]” because that unspoken, personal experience is what trans is. Not the brain stuff. That may be what trans is caused by. It’s like having a sore toe, that can be caused by a dropped hammer or kicking the door, but the essence of sore toeness can’t be determined by testing for hammers and a negative test for a dropped hammer would not disprove it, the essence of sore toeness is the ouch.
I’m pretty sure that the ouch is merely evidence that someone is experiencing pain. We’re perilously close to arguing definitions here, though. If someone developed such a scan and there were a lot of trans people coming up as cis that would be warning sign, but it is not impossible (merely unlikely) that there are “trans” people who have more in common with cis people than “real” trans people.
EDIT: it may help to consider autism here.
FURTHER EDIT: dammit, stupid karma toll cutting off my discussions.
If someone developed such a scan, and it labeled a bunch of trans-identified people as cis, then IMO that would be good evidence for the proposition that the scanner is buggy.
I’m a male LWer with an infant daughter. I’d like to request some specific advice on avoiding the common failure modes.
Look for female role models and characters, wherever you can. My daughter is dinosaur-mad. The Usborne Big Book of Big Dinosaurs includes little cartoon palaeontologists—and she was delighted some were women. “I like the girl dinosaur scientist!” And then she came out with “When I was a three I wanted to be a princess, but now I am a five I want to be a dinosaur scientist.” I CLAIM VICTORY. (so far.)
I suspect the problem there is that children are natural Platonic essentialists and categorise everything they can. (That big list of cognitive biases? Little kids show all of them, all of the time.) Particularly by gender. “Is that a boy toy or a girl toy?” It really helps that I have her mother (a monster truck pagan who knows everything and can do everything) to point at: “What would mummy think?” So having female examples on hand seems to have helped here. So I have this little girl who likes princesses and trains and My Little Pony and dinosaurs and Hello Kitty and space and is mad for anything pink and plays swordfighting with toy LARP swords. And her very favourite day out is the Natural History Museum.
(yeah, bragging about my kid again. You’ll cope.)
This isn’t a how-to, but I thought you might find these articles cute:
Linky- Story of how parents of toddler boys keep their kids from playing rought with the author’s toddler girl, because “you have to be gentle with girls”.
Linky- Dad tired all video game heroes are male. Reprograms Zelda to make Link a female for little daughter.
Linky- Video- A What Would You Do? episode, where you see how people in a costume store react when a little boy (actor) wants to dress as a princess, and a little girl (actress) wants to dress as Spiderman for Halloween
I can see the point the author is trying to make in the story about having to be gentle with girls, but I think I’d be conflicted about it if I had a son. Later in life there are severe social and legal consequences for a man that is too rough with women and I’d hate to set my kid up for failure.
I realize there is a difference between “playing rough” and abuse but there can be grey areas at the border. There are many situations were I would physically subdue a man (both playful and serious) but not a woman, partly for fear of causing harm but mainly because of the social blowback and potential for getting arrested.
I might be overly sensitive to this line of thinking because I have a military background, but I think teaching a son that he should behave as if girls and boys are the same physically is sub-optimal (in terms of setting him up for success and long-term hapiness).
It’s actually kind of remarkable how gender-neutral Link is in The Wind Waker, the game he reprogrammed. The storyline, the dialogue, even Link’s sound effects work equally well for all major genders.
We’re into holiday season again, so here’s a link to a post I made a year ago, that includes, among other things, NOT always commenting on “How cute” all your little nieces (and nephews) are.
How To Talk To Children- A Holiday Guide
I remember this post well, thanks for reminding me. I’ve already been conditioning myself to focus on the right things by complimenting the hard work that goes into her lifting her head or briefly controlling her hands, even though she doesn’t have any idea what I’m saying yet.
It’s frustratingly difficult to buy any clothes for baby girls that aren’t completely pink.
Aren’t babies kind of shaped alike? Surely there exist inoffensive onesies in pastel green or whatever, even if they are not officially intended for girls.
They exist, but it’s like this: you walk into the store. To your left, there are forty pink dresses and onesies with Cutest Princess or somesuch printed on them. To your right, there are forty blue onesies and overall combos, often with anthropomorphic male animals printed on them. In the middle, there are three yellow or green onesies.
On top of that, well-meaning relatives send us boxes of the pink dresses.
When I dress her, I avoid the overtly feminine outfits. But then I worry that I’m committing an entirely new mistake. I imagine my daughter telling me how confused she felt that her father seemed reluctant to cast her as a girl. “Did you wish I was a boy, Daddy?” There don’t seem to be many trivially obvious correct choices in parenting.
Actually, this seems a lot less disturbing to me than if, say, there were many different colors for boy clothes, but only pink clothing for girls. If you wouldn’t feel obliged to avoid dressing a baby boy in blue, why feel obliged to avoid dressing a baby girl in pink? None of this has the moral that gender differences in general should be downplayed; it’s when you start saying that male-is-default or ‘people can be nerds but girls have to be girls’ that you have a problem. In general, I think the mode of thought to be fought is that males are colorless and women have color; or to put it another way, the deadly thought is that there are all sorts of different people in the world like doctors, soldiers, mathematicians, and women. I do sometimes refer in my writing to a subgroup of people called “females”; but I refer to another subgroup, “males”, about equally often. (Actually, I usually call them “women” and “males” but that’s because if you say “men”, males assume you’re talking about people.)
Other. (See, postmodernism being good for something.) “Despite originally being a philosophical concept, othering has political, economic, social and psychological connotations and implications.” Othering on the Geek Feminism wiki. See also grunch.
I think clothing of both genders gets more varied with age, but faster for males, at least at first. I note that women actually come out ahead, with both pants and dresses, yet young boys wear noticeably more varied outfits. Clearly it clearly varies a lot with age.
It’s less the colors available to the kid and more the way the outside world responds to the kid in those colors, I think.
I’ve seen there be much more color variation among boys clothes, yes, but more importantly, a toddler wearing pink is gendered by others as female, and talked to as if female, and all other colors are generally talked to as if male. Occasionally yellow is gendered female too.
I’ve seen complaints about how much harder it is to find non-gendered clothing than it used to be.
I think the solution on clothes is that when the child is old enough to have opinions about how they want to dress, follow their lead.
I have no experience in raising kids, but maybe the important part is having a wide range of outfits—have an overtly feminine outfit, but also a blue onesie with a tiger, and two or three green/yellow ones.
You don’t need to eradicate pink. Just reducing it to a reasonable level won’t spur any ‘Did you wish I was a boy’ ideas.
Mine loves pink. We make sure to let her interest in non-pink things run free too (dinosaurs, space, trains, etc).
Learn to sew!
You can do a lot just topstitching appliques (great way to make superhero onesies).
Don’t take your parenting approach from ideology, because it’s not optimized for being a reflection of reality. (Extreme example here)
I’m coming from the perspective of a daughter who was and is pretty gender non-conforming, so my advice may not be useful generally, but I hope it helps anyway.
I think other commenters have talked about not saying “Girls do this” and “Girls don’t do that”, and an important aspect of that is to not be inherently dismissive of feminine/masculine attributes as whole. If she ends up being the only geek-ish type girl she knows, it becomes easy to dismiss the “feminine” interests of her peers as lesser compared to her own. So, expose her to media with significant female characters, but not just those who resemble her or share her interests. Actually, come to think of it, expose her to real women with varied interests, to avoid the whole categorising thing as much as possible.
Regarding clothes,which is an area in which I have frustrated both my parents very much, follow her lead where possible from young. If you have an occasion where a dress is required because of formality but she’s clearly upset/angry at wearing a dress, see if there’s an appropriate alternative. Whatever the outcome, don’t make it feel like it’s her fault for being uncomfortable in dresses. Also, children can change rather quickly, so remember that both the little girl who loves MLP and the little girl who loves Star Wars may not stay that way when they grow up.
I’d just like to add that I sincerely respect you for choosing to ask for this advice at all, since most parents never bother.
To clarify: you want to avoid to gender-stereotype your child? Specific advice for starters: the LGBT/Queer-scene tries to do some of that, so draw on their resources:
Wikipage with LGBT/Queer childbooks Maybe get in contact with your local queer/LGBT-scene? With 2 minutes of googling I found http://www.queerparents.org/. Good luck!
I want to avoid harm and let my daughter have the happiest possible life. If avoiding gender-stereotyping her will accomplish those things, then I want to do that. Thanks for the resources!
I’m also somewhat interested (if all goes according to plan, I have 50% chances of having an infant daughter too in the next couple of years; I already have a son).
I am, however, not particularly interested in avoiding gender stereotypes for my children like some in this subthread seem to advocate; sure there are some gender stereotypes I want to avoid (women should shut up and be stay-at-home wives etc.), but I don’t see anything wrong with the idea that men and women are different in our society, and have different social roles, etc. I’d probably be more likely to discourage my son from crying, and my daughter from swearing or hitting.
Of course, I won’t freak out if my son wants to play with dolls or my daughter wants to play with guns or if they turn out to be gay or transsexual or even heavens forbid Christian.
I do however want to correct any biases I might have about how women perceive things in society, so am looking forward to the next posts in this sequence.
The pill.
Until the child tells you their gender identity, don’t assume it matches their body, and even after then don’t police it. Any sentence that begins with a paraphrase of “girls do” (talk politely, their homework,...) or “girls don’t” (wear spiderman suits, climb trees,...) is nearly certainly sexist, wrong, and harmful. Learn the standard ways that parents treat children differently by gender (assuming girls are upset where they’d assume boys are angry, for example) and proactively refuse to do, or permit them done by other adults.
I’ll disagree with that one—it seems such an assumption is more than 99.9% likely to be true; and we assume less likely things all the time. Being aware of transsexuality and of the problems transfolk deal with should be enough until you have particular reasons to believe your child may identify with a different gender.
I think 99.5% is probably a reasonable upper bound on how confident you should be (with 0.5% of that being a Gettier case). Physical intersexuality of various sorts has an incident of about 1%, I have read, and in the absence of studies on the subject I’m inclined to deploy an ignorance prior about the mature gender identification of a random intersexed person. Garden-variety transfolk only cut this probability from there.
Even if instead of 99.9% Emile had said 95%, he would still have a point.
I’d think a parent would be aware of physical intersexuality, so I’m not sure that’s relevant in this thread’s context; physically ambiguous sex would certainly be a reason to be cautious about assuming gender! I’m having a hell of a time finding consistent prevalence data for psychological transsexuality, though; estimates seem to vary from 1 in 21000 to around one in 500 (taking the low estimate in the latter because it seems to be running on MtF numbers, which appear to skew a bit higher).
This is not reliably true. I have a friend who is a genetic chimera (fraternal twins, fused early enough in development to turn into one basically normal-shaped person). She was considered anatomically male and normal at birth and well past, and didn’t find out she had female organs too until her twenties, when they finally did an ultrasound to track down her irregular abdominal cramping, then did genetic tests to explain why there was a uterus in there. This gave her a relatively socially acceptable excuse to assume a female social role.
I don’t mean to trivialize any problems she may have gone through but at least on a first reading that sounds awesome.
I mean, I’m sure it wasn’t but it still sounds that way.
Yay! Someone high-status said it so I don’t have to!
I generally try to use probability when interacting with people. I know they are not as likely to jump of a bridge as to cross it. Amazingly it seems to help me have good relations with them. Incredible I know. I hear statistical reasoning about humans is evil though so maybe I shouldn’t be sharing this advice.
I never did get why that is though.
In certain cases, it’s evil (i.e. there should be an ethical injunction against it) because, due to corrupted mindware, certain people tend to overdo it (e.g., if they know that black people have a lower average IQ than white people, they’ll consider a black person significantly stupider than a white person in the same situation even though the evidence race provides about intelligence is likely almost completely screened off by information about what they say, wear, and do).
That’s not even the worst possibility—a racist may resent black people who are smarter than they “ought” to be.
One might argue that that’s not even a version of “statistical reasoning” corrupted by cognitive biases, that’s just being an asshole.
One might, but it’s plausible that being an asshole and having thinking that’s corrupted by emotional habits are entangled.
I’d say “It’s complicated.” Sometimes making someone less biased will make them more of a asshole.
BTW, I’m curious how Cognitive Reflection Test scores correlate with Big Five personality traits. I’d guess cbfvgvir pbeeryngvba jvgu Bcraarff naq Pbafpvragvbhfarff naq artngvir pbeeryngvba jvgu Arhebgvpvfz, ohg V unir ab vqrn nobhg Rkgebirefvba naq Nterrnoyrarff.
“Being an asshole” is a description of effects, not causes. In this case, the person’s assholy behavior might result from being insecure and angry, scapegoating other races for their insecurity and anger, having false beliefs about them, and responding to confusion with denial rather than doubt.
Are the specific examples that JulianMorrison gave things that are statistically true about girls versus boys. Is it statistically true that girls don’t climb trees? (I’m a girl, and tree climbing is awesome!)
Also, there’s a difference between what you’re talking about (using probability to predict behaviour when you know nothing else about others) and ways to raise children, since parents in part determine the future behaviour of their children. Even if it is statistically true, right now, that girls don’t wear Spider-Man suits as often as boys, and get upset rather than angry, I don’t think those states are the ideal world states. Treating your children like these stereotypes are true might be a self fulfilling prophecy.
Note that there are some examples that I think would be true. I do think that, on average, girls are more likely to get upset than angry when in a situation of conflict. But not always: I get upset more often, my brother gets angry, my sister gets angry, my dad gets upset. I do think that the average boy, if given a Barbie, is more likely to re-enact battles with it than dress it. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good parenting strategy to yell at your son because he’s an outlier who likes to dress Barbies. (From a purely predictive view, you could probably make a boy happier by giving him something other than a Barbie for his birthday, but that’s if you’re not the parent and your actions aren’t influencing his future preferences.)
This is what I was criticizing:
I also disagree with the first paragraph. If I have a daughter someday, I’m not going to treat her as gender-neutral-it’s too much work and probably wouldn’t work. I guess I just think that the examples in the second group aren’t “gender identity” examples. At most they’re gender stereotypes. I will treat my daughter as a girl, unless she tells me not to, but I’ll happily climb trees with her, I wouldn’t tell her to be polite because “girls are polite” (boys should be too!) and I won’t encourage or expect her to be upset rather than angry.
BTW, by “assuming girls are upset where they’d assume boys are angry” I am referring to unconscious fact judgements about infants too young to verbalize the problem. (Cite: “pink brain blue brain” by Lise Eliot). Macho emotions are attributed to babies in who appear male and gentle ones to babies who appear female. Since baby sex is almost unmarked, that means going by the colour of the clothes. (And google “baby Storm” for an example of adults panicking and pillorying the parents if the cues that allow them to gender the baby are intentionally witheld.)
Ohh. Oops. Not how I interpreted it. Your original meaning is much less likely to be a true-ish stereotype than my interpretation.
What’s your distinction between upset and angry?
When in a situation of conflict: Upset: assume you’re the one in the wrong, blame yourself, not try to defend yourself, cry. (Or some but not all of these elements.) Angry: Assume you’re right, blame the other person, argue back, yell. Or some but not all of these elements.
Obviously it depends on context. Some people have a very strong tendency to get upset, whereas others will sometimes be upset and sometimes be angry. I’m pretty strongly skewed towards getting upset; I don’t like the experience of anger; but in a conflict with family members, I will frequently behave more angrily than upset.
Apply Bayes to making decisions in real life, in ways that the cool people don’t? That idea will never fly on LessWrong!
There’s not as much reason to pay attention to statistical reasoning when we have insight into causal mechanisms. Particularly when our knowledge of the causal mechanisms suggests that the statistical results are very susceptible to misleading interpretations.
Incidentally we have essentially perfect insight into the causal mechanisms of what makes a number prime, and yet this sort of reasoning is spectacularly successful:
I dislike this emphasis on gender identity. I haven’t seen enough non-anecdotal evidence of this to be >0.8 confident, but my model predicts that this strategy wouldn’t achieve all that much, and has much more risk of being damaging (due to biases and two-steps-removed complications) than a strategy of behaving as non-sexist as possible (and ‘teaching’ this to the child, but that is most effective by example during childhood AFAIK).
What added benefit comes from not assuming it matches their body, if you’re not enforcing stereotypes?
You have an implicit assumption: that there are actions that you can take which assume that gender identity matches body, that do not enforce stereotypes and which cannot be co-opted to enforce stereotypes.
There is strong evidence to suggest that that is not true, within the current social landscape.
Referring to them by gendered pronouns, basically.
They might be full blown trans, whether the kind that’s so intense it forces people to transition despite all the grief they get, or the kinds that are less intense or more messy (and probably loads more common, like bisexual is more common than gay).
They might want to pick and mix their gender presentation or have a non-traditional way of expressing their identity. Like being a “tomboy” or a boy who likes dresses.
They will learn to behave in a non-assuming, non-policing way themselves.
How does treating a child as genderless help if they prove to be transexual?
Surely this is covered by “not enforcing stereotypes”?
I don’t follow.
“Until the child tells you their gender identity”, I said—you wait in a state of openness to all alternatives, and they tell you. A child is not cis until proven trans. It’s “no data”. They will say.
Yes, ultimately, this is not enforcing stereotypes. But that phrase primes you for vastly underestimating the scope of what you need to do. Like, it primes you to think in terms of “offer Jane a dinosaur as well as a Barbie” rather than “do not assume that Cody would prefer jeans rather than a skirt”.
Children raised to assume they have control of their gender presentation and the right to assert their gender identity, will not be inclined to make assumptions about, or tease and ostracise, other people’s gender.
I asked how it helps. When I meet someone who appears male, I assume they identify as male, and if they don’t then they tell me so. If I treated everyone I met as of indeterminate gender … I would be ignoring people’s established gender far more than accommodating people’s insecurities. Besides, I’m going to have to name the kid at some point.
Giving your boy a skirt is implicitly teaching him that wearing one does not signal gender. I may personally be fine with them wearing underpants on their head, but I don’t teach them to go to school like that.
I’m still unclear as to why ignoring the biological gender of your child will help them be more tolerant in later life.
Solving this type of problem is one reason that I advocate differentiating gender and biological sex. Once that distinction is made, I think many of these problems are analytically clearer.
FWIW, I think JulianMorrison is using “gender” when “sex” is meant in at least some of the comments.
When somebody’s born, they don’t identify as a gender. By the time they reach talking infancy, they do and will tell you. They will probably want to adopt gendered clothing and behaviours. Those might, or might not match their anatomy. If they pick cross-gendered ones, that might last, or it might go away, or it might turn into gay/lesbian identity. If you aren’t being pushy about any of this, they will find their own level. I am not proposing “never permit them a gender”, I am proposing “never assign them a gender, coercively”.
Unfortunately with strangers, I have less evidence about their genders than I might like. That is because people don’t feel very free to express cross-gender presentation, and in fact it takes such an immense crushing need that people dare the taunts, for them to even be visible. So there are lots of tans women walking around looking like men, and there are lots of trans men walking around looking like women. And it is because of dismissive attitudes like yours about the skirt, which easily translate into ridicule and ostracism. A boy in skirt is not like a boy with underpants on his head, he’s like a girl in jeans. That used to be scandalous. But we accepted it more readily, because dressing “like a girl” is seen as degrading while dressing “like a man” was seen as upgrading.
You are strawmanning “ignoring the biological gender” (and building upon an assumption that isn’t true; biology isn’t gender, it isn’t even oversimplified binary sex—but that’s a story for another day). I am not suggesting “ignoring” it, I am suggesting “not treating it as the thing that determines gender”.
Once, yes, and it was once possible for women to dress “as men” and be assumed to be “effeminate” men. (Google “sweet polly oliver”.) However, for various reasons this is no longer the case, whereas it is still so for men.
Are you saying gender identity is not determined by biology? Because I have some transsexuals who would like to talk to you. (Obviously much of the trappings we assign to gender can and should be ignored.)
EDIT:
I think you misspelled “transsexual” there,
So break it.
The etiology of trans is unknown. There are suggestions that hormones in the womb may play a part, with the brain and body controlled by hormone flushes at different times, resulting in something like “intersex of the brain”. But what I meant was more simply, that social categorization of bodies as “male or female” doesn’t determine their gender identity. Bear in mind I say social categorization here, because society looks at some things (penis length, particularly) and not at others (brains, particularly) about the body to put people into categories.
And no, I meant cross-gendered in the specific sense of “person socially assigned gender A in clothes socially assigned gender B”.
BTW: trans being inborn and immutable is a political thing. It is easier to get rights if your discriminated-against attribute is “not your fault” so you can’t be “blamed” for it. This doesn’t affect the rightness of the cause, only the ease of implementing it in the face of religious (sin focused) transphobia.
Ok, so you admit your movement is willing to lie, BS and corrupt social science for “the greater good”. Given that, why should I believe any of the empirical claims your movement makes?
So, this is the sort of thing that’s true for almost any advocacy group: They will present the evidence that helps them and not present the evidence that doesn’t. That means that for any political advocacy or organization you need to look at the evidence with that in mind and judge it carefully and accordingly. This makes the groups under discussion no different than any other similar group.
There is a difference between selectively presenting true evidence (or at least evidence they believe to be true) and telling things you know to be false.
Valid point in this context. I’m not sure if Julian was claiming to present things that are known to be false, although the wording of the comment certainly could be interpreted that way.
Wasn’t he basically just saying that these kinds of statements radically lower his epistemic confidence in empirical claims the movement makes which are politically convenient?
Well, there’s the connotative issue involved. But my point is that he seems to be making a strange adjustment here: Making a radical adjustment to one group when it should apply to all political groups. Moreover, the comment struck me (and it is possible that I’ve misinterpreted it here) as essentially dismissing any claims made rather than doing what one should actually do in such contexts- carefully examine the claims, and look for omitted evidence.
We’re willing to do any damn thing that saves the actual people that are hurting.
If this upsets you, I will enjoy schadenfreude.
The interesting question is what measures will pay off best in the long run.
Actually lying about the science might blow up later. On the other hand, saying that we don’t know what causes gender dysmorphia, but it begins very young, is not a matter of choice, and gets relieved by living as the gender that feels right to the dysmorphic person—and living in that way is not harmful-- is harder to say forcefully than to say “born that way”.
Yeah, if I’m talking to someone from who I can assume rationality, I’ll say all that (and that the sexist gender beliefs and patriarchal power structures that prevent trans people just flipping across in high school like it was a mere incidental fact, like hair colour, should be destroyed anyway for over-determined reasons). But I have no intention to give truth to enemies. Enemy is defined as: a person whose unshakeable beliefs harm the people I care about. If a lie makes them back off, lying is good.
Be cautious. Be extremely cautious.
How do you tell whether someone has unshakable beliefs?
Once your cause has embraced the dark arts how can you be sure what you’re doing is actually saving people from hurting? Are you sure the evidence for this belief, or the evidence that convinced you to join that cause in the first place wasn’t just another ‘pious lie’?
We’re willing to do any damn thing to find a sense of closure, of vindication. We don’t actually care to reduce evil, since we’re subconsciously quite aware that it would require us to take unacceptable measures.
To enforce a ruthless order and violate the sanctity of the individual, to disarm the weak and make them submit to their fate. Many here have been hinting darkly at this for a long time.
The reactionaries are completely correct in their bleak worldview. There is no deliverance. Good intentions are a self-righteous delusion, in a sense. Suffering can only be minimized by monstrous and inhuman policies. Someone will always scream and scream behind locks, walls and chains, behind a facade of normality. Finding happiness in slavery is the best that most people can count on.
...For fuck’s sake, donate to SIAI.
I think the former paragraphs here presume that politics is the domain of deluded do-gooders, rather than people (including those at the bottom of the heap) fighting self-consciously for their interests (or the interests of a broader alliance, TDT and all that.) It doesn’t strike me as hypocrisy to throw one’s enemies into the gulag, or to decieve them in warfare, even as you attempt to avoid the gulag and see through deceptions yourself.
Once again, I support the right to wear underpants on your head but I wouldn’t teach my kids it’s socially acceptable.
It shows up on brainscans.
How is the second sentence at all evidence against the first?
… because you don’t, as a rule, choose your own neurophysiology. Certain structures in transsexuals’ brains are closer to the form they take in cisgendered members of the sex they identify with than the sex they appear to be.
Become a taxi driver and grow your hippocampus. The boundary between what you can change and what you can’t is not as clear as you seem to think.
Do we know what these structures do?
As I have said elsewhere, there is a sliding scale involved. This is decidedly towards the “unchosen” end, and considering that transsexuals report having changed their lifestyle as a result of preexisting problems, it seems reasonable to call this one for the “nature” side.
Besides this? No.
You have some control over it. Everything you do and every thought you have affects your neurophysiology. How much control you have over it is an interesting question, which can’t be answered simply by pointing to differences on brain scans.
There’s a sliding scale. At one end, we have things like frontal lobes. At the other, we have imagination. This is the kind of structure that doesn’t alter without external stimuli, and even then it’s bloody hard.
If you take physicalism seriously, every experience can be expected to show up eventually, on sufficiently advanced brain scans. That has no bearing on what is a choice and what is not. Choices and non-choices will both have physical correlates.
Autism is a choice!
Then you are perpetuating cissexism.
And no it doesn’t, there are brain areas that are statistically different in the small population of trans brains donated to science, but there is no brain scan for trans and it would be useless anyway, because if you experience yourself as trans and the scan says “nope” it’s the scan that’s wrong. The individual is the sole authority and the diagnosis is by telling a shrink what you experience.
… how so?
The fact that we cannot currently diagnose gender dysphoria [EDIT: in a living subject] with a brain scan does not change the fact that it is caused by a neurological disorder, and as such is biological, not a choice.
Are you saying that cisgendered people should be eligible for gender reassignment surgery and so on, or that any brain-scan based test will be imperfect?
I am saying that a trans person can only be diagnosed by saying “I experience myself as [fill in the blank]” because that unspoken, personal experience is what trans is. Not the brain stuff. That may be what trans is caused by. It’s like having a sore toe, that can be caused by a dropped hammer or kicking the door, but the essence of sore toeness can’t be determined by testing for hammers and a negative test for a dropped hammer would not disprove it, the essence of sore toeness is the ouch.
I’m pretty sure that the ouch is merely evidence that someone is experiencing pain. We’re perilously close to arguing definitions here, though. If someone developed such a scan and there were a lot of trans people coming up as cis that would be warning sign, but it is not impossible (merely unlikely) that there are “trans” people who have more in common with cis people than “real” trans people.
EDIT: it may help to consider autism here.
FURTHER EDIT: dammit, stupid karma toll cutting off my discussions.
If someone developed such a scan, and it labeled a bunch of trans-identified people as cis, then IMO that would be good evidence for the proposition that the scanner is buggy.
“I experience myself as a beetle in a box.”