I have longed for a Less-Wrong style discussion of transsexuality. It appears to me that practically all discussion of this assumes that there is such a thing as inherent gender and that it can differ from that suggested by the arrangement of your genitals at birth. I would love to hear an account of the subject that gets away from that kind of essentialism, and provides an account of what transsexuality is that taboos all mention of sex and gender, and replaces the symbol with the substance.
I think it’s helpful to consider transsexuality as cosmetic surgery. It’s another case of “I’m unhappy with certain aspects of my body and I want to change them.” Currently, doctors in the US won’t perform this cosmetic surgery unless you convince them you’re an X trapped in a Y’s body.
The cosmetic surgery viewpoint goes beyond binary sex choices of male and female. Given better technology, in the future one could choose to be a blue-haired futanari catgirl. Why? Not to fit some story about finally becoming one’s true gender, but simply because it could be fun.
So you’d give the claim “I need to reshape my body into a catgirl/elf/dragon to achieve true happiness” the same credence as “I need to reshape my body into the other sex to achieve true happiness”?
Today’s society gives one of those statements less credence than the other. Do you think it’s a bad thing?
I hate to sound callous, but I don’t really care why people want to change their bodies. I am simply glad for them when they feel better about themselves afterwards.
To respond to your question: Yes that’s a bad thing, but I can extrapolate the moral trajectory. In the past, more people disliked transsexuals and total body revision wasn’t even on the map. Today, transsexuals are making inroads and some fringe people are speculating about more extreme modifications.
There are other times where I disagree with society giving different amounts of approval to things. For example, more people are for medicinal marijuana than for completely legalizing it.
I hate to sound callous, but I don’t really care why people want to change their bodies. I am simply glad for them when they feel better about themselves afterwards.
I’m at a loss for how such an open-minded and kind statement could be interpreted as callous. It just sounds like the obvious Right Thing. Am I missing something here?
It could, but hopefully in the context of LW wouldn’t, be interpreted as ‘the fact that you’re distressed doesn’t matter; your preference for a certain kind of body is no more significant than $LowStatusGroup’s similar and low-status preference’.
Sure. Although I think it’s worth distinguishing among different sorts of fun, here.
There is the fun that comes from not having other people infer things about me that aren’t true from my body, for example.
There is the fun that comes from having people infer things about me that aren’t true.
There is the fun that comes from novelty.
There is the fun that comes from pleasure—that is, if my new body can experience more pleasure than my old one, that might be fun even when it isn’t novel.
There are many others.
I’m not sure it makes sense to lump all of these together.
(Caveat: I am talking about colloquial fun here, not Fun. I don’t know that they’re different in this case, I’m just not really considering the latter at all.)
It appears to me that practically all discussion of this assumes that there is such a thing as inherent gender and that it can differ from that suggested by the arrangement of your genitals at birth.
Is it not a common right-wing point of view that transsexuality is a sexual fetish, and that the dichotomy between sex (biological) and gender (social) is a left-wing fiction? This is frequently part of a package of views that is more focused on criticism of homosexuality and feminism, but I remember encountering critics of transsexuality that were gay or gay-sympathetic. I wasn’t able to find anything like that the past half-hour, though.
If we abstract away from political agenda and evaluate hypotheses in their own right, the claim “transsexuality is a sexual fetish” is trivially disproven by the sheer number and range of available testimonies. There are even asexual transsexuals.
I remember encountering critics of transsexuality that were gay or gay-sympathetic. I wasn’t able to find anything like that the past half-hour, though.
I have long thought along the same vein simply because this is what everyone asserts, and in fact it could be the conflict between that belief and my rationalist principles that caused me mental discomfort—way before I discovered Less Wrong.
The problem, as it often is, in the matter of definitions. How do we define this “inherent gender”? Can it change later in life? If someone discovered their gender identity at a later age, does that mean that previously to that they behaved according to a “non-inherent gender” but were somehow consciously unaware of this? Can we build a brain scanner that detects it in a quantifiable way, and can we be sure that it will always match self-reporting? And most importantly, if we do that, can we be sure of 100% correlation between that characteristic and the expected utility of various options of gender presentation?
I’m not sure the right approach involves trying to clarify this idea of “inherent gender”. I think I’d rather treat it the way Yvain treats “disease” here: look for the various characteristics people track using gender terms and address them separately.
It might help to taboo the words “gender”, “male” and “female” and instead speak separately of the different (and numerous) aspects that compose the complex biological and social phenomena behind them.
I have longed for a Less-Wrong style discussion of transsexuality. It appears to me that practically all discussion of this assumes that there is such a thing as inherent gender and that it can differ from that suggested by the arrangement of your genitals at birth. I would love to hear an account of the subject that gets away from that kind of essentialism, and provides an account of what transsexuality is that taboos all mention of sex and gender, and replaces the symbol with the substance.
I think it’s helpful to consider transsexuality as cosmetic surgery. It’s another case of “I’m unhappy with certain aspects of my body and I want to change them.” Currently, doctors in the US won’t perform this cosmetic surgery unless you convince them you’re an X trapped in a Y’s body.
The cosmetic surgery viewpoint goes beyond binary sex choices of male and female. Given better technology, in the future one could choose to be a blue-haired futanari catgirl. Why? Not to fit some story about finally becoming one’s true gender, but simply because it could be fun.
So you’d give the claim “I need to reshape my body into a catgirl/elf/dragon to achieve true happiness” the same credence as “I need to reshape my body into the other sex to achieve true happiness”?
Today’s society gives one of those statements less credence than the other. Do you think it’s a bad thing?
I hate to sound callous, but I don’t really care why people want to change their bodies. I am simply glad for them when they feel better about themselves afterwards.
To respond to your question: Yes that’s a bad thing, but I can extrapolate the moral trajectory. In the past, more people disliked transsexuals and total body revision wasn’t even on the map. Today, transsexuals are making inroads and some fringe people are speculating about more extreme modifications.
There are other times where I disagree with society giving different amounts of approval to things. For example, more people are for medicinal marijuana than for completely legalizing it.
I’m at a loss for how such an open-minded and kind statement could be interpreted as callous. It just sounds like the obvious Right Thing. Am I missing something here?
It could, but hopefully in the context of LW wouldn’t, be interpreted as ‘the fact that you’re distressed doesn’t matter; your preference for a certain kind of body is no more significant than $LowStatusGroup’s similar and low-status preference’.
Sure. Although I think it’s worth distinguishing among different sorts of fun, here.
There is the fun that comes from not having other people infer things about me that aren’t true from my body, for example.
There is the fun that comes from having people infer things about me that aren’t true.
There is the fun that comes from novelty.
There is the fun that comes from pleasure—that is, if my new body can experience more pleasure than my old one, that might be fun even when it isn’t novel.
There are many others.
I’m not sure it makes sense to lump all of these together.
(Caveat: I am talking about colloquial fun here, not Fun. I don’t know that they’re different in this case, I’m just not really considering the latter at all.)
Is it not a common right-wing point of view that transsexuality is a sexual fetish, and that the dichotomy between sex (biological) and gender (social) is a left-wing fiction? This is frequently part of a package of views that is more focused on criticism of homosexuality and feminism, but I remember encountering critics of transsexuality that were gay or gay-sympathetic. I wasn’t able to find anything like that the past half-hour, though.
Julie Bindel is the motherlode. Lesbian, essentialist view of femaleness and famously despises transsexuals.
Ergo: politics is the mind killer.
If we abstract away from political agenda and evaluate hypotheses in their own right, the claim “transsexuality is a sexual fetish” is trivially disproven by the sheer number and range of available testimonies. There are even asexual transsexuals.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transphobia#Transphobia_in_the_lesbian.2C_gay_and_bisexual_community
I have long thought along the same vein simply because this is what everyone asserts, and in fact it could be the conflict between that belief and my rationalist principles that caused me mental discomfort—way before I discovered Less Wrong.
The problem, as it often is, in the matter of definitions. How do we define this “inherent gender”? Can it change later in life? If someone discovered their gender identity at a later age, does that mean that previously to that they behaved according to a “non-inherent gender” but were somehow consciously unaware of this? Can we build a brain scanner that detects it in a quantifiable way, and can we be sure that it will always match self-reporting? And most importantly, if we do that, can we be sure of 100% correlation between that characteristic and the expected utility of various options of gender presentation?
I’m not sure the right approach involves trying to clarify this idea of “inherent gender”. I think I’d rather treat it the way Yvain treats “disease” here: look for the various characteristics people track using gender terms and address them separately.
Indeed.
It might help to taboo the words “gender”, “male” and “female” and instead speak separately of the different (and numerous) aspects that compose the complex biological and social phenomena behind them.