Reposting an edited version of my comment to the original post, since I probably posted it too late for anyone to see it:
It seems useful to distinguish between false beliefs and impossible beliefs. The belief that ants are on your skin may be false, but it is hardly impossible. The belief that witches stole your penis is basically impossible.
The belief that are male souls trapped in women's bodies similarly seems like impossible thinking, rather than just false thinking. [This seems to be the presentation of "transgender" that I see most frequently. If it does not reflect what most people mean by "being trans," please drop a link to what they do mean. E.g. if most people don't think that they were born with the wrong body or are "really" the opposite sex, but just that they have certain characteristics more commonly associated with the opposite sex, and they think that they would therefore be better suited trying to make their bodies look like that of the opposite sex, and presenting themselves as it.]
Sure, both penis stealing and wrong-body having can be construed in false but possible ways, e.g. it is literally possible to cut off a penis and steal it, and it is literally possible to be born with various conditions which affect the state of the genitalia, but witch-penis-stealing is distinct from "violent castration" just as "transgender" is distinct from intersex medical conditions.
While as noted in the article, all beliefs are a result of some combination of physical stimuli and a priori social stimuli, beliefs in the impossible seem predicated on a specific false belief.
Just as modernizing societies that stopped believing in magic experienced near universal elimination of "witches-stealing-penises," even though they probably retained many of the sorts of physical stimuli that prompted people to experience particular episodes, our society too may (hopefully) eliminate "transgender," by emphasizing that the underlying belief is magical and false.
Hopefully acknowledging the impossibility of the delusion can lead to those with the unfortunate associated physical stimuli to seek out more productive, or at least less destructive solutions. Just as people in formerly koro believing regions much less frequently mutilate themselves attempting to protect or recover their genitals, hopefully people uncomfortable with their bodies can be conditioned away from mutilating them and towards less destructive solutions.
However, it seems like many critics of the transgender craze are fueling the delusion by implicitly acknowledging the underlying thinking and just questioning whether in a given case a person falsely believes they have a body of the wrong sex, rather than actually having a body of the wrong sex.
Oddly enough there are some peer-reviewed theological journals, e.g. "Theological Studies" (run by the Jesuits) and "The Journal of Theological Studies" (run by the Oxford University Press).
It sounds like you're simply asserting that feeling your body is the wrong sex is impossible. I don't see why that should be the case. To me, it doesn't fall at all in the same category as whether one's penis is there, which is physically verifiable and would also require some mechanism. Why would feeling your feelings be "impossible"?
1) A person IS his or her body. It is physiologically impossible for the nerve endings of a penis to send the message to the brain that the penis should be something else.
2) However, humans are complex creatures. They can convince themselves of a narrative where they are souls that are separate from their body and that their body is a prison for their soul (a narrative that Plato already had articulated). Then, they can further convince themselves that maybe a body of a different sex would be a better vessel for their soul, and they can convince themselves that they feel distressed from being what they are.
oh it is likely not the penis which sends the signals, but some other part of the brain which does so. And the brain can definitely send signals that don't match the body. See for example, phantom limbs.
Ok, but clearly males differ from females in more ways than just their genitalia. It seems an extreme claim to say that it is "impossible" for biological processes to result in a person having the outward appearance of one gender but the internal experience of the other.
No, because there is no such objectively testable thing as the "outward appearance of one gender but the internal experience of the other." That claim assumes that there exists a sexed soul separate from the body, which is not a falsifiable claim.
What exists are sex-related stereotypes. And stereotypes are stereotypes.
I agree it isn't a falsifiable claim (at least, not without a much better understandings of the human brain). In fact, if you go back and read my comment, the words "It seems an extreme claim to say that it is "impossible" for..." directly preceded the part you quoted. And no, what I said doesn't "assume there exists a soul" any more than talking about the internal experience of flavor assumes a soul.
It is funny though that you're making some pretty absolute claims and yet when I respond to the effect of "not necessarily" you're suddenly worried about falsifiability. My claim can be falsified by proving your claim is true, but as you've pointed out that isn't possible.
You're pointing to an internal experience that is dysphoric, right? But you wouldn't be dysphoric if your external sex characteristics weren't a certain way. That feeling of "mismatch" wouldn't exist otherwise. So everything about your internal and external experience is connected.
This sentence feels meaningless in the context of the overall discussion without first establishing what is meant by "internal experience of reproductive sex", "external experience of reproductive sex", and "separate". If it just means (as you seemed to clarify in your subsequent response) "everything about your internal and external experience is connected" then... ok? That doesn't contradict anything anyone else has said.
A trans woman isn't having a cis woman's internal experience and a cis man's external experience. She is having a trans woman's internal and external experience. The internal experience of a trans person is primarily characterized by dysphoria, which is something cis people rarely experience. Wishing your body was female or thinking you'd be more comfortable with a female body is fundamentally different from having and being comfortable with a female body.
I do think that you must believe in some kind of "gendered soul," philosophically speaking, to believe in an internal experience of sex that is disembodied and wholly shared between trans and cis women/men.
It's possible to feel/believe anything. However it is not possible to know that the qualia you're experiencing and attributing to being more like the standard qualia of the opposite sex is not in fact nothing like the qualia of the opposite sex and actually centrally the qualia of your birth sex. You can feel as though you'd be happier with the primary and secondary sexual characteristics of the opposite sex, and you can be right about this feeling but that is distinct from actually being a member of the opposite sex. It's a claim to have knowledge you simply can't have.
I don't actually think it's useful to distinguish between false vs. impossible beliefs. The person having them doesn't know they're impossible - to a 16th century European, witches are just as much a part of nature as ants. I would expect them both to be equally good culture-bound mental illnesses.
Of course, by definition, someone experiencing something thinks it is real, but why can it not be useful in studying the phenomenon?
Is it not reasonable to think that the two would behave differently? E.g. that impossible beliefs could be more effectively treated than other false beliefs? Doesn't that fit with koro being eliminated much more effectively than anorexia? People can learn that witches aren't real, and stop associating their experiences with them, but they can't stop being anorexic by learning that obesity isn't real, since obesity actually is real - they just aren't obese.
Looking at the transgender piece, I don't see how it invalidates my point, except in the trivial sense. That is, one could argue that the koro belief is not impossible, once we define "having a penis" to mean "feeling like one has a penis." But that seems trivially true and therefore not useful. If 'man' means 'someone who identifies as a man,' then identifying as a man becomes trivial and unhelpful. Inasmuch as it means something discrete, it seems impossible, and inasmuch as it is possible, it seems trivial.
That's what I was trying to address with my question in the brackets about what trans people believe.
Analogously, one could say the same thing about other beliefs, like a Man thinking he is a dog. Dogs and human both vary a lot and have various overlapping sets of characteristics. A given human may be as aggressive, for example, as the average dog.
Obvious differentiators between the two may sometimes fail, e.g. humans can suffer from hirsutism, and dogs may be hairless.
But does that mean that is is possible for a human to be a dog? Again, it seems like it's only possible if we trivialize the meaning of "being a dog," to mean" someone who thinks they are a dog," in which case it is a tautology that someone who thinks they are a dog is a dog.
Hermaphrodites exist. Half-human half-dog hybrids don't. There is clearly *some* biological possibility for nonstandard variations along the male/female paradigm (unlike the human/dog paradigm). So easily dismissing people's experiences in that regard as "impossible" is completely irrational.
For what it's worth, plenty of trans people also agree with the anti-essentialist point that it's impossible to for there to be a "soul" that "has" a gender, and go further and argue that the body doesn't "have" a gender either, but that it is put on by social interpretation.
They then say that what it is to be trans is to identify with a gender other than the one that people originally categorized you as, and want to interact socially as that gender. Some of them allow that medical treatments might be a useful part of that process, while others specifically want to de-medicalize it (though I don't know how many would actively criticize the use of hormones or surgery, rather than just encouraging people that there are plenty of ways to live as trans that don't require that).
They do not actually agree because men and women are categories that are used by 99.9% of people to assign people to biological categories. The idea that men and women are not biological categories then needs some form of "gendered soul" kind of idea.
This isn't true. To believe that transitioning doesn't work is closer to requiring a gendered soul. Since otherwise, you are looking at a breast-having human without a penis filled with estrogen and saying "this is a male".
It is true that most trans people respect people's requested pronouns even when it doesn't match how their body looks, because that is the nice thing to do.
Male and female reproductive categories. If you take an individual that produced sperm, give him estrogen and remove his penis, that doesn't actually change the fact that he is male.
How often is it socially relevant to you what someones chromosomes are, and do you have chromosome vision? Look at Kim Petra's or Nikki Dejager and tell me that's a man.
It's relevant when you have a biological man wanting to compete in women's sports. Or use women's restrooms. Or dwell in women's prisons. It's also relevant when you are cisgendered, looking for a mate and don't want to be cat fished in the worst way possible.
You don't have to literally produce sperm to be of the category of people that produces sperm. If you have the plumbing, even if it isn't working, you would still be considered reproductively male.
All categories have fuzzy edges. Obviously there are intersex conditions that make the classification confusing. But castration is pretty simple... it's taking a fertile or potentially fertile male and making him infertile. He still has the body that is generally associated with small gametes: a male body.
>Since otherwise, you are looking at a breast-having human without a penis filled with estrogen and saying "this is a male".<
My intuition is that there's more to sex than secondary sexual characteristics. Certainly, there are things like bone density and so forth, and of course the good ol' chromosomes themselves; but I mean there's more to it *in a sense more relevant to the social experience of sex* than "presence/absence of Y-chromosome".
E.g., on at least some interesting axes of personality, trans-women tend to score closer to the masculine mean than cis-women tend to. This is true for a lot of stuff like aggression, which seems like one of the more important (/) sex-linked personality traits...
...but I don't know how it comes out in toto — it could be that *overall*, the responses from the transwomen are more feminine than not.
Anyway, this is what I think people are thinking of when they maintain separate categories, in their heads, between cis- and trans-women.
(In my personal experience, the transwomen I've met have definitely seemed more aggressive, assertive, etc., than your average woman; but that's a population of, like, two. Also a heavily-selected population, perhaps.
...Relatedly: also that's all totally fine by me and I would very much like to meet women — trans or otherwise — who may be interested in working out any aggressive-type feelings they possess. Upon me. In a sexual fashion. ...HMU. *cough*)
Regarding categories, rationalists are fond of telling everyone the map is not the territory. I recently drove past a "road" that was closed off by barriers and had a sign which said "dry weather only". It was completely covered in grass and had sheep grazing on it. Was this "road" really a road, or was it a field? Which is more true? Does the idea that a road is not a physical category need some form of "road soul" or "field soul" to describe it?
Well...none of those questions are sensible questions. We don't have to be slaves to language when the actual road/field is in front of us. It's a seasonal road for the purposes of mapmakers, a normal road for the local council if they need to set up a detour, a road for the sheep farmer if he's selling the land around it, and a road for anyone who uses it when the weather is dry. It's a field for the sheep and their farmer for the purposes of grazing, and for me when I drive past it. It is both a road and a field, and without knowing the purpose of the question it's impossible to say which is more real.
As I understand it, there are a few ways to describe transness. A materialist version that doesn't require souls might look something like one or both of the following.
Medical: trans people have a medical/behavioral condition, dysmorphia, which causes them suffering when they are treated as their assigned gender at birth and/or when they perceive themselves as their assigned gender at birth. The most efficacious treatment for this condition is treating them as their identified gender and/or assisting them in medical transition towards this gender. The alternative - assisting the person with being more comfortable with their assigned gender - is at best useless or at worst harmful under this argument.
Cultural: In addition to the above, transness is a culture, and it's unethical to try to treat transness by counseling them not to be trans. Even if that treatment were effective, it would constitute erasure or genocide or something along those lines.
You can agree or disagree with whether the arguments are correct, but neither one requires a soul.
I think you're not being nearly critical enough of your understanding of biological sex. A "woman's soul trapped in a man's body" is certainly an overly simplistic way of describing it mostly told to young people, and is impossible since souls aren't real.
But a careful wording of what most trans people (trans, not non binary, I think these are different phenomena and can't speak for both) would say would be something like "Despite my karyotype and some of my sex characteristics, upon honest introspection I feel more like a man/woman, and female/male biological characteristics and social traits give me great distress, that I call gender dysphoria, the same way a woman might be distressed about facial hair caused by PCOS or a man might be distressed about his weak chin, wide hips, and fragile physique"
A really important part of the model of transgenderism is that cis people experience gender dysphoria too, we just don't call it that. But desires for women to feel womanly and men to feel manly already motivate a ton of distress and medical action. For trans people there just seems to be a flip.
And biologically this is absolutely possible, and anyone who wants to claim that biological sex is as cut and dry as karyotype is someone willfully plugging their fingers in their ears to hang on to their 7th grade anatomy class model in disregard of what the medical establishment and biologists have been saying for some time now.
The short version is, karyotype only signals what gonads to make, and then primary sex hormone controls all the differentiation. If there are any kinds of abnormalities in hormone production or reception, you can get weird differentiation.
There is evidence from doctors that transgender people have abnormal labs and statistically significant brain differences relative to cisgender people even _before_ hormone therapy interventions. I will link sources when I'm not on mobile.
An honest reading of history will readily identify a broad number of people exhibiting similar kinds of gender non conforming behavior, and widely disparate cultures having to integrate the fact that human sex and gender both are strongly bimodal but have non trivial spectrums that somewhere between 1 and 10 percent of people will reside along.
> "Despite my karyotype and some of my sex characteristics, upon honest introspection I feel more like a man/woman, and female/male biological characteristics and social traits give me great distress, that I call gender dysphoria, the same way a woman might be distressed about facial hair caused by PCOS or a man might be distressed about his weak chin, wide hips, and fragile physique"
If the distress is the core issue, and you had a choice of some intervention that realigned your introspection to your sex, rather than trying to change your secondary sex characteristics to match your introspective sense, would you opt for that less invasive intervention instead? Most people seem to struggle with this because of some innate sense of dualism, that they are their mind and not their body, and so they would prefer to change their body.
> There is evidence from doctors that transgender people have abnormal labs and statistically significant brain differences relative to cisgender people even _before_ hormone therapy interventions.
Lots of mental illnesses have physical characteristics too. I fully suspect that people with Body Integrity Identity Disorder will also have various brain and lab abnormalities. I don't think biological factors would convince anyone that considered gender dysmorphia to be a mental disorder that it wasn't one, or that this required revising gender categories.
If there was a medical intervention I could have taken to make myself cisgender back when I was trying to decide whether to start, I would have jumped on it, and I still now wish it had been there.
You're right many transwomen will report that this does not seem like a good idea to them but I suspect that mostly stems from a difficulty in feeling the algorithm from the _outside_. In general consider that all agents don't want to change their utility functions and generally allowing arbitrary modification to your cognition is the path of madness, so I wouldn't be too surprised about people's hesitancy to alter their brain. It's not dualism, it's that altering your utility functions is typically very bad for your current utility function.
And all that said, like I said, I would have jumped at the chance, and still would jump at the chance if it magically included my old body as well. Being trans is really awful, but ignoring being trans is intolerable.
As far as "is it a mental disorder or a physical one" I think that's all confused heap problems. The brain is a physical system, "mental or physical " is a semantic game people play.
I pointed out the biological correlates as a counterpoint to it being a delusion and physically impossible.
I wished that my penis would be cut off long before I realized I wanted to be girl. There is no need to hypothesis a "female soul", that is merely a short hand or comforting myth. After getting sex reassignment surgery, I don't feel mutilated. In fact it is a lovely improvement in my life. I am no longer constantly bothered every time I was reminded I had one.
It sounds like you are uncomfortable with me changing my genitals. Perhaps people uncomfortable with others having sex reassignment surgery can be conditioned towards a less destructive solution than politically controlling my genitals .
Think about someone you love, like your parents, life partner, child, or best friend. If they tell you they want their eyes gouged out because they want to be blind, would you be worried? Would you want doctors to satisfy their wishes and pour drain cleaner into their eyes? Even if you do, would you understand why many doctors would be uncomfortable with destroying healthy organs, and why their discomfort does not stem necessarily from wanting to politically control eyeballs?
I share you discomfort. But I believe that this discomfort is irrational. Similar to how I feel discomfort when I see women cut their long hair. I enjoy my longish hair and wish that it was longer, but it is a mistake to think that those women are being irrational when they cut it. It is the same mistake as looking as someone eating a food you dislike and assuming that they are suffering by eating it.
But I think this opposing this blinding does count as "wanting to politically control others eyeballs" as soon as you say "I am uncomfortable with you blinding yourself, therefore you shouldn't be able to do it" or "he should lose his license".
If you are merely saying "I think getting sex reassignment surgery is a mistake but I respect and defend your legal right to do so", then you don't want to politically control my genitals and I may have falsely assumed otherwise.
from the perspective of the trans person, this is like your family acting to prevent you from getting your infected appendix removed saying that you are "mutilating your body", or worse politicians saying "we need to ban appendectomies". Except it is even worse because there is no effective conversant therapies, but antibiotics can treat many cases of appendicitis.
You're talking about gouging eyes out and pouring drain cleaner on them - of course there's going to be visceral discomfort when you use the most violent analogies you can think of! But that discomfort only matters insofar as the violence specifically is an accurate aspect of the analogy - and I'm going to guess actual sex reassignment is a fair bit more civilized than an ice pick to the ocular orbit.
I don't think that's the point. Body Integrity Identity Disorder is a condition where people want to have their fully functional limbs amputated. Is the correct response to affirm their internal sense of reality that those limbs don't actually belong to them, or is the correct response to be sympathetic and accepting of their predicament, but that we should find another way to resolve their difficulties? I'm not sure the answer is obvious.
The analogy doesn't really hold. A lot of work is being done by smuggling in the implication that identifying as a "non right arm having person" is the same thing as "identifying as a woman despite a male karyotype".
We're right to approach a claim of "I'm an [x]" with some skepticism. In the case of the (even much smaller than number of trans people) people who want their limbs amputated, we're right to be skeptical that they want to be a non-right-arm-haver, because thats not a thing. But if someone says they think they are something half of all people are... Well it's hardly the same comparison.
Also, if cutting off BIID patients limbs had the kind of medical efficacy and low rate of regrets that transcare has, it would be pretty compelling.
> But if someone says they think they are something half of all people are...
But they're not something half of all people are, they are something maybe 1% of all people are, ie. transgender. Maybe BIID is 0.1%, but why is the cutoff somewhere between those two?
They would only be half of all people if we redefine the gender categories to entirely exclude consideration of sex. That's what's being done for gender, so at least they're trying to be consistent, but then why can't that be extended to eliminate the notion of disability too? That is, you're not disabled if you don't think you're disabled, and so any way of living is perfectly valid no matter how much it burdens your family or society.
In fact, some people are trying to do this. Witness some of the recent backlash against Mr. Beast curing some people's blindness, for instance.
Edit: also, doesn't your "half of all people" argument lead to absurdity? If I want a tail surgically attached that's not a problem either because the majority of mammals have tails. In other words, why stop at the human category? The category of human is essentially just as fictional as gender in the end, right? It's a convenient taxonomical shorthand, not an essential truth. This is the ultimate problem with deconstructing effective categories, everything starts to sound like special pleading and everything becomes permissible, no matter how much harm it causes.
> Also, if cutting off BIID patients limbs had the kind of medical efficacy and low rate of regrets that transcare has, it would be pretty compelling.
We don't have enough data to actually conclude that transgender interventions have long term medical efficacy or low rate of regrets. This is why many European countries have ruled out hormonal interventions for underage trans kids.
Furthermore, I'm convinced that it would be compelling even if it did have that data, because you're implicitly evaluating it based on an unknown counterfactual that they would not have been happier if we had devoted time and money to other interventions that weren't so invasive.
"The analogy doesn't really hold. A lot of work is being done by smuggling in the implication that identifying as a "non right arm having person" is the same thing as 'identifying as a woman despite a male karyotype'."
They are the exact same category of thing. Having a right arm and wishing you did not have one is the same as having a penis and wishing you did not have one.
What you really mean by "impossible beliefs" seems to be something like "spiritual beliefs." Judging by the responses, I think the word "impossible" here is a barrier to understanding.
You might also call it sensory delusions (or assertions) vs. non-sensory ones. Something that other people's senses would to be able to weigh in on, vs. something that they can't -- either because it's something invisible or because something like a witch illusion has fooled them.
Try replacing "soul" with "brain." It seems plausible to me that there is non-negligible sexual dimorphism in the brain, that said dimorphism can be mismatched between brain and body to varying degrees, and that this can contribute to experiences of dysphoria.
Right. We could replace "having a brain more typical of biological males" with "being more masculine, and "having a brain more typical of biological females" with "being more feminine."
But why should being more masculine necessitate having a man's body and vice versa? My understanding, is that those who identify as e.g. trans male don't think "I believe my brain is typical of those at the 60th percentile of masculinity." I thought that they think that they are more meaningfully male than that.
Why would thinking that you are e.g. 60th percentile in brain distribution from most feminine to most male cause you to feel miserable in your body?
If I were to find out that mapping out characteristics of people from my country (A) and other country (B) shows that I am more similar to the average person living in country B, would that make me feel miserable in my own country?
subjectively it is "I am in torment by having a male body; and having a female body seems so nice", not "I have a female brain, therefore I need a female body". (and that sensation wasn't an illusion, since after acquiring a more female body, I am far less tormented and my body is quite nice.)
One theory is that the brain has a map of the human body, and if that map doesn't match the body, one feels distress. e.g. phantom limbs and pain. Trans people have a map which doesn't map their birth body. We can't change the map, but we can change the body, quite easily in fact.
Though that doesn't explain how taking estrogen makes me feel better about even the parts of my body it doesn't change. With larger doses making me feel more comfortable. So might be some sort of thing were brains keep track of what hormones they want to have.
(Some of these are now paywalled after trying to refind)
This is what I was familiar with 3 years ago and I am certain do not represent the cutting edge. However, collectively they present a picture something like "Transgender brains are likely different from cisgender people prior to HRT, and definitely are after HRT"
Trans people generally (1) want to be seen and treated as a gender different from their assigned sex (or picture themselves as a different gender and want others to recognize this) and/or (2) have a deep-seated desire for different sex characteristics, with this often manifesting in seemingly strange ways such as wishing to get breast cancer so as to be rid of one’s breasts (may also be a mismatch between a mental map of one’s own body and the actual body). Many trans people have a combination of these two, to varying degrees. The social desire in (1) to be called a man or woman isn’t some logical conclusion, but also seems like an inexplicable terminal want from some corner of the brain.
> If I were to find out that mapping out characteristics of people from my country (A) and other country (B) shows that I am more similar to the average person living in country B, would that make me feel miserable in my own country?
If you visit country B and notice that people there are a lot more similar to you than people in your home country A, then you might want to spend more in country B (and maybe eventually even move there permanently) and feel miserable about having to return to country A.
I also imagine that the threshold for "a lot more similar" depends on how hard it is to move between the countries, so a more open [ei]migration policy would result in more people moving between A and B (in both directions).
> We could replace "having a brain more typical of biological males" with "being more masculine, and "having a brain more typical of biological females" with "being more feminine."
No, we couldn't.
"Masculine" and "feminine" are inherently cultural constructs. They contain some common cross-cultural elements that coincide with what we know about biological sex differences, but they also contain common cross-cultural elements that partially contradict what we know about biological sex differences. (For example, the near-universal idea that boys and men are physically and emotionally "tougher" or more resilient is a false generalization from a specific, limited sex difference in musculoskeletal injury risk in adults; in many other important respects, boys and men are more vulnerable than girls and women are.) And layered on top of those arguably-biology-linked universals are a number of completely arbitrarily gendered characteristics which vary widely across space and time.
Using the words "masculine" and "feminine" introduces all those connotations. Attempting to define them away in a casual context like this is just inviting misunderstandings.
>But why should [having a brain more typical of males] necessitate having a man's body and vice versa?
>My understanding, is that those who identify as e.g. trans male don't think "I believe my brain is typical of those at the 60th percentile of masculinity." I thought that they think that they are more meaningfully male than that.
See, this is what I'm talking about. What does "masculinity" mean here? Are we talking about physiological masculinization (which is itself a very complex multidimensional construct)? Culturally-defined masculinity? I can't tell.
As for what trans men think: I can only speak for myself, but I don't know what my brain is like from the "outside view." I have no idea where it fits on the spectrum of physiological masculinization. If I had to put a single number on it, I'd probably say 60th-70th percentile average of all the traits known to be linked to sex? But that's a weird average because I'm near zero on at least one trait (sexual orientation) and over 90 on at least one (things vs. people).
From the "inside view," none of that matters. The feature of my brain that I rely on to decide that I'm a man is the one that looks, from the inside, like "male self-concept."
I know that sounds tautological. I'm trying to draw a distinction between a bottom-up perception and my top-down interpretation of it, which is very difficult. I think the bottom-up perception has qualia features (there's no way to be truly sure that we're all experiencing the same thing). But one aspect of it that I think most people can relate to is that when I look at men and boys, I feel a sense of self-recognition, a "this entity is like me in some important way" feeling. I think we all respond that way to humans generally, and to a lesser degree mammals generally. I'm not sure how many people have a specific identity-tier for gender, but if you don't, just think about how you might feel different levels of identification with a person vs. e.g. a cat, and then imagine that there's another step slightly above "human" but below "self."
> Why would thinking that you are e.g. 60th percentile in brain distribution from most feminine to most male cause you to feel miserable in your body?
You've got the causality backwards. I was unhappy in my body long before I ever thought anything about brain percentiles. I'm only here thinking about brain percentiles because I was miserable in my body.
My typical internal self-comparison with other boys/men is less "I *am* like them" and more "I *should be* like them because I'm one of them."
To be clear, that's not a conscious belief that I've reasoned my way into by observation and analysis. I actually hold the opposite belief consciously - I don't think gender should have any bearing on how people are 'supposed' to look/behave/express themselves. But I feel emotions about my own gender-nonconformity that aren't aligned with my conscious belief.
Their assertion that it's the *only* relevant study is false. There are dozens of studies of trans people's brains. All of them are small, all of them are flawed in the ways brain imaging research in general is flawed, but the overall picture is weakly suggestive of structural differences between cis and trans people of the same natal sex and strongly suggestive of functional similarities between cis and trans people of the same identified gender.
I think actually the majority of the trans people I know do not consider themselves stereotypically conforming to their gender. I don't mean that they're nonbinary, I mean that I know e.g. trans men who present very effeminate and are proud of this. All of them have to be extremely patient with cis people who don't understand the difference between gender and presentation (because the difference between sex vs. gender is frequently simplified to sex vs. presentation...)
The literature on "brain sex" is inconsistent and germinal and it is hard to draw conclusions in one direction or another in its current state - I think this characterization is the best one I've seen.
You are too optimistic about our society. All societies have their primitive superstitions. Our modern society is no different.
The concept of transsexualism is one of these superstitious in our modern society. Other superstitions include all the concepts involved in critical race theory.
it is unclear what you even mean by saying it is "superstitious". Transsexuals say "I want to take hormones, surgery, and pronouns" and then get hormones, surgery, and pronouns and report that this makes them happier. This seems no different from the man who says "I want a pizza" and gets a pizza and reports being happier.
More like it looks like a person joining a scientology cult and reporting being happier.
The difference is that society as a whole does not think Scientology is more than a cult, while powerful medical organizations profit from the gender cult.
I developed a desire to chop off my penis at 13 after reading the Wikipedia page for amputations and seeing penis amputation was something happened. To my knowledge at the time, no one in the world besides me wanted this. But oh, I did want it. To remove that gross organ and had lately been growing to disgusting sizes (from puberty). Not sure how this could be explained in a social contagion model. That would be like developing Scientology independently.
I started wanting to be a girl after I realized that the modifications I wanted to do to my body were suspiciously similar just being a girl, and so I tried fantasizing that I was one and it was quite nice.
There isn't even consistent political opinions among trans people. There are conservatives and communists. Clearly no top down total control. Clearly not structured like a cult. I don't even feel at home among groups for trans people as they use too much leftist style language for me to feel comfortable.
Now I did notice (or develop) phantom breasts after learning that female to male transsexuals sometimes report phantom penises. So there could be some element of social contagion. But wanting pizza also has a strong element of social contagion. if you say "I want a pizza" other people are more likely to also want a pizza.
Different transgender people believe different things. Some may indeed believe in souls, but then religiosity is not an especially rare trait. Many theists attribute their consciousness to having a soul. Nevertheless, this is not seen as an argument against the existence of qualia.
I think that the conflict between you and the people you differ with is more about metaphysics than it is about material reality. That is, it's about how we ought (in the Humean sense) categorize things. How many grains of sand are required to make a heap. People widely agree that just a few grains aren't enough, and that a million are enough, but there are liminal amounts of sand over which there is conflict. In my view there isn't an objectively correct answer to where to draw the line, just different answers that draw on different systems. Some rational. Self-coherent. Some not. Of the rational systems, some contradict one another, and there is no issue with that, because you are not dealing with questions about what is, but about how we ought label it. Different maps can accurately reflect the same territory, but suggest different routes through it.
Here's a more sophisticated argument for why transgender men/women are men/women. It is no longer one I personally believe, but I do not need to believe it in order to see that it is internally consistent and requires no magic. Metarationality allows me to simultaneously think it's wrong and recognize that there is a difference in kind between it and a belief in the occult.
Some males are born with severe genitalial deformities that require surgical intervention. A condition known as Cloacal Exstrophy. In the past, and for highly dubious reasons, doctors have frequently decided to assign those individuals to the female sex at birth and advised their parents to rear them as girls. Many did. The years passed and a group of researchers decided to look into what has become of the people in question. What they found out is that a substantial amount of them continues to live as women to this day and a substantial amount transitioned to live as men. Many of those who transitioned declared their identity to be a masculine one spontaneously, without being told about their medical history. This is plausibly because certain aspects of one's biology play a role in deciding which gender identity one will develop, independently of rearing or potentially even external sensory input.
Looking at those male AFABs who have only ever lived as girls and then women, who see themselves as women, who are only ever seen as women, could you come and say: they are not women, for they were born male? This counters all intuition. Little separates them from other XY intersex women, who are counted as women. Even if they were not born women, they became women, and so are women. Accepting this, we must accept that sex is not what makes one a woman.
Looking at those male AFABs whose inner nature shone through, who were born with such a strong biological drive toward masculinity that no amount of social pressure could knock it out of them, could you come and say: they are not men, for they were not reared as men? I could not, for they are only claiming a birthright that some tried and failed to steal from them, and so we must admit that one's rearing isn't what makes one a man, provided that it fails to alter your gender identity.
So, we're looking at a group of men and a group of women, yet they do not differ in sex or rearing. What differentiates them? There is one such parameter: gender identity. One's deep-seated sense of being a man or a woman, which can be likened to sexual orientation in that that we are set up to develop it early on and once developed it is effectively fixed. It is no mere belief, any more than hunger is a belief. It's a developmentally acquired set of highly stable neural qualities. A homosexual man might genuinely believe himself to be straight, and say as much, but that does not make him straight. In the same fashion merely saying that you are a man or a woman does not make you a man or a woman. Having the proper gender identity does.
Transgender men/women have masculine/feminine gender identities, and so are men/women, because that is the deciding factor.
Furthermore, there are reasons to believe that transness is often downstream from hormonal shenanigans, some prenatal. Things that correlate with it, with being exposed to weird levels of sex hormones in utero, and with each other: homosexuality, intersex conditions, autism, gender nonconformance, partial neurological sex-atypicality regardless of sexual orientation and before the administration of cross-sex hormones. Other things that correlate with being transgender: having a transgender twin. Having genes that seem to be related to processing sex hormones.
Isn't it odd that people who feel like they're "really of the other sex inside" seem to be more likely to have a variety of biological traits that relate to sex-atypicality? Given what we've observed in people with cloacal exstrophy could this not be because sexual differentiation deeply wires gender into some or most of us, and this specific part of the brain is wired topsy turvy in trans folks? And if that is so, does it not make some sense to prioritize the brain, not the body, when determining whether someone is a man or a woman?
Now, before you challenge me to mortal combat, let me reiterate that I no longer fully buy this. Yes, biology is involved, but my model is far closer to Scott's nowadays. I think of it in terms of predisposition, not predetermination, with culture often playing a significant role in deciding how people will end up conceptualizing their feelings and how they'll evolve. Nevertheless, I still think it's sensible to believe that transgender men/women are men/women, even as I think that it's equally sensible to think otherwise. It all depends on how you count the grains.
My point with all of this is not to convince you that transgender people are this or that, but that at least some of the people who think differently from you do so for sensible reasons. They do not believe in the impossible, they simply assign different weight to different grains, or happen to think that there are grains you are unaware of. Likewise, I think it'd be incorrect of transgender activists to insist that your own position regarding who should be labeled how is somehow objectively wrong. There is no One True Heap Categorization Scheme. Just the world and what we choose to do with it. Just human beings, on all sides of this issue.
Of course, we aren't dealing with Platonic forms, so we can't speak of something being "objectively" anything. Everything has sets of characteristics, and for convenience, we use language to refer to clusters of those as different things. But that is just a starting point for talking about anything. It doesn't afford any novel insight about transgenderism.
In fact, we could say that one characteristic of of people who are perceived by others as having a penis, is the internal perception of a penis, and vice-versa. So in that sense, people who perceive their penises as having been stolen by witches, are lacking a characteristic of penises that other penis-havers have.
However, this seems like unproductive word games, rather than meaningful insight.
The same could be said for many delusions. E.g. as I referenced elsewhere, I am perfectly content to accept that a person who identifies as a dog would have many more shared characteristics with dogs, on average, than a person who does not identify as a dog.
And while I can't summon a Platonic form of a person or dog, to determine what the individual "really" is (because Platonic forms don't exist), I can think that inasmuch as anything can be said to be one thing or another, that the individual in question is not a dog.
It's not shocking that biological males who identify as women would have more in common with that sex than other biological males, on average, and vice versa; the same could be said for feminine men and masculine women in general. I don't think that that alone makes it useful to think of them as the opposite sex.
Similarly, a brain dead person may no longer identify as a man or a woman, since they don't identify themselves as anything, since they brain-dead. Although they have lost that characteristic associated with people of the sex, it does not seem useful to think of them as no longer belonging to their biological sex - the same goes for a corpse, of course. Which is why it doesn't seem to make sense to "follow the brain."
Another way to phrase the issue, is that if the statement "I am a man" is meaningful, and not trivial, then it has to mean more than "I identify as a man," as if "man" means "someone who identifies as a man," then it's a tautology. A statement like "the book is in the box" is meaningful inasmuch as it makes testable predictions, and it is falsifiable. I could say that the book is in the box, and then realize that it was not actually in the box.
If "I am a man" means I identify as someone who identifies as a man," then it could never be falsified. Even if I were to later not identify as such, then that would not invalidate the original statement, since the statement just referred to a feeling, and the feeling was indeed my feeling.
That would seem to make it not very meaningful, and not even what you are referring to of "following the brain." It would mean following one particular belief in someone's brain and using that to define their identity, which again, does not seem useful for the reasons I outlined.
So I repeat that yes, everything is a composite of various characteristics in various combinations, so anything could be declared to be anything, and it is not false. But more than that, it is not even false. And as such, it can hardly be said to be true.
For the reasons I outlined, it doesn't seem like personal identity is a particularly useful way of defining someone's sex. Inasmuch as it is the definition, it seems devalued and trivial. And inasmuch as it is meaningful, it is falsifiable and depending on what sorts of claims if makes, probably false.
In closing, it seems like the justification for recognizing trans identity as the primary meaningful sex of a person depends on lowering the stakes, by noting that nothing is absolute, no true heap, etc. but using those standards would seem to negate the conclusions that are drawn which actually correspond to the not stakes lowered way of thinking.
That is, "masculine" means have male characteristics. So by definition, a masculine woman is more of a man than a feminine woman. This is the "low stakes no true heap" way of thinking. But saying "so it makes sense that she feels uncomfortable in her body, she would probably be best off surgically altering her body, and we should all think of her as a man, and referring to her otherwise is false" corresponds to the "high stakes regular way of thinking about sex." If it's just a simple sex binary men have penises women have vaginas, and someone "is a man," then by the high stakes way of thinking, things like surgical intervention make sense.
I realize this comment has been slightly disjointed, but I hope it's been at least thought provoking, just as your comment was for me. Unless you have something significantly novel to add, though, I don't think either of us has much more to contribute at this point.
Word games and platonic ideals beside, the 'delusion' models fail to grapple with empirical data - there aee a great deal of transwomen who are passing so easily that no one they interact with is aware of their trans status. Nikki Dejager became a world famous make up YouTuber for years before any body knew. Look at Kim Petras and tell me you honestly categorize her as a man.
The delusion would be to say these people are not women. Sure, the exact context matters - Kim probably needs to get the occasional prostate exam. But for matters of social life, how they should be treated and regarded by others, you'd have to perform a lot of mental gymnastics to prevent your unconscious wiring from automatically gendering them as female.
And given that it's possible, it's hardly a delusion. I don't think passing or stealthing is a requirement for validity, but it's certainly an existence proof.
Furthermore, you really should question your adherence to this notion that biological sex is genuinely so cut and dry that it doesn't have room for weirdness at the frequency range of 0.1 to 10 percent.
The majority of doctors and the medical establishment have been saying this is a real thing for years, since the early 2000s in my own personal experience, long before "wokeness" or similar could possibly have been a factor. And biologists will readily tell you, this kind of fuzziness is the expectation, and it would be genuinely really weird if any biological system didn't have weird "mistakes" like improper gender differentiation show up occasionally.
"Well but intersex conditions are so rare"
A) they occur in about 1 in ten thousand births or more, so not far off the scale were talking about
B) The specific, dramatic, _named_ ones are pretty rare yea. But they're not able because the cause such dramatic visible changes. We don't measure or track tons and tons of very slight differentiation differences, and they are likely to have real affects
All that is likely to be predisposition and not pre determination, sure. Ultimately the motivation to actually undergo intervention has to come from how distressing the predicate and how low cost the intervention, both real and social.
Over the last 2 decades we've seen a precipitous drop in the cost to transition, so it's not too surprising to see an uptick.
Is some of it socially constructed and even socially contagious? Yea, absolutely. Especially among young afabs, who are just generally prone to social contagion.
But to the rest of us it's just as true as depression or PTSD being social - we're social creatures and gender and sex are inherently social in their consequences so of course. That doesn't really add anything insightful to the discourse or imply what we should do about it.
Your argument is right but your estimate of the intersex population is a couple of orders of magnitude small
see: https://doi.org/10.1002%2F%28SICI%291520-6300%28200003%2F04%2912%3A2%3C151%3A%3AAID-AJHB1%3E3.0.CO%3B2-F just over 20 years ago worked out the prevalence of nondyadic births to 2% (about double the trans population) and some contemporary estimates are even higher. This full percentage would not be reflected if you were only looking at genitals, but we clearly can't be *only* looking at genitals if chromosomes are being brought into the discussion
"Transgender men/women have masculine/feminine gender identities, and so are men/women, because that is the deciding factor."
This is completely inconsistent with gender being a social construct. If you actually believe that, then whether someone is a man or a woman has to do with how they are treated by other people, not how they self-identify. This is of course the reason behind the demands on the behaviors of other people, whether that's pronouns or the shredding of the Cotton Ceiling.
The cloacal exstrophy cases imply that gender identity *is* affected by rearing, and therefore we should be cautious about promoting social transition in young children, no?
"Trapped in a body" rhetoric is meant to mean that someone's psychological sexual development does not match their anatomical development in such a way that their body feels wrong to them and this dissonance is resolved by more closely presenting as having the features of the opposite gender their body would suggest. This clearly isn't "impossible."
The idea that it's impossible to want to be a woman when you have a penis ignores the massive cultural baggage that comes with the title "man" or "woman."
For example, imagine I'm not "trans," but I am more comfortable, physically, in a dress than I am in a t-shirt and jeans. I choose to wear a dress whenever I go out into public, but don't do any other transitioning like change my pronouns, speak in a higher pitch of voice, or shave my beard.
Would you expect me to be able to live a normal male life without any consequences? Of course not. The behavior I'm taking part in is coded as feminine and I will not be able to just pretend otherwise. It will impact the religions I can be accepted into, the cultures I can join, the partners I can court, the jobs I can hold, my relationships with friends and family, and literally every single part of my social life. You cannot easily separate the fact that I'm wearing a dress from the fact that people who wear dresses are expected to have vaginas. It's much more impossible to insist that you're a man when your actions code you as female than it is to believe you're a woman despite having a penis.
Sure, given a lot of assumptions. And in retrospect I'm not sure this response is a well-articulated synopsis of the trans experience. But you can imagine other ways in which maleness or femaleness might manifest that people would hate but which wouldn't necessarily be linked to whatever narrow definition of male/female you wanted to use. Maybe I hate growing visible body hair. That's auxiliary to what most people consider "maleness" (you wouldn't necessarily assume somebody with no visible body hair was female), but is still a part of the whole package. My point was just that "maleness" and "femaleness" is a package of behaviors and attributes, some cultural, some biological, etc., etc. And that if you try to say "it's impossible for someone who is male to believe they are female" you'd better be willing to throw out a lot of babies with your definition-of-maleness-and-femaleness bathwater.
Gay men do not exist, according to you, since gays are the ultimate form of breaking down masculine stereotypes: they are men who (gasp) want to have sex with men! Having sex with men is the most female-coded action that a person can do!
The original idea of transsexuality was developed in regards to very feminine gay men who were diagnosed as not being real men by sexist psychologists in the mid-20th century US.
I didn't say anything close to "men who do feminine things aren't men." I code as feminine to a lot of folks but don't consider myself trans.
What I said is that perception is part of gender identity, as are a number of other things, so it's completely reasonable for someone to say "I don't feel male" even though they have whatever you think the features of a man are. Masculinity and femininity are a grab bag of characteristics, and trying to boil it down to specific anatomy oversimplifies that. At any rate it's not "impossible" for a person to feel that they're better coded as, and treated as a female despite having a penis or XY chromosomes or whatever.
FWIW, a college classmate of mine, a man who was as far as I know straight and cisgender, wore a dress most days all through college because he liked it better than wearing pants, and didn't do anything else stereotypically feminine. This was in the mid-1990s at a small Midwestern liberal arts college.
As far as we could tell, he lived a normal life without consequences within the (certainly somewhat unusual) social milieu of that college. Nobody questioned his manhood, nobody harassed him. We laughed with him, not at him, about it. It was his quirk: a small weird habit of the sort that many college kids have, no more. Maybe this isn't the typical experience, but it was legitimately his experience. The wish that people would reduce the social policing of arbitrary and superficial gender-codings is not so utopian as it is sometimes held to be.
One of the strangest things from my perspective, as the current formulation of ideas around “being trans” has developed and spread around the internet and then to our young people in the UK, has been hearing and seeing people (predominantly young people) assert, completely straight-faced and sincere, that no man would dress ‘as a woman’ because it would be so terrible and humiliating to do so, and so anyone prepared to do so must really be a woman or at least have some serious psychological distress. It’s the clearest sign that this is an external cultural conception being spread into our culture.
Because men dressing up as women, and boys dressing up as women, is in no way unusual. Nor is men or boys wearing clothes more like traditional women’s clothing. Dressing as a woman is a pretty standard way in which men around me seem to party or socialise, especially in groups of men engaging in male-bonding, especially in the most stereotypical heterosexual groups. And wearing more feminine-coded clothes and pulling it off is pretty common, and reads as confident and sexy. And, of course, men disguising themselves as women to avoid detection is a standard cultural idea which nobody previously imagined caused great distress to the man disguising himself.
The very idea that this would be unusual or difficult for a man seems completely alien.
Suppose that there are pieces of genetic code that say how to make a male and female mind, and genetic code that says how to make a male and female body. And mostly these stay in sinc. Butt every now and then, the male neurodevelopmental pathway happens despite the presence of ovaries. That sounds like "male soul in female body" to me.
Just because something is described in imprecise language not traditionally associated with rationality, doesn't mean there isn't a state of the world it corresponds to.
Maybe that neurodevelopmental pathway stuff I said is nonsense. I don't know.
Um, actually yes, it's called dual gendered macro chimerism and although rare it is most _certainly_ possible. You don't know as much as you think you do regarding biology.
Transgender, or at least the physical feelings underlying it, is something that seems to crop up spontaneously, and those feelings are significantly more bothersome and permanent than the ones inspiring the 'penis-stealing-witches' condition. So I don't think it's plausible to believe it can be eliminated. How we interpret those feelings would be the culturally influenced part: traditionally in many societies as meaning the person is some kind of third gender, in the west previously as mental illness, currently as the quasi-metaphysical idea that someone can 'really' be the opposite sex despite having none of the typical features of that sex (at least pre-transition). It seems fairly plausible to me that social media, and more recently schools teaching very young children that they can choose to be girls, boys or both before they have even achieved gender permanence, might be spreading those dysphoric feelings to people who would not have developed them spontaneously. Which is bad. But even if the cultural consensus changed radically, some people would still feel uncomfortable with their body/expected social role and want to change it.
Souls don't exist, but personalities and preferences do. Gender is a useful DIY model kit we supply to everyone for the purpose of identity construction, it's a good aid for bringing forth a cohesive identity and understanding your social role and how you relate to the larger society. But it also comes with severe limitations, and boundaries, and you're only given one of two possible kits at birth, man or woman, which are capable of being put together in different ways. You can put them together in whatever fashion you want, but at the end of the day there will be people who find it much more comfortable or easy to manifest their individuality with one kind of kit than another, and sometimes that kit isn't the kind they were given when they were born. These people should be free to try whatever they wish so they don't have to live their entire lives in dissatisfaction.
Does any of that help you understand it a bit better than "man born in a woman's body?"
That's a case of not guilty by reason of insanity (or Canadian equivalent). I wouldn't call that "getting away with it" exactly, since people who are found not guilty by reason of insanity end up committed to state mental hospitals for years or more likely decades.
The man was wildly schizophrenic, and remained in mental health treatment for years afterward. "Not criminally responsible" is the Canadian criminal legal finding that you are physically guilty but mentally not guilty due to mental disorder (whether temporary or permanent).
It is notable that the mental health system in this province stopped supervising him after about seven years, in yet another demonstration of the way they're not fit to manage street sweeping, let alone people's mental health, but he did not blame a tiger spirit and get acquitted.
Edit: Scott has since fixed the issue. Leaving the old comment for reference.
I think you misread Aella's poll. It's more like 83% of supernatural believers get PMS while "only" 64% of materialists get it. Still, more than half of women across the board seem to get it.
Indeed. I wonder how many poll respondents currently have periods. Or, well, I'm unsure what someone who is currently menopausal or pregnant or something would answer if they used to have PMS but currently don't.
I would answer "yes" if I had had it, and would consider that the obvious thing to do - the question strikes me as a "is this a Thing You Get" question rather than a "is this a Thing You Are Currently Experiencing/Have Experienced Recently" question. Someone pregnant may not be getting it at the moment, and most women at most times aren't experiencing it, but most women still know whether, when they get periods, PMS is part of it, and the other question strikes me as fairly useless so I assume it's not the one being asked.
Right. Based on the numbers in the image it is 83.3% of believers and 64.3% of non-believers.
Crunching the numbers by hand, it looks like a Z-score of 6.3707 for the difference in proportion - that is, a highly statistically significant result. Does someone want to double-check my math?
I was too late to post this to the Review and got no hits on the Open Thread, but will try one more time.
Does the social contagion version of a disease (e.g., delusional parasitosis) improve if the patient changes social settings (e.g., moves out of the house where one roommate is spreading the delusion)? Or once their prior is trapped, does the original social cause not matter anymore?
If the former, it would seem to have implications for treating conditions with a social origin.
I don't know. I would guess yes for very simple contagion diseases, like delusional parasitosis you get from a roommate, and no for more complicated ones like "your culture believes chronic pain is a real thing and now you have chronic pain".
On a semi-related note, if you have the chutzpah for it, I'd read a "much more than you wanted to know" on the trade-offs around different treatments for gender dysphoria in children.
I'm wildly uninformed about this, but had the sense that there are some high-stakes treatments with big, hard-to-reverse consequences whether you do them or not. And I've heard a normie sort of concern along the lines of what if someone starts these treatments because of a "fad" and then regrets doing so. A hornet's nest of a topic, but I wish I understood it better.
I think "men have high libidos, women low libidos" was well in place as the conventional wisdom by Victorian times, long before hormonal birth control.
I'm skeptical that people ever actually believed that women have higher libidos than men. Every culture was aware that rape was committed by males against females.
Men are (statistically) stronger, more promiscuous (probably), and also just generally more likely to commit any violent act compared to women. I would expect men commit rape at a higher rate than women regardless of whether they are hornier than women or not.
It's like ... men probably commit more muggings against women than women commit against men. But I'm not sure the best explanation of this is that men love money more than women do.
"The results were surprising. For example, the CDC’s nationally representative data revealed that over one year, men and women were equally likely to experience nonconsensual sex, and most male victims reported female perpetrators. Over their lifetime, 79 percent of men who were “made to penetrate” someone else (a form of rape, in the view of most researchers) reported female perpetrators. Likewise, most men who experienced sexual coercion and unwanted sexual contact had female perpetrators.
We also pooled four years of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data and found that 35 percent of male victims who experienced rape or sexual assault reported at least one female perpetrator. Among those who were raped or sexually assaulted by a woman, 58 percent of male victims and 41 percent of female victims reported that the incident involved a violent attack, meaning the female perpetrator hit, knocked down or otherwise attacked the victim, many of whom reported injuries."
So yeah, there are lots and lots of women out there willing to sexually assault a man. The men just don't talk about it.
But was it in place outside of Victorian England? What did 1880s Japanese feel about it, for example? You have a confounder here in that Victorian culture *also* specifically chose to idolize the chaste woman.
Sure, but you would need to establish that it was valued in *all* or at least *most* culture by the time of Her Majesty's Silver Jubilee, say, to make the statement that it was "conventional wisdom by Victorian times."
To get to something more recent, Casanova's opinion was that women enjoyed sex more. His evidence was revealed preference. He had observed women in childbirth, possibly including at least one who died, and concluded that if that were the cost to him of sex he wouldn't do it. They did.
Hmm, the obvious problem with this to me is that on the one side we have revealed preference (the women have sex) but on the other we have only Casanova's intuition (that he *wouldn't* have sex if the price were childbirth). We don't know if Casanova was accurately intuiting how he would behave in the counterfactual.
I wouldn't even say that, honestly. It's just an opinion. We have to decide how seriously to take Casanova's prediction of how he'd behave in the counterfactual, and personally I'm deeply skeptical of pronouncements like that. People say "oh I would never do THAT" all the time, and then circumstances change, and shazam! they do. People are terrible at predicting how they'd behave in situations very different from those they've known -- I would expect Casanova to suffer from this disability as much as all of us.
Well, pretty much everything we know about ancient Greece is what we're told by a bunch of guys who by today's standards would be considered seriously misogynist. Except sappho, so N of one there.
"B) Women in antiquity were known as the sex with the higher libido."
Just out of curiosity, what is this based on? In Greek or Roman mythology, for example, it really does not seem obvious that women (or goddesses!) would be regarded as having a higher libido than their male counterparts.
There is a myth in which Zeus and Hera get into a dispute over which sex enjoys coitus more. They ask someone who has (due to being cursed) spent years in the body of the other sex, and he responds that women experience several times the pleasure that men do.
This is not a direct mythological assessment of libido, but it seems related.
You don't think I covered that with "this is not a direct assessment of libido, but it seems related"?
For the difference to be realized, you'd need to have people who are driven to do things that they don't like doing. You could make the argument that it happens, but it's not the default case. Mostly people seek to do things because they enjoy doing those things.
I do not think that libido and pleasure derived from sex are highly correlated. At least for women, it is for example common to orgasm easily but not desire sex very much, or the opposite.
Or I'm also thinking of Lysistrata, the ancient comedy in which the women of Greece plot to stop the Peloponnesian by going on a sex strike. That plot wouldn't make sense in a world where women were considered the higher-libido sex.
I am VERY skeptical about the claim regarding antiquity. I have read a lot of ancient sources (though none in the original language), and I don't remember a distinct pattern of this at all. Women are definitely portrayed as more emotional, and driven by personal/familial attachment/love, but that isn't the same thing at all.
Likely to be relevant: in ancient Rome, the average age of men at the time of their first marriage was about 30. The average of a woman's first marriage was about 13. Something similar existed in ancient Athens, too; the only women an upper class man would have encountered socially would have been their mothers, a high class prostitute, and their much younger wives. Ancient writers talking about women being silly and emotional were comparing themselves as middle aged adults to 14 year old girls and concluding that women were stupid and horny, not realizing that they were that way because they were teenagers, not because they were women.
"to 14 year old girls and concluding that women were stupid and horny, not realizing that they were that way because they were teenagers, "
But women's libido actually seems to be quite low when they are teenagers. I remember one of the wonderful posts from OK Cupid Trends, a long time ago, that plotted sex drive for men and women by age and body type. The peak of sex drive was very shifted for men and women. From memory, the peak was around 18-20 for men and 30-35 for women.
Also worth noting there's a cutoff in the okc data. Anyone under 18 isn't supposed to be in their data pool at all. 18-20 might be the tail end of a peak that begins earlier for men. But also, women might have bimodal peak libidos (which some report in my experience,) centered around puberty and one's thirties.
Yes, indeed, the data starts at 18. Given the shape of the curves (https://web.archive.org/web/20110423002625/http://blog.okcupid.com/ chart7/8 , not easy to read in thos format though), it seems rather unlikely to me that either men's or women's libido peaks before 18.
The second episode of Doogie Howser, M.D. has a scene about exactly this. A thirtyish doctor wants Doogie to be her sperm donor so she can have a super-smart kid. He, being still an idiot teenage boy despite also being a genius doctor (the premise of basically the entire show), thinks she's propositioning him for sex. His best friend, who has read an article about men's and women's sexual peaks, says something to the effect of "This is perfect! She's peaking, you're peaking."
The stories about women in antiquity could be through a patriarchal lens - women didn’t have much choice in sexual activity, assuming they were highly libidinous would justify male desires.
I have a theory about this. Societies in which women were viewed as the more libidinous sex were often also those that kept women secluded and in which men formed close emotional bonds with each other that men today only usually form with lovers. So the only time that women would get a break from being lonely was when they were with a man that wanted to have sex with them...
Or Napoleons quip about his reputation as a womanizer, but from his perspective woman attack him: „As for me, I defend myself, and I often capitulate.“
Or the cheap trope of comedy videos that cold women get suddenly chatty when a million dollar car drives into view:
Could it be that ancient histories viewpoint are rich/noble/high status men who are simply clueless about their privilege? If a prince and his posse, incredibly rich, powerful and handsome (because not growing up malnourished) ride into village, of course every girl will war paint herself.
Well and fair or not, the consequences for female infidelity are generally much much harder on a relationship than male infidelity. So the stakes are much higher. If a ancient male head of household gets a random slave pregnant or whatever, it is perhaps not super important (especially in an era where there is no government enforced child support etc.). If on the other hand the female head of household gets pregnant from a random slave it is a much larger disruption to the household (assuming anyone knows).
Carpal tunnel can be triggered by use birth control (and menopause). Also pregnancy, DM, thyroid issues. Hormonal changes can lead to swelling putting pressure on median nerve at wrist.
So a freshman women might develop some CTS symptoms (which might also present as a tendinitis) for reasons other than a violin playing roommate.
SA's last two sentences of follow up essay are weird.
PSA: If you or someone you know has pregnancy-related carpal tunnel, you can go to a hand doctor and get a cortisone shot. Your OB/GYN might not tell you this as it's out of their wheelhouse and they have enough liability to deal with, but I wish I'd known. The carpal tunnel was so miserable in my 3rd trimester, I actually got more sleep *after* the baby was born.
Any reputable OB/GYN should know that CTS can be pregnancy induced. And because CTS may also be indicative of diabetes or pre-diabetic condition - that would be an important symptom to note as suggesting potential for pregnancy related diabetes. (Whether a cortisone shot is any better than a placebo is a debatable question!)
The OB/GYN knew about pregnancy induced CTS- the problem was that they didn’t let on there was any way to address it except braces, which didn’t work for me. They also check you for gestational diabetes as part of routine care, and already had at the point where the CTS got really bad, so they knew it wasn’t that.
I don’t think my OB/GYN did anything wrong- I assumed there was no treatment so I suppose I downplayed it. Nothing I read online said anything about cortisone. I have since heard from other women who had a shot and said it helped. But shit, I’d have even taken a placebo if it meant I didn’t wake up at 2am feeling like I was holding hot pokers for ten weeks. You’ll put up with anything if you think there’s no treatment, which I did.
There are a number of terms like "carpal tunnel", "repetitive strain injury" and "tendinitis" which all appear to be vague references to the same thing. When I read the literature on this years ago, my impression was these conditions are poorly understood and poorly differentiated.
For me, the issue was knots/"trigger points" in the muscles in my arms, shoulders, etc. I feel fairly certain that the issue wasn't entirely mental: I was able to find specific places to massage muscles that replicated the characteristic wrist pain. Nonetheless, I think there *is* actually a psychological component to this -- psychological stress leads to tense muscles leads to chronic pain. For some people, it could be that psychological stress is the main causative agent, and removing the stress removes the pain, but I'm quite doubtful that is true in every case. I think there are other possible causative agents too.
I have been involved in litigation of the causal mechanism of "carpal tunnel", "repetitive strain injury" and "tendinitis", etc, including the cross and direct examination of medical experts for 30+ years.
Can there also be psychological overlay - of course. And motivations of monetary gain when these things interact with litigation - of course. (There was a concerted effort in 80s and 90s by plaintiffs' bar to link claims to workplaces involving increased computer use, notwithstanding typing being a part of business for a century.) There is also a lot of money to be made by orthopedics. And there are many complex biological processes involved that can produce these symptoms unrelated to physical activity. A median nerve impingement can be objectively identified but the causes are multi-factorial.
I had carpal tunnel surgery a year ago. I had been losing sensation in my fingers slowly over time, but never had pain except late in pregnancy when I was holding onto a lot of fluid. Once my last kid was born, I had a nerve test, and it showed delayed impulse responses consistent with nerve compression. This test is pretty standard in determining the progression of carpal tunnel, and I don't think your brain can easily fudge those electrical signals. I mean, this is a test where they insert a needle and fire a mild electrical current through your hand. (Not to discourage anyone from treatment- if I'd read a description before going in for that test, I would have freaked out. But in reality it wasn't that bad.) And when I did have the surgery, the surgeon commented that there were calcium deposits, which are typical and I think come from pressure on the ligaments. It can't be just cultural.
It is probably mostly genetic, though- my hand surgeon said the repetitive stress explanation hasn't really panned out. Both of my parents had carpal tunnel syndrome, and had surgery on both hands. I suppose I could have been primed by my exposure to that to develop it, but I think inheriting their weird wrists is a more plausible explanation.
Apropos something completely different: for more on how witches became "WITCHES!" who steal your penis and why we started burning them, then stopped, check out Keith Thomas's seminal (no pun intended) 1972 tome "Religion and the Decline of Magic". It's great on many levels.
Sigh. It kind of looks like a lot of the problems involved could be avoided with a clearer distinction between "sex" and "gender" - or maybe we can just go back to the good old days of "abolish gender"; somebody's desire to play with dolls shouldn't effect what other people think ought to be between their legs (as distinct from what is).
Modern gender discourse has increasingly just looked to me like the evil twin of gender essentialism.
I get happiness from doing things because they are labelled "female", so I would be saddened if gender was abolished. The situation with male and female soaps is silly, but I do enjoy using female soaps because they are female coded.
I am genuinely insecure about gender being abolished.
One concern I've heard from gender skeptical/critical feminists is that the identification of female gender with female-coded norms risks elevating stereotypes (liking pink, heels, beauty standards) to being part of female identity, where they should properly be thought of as clichés that women can take or leave.
If you're happy talking about it, I'd be curious to know if that resonates with you. I do find it a bit conflicting – it's genuinely wonderful to see trans women's euphoria when they first get to express themselves as they most want, but I can also empathise to an extent with women that feel that it cheapens the female experience to reduce it to "lipsticks and lingerie".
(I appreciate this is a personal topic for you, and I certainly don't want to undermine your identity or criticise your self expression. Please feel free to ignore this comment if you prefer!)
I leave many of the cliches. Ex: I don't wear make-up because of cost and effort. and I enjoy programming despite that being somewhat male-coded. The gender coded-ness is merely one of many factors involved in me deciding to do something or not.
People saying "Women are naturally good at childcare" is unpleasant for me to hear, because I dislike children, and makes me feel as either like less of a women or potentially fear being assigned childcare.
But "Women are submissive and need a man to rescue them" is pleasant to hear because I am submissive and like the idea of being rescued. It is definitely false, lots of dominate women exist. And it would be really bad to force all women to be submissive.
I believe that like half of cisgender people also experience gender euphoria and gender dysphoria. That is one reason why "you are a girly man!" works as an insult because many men don't want to be girly. Likewise, we see things like the manliness movement where cis-men go out of their way to be extra manly. Or how breast cancer survivors talk about "regaining their womanhood" when they get breast implants to restore their breasts.
I tentatively think ideally people wouldn't treat pronouncements about gender seriously. The true nature of womanhood is whatever makes you feel best. There is no truth here. Just believe what makes you happy.
And also potentially try to keep gender-ed things to lowered stakes things where the difference between male and female is lesser. Like male vs female soaps. "Being a surgeon" likely is best if it isn't gendered because that is a big important thing.
Take all the things that give you happiness, and - let's just give it a different name. Let's call it "glampunk." It's a set of fashions, styles, behaviors, which just happens to be more popular with girls than boys - and a girl isn't failing at being a girl for not being into glampunk, but rather, is just into something else. Female coded just becomes glam coded.
Yes*. Obviously not all happiness because I enjoy things for reasons besides their gender coded-ness. But yes, I like the girl soaps because they are labelled "girl" not because of colour of the packaging or the smell.
Like I had no preference between saying the word "uh" and "um" and then I learned that "um" is more commonly said by women, and that made me like "um" more. Yes, this seems really silly but it also true.
*unless I suspect that you have just renamed "girls" to "glampunk" which might happen at some point. like if you started saying "glampunkers are the sex that can get pregnant"
Abolishing gender seems like forcing everyone non-binary. I don't want to be non-binary. I want to be a girl.
Gender is the set of social expectations, including things like fashion choices, but also things like socially acceptable choices in career, that are applied to people of different sexes.
Girls, then, would be the people who can get [edited for proper tense] pregnant. Glampunkers would be the people opting into what used to be the expectations and stylistic choices applied to people on the basis of their ability to get pregnant.
Somebody who wants to be a girl, in that universe, is somebody who wants something different between their legs. Somebody who wants to be a girl in our universe could be somebody who wants to be a girl in that universe - but it could also be somebody who wants to be a glampunker in that universe.
At first this seemed so alien from our world that I had minimal confidence in my ability judge my emotional reaction to it, but the more I think about it most strongly I feel like it wouldn't. I feel like I would reinvent gender from scratch, like wearing tight pants to emphasize how I don't have a penis, or wearing clothes to emphasize my breasts, or leaning on extinct cultural norms back when gender still existed.
With a strong anti-gender norms you could likely convince me not to do this, but it would make me sad, and feel evil for wanting this anyway.
Portraying gender has being only about coercion is overly negative. That would be like analyzing language as being about coercion. "Language is a set of expectation about what sounds you will make with your mouth" is not strictly false, but to conclude that abolishing language is merely freeing people is a mistake. Gender allows me to signal to others and myself (largely myself).
Note that I do have strong preferences about what is between my legs.
As to why I describe gender as being coercive - just reverse the gender roles and see how you feel in a world where people frown at you for wearing tight pants, those are for men, or wearing clothes that emphasize your breasts, women should wear loose baggy clothing.
I assume, when you say it would make you feel sad, that this applies here too?
in a world where you can change what is between your legs and hormonal profile, putting those into a special category called "sex" separate from everything called "gender" is far less justified. Your hormones are just another choice you can have just like what you wear (assuming the doctors don't stop you).
No one should feel obligated to get surgery just because they want to wear a dress. Just like no one should feel obligated to wear a dress just because they like to sew.
But "remove any association between sex and other things" is going too far. Many people really like using these associations to signals to others and themselves.
Abolishing gender isn't about abolishing associations; glampunk, if you'll recall, was preferred by more women than men. Abolishing gender should not be measured by the yardstick of statistical associations. Rather, it should be measured by the yardstick of societal expectations; expectations are inherently coercive, for good and for bad. We expect people not to harm other people; I wouldn't argue against this, for an instance of coercion as a good.
Gender, then, is, in its entirety, the degree to which society coerces those expectations based on sex - or coerces sex based on gender conformity.
So, I agree with you that lots of people get enjoyment out of gender. Many people enjoy being seen as a feminine/masculine woman/man, or are attracted to especially feminine/masculine women/men. Other people enjoy gender-bending in a way that would be impossible if gender were abolished.
However, I have to say that the but about "uh" vs. "um" is evidence, to me, that trans women do not have a female gender identity in the same sense that cis women have a female gender identity. I can not even imagine getting pleasure from saying "um" because that's the girlier option.. Cannot conceive of that feeling.
Note that trans-women are highly varied, and you shouldn't judge all trans-women by my experience. Others trans women would likely find my experience alien. However, cis-women are also highly varied too and I would be cautious to assume your experience is universal.
But "trans women are more insecure about their gender on average" does seem plausible. Partly because most cis-women don't have political movements dedicated to calling them men and forcibly masculinize them.
And being insecure about one's gender likely causes other things.
I'm trans as well and I have a different perspective from the other poster. I don't get enjoyment from things that are female coded because they are female coded, I just like some of those things. I also like some things that are more male coded without feeling uncomfortable about that.
That stuff had nothing to do with transitioning for me though, for me it was mostly about having a body that matches - as much as possible - how I want it to be.
I can't be certain, but I'm pretty sure that if we lived in a society in which activities, clothes, makeup and things like that were not gender coded, we all used gender neutral names and pronouns, I still would have wanted to change my body.
The frustrating thing about the way that we think of gender versus sex in our society - or rather, the way society seems increasingly ignorant of the distinction - is that, if you want to wear a dress, a lot of people "who should know better" also think this must mean you want to get surgery, or take hormone blockers, or otherwise begin physical transitioning - and then begin applying social pressure to that end. And there's some dark humor in the fact that this pressure comes from both sides of the political spectrum.
Like, nobody should be under social pressure to get surgery. If you want it, alright, you still shouldn't be *pressured* to get it. If you don't? Well, good luck right now.
I totally agree that what you're describing is bad - it is very annoying when "boy liked to play with dolls as a child" is seen as "that person as an adult wants to transition". There's probably some correlation there, but one doesn't imply the other. (The other direction of this annoys me too - when I wanted to get sex reassignenment surgery, I needed psychological reports, which makes sense. However, I knew that I was more likely to get a recommendation for surgery if I told them "I always liked dolls, I love pink and dresses and everything feminine." I agree with you that these things should be seperated.
However, I don't feel that there's a lot of pressure for people who show some gender-noncomformity to immediately (medically) transition. I don't interact with that many queer people, but from what I've experienced, they are very open to all kinds of gender expressions.
In the end, we have to draw a line somewhere how much we want to encourage taking hormones/getting surgery and how hard we want to make it. I'd argue that for me, it was too hard, having to wait a whole year after finding a therapist (and being told by them that it would make sense for me to tkae hormones) sucked a lot, but making it too easy is also obviously bad. No matter where this line is drawn, there is always a tradeoff and always people who will suffer because of it. I'm really not sure what the best way to handle this would be.
I think the major complication here isn't so much that there is universal pressure in one direction, so much as the pressure is inconsistent and of inconsistent direction - one person can grow up in an environment that pressures them not to transition, and another can grow up in an environment that pressures them to transition, and both can assume this is "the way things are".
Or they experience the pressure to do what they want/need to do anyways as not pressure at all, but assistance, and want that increased, or increase it themselves, or encourage other people to increase it.
It's one of the worst possible subjects to have been politicized, which I guess guarantees that it got politicized.
> If I’m reading that poll right, 39% of ghost believers get PMS, but only 19% of ghost skeptics do.
I'm not sure where you got these numbers from but I'm getting something different. 27.5% + 5.5% = 33% believe in ghosts and of those 27.5% also get PMS so this gives a conditional probability of 83.3% that's the probability of getting PMS conditional on believing in ghosts.
Similarly we can calculate a conditional probability of 43.1/(43.1+23.9) = 64.3% that's the probability of getting PMS conditional on not believing in ghosts.
So the numbers show the same trend as you thought but the overall incidence of PMS is much higher
"This encouraged me to look into the school shooting statistics further, and I take back my claim that Columbine was a break from trend. This article claims the first mass shooting in US history was in 1949, and that the initiating factor seemed to be advances in gun technology; there have been violent sprees since forever, but semi-automatic weapons raised the death count to levels that made national news."
I don't think it's a good explanation. The iconic Mauser "broomhandle" semiauto pistol has been mass produced since about 1900, Colt 1911 was adopted by the US Army in 1911, revolvers and repeating rifles were widespread since before the Civil War.
On the other hand, the 1949 murderer killed the people he personally knew, the 1966 U of T shooter had a literal brain tumor, and the 1978 girl had brain damage and other severe issues. This sounds like nitpicking, but really it is exactly what you'd expect from your "random malfunctions vs social contagion" model: you get these widely spaced apart events in genuinely insane people, but if the idea that this is what you do in certain circumstances gets culturally fixed, you gradually get a lot of otherwise more or less normal (if maladjusted) people doing it, like in Columbine.
Also you obviously can't trust Vox not to conflate genuine mass shootings, again like Columbine, with gang-related activity etc completely drowning it in that noise, unless you can look at their raw data and go through it yourself. Those are very distinct categories and that's important not only for the present discussion about socially contagious mental illnesses (which shooting rival drug dealers probably isn't) but also policy responses in general.
"Also you obviously can't trust Vox not to conflate genuine mass shootings, again like Columbine, with gang-related activity etc completely drowning it in that noise, unless you can look at their raw data and go through it yourself."
In defense of Vox the may be using the FBI's definition of "mass shooting" rather than making up their own.
From the DOJ: "For the purposes of tracking crime data, the FBI defines a 'mass shooting' as any incident in which at least four people are murdered with a gun."
I believe the FBI's definition has other constraints, like the shootings not occurring in a single private residence and not being subordinate to another crime. But the big expansion in mass shootings reported by some sources (not going to dig into Vox specifically), comes from sources which change "murdered with a gun" to "shot with a gun", hoping the audience won't notice the difference and won't know that a large majority of shooting victims don't die.
Someone losing their cool at one particular guy at a crowded party, and emptying a pistol at them with crappy aim, is not anywhere close to the central idea of a "mass shooting", but can very easily result in one person being murdered and three others being wounded.
(Safety tip: don't go to the sort of parties where people both carry guns and drink heavily).
The FBI has (fairly recently?) started tracking “active shooter incidents” separately from “mass shootings”, with the former category being defined as “an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area” (probably a more involved definition somewhere but that’s what’s on the FBI’s top level page on the topic).
I believe the highest annual total for this category was 61 in 2021, which is a lot but much lower than the “more than one a day” statistic that gets passed around frequently - that one, as you note, includes a lot of non central examples.
Gang-related violence and mass-shootings and suicides are all related if you examine the literature regarding "alienation" (who am I and to whom am I a part of) and "hidden shame". The differences are slow motion and how much the attempt to resolve the internal conflict is also transferred to others.
For a poetic take, consider the granfalloon in Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" and "Slapstick: Lonesome No More".
For an anthropological dive, consider Rene Girard and the origins of violence.
Well said. Samuel Colt's famous revolver traces back to 1836.
By the way, if you are looking for a carefully curated list of what I call Columbine-like mass shootings, the kind that the media care about, the "Mother Jones" list is the best:
They exclude criminal shootings, domestics, block party shoot-ups, drive-bys, and so forth, the kind that fall out of the headlines immediately. They include more than just school shootings, but they do capture almost all of the famous school shootings.
There really has been an increase in these Columbine-type shootings over the decades.
One of my closest friends is married to a Japanese woman. After the previous post I asked her about jikoshu-kyofu. That's the body odor one. She was more than familiar with the issue but seem a bit confused about it being a distinct psychiatric disorder or culture bound syndrome, but her take otherwise was interesting. Essentially she said the following. Japanese people live and work very close together. Aside from incense in buildings like temples they really don't have a tradition of 'fragrance'. They don't wear cologne or perfume and deodorant is designed to smell like nothing. Additionally everyone needs to individually also strive to smell like 'nothing'. There are no positive personal odors, natural or otherwise. A polite person is from an olfactory perspective invisible. That being said, some people in Japan do have a smell and they are damaging the mental calm of the people around them everywhere they go like a cloud of misery. Foreigners are the worst but forgivable; they bring their foreign products with them. Especially western women but they don't know any better and no one really makes an issue of telling them as they are assumed to be guests and that would be rude. Still its very common to for guests in a restaurant, theatre etc to ask to be moved if they can smell a westerner near them. For the Japanese themselves though there is no excuse for others being able to smell them. They *should* feel bad. If others can actually smell them and they don't correct this problem they really ought to be miserable (by themselves please), or at least avoid the public. She genuinely got a little upset recounting smelly Japanese people. I could easily imagine a culture with beliefs like this developing a culture bound syndrome about smell paranoia. The idea that they don't actually have a detectable odor and its some sort of delusion didn't really register; some level of smell-fear is expected and polite. (mental illness also carries a larger stigma, people need to just knock it off and act right).
Really interesting. In Genji Monogatari, the title character is noted as having an unusual pleasant fragrance (another major character appearing in the narrative after his death is also known for his fragrance). The fragrance is kind of implied to be supernatural or spiritual, and it's treated as attractive and appealing, another way in which the title character is pure and superior as a prince and as a lover. His personal fragrance often gets left on robes etc., making other characters sentimental and/or vaguely horny. In that work and other Heian-era literature, perfume is described as being made and used, mainly like incense, by burning it and letting the fragrant smoke penetrate clothing hung on a rack. I don't know what may have changed over the past 1000 or so years or what cultural nuances I might be missing here, but I got a strong and specific impression of historical Japanese cultural aesthetics as including positive personal fragrance as something aspirational aand associated with virtue or attractiveness, with compounding perfume being one valued art and expression of good taste.
It's not at all surprising that people who essentially don't have BO to find it odd & abhorrent, the same way we might find the idea of sweating blood instead of water to be odd & abhorrent.
I wonder if it's also a function of sumptuary laws? At various periods, especially as the merchant class became rich, laws were passed strictly regulating everything that different social classes could wear from materials to colours. Scent, being expensive and something mostly for the upper classes, could well fall into this category of regulation as well, hence why 'neutral' smells are the safest - you can't get in trouble for smelling 'above your class' that way. That then becomes a tradition and accepted social behaviour:
"While we have developed oil-based perfumes, the Japanese have perfected the art of heating the woods which form the basis of their scents so that they produce no smoke, only fragrance. Till the mid-nineteenth century women scented their kimonos overnight, laying them on a wooden framework over an incense burner, and draped their glossy long black hair over incense burners to scent it.
Young men about town, geisha and courtesans carried pieces of scented wood in their sleeves and rub[bed] powdered scent onto their hands and neck."
Indian customs also use incense-based scenting of hair and clothing in this way.
One extension of the thinking about mental illness here is the blindness of the observer about themselves when running around the world applying psychiatry which is mostly a cultural expression in and of itself. The biggest cultural element in terms of mental disease isn't the expressions and possible failure states of misfiring or whatnot in the brain and body. I'd say it is the edifice, frameworks, mindsets, and the entire cultural-conceptual space of psychiatry, mental health, and mental illness coming from the Euro-American perspectives.
The desire to taxonomise and break things down is itself a western framework which is in opposition to the more holistic frameworks and understandings of eastern medicine. In the same way we get kidney doctors and liver doctors and OCD treatment specialists in the west, you don't get that in the eastern systems and they view every problem as a whole body system problem.
Taking a step back, one can see this is the true difference of frameworks rather than detailed definitions within a western cultural framework. Sure if you go into the eastern cultures or into African cultures with your rulers and measuring sticks you can indeed take them out and measure things according to your own ideas.
The issue here in terms of true cultural differences is not that you can not go to African and measure the height of a giraffe with a western meter or foot ruler, it is to begin by engaging and asking if and how the people there think about giraffes first. Not even front loading the question to ask about giraffe height, but simply to learn about their relationship with the animal. Perhaps the very concept of measuring this makes no sense to them as there are other more practical concerns about dealing with giraffes. In this way psychiatry is also something an anthropologist could study for why these curious humans in a few cultures have all fixated on semantics and taxonomies.
It just seems to me you are in a circular argument world where you think nothing escapes measurement of rulers and no matter where you go in the world and what the locals think, you can 100% slap a ruler on any object and get a measurement. This is a self-reinforcing idea and low and behold after that intellectually limited activity one finds that they were right all along. But one hasn't really learned anything or understood that they've simply applied their own framework for mental illness over top of another culture's framework for dealing with people who behave strangely. Of course people behave strangely in every part of the world.
But but but...the ruler still works everywhere, so I'm clearly wrong. Ugh! So tiring and limited. There is no meaningful new truth in doing this and these sorts of semantics and win by definition and win by imposing your framework are just meta-steps in the wrong direction towards limited understanding which always ends up with your original idea being correct no mater what you encounter. Maybe we can define sadness in 10 different ways and measure it in other cultures and compare rates and apply some statistics to it, but we've learned nothing about how they experience, understand, and deal with experiences of being sad. Only that we can apply more of the same with our pills, talk therapy, studies, and such.
Win by framework is just as silly as win by definition. At least that's the steel manning I can do for that position. If the question then becomes 'well what do we do if we don't go around the world to other cultures applying science to them?' The answer is...I don't know and wouldn't it be exciting to engage with other modes and mental frameworks for understanding reality. But it is true imperialism and cultural supremacist thinking to imagine there is nothing worthwhile to find in all other cultures and we just need to apply science at/towards them enough to know everything worth knowing. As long as we show up with our DSM, studies, and rulers, then we're just applying our culture to theirs with some implicit biases involved in that.
Ok, but if the field of psychology is a cultural construct itself and maladapted to work outside of that context, wouldn't one way of figuring that out be to try applying the same models to other cultures and seeing if they work or fall apart? Because it doesn't make any more sense to assume you can't measure the giraffe than to assume you can. And however culture-bound current psychological science may turn out to be, its intention is not to be. If our psychological rulers are he wrong instruments, then that just means we have to figure out what the right ones are, not to stop "applying science".
1) On the issue of acute and transient psychotic disorder -- A decade ago, I spent a little less than a year as a psychiatry trainee in Doha, Qatar, and during that year, I saw a few clear cases of brief reactive psychosis. Typical profile was that of a laborer from South Asian region with no prior psychopathology who comes to Doha to do manual labor, finds himself trapped in extremely harsh working and living conditions and unable to leave the country, and then experiences an acute and transient episode of psychosis in that stressful environment. In contrast, my experience of brief psychotic disorder has been very uncommon in the US (the cases I have seen have been in the context of interfacing with first episode psychosis programs), and I have worked in the US for many more years.
2) I did once treat a case of geriatric-onset Olfactory Reference Syndrome in an African-American woman in the US who also had mild dementia. The ORS was successfully treated with Duloxetine and Memantine. I reported on that case as a trainee back then (https://www.psychiatrist.com/pcc/mental/geriatric-onset-olfactory-reference-syndrome-treated-with-duloxetine-and-memantine/ ). In terms of shifting brain's priors, this is probably similar to how an individual with schizophrenia might experience a koro-like picture.
It's understandable, in the same way as a hip fracture in an elderly is understandable after a fall... but the so-called loss of contact with reality represented by psychosis is nonetheless a pretty significant disruption in psychological functioning and something quite out of the ordinary (you may consider it an insane response to an insane situation!).
"I don’t think it’s obvious that “believes in ghosts” is a proxy for “more likely to develop culture-bound illnesses”, but I can’t think of a better reason why these should be so connected."
Perhaps those who believe in ghosts might tend to feel entitled to easy explanations of complex phenomena.
Research done at universities worldwide finds a negative relationship between both belief in astrology and belief in paranormal phenomena, on the one hand, and performance in courses requiring “critical thinking,” on the other. The negative effect of belief in paranormal phenomena has consistently been found to be larger than the negative effect of belief in astrology.
Thomas J. Mowen, Amanda Heitkamp & John Boman, “Paranormal Activity: Self-control Theory and Belief in the Paranormal,” Deviant Behavior (2021), DOI: 10.1080/01639625.2021.1915723 rely on self-control theory where: “… low self-control … encompasses six characteristics: impulsivity, risk-seeking, self-centeredness, low frustration tolerance, preferring simple tasks over more difficult ones, and preferring physical tasks over mental ones …. Our findings suggest that adopting a greater number of paranormal beliefs may reflect a decision-making process whereby scientific evidence is cast aside in lieu of an easy explanation for some of life’s greatest mysteries. Individuals with low levels of self-control may be more likely to accept the notion ‘ . . . that the relative position of the planets and the stars could have a special deep significance or meaning that exclusively applies to only [them]’, instead of taking a more critical approach to understanding complex social phenomena and existential questions. Endorsing more paranormal beliefs may be a characteristic of an individual susceptible to getting ripped off in return for the promise of easy and cheap explanations for some of the biggest and unresolved events in life.”
Ida Andersson, Julia Persson, Petri Kajonius, “Even the stars think that I am superior: Personality, intelligence and belief in astrology,” Personality and Individual Differences (November 2021) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2021.111389 say that, “Narcissism was surprisingly the strongest predictor [of belief in astrology], and intelligence showed a negative relationship with belief in astrology.”
It would be interesting to discover if there’s a significant, positive correlation between belief in astrology and PMDD, and how any such correlation compares to the reported correlation with belief in ghosts.
Thanks for sharing this research. I had never heard of this, and now I want to learn more.
I'm also posting this further comment here not as a direct response to you, but because it's jumping off from the same part of Scott's post:
Aella notes that she is 'slightly wary' of her results because she didn't include a 'see results' option. We should consider the possibility that a very disproportionate number of false respondents decided that yes-PMS-mood & yes-ghost-belief was the funniest way to see the results. So her 'slightly' may be a substantial understatement of how wary one should be.
I can assure you that gender dysphoria does not exist as a well-defined concept. Different people who report having gender dysphoria report their feelings very differently. For example, the famous transsexual academic, Deirdre MacCloskey, said that when she was a he, that he got the idea of changing his sex based on his evaluation of transsexuals in a crossdressing convention; she said deciding on sex-change was like deciding on purchasing a car. Quite distinct from the way that young teenage girls who claim to be boys report their feelings of gender dysphoria.
As Helen Joyce explained in interviews, the whole concept of transsexualism is an American superstition that came about when sexist American psychologists/doctors in the 1950s decided to pump up gender non-conforming homosexuals with cross-sex hormones. They considered men who have crossdressing fetishism (a quite common fetish, prevalent in about 3-5% of all men) to suffer from a partial degree of the transsexual condition and that very feminine gay men suffer from a full transsexual condition (as homosexuals are sexually attracted to men, and that was to them was the highest markers of inner femininity, so heterosexual crossdressers were not regarded as true transsexuals).
The reality is very simple: there are sex-related stereotypes, and there exist people who do not fit well within these stereotypes. Nobody can fit perfectly, but most people fit well enough that nobody questions their manhood/womanhood. In most societies, it is widely accepted that some gender-nonconforming people exist, and these societies just accept their existence.
The idea that gender nonconforming people are actually "members of the opposite sex on inside" and that they should be castrated and surgically modified to try to approximate the appearance of the opposite sex, as some form of "medical treatment" is a mid-20th century American invention that essentially derives from the bigotry of the mid-20th American society in it not being capable of accepting the reality that some men are feminine homosexuals or that they are heterosexual men who enjoy cross-dressing.
For example, consider this German guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4-hrKBrIc4, in America he would be regarded as transgender, and then he would be forced to have to choose between being a stereotypically masculine man or "transitioning into a woman" because of his desire for looking in a stereotypically feminine manner. To force a person to choose between these artificial boxes is what creates anxiety and unease, and it is what most cases of "gender dysphoria" are.
In a modern enlightened society, we should accept that not everybody conforms to their sex-related stereotypes (as the German guy above), and there is no need for them to feel like they are not really real men or real women. They can do anything, including any kind of cosmetic procedure, without society requiring us to suspend disbelief regarding the fantasy that people can change sex. That is better for them, as they can live as themselves without being forced to choose between boxes, and for us, who do not need to pretend that people can change sex.
There are certain mental conditions that are universal and not culturally constructed: anxiety, rage, sadness, hunger, etc. Gender dysphoria is not one of these conditions.
This is such a bizarre and dishonest reading of history and transness, but if it all comes out to "people should be able to have the interventions that they want" then okay I guess.
Sex is 1:1 with reproductive strategy, highly correlated with size and strength, and highly correlated with crime patterns. Gender identity a nebulous notion that is important to the individual but doesnt correlate with anything that impacts others in any meaningful way.
Let policy and law reflect that and you'll find that all the heat in these conversations go away.
But yeah, adults can have whatever interventions they want. Most people, outside of ones own loved ones don't care what any of us does.
Flowers of virtue - just to add: yes, it was written 1411, but printed first in 1486 (no printed books before 1450 as we all know) . - https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Vintler has more content than the English entry ;) - The illustration might have been used for this book anyways. Or not. Nice pic. Weird? Well, I remember a SF-novel I bought because its cover showed a sexy robot. And no such robot in the novel. Weird, in der Tat.
[1] orenwützel seems to be "Ohren" ("ears") + a diminutive of "Wutz", which is a dialectal German word for "pig" but also a slang term for "penis", so I think the "ear-pig" is a penis. Or maybe it's an earwig ("Ohrenwusler") that crawled inside someone's penis and made it go limp, who knows.
[2] "Zipfel" means the the corner or tip of a piece of cloth. It's also a slang term for "penis"... But I think "chuszipfel" might be a poetic word for "tongue." Or maybe the author just made up a word to rhyme with orenwützel.
So this might be a description of someone having their penis stolen or getting a handjob or whatever.
And at this point I hit upon the dictionary entry for "ohrenwützel" in the Brothers Grimm's German dictionary https://www.dwds.de/wb/dwb/ohrenw%C3%BCtzel where this exact stanza is being quoted for the meaning of "ear pain" (with another meaning being "earwig") and my interpretation changed completely:
When they have the earwig [believed to cause pain by crawling inside the ear],
they take a pillow into the hand,
and hit it against the temple at hand [i.e. the side of the head that hurts]
and say: flee, flee, earwig
you're being chased by a pillow corner.
Actually, if you carefully look at the woodcut, the man is holding one hand to the side of his head, as if his ear hurts. Maybe those "penises" are actually badly-drawn earwigs and it only looks like there's a scrotum because of the way it merges with the woman's hand?
Conclusion: it's easy to see evidence for penis-stealing witches if that's what you expect to see. And medieval poetry is more interesting when you interpret unknown nouns as slang for "penis".
Lol. Thank you for the link! I am no real expert in the German of the time, but I think you are on the right page, but got the wrong part of the text. Some Ear-treatment it is alright, but that refers to the right half of the illustration, where ear-pain is treated by applying a pillow ("chus"-kissen). To see the text in a more readable print - exact page here: https://archive.org/details/diepluemendertu00maxigoog/page/n311/mode/1up
After the ear-piece comes sth, I do not get at all: "manig zaubrerin die sein - die nement ain hacken und slahent wein" - Many a witch there is who taketh an ax and slays/beats YEAH, but then "wein" (as wine??) "aus ainer dorren aichenseul", from a dry oak-stem?? - a bit later (illustration next page on your source - what does that lady take from the hanged guy?) sth "even" more penis-theft like: "etleich stelen aus der pruech dem man sein geschirre gar" sounds like "quite a few steal the guys his harness". We really need someone who knows. ;) Anyway I adjust - yes the pic is from the "Flowers of Virtue", and it does say sth about witches being very interested in penises. Who is not? ;) Penis theft 1411 - I say: Jawohl! - And I do not think this was in the Italian version that inspired Vintler (full of moral anecdotes from bible and classics).
Just made the same mistake. The axe in oak stem is on the pic at the very right. As all other illustrations are really about the text (at least, where i can get the meaning) it might be those words: "etleich machent mit dem cleul vadeo manigerlai troflferei. so nimpt maniger gerstprei für den affel, hör ich sagen." wtx, no idea. Belief in "penis-theft" existed, though Vintler frames it "as some ppl say, some ppl do" - Kramer agreed it was an illusionary theft (but the penis really not to bee seen or felt anymore also by other persons). it's complicated, I guess. An even older pic of penises having a separate life - spot the weenies: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Albero_della_Fecondit%C3%A0_(Massa_Marittima)_01.jpg Further reading in German: https://heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/index.php/mial/article/view/24452/18303
> This article claims the first mass shooting in US history was in 1949, and that the initiating factor seemed to be advances in gun technology; there have been violent sprees since forever, but semi-automatic weapons raised the death count to levels that made national news.
I linked previously to Paul Harrell debunking that idea: the 1911 semi-automatic pistol dates back to 1911, well before the 1949 German Luger rampage discussed in the link.
> I’m realizing I have only Ethan Watters’ account of how unknown anorexia was in pre-1994 Hong Kong
How often were young women winding up in hospitals from malnourishment?
> In 21st-century America, women are less enthusiastic about sex, often unsatisfied by it; therefore, it's only natural that men initiate most sexual encounters. In ancient Athens, women, the irrational sex, were slaves to their desires, and part of the humor of the Lysistrata was the idea that the women took their protest so seriously that they could restrain their sexual appetites.
I don't buy that. The fundamental difference between males & females, across species, is that sperm is cheap & eggs are expensive. Thus males are always more on the lookout for mating opportunities, as it costs them essentially nothing.
"the 1911 semi-automatic pistol dates back to 1911".... and mobsters in the prohibition-era US seemed to have no technological problems mowing down people with submachine guns, but they usually had a tangible motive to do it.,
"I don't buy that." - it deserves a closer analysis of the claims. I find it plausible that sexual desires of women *in the context of their marriage* were more accepted, and taken more seriously, in other times and places. Women who initiated sexual encounters with strangers were probably frowned on pretty much universally (moreso by other women than by men).
Mass violence at schools goes back at least as far as 1927. The Bath School Massacre (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster) was conducted using bombs instead of guns, but it resulted in the same kind of media attention the Columbine mass school shooting did.
I noted on the previous thread as well, that Columbine was supposed to be mostly a bombing - but the bombs failed.
Bombs and arson can be very effective weapons, and it does seem culture bound that we’ve ended up mostly with “semi automatic rifle” as the preferred weapon of “lone wolf on a rampage” type terrorism.
Regarding 'David Chapman writes about the “choiceless” nature of traditional societies; if you were born in a peasant village in medieval England, you would be straight, cis, Christian, monarchist, and a farmer - neither because you loved those things and chose them voluntarily, nor because evil outsiders forced you to do those things which you secretly hated, but because you couldn’t conceive of doing anything else.' - many ancient societies had a third gender, and this third gender had to come from somewhere (some people were clearly different enough that they were put in another category).
Additionally, there are many accounts of non-cis or non-straight people in ancient, 'choiceless' societies (e.g. Sappho). It seems much easier to imagine most people ignored their urges because they had no other choice, than say that they didn't even think of having those urges.
He said they lacked choice, not urges, which is kind of his whole point. We can't strictly compare people by their choices if those choices are limited by cultural factors.
I'd argue that's not all he said. He said they couldn't *concieve* of anything else, whereas we have many examples of people concieving of other options even when they didn't grow up with them. I agree that they still were limited by the choices they had (but they could still have felt unhappy about it, which Chapman seems to imply they wouldn't).
He's saying people wouldn't make choices they couldn't conceive of, not that it's impossible to conceive of those choices without the requisite urge. The end of the paragraph is "if they didn’t realize that was a choice, the pressure might come out some other way, or just fizzle out" which explicitly acknowledges that the urges exist irrespective of the available choices.
It is definitely true that there hasc always been sexuality and gender-ality diversity, and there's probably some biological component of that.
But that doesn't mean culture doesn't shape the form that takes. I recall an article by an anthropologist who studied the "third gender" of a culture--male-bodied people who dressed like women, took women's names, did women's work. According to him, these people did not think they "were women" and even got offended at the suggestion. When he described the gay male community in the US to one person he was told "I'm like that."
I think it's very possible that someone with the same hormones and brain could be a "gay man" or a "third gender person" depending on where and when they were born--and maybe that same person could also be a "trans woman" or "nonbinary" or "gender fluid" in other circumstances.
Agreed! I think the quote in question is really overstating it, though (and in doing so giving support to ideas like 'my kid would never have turned out gay if those darned tv shows didn't keep showing gay people'). The exact form certain things take vary a lot by culture, as you said - one can imagine feeling like you don't identify with the usual genders, but what you conceive of as a 'new' gender depending entirely on your culturally-influenced ideas of gender.
This whole idea of a choiceless society can only appear in the mind of someone who knows the Middle Ages only in stereotypes. Let's start with agriculture - did you have to be a farmer? Of course not. You could be a monk, a bandit, a vagabond, you could go to the city, or into the wilderness, the forest, or the steppes (in Eastern Europe, the flight of peasants from the farms was one of the leavens of the revival of Ukraine, after the Mongol invasions). As for monarchism being the only conceivable political stance for a medieval peasant - that's nonsense. Countless revolts, utopian social movements, bloody revolutions against the hierarchy took place in England and elsewhere. The nobility put them down bloodily and not without effort. Now it is the turn of the alleged lack of choice in the matter of religion. In fact, there was a multiplicity of varieties of Christianity in medieval Europe, a multitude of sects and cults competed for people's minds, especially in the countryside, where religions that preceded Christianity did very well, sometimes continuing in "public secrecy" until today. Many sects had ideas about sex that differed from the church of priests, bishops and the Pope. Not forgetting, of course, that the choice of a clerical career, especially in a monastery, was sometimes combined with the possibility of practicing homosexuality in a way that society for centuries, despite its stated values, accepted throughout Europe.
>There is a contingent of people who think of tendonitis, repetitive stress injury, carpal tunnel, etc as somewhere between 50% and 99% cultural.
But there is a real, physical, carpal tunnel thing, right?
I had it at round 30 from bagging potting soil on a production line. You could put your hand on my wrist and feel the internal grinding. The doctor I saw asked if he could call in an associate so he could learn how to feel for it and diagnose a patient.
What about those panic attacks that people used to have the first time they were on a high speed train? Thinking the speed prevented them from breathing. Then after a few trips, they notice no one else has them, and are fine.
One of my dogs has a similar panic attack during a car ride, but not the other. Can animals have culture bound diseases?
>In 21st-century America, women are less enthusiastic about sex, often unsatisfied by it; therefore, it's only natural that men initiate most sexual encounters. In ancient Athens, women, the irrational sex, were slaves to their desires, and part of the humor of the Lysistrata was the idea that the women took their protest so seriously that they could restrain their sexual appetites.
The evolutionary arguments for why men should be more interested in sex than women seem very good. Are there any modern societies where women seem more interested in sex?
If Athens actually is an example of women seeming more interested in sex, I wonder if the high prevalence of homosexuality among men is the cause?
Maybe women were more enthusiastic about sex *with their spouses* or the high status men who wrote Athenian literature, whereas men were more enthusiastic about sex with low status people like slaves and prostitutes.
Scott, context implies you are (entirely reasonably) reading antimemetics division as "against memes", but it is in fact referring to "antimemes" and the excellent SCP wiki series "There Is No Antimemetics Division" (https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub , apparently also now a book published on Amazon).
Unless of course reading antimemetics as "against memes" is an extremely subtle bit and/or unsettling inevitability when attempting to discuss that concept. What was I talking about again?
I remembered something from a class back in college about Shiva trying to preserve semen, and saw references to it when looking it up, e.g. "It explains that the loss of bindu, the vital force of the semen, causes death, while its retention causes life." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajroli_mudra
So I guess the Indians might be in on the NoFap too.
when I saw you mention NoFap, I instantly thought how awesome it would be if you did a “NoFap: Much More Than You Wanted To Know”, given how both medically and culturally it’s quite a double-edged sword
> There is a contingent of people who think of tendonitis, repetitive stress injury, carpal tunnel, etc as somewhere between 50% and 99% cultural.
n=1 observation on this - I had carpal tunnel on my mind due to it being a topic I ran into several times for coincidental reasons, and soon started to feel more-than-usual (I work a job that has me typing for several hours per day so some is normal) soreness in my wrists.
I eventually came to realize that I was feeling some stiffness, then vigorously flexing my wrists to "loosen them up", and after doing this many times per day, *making them sore by doing so.*
So... Psychosomatic -> genuinely physical due to screwing around with the issue too much?
I keep commenting on CT, but I had almost the opposite experience. Both my parents had CTS and needed surgery, so my whole life I was kind of scanning the horizon, doing little things to prevent myself from getting it. I always used a weird ergonomic computer mouse, and even switched between different models. I wanted to catch it early, unlike my mother, who waited too long and lost a lot of sensation in her hands.
But it snuck up on me anyway! I didn’t have numbness except when doing certain activities. And I didn’t have pain until pregnancy aggravated the problem. I saw a hand doctor and had a nerve test thinking I might be catching it early, but apparently my nerves had slowly been checking out and I already had some damage. My brain worked around a lot of it, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I had slowly been changing my behavior to cope with a problem that didn’t register. It had been a long time since I could hold a pen long enough to write a letter or draw a picture, but it’s not like I tried very often. It had never sunk in that I really *couldn’t do it* and that this wasn’t normal. After CT surgery, I realized how many things had been making my hands go numb for God knows how long. Luckily, it seems like I still have most of my nerves, and I can draw again.
> Aella also has written about her own experience with trauma - and how it changed once she left her culty upbringing, learned what trauma was, and understood that other people expected her to have it - here.
After reading the article, I think there are essentially three possible reactions to other people's bad experience, and people often conflate two of them.
a) what happened to you is no big deal, and you are a bad person for whining about it;
b) what happened to you was bad, but it only reflects negatively on the perpetrator, not you;
c) what happened to you was bad, and by contagion, it makes you a bad person.
I understand why (a) could be preferable to (c) even for the victim. If you are a bad person for whining about something what is not a big deal, you still have the option to... stop whining. If you are a bad/broken person by association with the bad things that happened to you, there is nothing you can do about it.
The problem with (b) is that people who claim/try to do it, often do (c) instead. They may say "it does not reflect negatively on you", but if they afterwards start avoiding you, or behave weirdly and uncomfortably in your presence, they are de facto punishing you for being hurt in the past and mentioning it.
I still think that (b) is in theory the correct reaction, but if your experience is that people usually do it wrong, the objection makes sense.
I think another insidious factor is that (b) can often turn into “what happened to you is the WORST POSSIBLE THING and you are surely deeply traumatized - if you have completely moved on from it or think it wasn’t a big deal, you are broken and wrong”.
In trying to be sensitive to trauma, it’s possible to treat severe trauma as the only “right way” to feel after certain experiences. I could certainly see that causing anxiety or trauma where it would not otherwise exist.
Yeah. Either way, the current social *expectations* are what makes the trauma worse.
It distracts you from processing your memories naturally. Like, maybe one day you want to cry, and another day you just want to forget it completely. Instead, every day you need to do what the others expect of you. (In some sub/cultures, they may expect you to cry every day, in others to pretend that nothing happened, or even act heroically every day.)
Plus there may be other costs, such as if you are socially expected to cry all the time, people will stop inviting you to fun activities.
The proper way is to react *without* expectations, not even the expectation of consistent reaction every day.
"The other culture-bound illness I mentioned on the post was shenkui, a Chinese condition where people who believe in yin and yang feel like orgasming depletes them of vitality."
Hasn't that been a trope since forever? Indeed, don't many people feel sleepy after orgasm.
General Jack D. Ripper: [somewhat embarassed] Well, I, uh... I... I... first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love.
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Hmm.
General Jack D. Ripper: Yes, a uh, a profound sense of fatigue... a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I... I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence.
"Maybe this is an argument for gender dysphoria not being like culture-bound mental illness; I don’t think there’s any sense in which, given a choice to believe that a witch stole your penis, some people are going to choose yes."
I think there's a sense in which this could happen. I imagine the following scenario: first, you feel discomfort and unhappiness, maybe vaguely penis-themed. Then, you are given a choice (maybe not a conscious one) to attribute this to a witch stealing your penis. Then, some people choose yes (over not having an explanation at all), and then the magic of human psychology rounds off as many other symptoms as it can to fit more closely with the witch theory.
Re: "Romans didn't get PSTD": r/AskHistorians quoted by HN comment quoted in the comments of the linked ACOUP post, now quoted by me in ACX:
> Cross-cultural psychologists have observed that, regardless of cultural background, people who suffer persistent emotional disturbances in the wake of a traumatic event exhibit intrusive memory symptoms in some form. Here in the US, these are closely related to what we commonly call “flashbacks.” For the Romans, people experiencing intrusive memories were said to be haunted by ghosts. These individuals show up in historical, philosophical, and even medical texts.
> Josephus, who was an outsider to Roman culture, also describes this phenomenon in his history of The Great Revolt. Those haunted by ghosts are constantly depicted showing many symptoms which would be familiar to the modern PTSD sufferer. Insomnia, depression, mood swings, being easily startled, frequent eye movement, alertness all day and night, paranoia, avoidance of crowds, suicidal thoughts/attempts, loss of appetite, shaking/shivering, self-hatred, and impulsive violence have all turned up in association with these individuals.
> Since in almost every case the person experiencing these things had made himself an object of public shame, the “ghosts” in question often came in the form of those he had killed or wronged in the past. These would either appear spontaneously to the sufferer, or would come in the form of vivid, frightening nightmares.
> The key component to these experiences, as with modern cases of PTSD, was that the sufferer had no control over his own symptoms. Thoughts or vivid memories would occur unexpectedly and uncontrollably. It is easy to see why the Romans, who were religiously superstitious to begin with, would attribute such things to the foul play of malicious spirits.
How it relates to Geography of Madness: The mechanism by which penis-stealing fears or certain sudden hysterias may appear could be a fearful feedback loop, discussed in Going Loopy as somewhat speculative accounts of how OCD and anxiety disorders work.
The question of whether it can be wrong to crystallize patterns, relates to whether the introduction of the language and concepts of western medicine can indirectly cause people to find ideas with negative side effects, i.e. anorexia and disorders which previously could not be comprehended in your culture.
I almost made the same comment about bouffée délirante being brief psychotic disorder! Though in my case I would have merely raised the question, being far from an expert, and I decided not to. (I only know about the condition due to researching it for a novel. Very relatedly, thank you to Scott and to Thomas Reilly for providing me with the most culturally appropriate translation of "brief psychotic disorder" for the French version--and just in time before we send in the translation to the publisher.)
I'm skeptical that the concept of a culture bound mental illness is particularly useful.
Ok, so if you are going to worry/panic about something it's more likely to be something that seems plausible to you. Sure, that's not surprising but I don't really see how much follows from that. True, there are the cases of social contagion but that doesn't really seem very different from the general issue of rumors or disinformation (what's different from accepting the election was stolen based o. shaky evidence)
Especially in the trans case it seems like what we really want to know is something more like: is there reason to suspect that taking the feeling at face value isn't likely to be the most cost/beneficial way to improve lives. That's almost certainly true in the case of penis thefts but PMS is likely better dealt with by just treating symptoms (even tho perceived severity is increased by cultural acceptance you can't practically hide the existence of the real effect or make everyone treat it as no biggie by fiat).
And here I expect the fact that the culture bound concept packs together different things causes trouble. I mean is it true that there are probably a fair number of 'trans' teens who are really just having normal sexual worries/exploration? Sure, but they are probably much less likely to be getting surgery or taking medications with truly serious side effects. They are just applying a different name to the same gender non-conformity we've seen forever. They are just projecting their worries/concerns onto culturally relevant notions and, unlike those who help stoke witch panic, there isn't much cost.
So it's really all back to the empirical question about cost/benefit to high cost transitioning and this doesn't seem to throw much light on the topic.
Hey Scott, quick comment that I'm leaving here because you're probably more likely to see it: You have used the "the the" example so many darned times that my husband and I have a prior for it the size of an elephant. It no longer works for your loyal readers! Please stop, we always role our eyes when we get to that example yet again.
I suspect PTSD isn't so much culture bound as it is the product of changing warfare, when it came unto existence it was under the name "shell-shock", because it was suspected to be the result of repeated concussions and loud noises that come from being shelled, as it was one of the main changes in the way warfare was fought. It was renamed PTSD afterwards when it became clear being shelled was not a necessary requisite, but I think the idea that it came into existence as war changed to be on the right track, reading war memoirs from men on the front lines you really get the sense that being constantly at risk of death at any second with not much you can do for extremely extended periods of time really does a number on a man in a way that didn't happen prior to the invention of accurate firearms, plus engagements are much deadlier overall, with old wars ending in routs after a much lower percentage of casualties and after much shorter engagements.
Modern war straight up sets your stress levels so high and for so long it's no wonder your body can't return to baseline at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDNyU1TQUXg Here's a video on the topic, although I don't like Lindybeige's propensity to theorize wildly, the comments are very elucidating.
A particular highlight: In the ancient world, if you try to sell a slave, you didn't by law have to declare if he had participated in war, but you did have to declare if he had been attacked by a bear or lion, presumably because it'd cause some sort of... lingering stress after the traumatic experience.
Basically, our brains have "maps" of our bodies that are based on an expectation of an internal body map. When people lose a leg they have phantom leg syndrome, or sometimes an arm will feel like an alien part of their body. We've discovered there are parts of the brain that have different average sizes in males and females. Transgender people tend to have a brain of the opposite sex in this sense to their physical bodies. They have a brain map for a sex that doesnt match their actual sex, hence the dysphori and the comfort provided when their bodies more closely match their internal map. the description of having a different gender "spirit" is probably a primitive attempt to describe this.
Concerning "Bouffée délirante", in German and Scandinavian context a similar rare condition is named "psycloid psychosis" that is characterised by a sudden onset of disorganised psychosis, confusion, motor agitation, with full remission even if the episodes are sometimes recurrent. It's debated whether it should be considered as more on a bipolar spectrum, maybe partly since it seems to respond to ECT.
Reposting an edited version of my comment to the original post, since I probably posted it too late for anyone to see it:
It seems useful to distinguish between false beliefs and impossible beliefs. The belief that ants are on your skin may be false, but it is hardly impossible. The belief that witches stole your penis is basically impossible.
The belief that are male souls trapped in women's bodies similarly seems like impossible thinking, rather than just false thinking. [This seems to be the presentation of "transgender" that I see most frequently. If it does not reflect what most people mean by "being trans," please drop a link to what they do mean. E.g. if most people don't think that they were born with the wrong body or are "really" the opposite sex, but just that they have certain characteristics more commonly associated with the opposite sex, and they think that they would therefore be better suited trying to make their bodies look like that of the opposite sex, and presenting themselves as it.]
Sure, both penis stealing and wrong-body having can be construed in false but possible ways, e.g. it is literally possible to cut off a penis and steal it, and it is literally possible to be born with various conditions which affect the state of the genitalia, but witch-penis-stealing is distinct from "violent castration" just as "transgender" is distinct from intersex medical conditions.
While as noted in the article, all beliefs are a result of some combination of physical stimuli and a priori social stimuli, beliefs in the impossible seem predicated on a specific false belief.
Just as modernizing societies that stopped believing in magic experienced near universal elimination of "witches-stealing-penises," even though they probably retained many of the sorts of physical stimuli that prompted people to experience particular episodes, our society too may (hopefully) eliminate "transgender," by emphasizing that the underlying belief is magical and false.
Hopefully acknowledging the impossibility of the delusion can lead to those with the unfortunate associated physical stimuli to seek out more productive, or at least less destructive solutions. Just as people in formerly koro believing regions much less frequently mutilate themselves attempting to protect or recover their genitals, hopefully people uncomfortable with their bodies can be conditioned away from mutilating them and towards less destructive solutions.
However, it seems like many critics of the transgender craze are fueling the delusion by implicitly acknowledging the underlying thinking and just questioning whether in a given case a person falsely believes they have a body of the wrong sex, rather than actually having a body of the wrong sex.
Oddly enough there are some peer-reviewed theological journals, e.g. "Theological Studies" (run by the Jesuits) and "The Journal of Theological Studies" (run by the Oxford University Press).
It sounds like you're simply asserting that feeling your body is the wrong sex is impossible. I don't see why that should be the case. To me, it doesn't fall at all in the same category as whether one's penis is there, which is physically verifiable and would also require some mechanism. Why would feeling your feelings be "impossible"?
No that's not what I'm asserting. See my responses to Scott and Maxmilian.
Depends on what you mean.
1) A person IS his or her body. It is physiologically impossible for the nerve endings of a penis to send the message to the brain that the penis should be something else.
2) However, humans are complex creatures. They can convince themselves of a narrative where they are souls that are separate from their body and that their body is a prison for their soul (a narrative that Plato already had articulated). Then, they can further convince themselves that maybe a body of a different sex would be a better vessel for their soul, and they can convince themselves that they feel distressed from being what they are.
oh it is likely not the penis which sends the signals, but some other part of the brain which does so. And the brain can definitely send signals that don't match the body. See for example, phantom limbs.
Ok, but clearly males differ from females in more ways than just their genitalia. It seems an extreme claim to say that it is "impossible" for biological processes to result in a person having the outward appearance of one gender but the internal experience of the other.
No, because there is no such objectively testable thing as the "outward appearance of one gender but the internal experience of the other." That claim assumes that there exists a sexed soul separate from the body, which is not a falsifiable claim.
What exists are sex-related stereotypes. And stereotypes are stereotypes.
I agree it isn't a falsifiable claim (at least, not without a much better understandings of the human brain). In fact, if you go back and read my comment, the words "It seems an extreme claim to say that it is "impossible" for..." directly preceded the part you quoted. And no, what I said doesn't "assume there exists a soul" any more than talking about the internal experience of flavor assumes a soul.
It is funny though that you're making some pretty absolute claims and yet when I respond to the effect of "not necessarily" you're suddenly worried about falsifiability. My claim can be falsified by proving your claim is true, but as you've pointed out that isn't possible.
There is not an internal experience of reproductive sex that is separate from the external experience of reproductive sex.
Of course there is? Maybe you don't have one but a lot of us do and can readily point to it
You're pointing to an internal experience that is dysphoric, right? But you wouldn't be dysphoric if your external sex characteristics weren't a certain way. That feeling of "mismatch" wouldn't exist otherwise. So everything about your internal and external experience is connected.
This sentence feels meaningless in the context of the overall discussion without first establishing what is meant by "internal experience of reproductive sex", "external experience of reproductive sex", and "separate". If it just means (as you seemed to clarify in your subsequent response) "everything about your internal and external experience is connected" then... ok? That doesn't contradict anything anyone else has said.
A trans woman isn't having a cis woman's internal experience and a cis man's external experience. She is having a trans woman's internal and external experience. The internal experience of a trans person is primarily characterized by dysphoria, which is something cis people rarely experience. Wishing your body was female or thinking you'd be more comfortable with a female body is fundamentally different from having and being comfortable with a female body.
I do think that you must believe in some kind of "gendered soul," philosophically speaking, to believe in an internal experience of sex that is disembodied and wholly shared between trans and cis women/men.
It's possible to feel/believe anything. However it is not possible to know that the qualia you're experiencing and attributing to being more like the standard qualia of the opposite sex is not in fact nothing like the qualia of the opposite sex and actually centrally the qualia of your birth sex. You can feel as though you'd be happier with the primary and secondary sexual characteristics of the opposite sex, and you can be right about this feeling but that is distinct from actually being a member of the opposite sex. It's a claim to have knowledge you simply can't have.
I don't actually think it's useful to distinguish between false vs. impossible beliefs. The person having them doesn't know they're impossible - to a 16th century European, witches are just as much a part of nature as ants. I would expect them both to be equally good culture-bound mental illnesses.
For my more complicated case for why transgender isn't "impossible", see https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
Of course, by definition, someone experiencing something thinks it is real, but why can it not be useful in studying the phenomenon?
Is it not reasonable to think that the two would behave differently? E.g. that impossible beliefs could be more effectively treated than other false beliefs? Doesn't that fit with koro being eliminated much more effectively than anorexia? People can learn that witches aren't real, and stop associating their experiences with them, but they can't stop being anorexic by learning that obesity isn't real, since obesity actually is real - they just aren't obese.
Looking at the transgender piece, I don't see how it invalidates my point, except in the trivial sense. That is, one could argue that the koro belief is not impossible, once we define "having a penis" to mean "feeling like one has a penis." But that seems trivially true and therefore not useful. If 'man' means 'someone who identifies as a man,' then identifying as a man becomes trivial and unhelpful. Inasmuch as it means something discrete, it seems impossible, and inasmuch as it is possible, it seems trivial.
That's what I was trying to address with my question in the brackets about what trans people believe.
Analogously, one could say the same thing about other beliefs, like a Man thinking he is a dog. Dogs and human both vary a lot and have various overlapping sets of characteristics. A given human may be as aggressive, for example, as the average dog.
Obvious differentiators between the two may sometimes fail, e.g. humans can suffer from hirsutism, and dogs may be hairless.
But does that mean that is is possible for a human to be a dog? Again, it seems like it's only possible if we trivialize the meaning of "being a dog," to mean" someone who thinks they are a dog," in which case it is a tautology that someone who thinks they are a dog is a dog.
Hermaphrodites exist. Half-human half-dog hybrids don't. There is clearly *some* biological possibility for nonstandard variations along the male/female paradigm (unlike the human/dog paradigm). So easily dismissing people's experiences in that regard as "impossible" is completely irrational.
Human hermaphrodites do not exist. There are zero intersex conditions that result in fertile sperm and fertile eggs.
transsexuals are a real thing like scientologists are a real thing, both are superstitions.
For what it's worth, plenty of trans people also agree with the anti-essentialist point that it's impossible to for there to be a "soul" that "has" a gender, and go further and argue that the body doesn't "have" a gender either, but that it is put on by social interpretation.
They then say that what it is to be trans is to identify with a gender other than the one that people originally categorized you as, and want to interact socially as that gender. Some of them allow that medical treatments might be a useful part of that process, while others specifically want to de-medicalize it (though I don't know how many would actively criticize the use of hormones or surgery, rather than just encouraging people that there are plenty of ways to live as trans that don't require that).
They do not actually agree because men and women are categories that are used by 99.9% of people to assign people to biological categories. The idea that men and women are not biological categories then needs some form of "gendered soul" kind of idea.
This isn't true. To believe that transitioning doesn't work is closer to requiring a gendered soul. Since otherwise, you are looking at a breast-having human without a penis filled with estrogen and saying "this is a male".
It is true that most trans people respect people's requested pronouns even when it doesn't match how their body looks, because that is the nice thing to do.
Male and female reproductive categories. If you take an individual that produced sperm, give him estrogen and remove his penis, that doesn't actually change the fact that he is male.
How often is it socially relevant to you what someones chromosomes are, and do you have chromosome vision? Look at Kim Petra's or Nikki Dejager and tell me that's a man.
I was talking about male and female, not man and woman. They overlap a lot but they're not the same thing.
It's relevant when you have a biological man wanting to compete in women's sports. Or use women's restrooms. Or dwell in women's prisons. It's also relevant when you are cisgendered, looking for a mate and don't want to be cat fished in the worst way possible.
>Look at Kim Petra's or Nikki Dejager and tell me that's a man.
What I see isn't always what *is*
A kid on the shoulder of another, wearing a trenchcoat, isn't a grown man.
A trompe-l'oeil, no matter how realtistic, is still just a painting.
Sean Connery was not a lady killer spy (just a regular lady killer).
Man who was castrated before puberty never produced sperm. Would you claim that he is not male?
Traditionally, eunuchs weren't considered to be male or female, so it wouldn't be an unprecedented categorization.
Ask David Reimer.
You don't have to literally produce sperm to be of the category of people that produces sperm. If you have the plumbing, even if it isn't working, you would still be considered reproductively male.
All categories have fuzzy edges. Obviously there are intersex conditions that make the classification confusing. But castration is pretty simple... it's taking a fertile or potentially fertile male and making him infertile. He still has the body that is generally associated with small gametes: a male body.
>Since otherwise, you are looking at a breast-having human without a penis filled with estrogen and saying "this is a male".<
My intuition is that there's more to sex than secondary sexual characteristics. Certainly, there are things like bone density and so forth, and of course the good ol' chromosomes themselves; but I mean there's more to it *in a sense more relevant to the social experience of sex* than "presence/absence of Y-chromosome".
E.g., on at least some interesting axes of personality, trans-women tend to score closer to the masculine mean than cis-women tend to. This is true for a lot of stuff like aggression, which seems like one of the more important (/) sex-linked personality traits...
...but I don't know how it comes out in toto — it could be that *overall*, the responses from the transwomen are more feminine than not.
Anyway, this is what I think people are thinking of when they maintain separate categories, in their heads, between cis- and trans-women.
(In my personal experience, the transwomen I've met have definitely seemed more aggressive, assertive, etc., than your average woman; but that's a population of, like, two. Also a heavily-selected population, perhaps.
...Relatedly: also that's all totally fine by me and I would very much like to meet women — trans or otherwise — who may be interested in working out any aggressive-type feelings they possess. Upon me. In a sexual fashion. ...HMU. *cough*)
Well, that took a turn.
Regarding categories, rationalists are fond of telling everyone the map is not the territory. I recently drove past a "road" that was closed off by barriers and had a sign which said "dry weather only". It was completely covered in grass and had sheep grazing on it. Was this "road" really a road, or was it a field? Which is more true? Does the idea that a road is not a physical category need some form of "road soul" or "field soul" to describe it?
Well...none of those questions are sensible questions. We don't have to be slaves to language when the actual road/field is in front of us. It's a seasonal road for the purposes of mapmakers, a normal road for the local council if they need to set up a detour, a road for the sheep farmer if he's selling the land around it, and a road for anyone who uses it when the weather is dry. It's a field for the sheep and their farmer for the purposes of grazing, and for me when I drive past it. It is both a road and a field, and without knowing the purpose of the question it's impossible to say which is more real.
As I understand it, there are a few ways to describe transness. A materialist version that doesn't require souls might look something like one or both of the following.
Medical: trans people have a medical/behavioral condition, dysmorphia, which causes them suffering when they are treated as their assigned gender at birth and/or when they perceive themselves as their assigned gender at birth. The most efficacious treatment for this condition is treating them as their identified gender and/or assisting them in medical transition towards this gender. The alternative - assisting the person with being more comfortable with their assigned gender - is at best useless or at worst harmful under this argument.
Cultural: In addition to the above, transness is a culture, and it's unethical to try to treat transness by counseling them not to be trans. Even if that treatment were effective, it would constitute erasure or genocide or something along those lines.
You can agree or disagree with whether the arguments are correct, but neither one requires a soul.
I think you're not being nearly critical enough of your understanding of biological sex. A "woman's soul trapped in a man's body" is certainly an overly simplistic way of describing it mostly told to young people, and is impossible since souls aren't real.
But a careful wording of what most trans people (trans, not non binary, I think these are different phenomena and can't speak for both) would say would be something like "Despite my karyotype and some of my sex characteristics, upon honest introspection I feel more like a man/woman, and female/male biological characteristics and social traits give me great distress, that I call gender dysphoria, the same way a woman might be distressed about facial hair caused by PCOS or a man might be distressed about his weak chin, wide hips, and fragile physique"
A really important part of the model of transgenderism is that cis people experience gender dysphoria too, we just don't call it that. But desires for women to feel womanly and men to feel manly already motivate a ton of distress and medical action. For trans people there just seems to be a flip.
And biologically this is absolutely possible, and anyone who wants to claim that biological sex is as cut and dry as karyotype is someone willfully plugging their fingers in their ears to hang on to their 7th grade anatomy class model in disregard of what the medical establishment and biologists have been saying for some time now.
The short version is, karyotype only signals what gonads to make, and then primary sex hormone controls all the differentiation. If there are any kinds of abnormalities in hormone production or reception, you can get weird differentiation.
There is evidence from doctors that transgender people have abnormal labs and statistically significant brain differences relative to cisgender people even _before_ hormone therapy interventions. I will link sources when I'm not on mobile.
An honest reading of history will readily identify a broad number of people exhibiting similar kinds of gender non conforming behavior, and widely disparate cultures having to integrate the fact that human sex and gender both are strongly bimodal but have non trivial spectrums that somewhere between 1 and 10 percent of people will reside along.
> "Despite my karyotype and some of my sex characteristics, upon honest introspection I feel more like a man/woman, and female/male biological characteristics and social traits give me great distress, that I call gender dysphoria, the same way a woman might be distressed about facial hair caused by PCOS or a man might be distressed about his weak chin, wide hips, and fragile physique"
If the distress is the core issue, and you had a choice of some intervention that realigned your introspection to your sex, rather than trying to change your secondary sex characteristics to match your introspective sense, would you opt for that less invasive intervention instead? Most people seem to struggle with this because of some innate sense of dualism, that they are their mind and not their body, and so they would prefer to change their body.
> There is evidence from doctors that transgender people have abnormal labs and statistically significant brain differences relative to cisgender people even _before_ hormone therapy interventions.
Lots of mental illnesses have physical characteristics too. I fully suspect that people with Body Integrity Identity Disorder will also have various brain and lab abnormalities. I don't think biological factors would convince anyone that considered gender dysmorphia to be a mental disorder that it wasn't one, or that this required revising gender categories.
If there was a medical intervention I could have taken to make myself cisgender back when I was trying to decide whether to start, I would have jumped on it, and I still now wish it had been there.
You're right many transwomen will report that this does not seem like a good idea to them but I suspect that mostly stems from a difficulty in feeling the algorithm from the _outside_. In general consider that all agents don't want to change their utility functions and generally allowing arbitrary modification to your cognition is the path of madness, so I wouldn't be too surprised about people's hesitancy to alter their brain. It's not dualism, it's that altering your utility functions is typically very bad for your current utility function.
And all that said, like I said, I would have jumped at the chance, and still would jump at the chance if it magically included my old body as well. Being trans is really awful, but ignoring being trans is intolerable.
As far as "is it a mental disorder or a physical one" I think that's all confused heap problems. The brain is a physical system, "mental or physical " is a semantic game people play.
I pointed out the biological correlates as a counterpoint to it being a delusion and physically impossible.
I wished that my penis would be cut off long before I realized I wanted to be girl. There is no need to hypothesis a "female soul", that is merely a short hand or comforting myth. After getting sex reassignment surgery, I don't feel mutilated. In fact it is a lovely improvement in my life. I am no longer constantly bothered every time I was reminded I had one.
It sounds like you are uncomfortable with me changing my genitals. Perhaps people uncomfortable with others having sex reassignment surgery can be conditioned towards a less destructive solution than politically controlling my genitals .
Think about someone you love, like your parents, life partner, child, or best friend. If they tell you they want their eyes gouged out because they want to be blind, would you be worried? Would you want doctors to satisfy their wishes and pour drain cleaner into their eyes? Even if you do, would you understand why many doctors would be uncomfortable with destroying healthy organs, and why their discomfort does not stem necessarily from wanting to politically control eyeballs?
By the way, the scenario I came up with is not hypothetical or metaphorical: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/real-life-stories/psychologist-blinds-woman-drain-cleaner-6552282
I would venture to guess that you share at least a part of my visceral discomfort at this story, even if you don't agree with my conclusions.
I share you discomfort. But I believe that this discomfort is irrational. Similar to how I feel discomfort when I see women cut their long hair. I enjoy my longish hair and wish that it was longer, but it is a mistake to think that those women are being irrational when they cut it. It is the same mistake as looking as someone eating a food you dislike and assuming that they are suffering by eating it.
But I think this opposing this blinding does count as "wanting to politically control others eyeballs" as soon as you say "I am uncomfortable with you blinding yourself, therefore you shouldn't be able to do it" or "he should lose his license".
If you are merely saying "I think getting sex reassignment surgery is a mistake but I respect and defend your legal right to do so", then you don't want to politically control my genitals and I may have falsely assumed otherwise.
from the perspective of the trans person, this is like your family acting to prevent you from getting your infected appendix removed saying that you are "mutilating your body", or worse politicians saying "we need to ban appendectomies". Except it is even worse because there is no effective conversant therapies, but antibiotics can treat many cases of appendicitis.
You're talking about gouging eyes out and pouring drain cleaner on them - of course there's going to be visceral discomfort when you use the most violent analogies you can think of! But that discomfort only matters insofar as the violence specifically is an accurate aspect of the analogy - and I'm going to guess actual sex reassignment is a fair bit more civilized than an ice pick to the ocular orbit.
I don't think that's the point. Body Integrity Identity Disorder is a condition where people want to have their fully functional limbs amputated. Is the correct response to affirm their internal sense of reality that those limbs don't actually belong to them, or is the correct response to be sympathetic and accepting of their predicament, but that we should find another way to resolve their difficulties? I'm not sure the answer is obvious.
The analogy doesn't really hold. A lot of work is being done by smuggling in the implication that identifying as a "non right arm having person" is the same thing as "identifying as a woman despite a male karyotype".
We're right to approach a claim of "I'm an [x]" with some skepticism. In the case of the (even much smaller than number of trans people) people who want their limbs amputated, we're right to be skeptical that they want to be a non-right-arm-haver, because thats not a thing. But if someone says they think they are something half of all people are... Well it's hardly the same comparison.
Also, if cutting off BIID patients limbs had the kind of medical efficacy and low rate of regrets that transcare has, it would be pretty compelling.
> But if someone says they think they are something half of all people are...
But they're not something half of all people are, they are something maybe 1% of all people are, ie. transgender. Maybe BIID is 0.1%, but why is the cutoff somewhere between those two?
They would only be half of all people if we redefine the gender categories to entirely exclude consideration of sex. That's what's being done for gender, so at least they're trying to be consistent, but then why can't that be extended to eliminate the notion of disability too? That is, you're not disabled if you don't think you're disabled, and so any way of living is perfectly valid no matter how much it burdens your family or society.
In fact, some people are trying to do this. Witness some of the recent backlash against Mr. Beast curing some people's blindness, for instance.
Edit: also, doesn't your "half of all people" argument lead to absurdity? If I want a tail surgically attached that's not a problem either because the majority of mammals have tails. In other words, why stop at the human category? The category of human is essentially just as fictional as gender in the end, right? It's a convenient taxonomical shorthand, not an essential truth. This is the ultimate problem with deconstructing effective categories, everything starts to sound like special pleading and everything becomes permissible, no matter how much harm it causes.
> Also, if cutting off BIID patients limbs had the kind of medical efficacy and low rate of regrets that transcare has, it would be pretty compelling.
We don't have enough data to actually conclude that transgender interventions have long term medical efficacy or low rate of regrets. This is why many European countries have ruled out hormonal interventions for underage trans kids.
Furthermore, I'm convinced that it would be compelling even if it did have that data, because you're implicitly evaluating it based on an unknown counterfactual that they would not have been happier if we had devoted time and money to other interventions that weren't so invasive.
"The analogy doesn't really hold. A lot of work is being done by smuggling in the implication that identifying as a "non right arm having person" is the same thing as 'identifying as a woman despite a male karyotype'."
They are the exact same category of thing. Having a right arm and wishing you did not have one is the same as having a penis and wishing you did not have one.
What you really mean by "impossible beliefs" seems to be something like "spiritual beliefs." Judging by the responses, I think the word "impossible" here is a barrier to understanding.
You might also call it sensory delusions (or assertions) vs. non-sensory ones. Something that other people's senses would to be able to weigh in on, vs. something that they can't -- either because it's something invisible or because something like a witch illusion has fooled them.
Try replacing "soul" with "brain." It seems plausible to me that there is non-negligible sexual dimorphism in the brain, that said dimorphism can be mismatched between brain and body to varying degrees, and that this can contribute to experiences of dysphoria.
Right. We could replace "having a brain more typical of biological males" with "being more masculine, and "having a brain more typical of biological females" with "being more feminine."
But why should being more masculine necessitate having a man's body and vice versa? My understanding, is that those who identify as e.g. trans male don't think "I believe my brain is typical of those at the 60th percentile of masculinity." I thought that they think that they are more meaningfully male than that.
Why would thinking that you are e.g. 60th percentile in brain distribution from most feminine to most male cause you to feel miserable in your body?
If I were to find out that mapping out characteristics of people from my country (A) and other country (B) shows that I am more similar to the average person living in country B, would that make me feel miserable in my own country?
Notably, according to this comment: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-geography-of-madness/comment/13026459, the brains of trans people are much more similar to other people of the same biological sex, than to members of the opposite sex. I have not looked up the study in question to investigate the veracity of that.
subjectively it is "I am in torment by having a male body; and having a female body seems so nice", not "I have a female brain, therefore I need a female body". (and that sensation wasn't an illusion, since after acquiring a more female body, I am far less tormented and my body is quite nice.)
One theory is that the brain has a map of the human body, and if that map doesn't match the body, one feels distress. e.g. phantom limbs and pain. Trans people have a map which doesn't map their birth body. We can't change the map, but we can change the body, quite easily in fact.
Though that doesn't explain how taking estrogen makes me feel better about even the parts of my body it doesn't change. With larger doses making me feel more comfortable. So might be some sort of thing were brains keep track of what hormones they want to have.
I could not find a reference for the study in question either, but I am familiar with these:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1509654112
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0149763415002432
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6235900/#!po=0.238095
https://www.the-scientist.com/features/are-the-brains-of-transgender-people-different-from-those-of-cisgender-people-30027
https://www.jsm.jsexmed.org/article/S1743-6095(15)30744-X/fulltext
(Some of these are now paywalled after trying to refind)
This is what I was familiar with 3 years ago and I am certain do not represent the cutting edge. However, collectively they present a picture something like "Transgender brains are likely different from cisgender people prior to HRT, and definitely are after HRT"
Trans people generally (1) want to be seen and treated as a gender different from their assigned sex (or picture themselves as a different gender and want others to recognize this) and/or (2) have a deep-seated desire for different sex characteristics, with this often manifesting in seemingly strange ways such as wishing to get breast cancer so as to be rid of one’s breasts (may also be a mismatch between a mental map of one’s own body and the actual body). Many trans people have a combination of these two, to varying degrees. The social desire in (1) to be called a man or woman isn’t some logical conclusion, but also seems like an inexplicable terminal want from some corner of the brain.
> If I were to find out that mapping out characteristics of people from my country (A) and other country (B) shows that I am more similar to the average person living in country B, would that make me feel miserable in my own country?
If you visit country B and notice that people there are a lot more similar to you than people in your home country A, then you might want to spend more in country B (and maybe eventually even move there permanently) and feel miserable about having to return to country A.
I also imagine that the threshold for "a lot more similar" depends on how hard it is to move between the countries, so a more open [ei]migration policy would result in more people moving between A and B (in both directions).
> We could replace "having a brain more typical of biological males" with "being more masculine, and "having a brain more typical of biological females" with "being more feminine."
No, we couldn't.
"Masculine" and "feminine" are inherently cultural constructs. They contain some common cross-cultural elements that coincide with what we know about biological sex differences, but they also contain common cross-cultural elements that partially contradict what we know about biological sex differences. (For example, the near-universal idea that boys and men are physically and emotionally "tougher" or more resilient is a false generalization from a specific, limited sex difference in musculoskeletal injury risk in adults; in many other important respects, boys and men are more vulnerable than girls and women are.) And layered on top of those arguably-biology-linked universals are a number of completely arbitrarily gendered characteristics which vary widely across space and time.
Using the words "masculine" and "feminine" introduces all those connotations. Attempting to define them away in a casual context like this is just inviting misunderstandings.
>But why should [having a brain more typical of males] necessitate having a man's body and vice versa?
Nobody knows! We have some hypotheses about abnormalities in the "brain homunculus" with limited support from imaging studies (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8324983/#!po=22.6563), but nothing super-compelling yet.
>My understanding, is that those who identify as e.g. trans male don't think "I believe my brain is typical of those at the 60th percentile of masculinity." I thought that they think that they are more meaningfully male than that.
See, this is what I'm talking about. What does "masculinity" mean here? Are we talking about physiological masculinization (which is itself a very complex multidimensional construct)? Culturally-defined masculinity? I can't tell.
As for what trans men think: I can only speak for myself, but I don't know what my brain is like from the "outside view." I have no idea where it fits on the spectrum of physiological masculinization. If I had to put a single number on it, I'd probably say 60th-70th percentile average of all the traits known to be linked to sex? But that's a weird average because I'm near zero on at least one trait (sexual orientation) and over 90 on at least one (things vs. people).
From the "inside view," none of that matters. The feature of my brain that I rely on to decide that I'm a man is the one that looks, from the inside, like "male self-concept."
I know that sounds tautological. I'm trying to draw a distinction between a bottom-up perception and my top-down interpretation of it, which is very difficult. I think the bottom-up perception has qualia features (there's no way to be truly sure that we're all experiencing the same thing). But one aspect of it that I think most people can relate to is that when I look at men and boys, I feel a sense of self-recognition, a "this entity is like me in some important way" feeling. I think we all respond that way to humans generally, and to a lesser degree mammals generally. I'm not sure how many people have a specific identity-tier for gender, but if you don't, just think about how you might feel different levels of identification with a person vs. e.g. a cat, and then imagine that there's another step slightly above "human" but below "self."
> Why would thinking that you are e.g. 60th percentile in brain distribution from most feminine to most male cause you to feel miserable in your body?
You've got the causality backwards. I was unhappy in my body long before I ever thought anything about brain percentiles. I'm only here thinking about brain percentiles because I was miserable in my body.
My typical internal self-comparison with other boys/men is less "I *am* like them" and more "I *should be* like them because I'm one of them."
To be clear, that's not a conscious belief that I've reasoned my way into by observation and analysis. I actually hold the opposite belief consciously - I don't think gender should have any bearing on how people are 'supposed' to look/behave/express themselves. But I feel emotions about my own gender-nonconformity that aren't aligned with my conscious belief.
> Notably, according to this comment: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-geography-of-madness/comment/13026459, the brains of trans people are much more similar to other people of the same biological sex, than to members of the opposite sex. I have not looked up the study in question to investigate the veracity of that.
Their characterization of this study is mostly accurate. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8955456/
Their assertion that it's the *only* relevant study is false. There are dozens of studies of trans people's brains. All of them are small, all of them are flawed in the ways brain imaging research in general is flawed, but the overall picture is weakly suggestive of structural differences between cis and trans people of the same natal sex and strongly suggestive of functional similarities between cis and trans people of the same identified gender.
I think actually the majority of the trans people I know do not consider themselves stereotypically conforming to their gender. I don't mean that they're nonbinary, I mean that I know e.g. trans men who present very effeminate and are proud of this. All of them have to be extremely patient with cis people who don't understand the difference between gender and presentation (because the difference between sex vs. gender is frequently simplified to sex vs. presentation...)
The literature on "brain sex" is inconsistent and germinal and it is hard to draw conclusions in one direction or another in its current state - I think this characterization is the best one I've seen.
You are too optimistic about our society. All societies have their primitive superstitions. Our modern society is no different.
The concept of transsexualism is one of these superstitious in our modern society. Other superstitions include all the concepts involved in critical race theory.
it is unclear what you even mean by saying it is "superstitious". Transsexuals say "I want to take hormones, surgery, and pronouns" and then get hormones, surgery, and pronouns and report that this makes them happier. This seems no different from the man who says "I want a pizza" and gets a pizza and reports being happier.
More like it looks like a person joining a scientology cult and reporting being happier.
The difference is that society as a whole does not think Scientology is more than a cult, while powerful medical organizations profit from the gender cult.
I developed a desire to chop off my penis at 13 after reading the Wikipedia page for amputations and seeing penis amputation was something happened. To my knowledge at the time, no one in the world besides me wanted this. But oh, I did want it. To remove that gross organ and had lately been growing to disgusting sizes (from puberty). Not sure how this could be explained in a social contagion model. That would be like developing Scientology independently.
I started wanting to be a girl after I realized that the modifications I wanted to do to my body were suspiciously similar just being a girl, and so I tried fantasizing that I was one and it was quite nice.
There isn't even consistent political opinions among trans people. There are conservatives and communists. Clearly no top down total control. Clearly not structured like a cult. I don't even feel at home among groups for trans people as they use too much leftist style language for me to feel comfortable.
Now I did notice (or develop) phantom breasts after learning that female to male transsexuals sometimes report phantom penises. So there could be some element of social contagion. But wanting pizza also has a strong element of social contagion. if you say "I want a pizza" other people are more likely to also want a pizza.
Different transgender people believe different things. Some may indeed believe in souls, but then religiosity is not an especially rare trait. Many theists attribute their consciousness to having a soul. Nevertheless, this is not seen as an argument against the existence of qualia.
I think that the conflict between you and the people you differ with is more about metaphysics than it is about material reality. That is, it's about how we ought (in the Humean sense) categorize things. How many grains of sand are required to make a heap. People widely agree that just a few grains aren't enough, and that a million are enough, but there are liminal amounts of sand over which there is conflict. In my view there isn't an objectively correct answer to where to draw the line, just different answers that draw on different systems. Some rational. Self-coherent. Some not. Of the rational systems, some contradict one another, and there is no issue with that, because you are not dealing with questions about what is, but about how we ought label it. Different maps can accurately reflect the same territory, but suggest different routes through it.
Here's a more sophisticated argument for why transgender men/women are men/women. It is no longer one I personally believe, but I do not need to believe it in order to see that it is internally consistent and requires no magic. Metarationality allows me to simultaneously think it's wrong and recognize that there is a difference in kind between it and a belief in the occult.
Some males are born with severe genitalial deformities that require surgical intervention. A condition known as Cloacal Exstrophy. In the past, and for highly dubious reasons, doctors have frequently decided to assign those individuals to the female sex at birth and advised their parents to rear them as girls. Many did. The years passed and a group of researchers decided to look into what has become of the people in question. What they found out is that a substantial amount of them continues to live as women to this day and a substantial amount transitioned to live as men. Many of those who transitioned declared their identity to be a masculine one spontaneously, without being told about their medical history. This is plausibly because certain aspects of one's biology play a role in deciding which gender identity one will develop, independently of rearing or potentially even external sensory input.
Looking at those male AFABs who have only ever lived as girls and then women, who see themselves as women, who are only ever seen as women, could you come and say: they are not women, for they were born male? This counters all intuition. Little separates them from other XY intersex women, who are counted as women. Even if they were not born women, they became women, and so are women. Accepting this, we must accept that sex is not what makes one a woman.
Looking at those male AFABs whose inner nature shone through, who were born with such a strong biological drive toward masculinity that no amount of social pressure could knock it out of them, could you come and say: they are not men, for they were not reared as men? I could not, for they are only claiming a birthright that some tried and failed to steal from them, and so we must admit that one's rearing isn't what makes one a man, provided that it fails to alter your gender identity.
So, we're looking at a group of men and a group of women, yet they do not differ in sex or rearing. What differentiates them? There is one such parameter: gender identity. One's deep-seated sense of being a man or a woman, which can be likened to sexual orientation in that that we are set up to develop it early on and once developed it is effectively fixed. It is no mere belief, any more than hunger is a belief. It's a developmentally acquired set of highly stable neural qualities. A homosexual man might genuinely believe himself to be straight, and say as much, but that does not make him straight. In the same fashion merely saying that you are a man or a woman does not make you a man or a woman. Having the proper gender identity does.
Transgender men/women have masculine/feminine gender identities, and so are men/women, because that is the deciding factor.
Furthermore, there are reasons to believe that transness is often downstream from hormonal shenanigans, some prenatal. Things that correlate with it, with being exposed to weird levels of sex hormones in utero, and with each other: homosexuality, intersex conditions, autism, gender nonconformance, partial neurological sex-atypicality regardless of sexual orientation and before the administration of cross-sex hormones. Other things that correlate with being transgender: having a transgender twin. Having genes that seem to be related to processing sex hormones.
Isn't it odd that people who feel like they're "really of the other sex inside" seem to be more likely to have a variety of biological traits that relate to sex-atypicality? Given what we've observed in people with cloacal exstrophy could this not be because sexual differentiation deeply wires gender into some or most of us, and this specific part of the brain is wired topsy turvy in trans folks? And if that is so, does it not make some sense to prioritize the brain, not the body, when determining whether someone is a man or a woman?
Now, before you challenge me to mortal combat, let me reiterate that I no longer fully buy this. Yes, biology is involved, but my model is far closer to Scott's nowadays. I think of it in terms of predisposition, not predetermination, with culture often playing a significant role in deciding how people will end up conceptualizing their feelings and how they'll evolve. Nevertheless, I still think it's sensible to believe that transgender men/women are men/women, even as I think that it's equally sensible to think otherwise. It all depends on how you count the grains.
My point with all of this is not to convince you that transgender people are this or that, but that at least some of the people who think differently from you do so for sensible reasons. They do not believe in the impossible, they simply assign different weight to different grains, or happen to think that there are grains you are unaware of. Likewise, I think it'd be incorrect of transgender activists to insist that your own position regarding who should be labeled how is somehow objectively wrong. There is no One True Heap Categorization Scheme. Just the world and what we choose to do with it. Just human beings, on all sides of this issue.
Of course, we aren't dealing with Platonic forms, so we can't speak of something being "objectively" anything. Everything has sets of characteristics, and for convenience, we use language to refer to clusters of those as different things. But that is just a starting point for talking about anything. It doesn't afford any novel insight about transgenderism.
In fact, we could say that one characteristic of of people who are perceived by others as having a penis, is the internal perception of a penis, and vice-versa. So in that sense, people who perceive their penises as having been stolen by witches, are lacking a characteristic of penises that other penis-havers have.
However, this seems like unproductive word games, rather than meaningful insight.
The same could be said for many delusions. E.g. as I referenced elsewhere, I am perfectly content to accept that a person who identifies as a dog would have many more shared characteristics with dogs, on average, than a person who does not identify as a dog.
And while I can't summon a Platonic form of a person or dog, to determine what the individual "really" is (because Platonic forms don't exist), I can think that inasmuch as anything can be said to be one thing or another, that the individual in question is not a dog.
It's not shocking that biological males who identify as women would have more in common with that sex than other biological males, on average, and vice versa; the same could be said for feminine men and masculine women in general. I don't think that that alone makes it useful to think of them as the opposite sex.
Similarly, a brain dead person may no longer identify as a man or a woman, since they don't identify themselves as anything, since they brain-dead. Although they have lost that characteristic associated with people of the sex, it does not seem useful to think of them as no longer belonging to their biological sex - the same goes for a corpse, of course. Which is why it doesn't seem to make sense to "follow the brain."
Another way to phrase the issue, is that if the statement "I am a man" is meaningful, and not trivial, then it has to mean more than "I identify as a man," as if "man" means "someone who identifies as a man," then it's a tautology. A statement like "the book is in the box" is meaningful inasmuch as it makes testable predictions, and it is falsifiable. I could say that the book is in the box, and then realize that it was not actually in the box.
If "I am a man" means I identify as someone who identifies as a man," then it could never be falsified. Even if I were to later not identify as such, then that would not invalidate the original statement, since the statement just referred to a feeling, and the feeling was indeed my feeling.
That would seem to make it not very meaningful, and not even what you are referring to of "following the brain." It would mean following one particular belief in someone's brain and using that to define their identity, which again, does not seem useful for the reasons I outlined.
So I repeat that yes, everything is a composite of various characteristics in various combinations, so anything could be declared to be anything, and it is not false. But more than that, it is not even false. And as such, it can hardly be said to be true.
For the reasons I outlined, it doesn't seem like personal identity is a particularly useful way of defining someone's sex. Inasmuch as it is the definition, it seems devalued and trivial. And inasmuch as it is meaningful, it is falsifiable and depending on what sorts of claims if makes, probably false.
In closing, it seems like the justification for recognizing trans identity as the primary meaningful sex of a person depends on lowering the stakes, by noting that nothing is absolute, no true heap, etc. but using those standards would seem to negate the conclusions that are drawn which actually correspond to the not stakes lowered way of thinking.
That is, "masculine" means have male characteristics. So by definition, a masculine woman is more of a man than a feminine woman. This is the "low stakes no true heap" way of thinking. But saying "so it makes sense that she feels uncomfortable in her body, she would probably be best off surgically altering her body, and we should all think of her as a man, and referring to her otherwise is false" corresponds to the "high stakes regular way of thinking about sex." If it's just a simple sex binary men have penises women have vaginas, and someone "is a man," then by the high stakes way of thinking, things like surgical intervention make sense.
I realize this comment has been slightly disjointed, but I hope it's been at least thought provoking, just as your comment was for me. Unless you have something significantly novel to add, though, I don't think either of us has much more to contribute at this point.
Word games and platonic ideals beside, the 'delusion' models fail to grapple with empirical data - there aee a great deal of transwomen who are passing so easily that no one they interact with is aware of their trans status. Nikki Dejager became a world famous make up YouTuber for years before any body knew. Look at Kim Petras and tell me you honestly categorize her as a man.
The delusion would be to say these people are not women. Sure, the exact context matters - Kim probably needs to get the occasional prostate exam. But for matters of social life, how they should be treated and regarded by others, you'd have to perform a lot of mental gymnastics to prevent your unconscious wiring from automatically gendering them as female.
And given that it's possible, it's hardly a delusion. I don't think passing or stealthing is a requirement for validity, but it's certainly an existence proof.
Furthermore, you really should question your adherence to this notion that biological sex is genuinely so cut and dry that it doesn't have room for weirdness at the frequency range of 0.1 to 10 percent.
The majority of doctors and the medical establishment have been saying this is a real thing for years, since the early 2000s in my own personal experience, long before "wokeness" or similar could possibly have been a factor. And biologists will readily tell you, this kind of fuzziness is the expectation, and it would be genuinely really weird if any biological system didn't have weird "mistakes" like improper gender differentiation show up occasionally.
"Well but intersex conditions are so rare"
A) they occur in about 1 in ten thousand births or more, so not far off the scale were talking about
B) The specific, dramatic, _named_ ones are pretty rare yea. But they're not able because the cause such dramatic visible changes. We don't measure or track tons and tons of very slight differentiation differences, and they are likely to have real affects
All that is likely to be predisposition and not pre determination, sure. Ultimately the motivation to actually undergo intervention has to come from how distressing the predicate and how low cost the intervention, both real and social.
Over the last 2 decades we've seen a precipitous drop in the cost to transition, so it's not too surprising to see an uptick.
Is some of it socially constructed and even socially contagious? Yea, absolutely. Especially among young afabs, who are just generally prone to social contagion.
But to the rest of us it's just as true as depression or PTSD being social - we're social creatures and gender and sex are inherently social in their consequences so of course. That doesn't really add anything insightful to the discourse or imply what we should do about it.
Your argument is right but your estimate of the intersex population is a couple of orders of magnitude small
see: https://doi.org/10.1002%2F%28SICI%291520-6300%28200003%2F04%2912%3A2%3C151%3A%3AAID-AJHB1%3E3.0.CO%3B2-F just over 20 years ago worked out the prevalence of nondyadic births to 2% (about double the trans population) and some contemporary estimates are even higher. This full percentage would not be reflected if you were only looking at genitals, but we clearly can't be *only* looking at genitals if chromosomes are being brought into the discussion
Neato! I thought it was higher but could only quickly find the estimate I gave. Thanks!
"Transgender men/women have masculine/feminine gender identities, and so are men/women, because that is the deciding factor."
This is completely inconsistent with gender being a social construct. If you actually believe that, then whether someone is a man or a woman has to do with how they are treated by other people, not how they self-identify. This is of course the reason behind the demands on the behaviors of other people, whether that's pronouns or the shredding of the Cotton Ceiling.
The cloacal exstrophy cases imply that gender identity *is* affected by rearing, and therefore we should be cautious about promoting social transition in young children, no?
"Trapped in a body" rhetoric is meant to mean that someone's psychological sexual development does not match their anatomical development in such a way that their body feels wrong to them and this dissonance is resolved by more closely presenting as having the features of the opposite gender their body would suggest. This clearly isn't "impossible."
The idea that it's impossible to want to be a woman when you have a penis ignores the massive cultural baggage that comes with the title "man" or "woman."
For example, imagine I'm not "trans," but I am more comfortable, physically, in a dress than I am in a t-shirt and jeans. I choose to wear a dress whenever I go out into public, but don't do any other transitioning like change my pronouns, speak in a higher pitch of voice, or shave my beard.
Would you expect me to be able to live a normal male life without any consequences? Of course not. The behavior I'm taking part in is coded as feminine and I will not be able to just pretend otherwise. It will impact the religions I can be accepted into, the cultures I can join, the partners I can court, the jobs I can hold, my relationships with friends and family, and literally every single part of my social life. You cannot easily separate the fact that I'm wearing a dress from the fact that people who wear dresses are expected to have vaginas. It's much more impossible to insist that you're a man when your actions code you as female than it is to believe you're a woman despite having a penis.
Or maybe you start a trend of male dresses? Like kilts or the baggy yoga dress. That is how women can wear trousers now.
Sure, given a lot of assumptions. And in retrospect I'm not sure this response is a well-articulated synopsis of the trans experience. But you can imagine other ways in which maleness or femaleness might manifest that people would hate but which wouldn't necessarily be linked to whatever narrow definition of male/female you wanted to use. Maybe I hate growing visible body hair. That's auxiliary to what most people consider "maleness" (you wouldn't necessarily assume somebody with no visible body hair was female), but is still a part of the whole package. My point was just that "maleness" and "femaleness" is a package of behaviors and attributes, some cultural, some biological, etc., etc. And that if you try to say "it's impossible for someone who is male to believe they are female" you'd better be willing to throw out a lot of babies with your definition-of-maleness-and-femaleness bathwater.
Gay men do not exist, according to you, since gays are the ultimate form of breaking down masculine stereotypes: they are men who (gasp) want to have sex with men! Having sex with men is the most female-coded action that a person can do!
The original idea of transsexuality was developed in regards to very feminine gay men who were diagnosed as not being real men by sexist psychologists in the mid-20th century US.
I didn't say anything close to "men who do feminine things aren't men." I code as feminine to a lot of folks but don't consider myself trans.
What I said is that perception is part of gender identity, as are a number of other things, so it's completely reasonable for someone to say "I don't feel male" even though they have whatever you think the features of a man are. Masculinity and femininity are a grab bag of characteristics, and trying to boil it down to specific anatomy oversimplifies that. At any rate it's not "impossible" for a person to feel that they're better coded as, and treated as a female despite having a penis or XY chromosomes or whatever.
FWIW, a college classmate of mine, a man who was as far as I know straight and cisgender, wore a dress most days all through college because he liked it better than wearing pants, and didn't do anything else stereotypically feminine. This was in the mid-1990s at a small Midwestern liberal arts college.
As far as we could tell, he lived a normal life without consequences within the (certainly somewhat unusual) social milieu of that college. Nobody questioned his manhood, nobody harassed him. We laughed with him, not at him, about it. It was his quirk: a small weird habit of the sort that many college kids have, no more. Maybe this isn't the typical experience, but it was legitimately his experience. The wish that people would reduce the social policing of arbitrary and superficial gender-codings is not so utopian as it is sometimes held to be.
One of the strangest things from my perspective, as the current formulation of ideas around “being trans” has developed and spread around the internet and then to our young people in the UK, has been hearing and seeing people (predominantly young people) assert, completely straight-faced and sincere, that no man would dress ‘as a woman’ because it would be so terrible and humiliating to do so, and so anyone prepared to do so must really be a woman or at least have some serious psychological distress. It’s the clearest sign that this is an external cultural conception being spread into our culture.
Because men dressing up as women, and boys dressing up as women, is in no way unusual. Nor is men or boys wearing clothes more like traditional women’s clothing. Dressing as a woman is a pretty standard way in which men around me seem to party or socialise, especially in groups of men engaging in male-bonding, especially in the most stereotypical heterosexual groups. And wearing more feminine-coded clothes and pulling it off is pretty common, and reads as confident and sexy. And, of course, men disguising themselves as women to avoid detection is a standard cultural idea which nobody previously imagined caused great distress to the man disguising himself.
The very idea that this would be unusual or difficult for a man seems completely alien.
"male souls trapped in women's bodies"
Lets try describing that in different language.
Suppose that there are pieces of genetic code that say how to make a male and female mind, and genetic code that says how to make a male and female body. And mostly these stay in sinc. Butt every now and then, the male neurodevelopmental pathway happens despite the presence of ovaries. That sounds like "male soul in female body" to me.
Just because something is described in imprecise language not traditionally associated with rationality, doesn't mean there isn't a state of the world it corresponds to.
Maybe that neurodevelopmental pathway stuff I said is nonsense. I don't know.
Do you know cases of males born with one female arm or female intestines? That makes as much sense as claiming some males have a female brain.
Um, actually yes, it's called dual gendered macro chimerism and although rare it is most _certainly_ possible. You don't know as much as you think you do regarding biology.
http://www.hy-ls.org/index.php/hyls/article/download/57/57-264-1-PB.pdf
Transgender, or at least the physical feelings underlying it, is something that seems to crop up spontaneously, and those feelings are significantly more bothersome and permanent than the ones inspiring the 'penis-stealing-witches' condition. So I don't think it's plausible to believe it can be eliminated. How we interpret those feelings would be the culturally influenced part: traditionally in many societies as meaning the person is some kind of third gender, in the west previously as mental illness, currently as the quasi-metaphysical idea that someone can 'really' be the opposite sex despite having none of the typical features of that sex (at least pre-transition). It seems fairly plausible to me that social media, and more recently schools teaching very young children that they can choose to be girls, boys or both before they have even achieved gender permanence, might be spreading those dysphoric feelings to people who would not have developed them spontaneously. Which is bad. But even if the cultural consensus changed radically, some people would still feel uncomfortable with their body/expected social role and want to change it.
Souls don't exist, but personalities and preferences do. Gender is a useful DIY model kit we supply to everyone for the purpose of identity construction, it's a good aid for bringing forth a cohesive identity and understanding your social role and how you relate to the larger society. But it also comes with severe limitations, and boundaries, and you're only given one of two possible kits at birth, man or woman, which are capable of being put together in different ways. You can put them together in whatever fashion you want, but at the end of the day there will be people who find it much more comfortable or easy to manifest their individuality with one kind of kit than another, and sometimes that kit isn't the kind they were given when they were born. These people should be free to try whatever they wish so they don't have to live their entire lives in dissatisfaction.
Does any of that help you understand it a bit better than "man born in a woman's body?"
Regarding blaming a Tiger spirit to get away with running amok, at least one person was able to do something similar in Canada:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Tim_McLean
That's a case of not guilty by reason of insanity (or Canadian equivalent). I wouldn't call that "getting away with it" exactly, since people who are found not guilty by reason of insanity end up committed to state mental hospitals for years or more likely decades.
If I read Wikipedia correctly, in this specific case it was 8 years.
The man was wildly schizophrenic, and remained in mental health treatment for years afterward. "Not criminally responsible" is the Canadian criminal legal finding that you are physically guilty but mentally not guilty due to mental disorder (whether temporary or permanent).
It is notable that the mental health system in this province stopped supervising him after about seven years, in yet another demonstration of the way they're not fit to manage street sweeping, let alone people's mental health, but he did not blame a tiger spirit and get acquitted.
Edit: Scott has since fixed the issue. Leaving the old comment for reference.
I think you misread Aella's poll. It's more like 83% of supernatural believers get PMS while "only" 64% of materialists get it. Still, more than half of women across the board seem to get it.
Indeed. I wonder how many poll respondents currently have periods. Or, well, I'm unsure what someone who is currently menopausal or pregnant or something would answer if they used to have PMS but currently don't.
I would answer "yes" if I had had it, and would consider that the obvious thing to do - the question strikes me as a "is this a Thing You Get" question rather than a "is this a Thing You Are Currently Experiencing/Have Experienced Recently" question. Someone pregnant may not be getting it at the moment, and most women at most times aren't experiencing it, but most women still know whether, when they get periods, PMS is part of it, and the other question strikes me as fairly useless so I assume it's not the one being asked.
For what it's worth!
Right. Based on the numbers in the image it is 83.3% of believers and 64.3% of non-believers.
Crunching the numbers by hand, it looks like a Z-score of 6.3707 for the difference in proportion - that is, a highly statistically significant result. Does someone want to double-check my math?
I was too late to post this to the Review and got no hits on the Open Thread, but will try one more time.
Does the social contagion version of a disease (e.g., delusional parasitosis) improve if the patient changes social settings (e.g., moves out of the house where one roommate is spreading the delusion)? Or once their prior is trapped, does the original social cause not matter anymore?
If the former, it would seem to have implications for treating conditions with a social origin.
I don't know. I would guess yes for very simple contagion diseases, like delusional parasitosis you get from a roommate, and no for more complicated ones like "your culture believes chronic pain is a real thing and now you have chronic pain".
Thanks!
On a semi-related note, if you have the chutzpah for it, I'd read a "much more than you wanted to know" on the trade-offs around different treatments for gender dysphoria in children.
I'm wildly uninformed about this, but had the sense that there are some high-stakes treatments with big, hard-to-reverse consequences whether you do them or not. And I've heard a normie sort of concern along the lines of what if someone starts these treatments because of a "fad" and then regrets doing so. A hornet's nest of a topic, but I wish I understood it better.
On women's sexuality you noted that
A) First world women today tend to have lower libido's than men (easy to see in surveys and interviews)
B) Women in antiquity were known as the higher libido gender.
I'd probably chalk that up to hormonal birth control lowering libidos.
I think "men have high libidos, women low libidos" was well in place as the conventional wisdom by Victorian times, long before hormonal birth control.
Here seems to have been the historical theory 40 years ago. Male high, female quite a bit of variability.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1981/03/22/men-women-and-sex-how-it-all-evolved/dc1fa94e-039c-4303-b19b-dc08c0a7ca1b/
I'm skeptical that people ever actually believed that women have higher libidos than men. Every culture was aware that rape was committed by males against females.
Men are (statistically) stronger, more promiscuous (probably), and also just generally more likely to commit any violent act compared to women. I would expect men commit rape at a higher rate than women regardless of whether they are hornier than women or not.
It's like ... men probably commit more muggings against women than women commit against men. But I'm not sure the best explanation of this is that men love money more than women do.
Good point, although I also think men on average are greedier than women.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sexual-victimization-by-women-is-more-common-than-previously-known/
"The results were surprising. For example, the CDC’s nationally representative data revealed that over one year, men and women were equally likely to experience nonconsensual sex, and most male victims reported female perpetrators. Over their lifetime, 79 percent of men who were “made to penetrate” someone else (a form of rape, in the view of most researchers) reported female perpetrators. Likewise, most men who experienced sexual coercion and unwanted sexual contact had female perpetrators.
We also pooled four years of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data and found that 35 percent of male victims who experienced rape or sexual assault reported at least one female perpetrator. Among those who were raped or sexually assaulted by a woman, 58 percent of male victims and 41 percent of female victims reported that the incident involved a violent attack, meaning the female perpetrator hit, knocked down or otherwise attacked the victim, many of whom reported injuries."
So yeah, there are lots and lots of women out there willing to sexually assault a man. The men just don't talk about it.
But was it in place outside of Victorian England? What did 1880s Japanese feel about it, for example? You have a confounder here in that Victorian culture *also* specifically chose to idolize the chaste woman.
Chastity in women is valued in LOTS of cultures. Often that's expressed by secluding them away from non-related men:
https://draliceevans.substack.com/p/did-alpha-male-alliances-institutionalise-patriarchy-over-300-000-years-ago
Sure, but you would need to establish that it was valued in *all* or at least *most* culture by the time of Her Majesty's Silver Jubilee, say, to make the statement that it was "conventional wisdom by Victorian times."
I don't know how one would count "cultures", but at the scale of what Samuel Huntington termed "civilizations" I think we could establish that.
How confident are we that the ancient sources are accurate?
To get to something more recent, Casanova's opinion was that women enjoyed sex more. His evidence was revealed preference. He had observed women in childbirth, possibly including at least one who died, and concluded that if that were the cost to him of sex he wouldn't do it. They did.
Casanova was a 100-year outlier, we shouldn't be the least bit surprised if he has some unusual beliefs about this
One would expect his libido to be higher, not lower, than average, which makes his evidence that women enjoy sex more than men even stronger.
Does "higher libido" equate to "enjoys sex more," or is it more of a "desires sex more" sort of thing. I can see the two as not necessarily the same.
That is very poor reasoning because women do also want children and for numerous other reasons.
I don't think the women whose pregnancy Casanova observed wanted children.
Well, I don’t know anything about that but it’s still very poor reasoning.
Hmm, the obvious problem with this to me is that on the one side we have revealed preference (the women have sex) but on the other we have only Casanova's intuition (that he *wouldn't* have sex if the price were childbirth). We don't know if Casanova was accurately intuiting how he would behave in the counterfactual.
It isn't proof, but it's evidence.
I wouldn't even say that, honestly. It's just an opinion. We have to decide how seriously to take Casanova's prediction of how he'd behave in the counterfactual, and personally I'm deeply skeptical of pronouncements like that. People say "oh I would never do THAT" all the time, and then circumstances change, and shazam! they do. People are terrible at predicting how they'd behave in situations very different from those they've known -- I would expect Casanova to suffer from this disability as much as all of us.
Well, pretty much everything we know about ancient Greece is what we're told by a bunch of guys who by today's standards would be considered seriously misogynist. Except sappho, so N of one there.
"B) Women in antiquity were known as the sex with the higher libido."
Just out of curiosity, what is this based on? In Greek or Roman mythology, for example, it really does not seem obvious that women (or goddesses!) would be regarded as having a higher libido than their male counterparts.
There is a myth in which Zeus and Hera get into a dispute over which sex enjoys coitus more. They ask someone who has (due to being cursed) spent years in the body of the other sex, and he responds that women experience several times the pleasure that men do.
This is not a direct mythological assessment of libido, but it seems related.
But that really was a man in the body of a woman who retained his male brain :)
And that made Hera angry so she struck Tiresias blind.
𝐻𝑎𝑝𝑝𝑦 𝑖𝑠 ℎ𝑒 𝑤ℎ𝑜 𝑛𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟 ℎ𝑎𝑠 𝑑𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑠 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑢𝑠.
No one ever said it was a good idea to get involved in divine affairs (much less disputes!).
But when the gods come to you, it's not like you can make them go away.
There's a difference between getting pleasure out of coitus, and having a higher sex drive.
I was going to make the same point!
You don't think I covered that with "this is not a direct assessment of libido, but it seems related"?
For the difference to be realized, you'd need to have people who are driven to do things that they don't like doing. You could make the argument that it happens, but it's not the default case. Mostly people seek to do things because they enjoy doing those things.
I do not think that libido and pleasure derived from sex are highly correlated. At least for women, it is for example common to orgasm easily but not desire sex very much, or the opposite.
If we stay with Zeus and Hera, the one portrayed with a very high libido is clearly not Hera!
I think even at the time, they recognized "desire for sex" and "enjoyment of sex" as separate categories.
Or I'm also thinking of Lysistrata, the ancient comedy in which the women of Greece plot to stop the Peloponnesian by going on a sex strike. That plot wouldn't make sense in a world where women were considered the higher-libido sex.
I am VERY skeptical about the claim regarding antiquity. I have read a lot of ancient sources (though none in the original language), and I don't remember a distinct pattern of this at all. Women are definitely portrayed as more emotional, and driven by personal/familial attachment/love, but that isn't the same thing at all.
Likely to be relevant: in ancient Rome, the average age of men at the time of their first marriage was about 30. The average of a woman's first marriage was about 13. Something similar existed in ancient Athens, too; the only women an upper class man would have encountered socially would have been their mothers, a high class prostitute, and their much younger wives. Ancient writers talking about women being silly and emotional were comparing themselves as middle aged adults to 14 year old girls and concluding that women were stupid and horny, not realizing that they were that way because they were teenagers, not because they were women.
"to 14 year old girls and concluding that women were stupid and horny, not realizing that they were that way because they were teenagers, "
But women's libido actually seems to be quite low when they are teenagers. I remember one of the wonderful posts from OK Cupid Trends, a long time ago, that plotted sex drive for men and women by age and body type. The peak of sex drive was very shifted for men and women. From memory, the peak was around 18-20 for men and 30-35 for women.
Also worth noting there's a cutoff in the okc data. Anyone under 18 isn't supposed to be in their data pool at all. 18-20 might be the tail end of a peak that begins earlier for men. But also, women might have bimodal peak libidos (which some report in my experience,) centered around puberty and one's thirties.
Yes, indeed, the data starts at 18. Given the shape of the curves (https://web.archive.org/web/20110423002625/http://blog.okcupid.com/ chart7/8 , not easy to read in thos format though), it seems rather unlikely to me that either men's or women's libido peaks before 18.
The second episode of Doogie Howser, M.D. has a scene about exactly this. A thirtyish doctor wants Doogie to be her sperm donor so she can have a super-smart kid. He, being still an idiot teenage boy despite also being a genius doctor (the premise of basically the entire show), thinks she's propositioning him for sex. His best friend, who has read an article about men's and women's sexual peaks, says something to the effect of "This is perfect! She's peaking, you're peaking."
The stories about women in antiquity could be through a patriarchal lens - women didn’t have much choice in sexual activity, assuming they were highly libidinous would justify male desires.
I have a theory about this. Societies in which women were viewed as the more libidinous sex were often also those that kept women secluded and in which men formed close emotional bonds with each other that men today only usually form with lovers. So the only time that women would get a break from being lonely was when they were with a man that wanted to have sex with them...
Or that their sexuality was a greater concern or threat.
Or that women were more poorly educated so they learned less to control themselves.
We still have vestiges of that. Beatlemania. Bill Burrs comedy about hordes of gold diggers chasing athletes getting famous:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdvSwStGErs
Or Napoleons quip about his reputation as a womanizer, but from his perspective woman attack him: „As for me, I defend myself, and I often capitulate.“
Or the cheap trope of comedy videos that cold women get suddenly chatty when a million dollar car drives into view:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFekhU0LjSs
Could it be that ancient histories viewpoint are rich/noble/high status men who are simply clueless about their privilege? If a prince and his posse, incredibly rich, powerful and handsome (because not growing up malnourished) ride into village, of course every girl will war paint herself.
In antiquity is was more about women being unable to control their libidos, not having extremely high libidos.
Well and fair or not, the consequences for female infidelity are generally much much harder on a relationship than male infidelity. So the stakes are much higher. If a ancient male head of household gets a random slave pregnant or whatever, it is perhaps not super important (especially in an era where there is no government enforced child support etc.). If on the other hand the female head of household gets pregnant from a random slave it is a much larger disruption to the household (assuming anyone knows).
Well, male infidelity (that results in pregnancy) can be more easily concealed.
Yeah that was part of what I was getting at.
Carpal tunnel can be triggered by use birth control (and menopause). Also pregnancy, DM, thyroid issues. Hormonal changes can lead to swelling putting pressure on median nerve at wrist.
So a freshman women might develop some CTS symptoms (which might also present as a tendinitis) for reasons other than a violin playing roommate.
SA's last two sentences of follow up essay are weird.
PSA: If you or someone you know has pregnancy-related carpal tunnel, you can go to a hand doctor and get a cortisone shot. Your OB/GYN might not tell you this as it's out of their wheelhouse and they have enough liability to deal with, but I wish I'd known. The carpal tunnel was so miserable in my 3rd trimester, I actually got more sleep *after* the baby was born.
Any reputable OB/GYN should know that CTS can be pregnancy induced. And because CTS may also be indicative of diabetes or pre-diabetic condition - that would be an important symptom to note as suggesting potential for pregnancy related diabetes. (Whether a cortisone shot is any better than a placebo is a debatable question!)
The OB/GYN knew about pregnancy induced CTS- the problem was that they didn’t let on there was any way to address it except braces, which didn’t work for me. They also check you for gestational diabetes as part of routine care, and already had at the point where the CTS got really bad, so they knew it wasn’t that.
I don’t think my OB/GYN did anything wrong- I assumed there was no treatment so I suppose I downplayed it. Nothing I read online said anything about cortisone. I have since heard from other women who had a shot and said it helped. But shit, I’d have even taken a placebo if it meant I didn’t wake up at 2am feeling like I was holding hot pokers for ten weeks. You’ll put up with anything if you think there’s no treatment, which I did.
There are a number of terms like "carpal tunnel", "repetitive strain injury" and "tendinitis" which all appear to be vague references to the same thing. When I read the literature on this years ago, my impression was these conditions are poorly understood and poorly differentiated.
I fixed my wrist pain after I found this guide: https://www.painscience.com/tutorials/trigger-points.php
For me, the issue was knots/"trigger points" in the muscles in my arms, shoulders, etc. I feel fairly certain that the issue wasn't entirely mental: I was able to find specific places to massage muscles that replicated the characteristic wrist pain. Nonetheless, I think there *is* actually a psychological component to this -- psychological stress leads to tense muscles leads to chronic pain. For some people, it could be that psychological stress is the main causative agent, and removing the stress removes the pain, but I'm quite doubtful that is true in every case. I think there are other possible causative agents too.
I have been involved in litigation of the causal mechanism of "carpal tunnel", "repetitive strain injury" and "tendinitis", etc, including the cross and direct examination of medical experts for 30+ years.
Can there also be psychological overlay - of course. And motivations of monetary gain when these things interact with litigation - of course. (There was a concerted effort in 80s and 90s by plaintiffs' bar to link claims to workplaces involving increased computer use, notwithstanding typing being a part of business for a century.) There is also a lot of money to be made by orthopedics. And there are many complex biological processes involved that can produce these symptoms unrelated to physical activity. A median nerve impingement can be objectively identified but the causes are multi-factorial.
I had carpal tunnel surgery a year ago. I had been losing sensation in my fingers slowly over time, but never had pain except late in pregnancy when I was holding onto a lot of fluid. Once my last kid was born, I had a nerve test, and it showed delayed impulse responses consistent with nerve compression. This test is pretty standard in determining the progression of carpal tunnel, and I don't think your brain can easily fudge those electrical signals. I mean, this is a test where they insert a needle and fire a mild electrical current through your hand. (Not to discourage anyone from treatment- if I'd read a description before going in for that test, I would have freaked out. But in reality it wasn't that bad.) And when I did have the surgery, the surgeon commented that there were calcium deposits, which are typical and I think come from pressure on the ligaments. It can't be just cultural.
It is probably mostly genetic, though- my hand surgeon said the repetitive stress explanation hasn't really panned out. Both of my parents had carpal tunnel syndrome, and had surgery on both hands. I suppose I could have been primed by my exposure to that to develop it, but I think inheriting their weird wrists is a more plausible explanation.
Apropos something completely different: for more on how witches became "WITCHES!" who steal your penis and why we started burning them, then stopped, check out Keith Thomas's seminal (no pun intended) 1972 tome "Religion and the Decline of Magic". It's great on many levels.
Sigh. It kind of looks like a lot of the problems involved could be avoided with a clearer distinction between "sex" and "gender" - or maybe we can just go back to the good old days of "abolish gender"; somebody's desire to play with dolls shouldn't effect what other people think ought to be between their legs (as distinct from what is).
Modern gender discourse has increasingly just looked to me like the evil twin of gender essentialism.
I get happiness from doing things because they are labelled "female", so I would be saddened if gender was abolished. The situation with male and female soaps is silly, but I do enjoy using female soaps because they are female coded.
I am genuinely insecure about gender being abolished.
One concern I've heard from gender skeptical/critical feminists is that the identification of female gender with female-coded norms risks elevating stereotypes (liking pink, heels, beauty standards) to being part of female identity, where they should properly be thought of as clichés that women can take or leave.
If you're happy talking about it, I'd be curious to know if that resonates with you. I do find it a bit conflicting – it's genuinely wonderful to see trans women's euphoria when they first get to express themselves as they most want, but I can also empathise to an extent with women that feel that it cheapens the female experience to reduce it to "lipsticks and lingerie".
(I appreciate this is a personal topic for you, and I certainly don't want to undermine your identity or criticise your self expression. Please feel free to ignore this comment if you prefer!)
I leave many of the cliches. Ex: I don't wear make-up because of cost and effort. and I enjoy programming despite that being somewhat male-coded. The gender coded-ness is merely one of many factors involved in me deciding to do something or not.
People saying "Women are naturally good at childcare" is unpleasant for me to hear, because I dislike children, and makes me feel as either like less of a women or potentially fear being assigned childcare.
But "Women are submissive and need a man to rescue them" is pleasant to hear because I am submissive and like the idea of being rescued. It is definitely false, lots of dominate women exist. And it would be really bad to force all women to be submissive.
I believe that like half of cisgender people also experience gender euphoria and gender dysphoria. That is one reason why "you are a girly man!" works as an insult because many men don't want to be girly. Likewise, we see things like the manliness movement where cis-men go out of their way to be extra manly. Or how breast cancer survivors talk about "regaining their womanhood" when they get breast implants to restore their breasts.
I tentatively think ideally people wouldn't treat pronouncements about gender seriously. The true nature of womanhood is whatever makes you feel best. There is no truth here. Just believe what makes you happy.
And also potentially try to keep gender-ed things to lowered stakes things where the difference between male and female is lesser. Like male vs female soaps. "Being a surgeon" likely is best if it isn't gendered because that is a big important thing.
Take all the things that give you happiness, and - let's just give it a different name. Let's call it "glampunk." It's a set of fashions, styles, behaviors, which just happens to be more popular with girls than boys - and a girl isn't failing at being a girl for not being into glampunk, but rather, is just into something else. Female coded just becomes glam coded.
Does this take the happiness away?
Yes*. Obviously not all happiness because I enjoy things for reasons besides their gender coded-ness. But yes, I like the girl soaps because they are labelled "girl" not because of colour of the packaging or the smell.
Like I had no preference between saying the word "uh" and "um" and then I learned that "um" is more commonly said by women, and that made me like "um" more. Yes, this seems really silly but it also true.
*unless I suspect that you have just renamed "girls" to "glampunk" which might happen at some point. like if you started saying "glampunkers are the sex that can get pregnant"
Abolishing gender seems like forcing everyone non-binary. I don't want to be non-binary. I want to be a girl.
Gender is the set of social expectations, including things like fashion choices, but also things like socially acceptable choices in career, that are applied to people of different sexes.
Girls, then, would be the people who can get [edited for proper tense] pregnant. Glampunkers would be the people opting into what used to be the expectations and stylistic choices applied to people on the basis of their ability to get pregnant.
Somebody who wants to be a girl, in that universe, is somebody who wants something different between their legs. Somebody who wants to be a girl in our universe could be somebody who wants to be a girl in that universe - but it could also be somebody who wants to be a glampunker in that universe.
At first this seemed so alien from our world that I had minimal confidence in my ability judge my emotional reaction to it, but the more I think about it most strongly I feel like it wouldn't. I feel like I would reinvent gender from scratch, like wearing tight pants to emphasize how I don't have a penis, or wearing clothes to emphasize my breasts, or leaning on extinct cultural norms back when gender still existed.
With a strong anti-gender norms you could likely convince me not to do this, but it would make me sad, and feel evil for wanting this anyway.
Portraying gender has being only about coercion is overly negative. That would be like analyzing language as being about coercion. "Language is a set of expectation about what sounds you will make with your mouth" is not strictly false, but to conclude that abolishing language is merely freeing people is a mistake. Gender allows me to signal to others and myself (largely myself).
Note that I do have strong preferences about what is between my legs.
As to why I describe gender as being coercive - just reverse the gender roles and see how you feel in a world where people frown at you for wearing tight pants, those are for men, or wearing clothes that emphasize your breasts, women should wear loose baggy clothing.
I assume, when you say it would make you feel sad, that this applies here too?
in a world where you can change what is between your legs and hormonal profile, putting those into a special category called "sex" separate from everything called "gender" is far less justified. Your hormones are just another choice you can have just like what you wear (assuming the doctors don't stop you).
No one should feel obligated to get surgery just because they want to wear a dress. Just like no one should feel obligated to wear a dress just because they like to sew.
But "remove any association between sex and other things" is going too far. Many people really like using these associations to signals to others and themselves.
Abolishing gender isn't about abolishing associations; glampunk, if you'll recall, was preferred by more women than men. Abolishing gender should not be measured by the yardstick of statistical associations. Rather, it should be measured by the yardstick of societal expectations; expectations are inherently coercive, for good and for bad. We expect people not to harm other people; I wouldn't argue against this, for an instance of coercion as a good.
Gender, then, is, in its entirety, the degree to which society coerces those expectations based on sex - or coerces sex based on gender conformity.
So, I agree with you that lots of people get enjoyment out of gender. Many people enjoy being seen as a feminine/masculine woman/man, or are attracted to especially feminine/masculine women/men. Other people enjoy gender-bending in a way that would be impossible if gender were abolished.
However, I have to say that the but about "uh" vs. "um" is evidence, to me, that trans women do not have a female gender identity in the same sense that cis women have a female gender identity. I can not even imagine getting pleasure from saying "um" because that's the girlier option.. Cannot conceive of that feeling.
Note that trans-women are highly varied, and you shouldn't judge all trans-women by my experience. Others trans women would likely find my experience alien. However, cis-women are also highly varied too and I would be cautious to assume your experience is universal.
But "trans women are more insecure about their gender on average" does seem plausible. Partly because most cis-women don't have political movements dedicated to calling them men and forcibly masculinize them.
And being insecure about one's gender likely causes other things.
I'm trans as well and I have a different perspective from the other poster. I don't get enjoyment from things that are female coded because they are female coded, I just like some of those things. I also like some things that are more male coded without feeling uncomfortable about that.
That stuff had nothing to do with transitioning for me though, for me it was mostly about having a body that matches - as much as possible - how I want it to be.
I can't be certain, but I'm pretty sure that if we lived in a society in which activities, clothes, makeup and things like that were not gender coded, we all used gender neutral names and pronouns, I still would have wanted to change my body.
The frustrating thing about the way that we think of gender versus sex in our society - or rather, the way society seems increasingly ignorant of the distinction - is that, if you want to wear a dress, a lot of people "who should know better" also think this must mean you want to get surgery, or take hormone blockers, or otherwise begin physical transitioning - and then begin applying social pressure to that end. And there's some dark humor in the fact that this pressure comes from both sides of the political spectrum.
Like, nobody should be under social pressure to get surgery. If you want it, alright, you still shouldn't be *pressured* to get it. If you don't? Well, good luck right now.
I totally agree that what you're describing is bad - it is very annoying when "boy liked to play with dolls as a child" is seen as "that person as an adult wants to transition". There's probably some correlation there, but one doesn't imply the other. (The other direction of this annoys me too - when I wanted to get sex reassignenment surgery, I needed psychological reports, which makes sense. However, I knew that I was more likely to get a recommendation for surgery if I told them "I always liked dolls, I love pink and dresses and everything feminine." I agree with you that these things should be seperated.
However, I don't feel that there's a lot of pressure for people who show some gender-noncomformity to immediately (medically) transition. I don't interact with that many queer people, but from what I've experienced, they are very open to all kinds of gender expressions.
In the end, we have to draw a line somewhere how much we want to encourage taking hormones/getting surgery and how hard we want to make it. I'd argue that for me, it was too hard, having to wait a whole year after finding a therapist (and being told by them that it would make sense for me to tkae hormones) sucked a lot, but making it too easy is also obviously bad. No matter where this line is drawn, there is always a tradeoff and always people who will suffer because of it. I'm really not sure what the best way to handle this would be.
Yeah. It's a genuinely hard problem.
I think the major complication here isn't so much that there is universal pressure in one direction, so much as the pressure is inconsistent and of inconsistent direction - one person can grow up in an environment that pressures them not to transition, and another can grow up in an environment that pressures them to transition, and both can assume this is "the way things are".
Or they experience the pressure to do what they want/need to do anyways as not pressure at all, but assistance, and want that increased, or increase it themselves, or encourage other people to increase it.
It's one of the worst possible subjects to have been politicized, which I guess guarantees that it got politicized.
I think the rational psychiatry link is wrong, it goes to article that Reilly isn't an author o
You're right, thanks, fixed.
> If I’m reading that poll right, 39% of ghost believers get PMS, but only 19% of ghost skeptics do.
I'm not sure where you got these numbers from but I'm getting something different. 27.5% + 5.5% = 33% believe in ghosts and of those 27.5% also get PMS so this gives a conditional probability of 83.3% that's the probability of getting PMS conditional on believing in ghosts.
Similarly we can calculate a conditional probability of 43.1/(43.1+23.9) = 64.3% that's the probability of getting PMS conditional on not believing in ghosts.
So the numbers show the same trend as you thought but the overall incidence of PMS is much higher
"This encouraged me to look into the school shooting statistics further, and I take back my claim that Columbine was a break from trend. This article claims the first mass shooting in US history was in 1949, and that the initiating factor seemed to be advances in gun technology; there have been violent sprees since forever, but semi-automatic weapons raised the death count to levels that made national news."
I don't think it's a good explanation. The iconic Mauser "broomhandle" semiauto pistol has been mass produced since about 1900, Colt 1911 was adopted by the US Army in 1911, revolvers and repeating rifles were widespread since before the Civil War.
On the other hand, the 1949 murderer killed the people he personally knew, the 1966 U of T shooter had a literal brain tumor, and the 1978 girl had brain damage and other severe issues. This sounds like nitpicking, but really it is exactly what you'd expect from your "random malfunctions vs social contagion" model: you get these widely spaced apart events in genuinely insane people, but if the idea that this is what you do in certain circumstances gets culturally fixed, you gradually get a lot of otherwise more or less normal (if maladjusted) people doing it, like in Columbine.
Also you obviously can't trust Vox not to conflate genuine mass shootings, again like Columbine, with gang-related activity etc completely drowning it in that noise, unless you can look at their raw data and go through it yourself. Those are very distinct categories and that's important not only for the present discussion about socially contagious mental illnesses (which shooting rival drug dealers probably isn't) but also policy responses in general.
"Also you obviously can't trust Vox not to conflate genuine mass shootings, again like Columbine, with gang-related activity etc completely drowning it in that noise, unless you can look at their raw data and go through it yourself."
In defense of Vox the may be using the FBI's definition of "mass shooting" rather than making up their own.
From the DOJ: "For the purposes of tracking crime data, the FBI defines a 'mass shooting' as any incident in which at least four people are murdered with a gun."
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/analysis-recent-mass-shootings
I believe the FBI's definition has other constraints, like the shootings not occurring in a single private residence and not being subordinate to another crime. But the big expansion in mass shootings reported by some sources (not going to dig into Vox specifically), comes from sources which change "murdered with a gun" to "shot with a gun", hoping the audience won't notice the difference and won't know that a large majority of shooting victims don't die.
Someone losing their cool at one particular guy at a crowded party, and emptying a pistol at them with crappy aim, is not anywhere close to the central idea of a "mass shooting", but can very easily result in one person being murdered and three others being wounded.
(Safety tip: don't go to the sort of parties where people both carry guns and drink heavily).
The FBI has (fairly recently?) started tracking “active shooter incidents” separately from “mass shootings”, with the former category being defined as “an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area” (probably a more involved definition somewhere but that’s what’s on the FBI’s top level page on the topic).
I believe the highest annual total for this category was 61 in 2021, which is a lot but much lower than the “more than one a day” statistic that gets passed around frequently - that one, as you note, includes a lot of non central examples.
Gang-related violence and mass-shootings and suicides are all related if you examine the literature regarding "alienation" (who am I and to whom am I a part of) and "hidden shame". The differences are slow motion and how much the attempt to resolve the internal conflict is also transferred to others.
For a poetic take, consider the granfalloon in Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" and "Slapstick: Lonesome No More".
For an anthropological dive, consider Rene Girard and the origins of violence.
All pretty much the same phenomenon.
Sailer's Law of Mass Shootings suggests there are two main kind of mass shootings (with four or more killed or wounded):
If there are more dead than wounded, the shooter is likely nonblack.
If there are more wounded than dead, the shooter or shooters are likely black.
In the first kind, the shooter has made up his mind that he's never going home, so he sticks around to finish off the wounded.
In the second kind, the shooter or shooters hope to get away, so they don't finish off the wounded, but instead flee.
Obviously, it's not a scientific law, that's a joke, but people on Twitter keep note of it and it's accurate over 80% of the time.
Well said. Samuel Colt's famous revolver traces back to 1836.
By the way, if you are looking for a carefully curated list of what I call Columbine-like mass shootings, the kind that the media care about, the "Mother Jones" list is the best:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data/
They exclude criminal shootings, domestics, block party shoot-ups, drive-bys, and so forth, the kind that fall out of the headlines immediately. They include more than just school shootings, but they do capture almost all of the famous school shootings.
There really has been an increase in these Columbine-type shootings over the decades.
One of my closest friends is married to a Japanese woman. After the previous post I asked her about jikoshu-kyofu. That's the body odor one. She was more than familiar with the issue but seem a bit confused about it being a distinct psychiatric disorder or culture bound syndrome, but her take otherwise was interesting. Essentially she said the following. Japanese people live and work very close together. Aside from incense in buildings like temples they really don't have a tradition of 'fragrance'. They don't wear cologne or perfume and deodorant is designed to smell like nothing. Additionally everyone needs to individually also strive to smell like 'nothing'. There are no positive personal odors, natural or otherwise. A polite person is from an olfactory perspective invisible. That being said, some people in Japan do have a smell and they are damaging the mental calm of the people around them everywhere they go like a cloud of misery. Foreigners are the worst but forgivable; they bring their foreign products with them. Especially western women but they don't know any better and no one really makes an issue of telling them as they are assumed to be guests and that would be rude. Still its very common to for guests in a restaurant, theatre etc to ask to be moved if they can smell a westerner near them. For the Japanese themselves though there is no excuse for others being able to smell them. They *should* feel bad. If others can actually smell them and they don't correct this problem they really ought to be miserable (by themselves please), or at least avoid the public. She genuinely got a little upset recounting smelly Japanese people. I could easily imagine a culture with beliefs like this developing a culture bound syndrome about smell paranoia. The idea that they don't actually have a detectable odor and its some sort of delusion didn't really register; some level of smell-fear is expected and polite. (mental illness also carries a larger stigma, people need to just knock it off and act right).
Really interesting. In Genji Monogatari, the title character is noted as having an unusual pleasant fragrance (another major character appearing in the narrative after his death is also known for his fragrance). The fragrance is kind of implied to be supernatural or spiritual, and it's treated as attractive and appealing, another way in which the title character is pure and superior as a prince and as a lover. His personal fragrance often gets left on robes etc., making other characters sentimental and/or vaguely horny. In that work and other Heian-era literature, perfume is described as being made and used, mainly like incense, by burning it and letting the fragrant smoke penetrate clothing hung on a rack. I don't know what may have changed over the past 1000 or so years or what cultural nuances I might be missing here, but I got a strong and specific impression of historical Japanese cultural aesthetics as including positive personal fragrance as something aspirational aand associated with virtue or attractiveness, with compounding perfume being one valued art and expression of good taste.
Note: It's worth keeping in mind that it is, in fact, rare for Japanese people to have body odor. In fact, it's rare for East Asian people in general, because of the ABCC11 gene: https://www.geneticlifehacks.com/ear-wax-and-body-odor-its-genetic/,
https://thechinaproject.com/2019/07/08/kuora-why-chinese-people-dont-need-deodorant/, & https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/body-odor-asians-and-earwax.
It's not at all surprising that people who essentially don't have BO to find it odd & abhorrent, the same way we might find the idea of sweating blood instead of water to be odd & abhorrent.
Also note that "Japanese people don't wear perfume" is definitely an exaggeration - they wear it *less*, but a decent chunk do wear it.
I wonder if it's also a function of sumptuary laws? At various periods, especially as the merchant class became rich, laws were passed strictly regulating everything that different social classes could wear from materials to colours. Scent, being expensive and something mostly for the upper classes, could well fall into this category of regulation as well, hence why 'neutral' smells are the safest - you can't get in trouble for smelling 'above your class' that way. That then becomes a tradition and accepted social behaviour:
https://www.japanese-wiki-corpus.org/history/Sumptuary%20law.html
https://www.lesleydowner.com/the-japanese-art-of-scent/
"While we have developed oil-based perfumes, the Japanese have perfected the art of heating the woods which form the basis of their scents so that they produce no smoke, only fragrance. Till the mid-nineteenth century women scented their kimonos overnight, laying them on a wooden framework over an incense burner, and draped their glossy long black hair over incense burners to scent it.
Young men about town, geisha and courtesans carried pieces of scented wood in their sleeves and rub[bed] powdered scent onto their hands and neck."
Indian customs also use incense-based scenting of hair and clothing in this way.
Here's a geographer of madness.
https://claireberlinski.substack.com/p/the-age-of-spectacle-part-ii?utm_medium=email
One extension of the thinking about mental illness here is the blindness of the observer about themselves when running around the world applying psychiatry which is mostly a cultural expression in and of itself. The biggest cultural element in terms of mental disease isn't the expressions and possible failure states of misfiring or whatnot in the brain and body. I'd say it is the edifice, frameworks, mindsets, and the entire cultural-conceptual space of psychiatry, mental health, and mental illness coming from the Euro-American perspectives.
The desire to taxonomise and break things down is itself a western framework which is in opposition to the more holistic frameworks and understandings of eastern medicine. In the same way we get kidney doctors and liver doctors and OCD treatment specialists in the west, you don't get that in the eastern systems and they view every problem as a whole body system problem.
Taking a step back, one can see this is the true difference of frameworks rather than detailed definitions within a western cultural framework. Sure if you go into the eastern cultures or into African cultures with your rulers and measuring sticks you can indeed take them out and measure things according to your own ideas.
The issue here in terms of true cultural differences is not that you can not go to African and measure the height of a giraffe with a western meter or foot ruler, it is to begin by engaging and asking if and how the people there think about giraffes first. Not even front loading the question to ask about giraffe height, but simply to learn about their relationship with the animal. Perhaps the very concept of measuring this makes no sense to them as there are other more practical concerns about dealing with giraffes. In this way psychiatry is also something an anthropologist could study for why these curious humans in a few cultures have all fixated on semantics and taxonomies.
It just seems to me you are in a circular argument world where you think nothing escapes measurement of rulers and no matter where you go in the world and what the locals think, you can 100% slap a ruler on any object and get a measurement. This is a self-reinforcing idea and low and behold after that intellectually limited activity one finds that they were right all along. But one hasn't really learned anything or understood that they've simply applied their own framework for mental illness over top of another culture's framework for dealing with people who behave strangely. Of course people behave strangely in every part of the world.
But but but...the ruler still works everywhere, so I'm clearly wrong. Ugh! So tiring and limited. There is no meaningful new truth in doing this and these sorts of semantics and win by definition and win by imposing your framework are just meta-steps in the wrong direction towards limited understanding which always ends up with your original idea being correct no mater what you encounter. Maybe we can define sadness in 10 different ways and measure it in other cultures and compare rates and apply some statistics to it, but we've learned nothing about how they experience, understand, and deal with experiences of being sad. Only that we can apply more of the same with our pills, talk therapy, studies, and such.
Win by framework is just as silly as win by definition. At least that's the steel manning I can do for that position. If the question then becomes 'well what do we do if we don't go around the world to other cultures applying science to them?' The answer is...I don't know and wouldn't it be exciting to engage with other modes and mental frameworks for understanding reality. But it is true imperialism and cultural supremacist thinking to imagine there is nothing worthwhile to find in all other cultures and we just need to apply science at/towards them enough to know everything worth knowing. As long as we show up with our DSM, studies, and rulers, then we're just applying our culture to theirs with some implicit biases involved in that.
Feels like a good point, thanks for sharing. Separately, I sympathize with the difficulty of expressing these broad concepts more concisely.
Ok, but if the field of psychology is a cultural construct itself and maladapted to work outside of that context, wouldn't one way of figuring that out be to try applying the same models to other cultures and seeing if they work or fall apart? Because it doesn't make any more sense to assume you can't measure the giraffe than to assume you can. And however culture-bound current psychological science may turn out to be, its intention is not to be. If our psychological rulers are he wrong instruments, then that just means we have to figure out what the right ones are, not to stop "applying science".
1) On the issue of acute and transient psychotic disorder -- A decade ago, I spent a little less than a year as a psychiatry trainee in Doha, Qatar, and during that year, I saw a few clear cases of brief reactive psychosis. Typical profile was that of a laborer from South Asian region with no prior psychopathology who comes to Doha to do manual labor, finds himself trapped in extremely harsh working and living conditions and unable to leave the country, and then experiences an acute and transient episode of psychosis in that stressful environment. In contrast, my experience of brief psychotic disorder has been very uncommon in the US (the cases I have seen have been in the context of interfacing with first episode psychosis programs), and I have worked in the US for many more years.
2) I did once treat a case of geriatric-onset Olfactory Reference Syndrome in an African-American woman in the US who also had mild dementia. The ORS was successfully treated with Duloxetine and Memantine. I reported on that case as a trainee back then (https://www.psychiatrist.com/pcc/mental/geriatric-onset-olfactory-reference-syndrome-treated-with-duloxetine-and-memantine/ ). In terms of shifting brain's priors, this is probably similar to how an individual with schizophrenia might experience a koro-like picture.
1). Is that even a disorder though, or a sane response to an insane situation?
It's understandable, in the same way as a hip fracture in an elderly is understandable after a fall... but the so-called loss of contact with reality represented by psychosis is nonetheless a pretty significant disruption in psychological functioning and something quite out of the ordinary (you may consider it an insane response to an insane situation!).
"I don’t think it’s obvious that “believes in ghosts” is a proxy for “more likely to develop culture-bound illnesses”, but I can’t think of a better reason why these should be so connected."
Perhaps those who believe in ghosts might tend to feel entitled to easy explanations of complex phenomena.
Research done at universities worldwide finds a negative relationship between both belief in astrology and belief in paranormal phenomena, on the one hand, and performance in courses requiring “critical thinking,” on the other. The negative effect of belief in paranormal phenomena has consistently been found to be larger than the negative effect of belief in astrology.
Thomas J. Mowen, Amanda Heitkamp & John Boman, “Paranormal Activity: Self-control Theory and Belief in the Paranormal,” Deviant Behavior (2021), DOI: 10.1080/01639625.2021.1915723 rely on self-control theory where: “… low self-control … encompasses six characteristics: impulsivity, risk-seeking, self-centeredness, low frustration tolerance, preferring simple tasks over more difficult ones, and preferring physical tasks over mental ones …. Our findings suggest that adopting a greater number of paranormal beliefs may reflect a decision-making process whereby scientific evidence is cast aside in lieu of an easy explanation for some of life’s greatest mysteries. Individuals with low levels of self-control may be more likely to accept the notion ‘ . . . that the relative position of the planets and the stars could have a special deep significance or meaning that exclusively applies to only [them]’, instead of taking a more critical approach to understanding complex social phenomena and existential questions. Endorsing more paranormal beliefs may be a characteristic of an individual susceptible to getting ripped off in return for the promise of easy and cheap explanations for some of the biggest and unresolved events in life.”
Ida Andersson, Julia Persson, Petri Kajonius, “Even the stars think that I am superior: Personality, intelligence and belief in astrology,” Personality and Individual Differences (November 2021) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2021.111389 say that, “Narcissism was surprisingly the strongest predictor [of belief in astrology], and intelligence showed a negative relationship with belief in astrology.”
It would be interesting to discover if there’s a significant, positive correlation between belief in astrology and PMDD, and how any such correlation compares to the reported correlation with belief in ghosts.
Thanks for sharing this research. I had never heard of this, and now I want to learn more.
I'm also posting this further comment here not as a direct response to you, but because it's jumping off from the same part of Scott's post:
Aella notes that she is 'slightly wary' of her results because she didn't include a 'see results' option. We should consider the possibility that a very disproportionate number of false respondents decided that yes-PMS-mood & yes-ghost-belief was the funniest way to see the results. So her 'slightly' may be a substantial understatement of how wary one should be.
I can assure you that gender dysphoria does not exist as a well-defined concept. Different people who report having gender dysphoria report their feelings very differently. For example, the famous transsexual academic, Deirdre MacCloskey, said that when she was a he, that he got the idea of changing his sex based on his evaluation of transsexuals in a crossdressing convention; she said deciding on sex-change was like deciding on purchasing a car. Quite distinct from the way that young teenage girls who claim to be boys report their feelings of gender dysphoria.
As Helen Joyce explained in interviews, the whole concept of transsexualism is an American superstition that came about when sexist American psychologists/doctors in the 1950s decided to pump up gender non-conforming homosexuals with cross-sex hormones. They considered men who have crossdressing fetishism (a quite common fetish, prevalent in about 3-5% of all men) to suffer from a partial degree of the transsexual condition and that very feminine gay men suffer from a full transsexual condition (as homosexuals are sexually attracted to men, and that was to them was the highest markers of inner femininity, so heterosexual crossdressers were not regarded as true transsexuals).
The reality is very simple: there are sex-related stereotypes, and there exist people who do not fit well within these stereotypes. Nobody can fit perfectly, but most people fit well enough that nobody questions their manhood/womanhood. In most societies, it is widely accepted that some gender-nonconforming people exist, and these societies just accept their existence.
The idea that gender nonconforming people are actually "members of the opposite sex on inside" and that they should be castrated and surgically modified to try to approximate the appearance of the opposite sex, as some form of "medical treatment" is a mid-20th century American invention that essentially derives from the bigotry of the mid-20th American society in it not being capable of accepting the reality that some men are feminine homosexuals or that they are heterosexual men who enjoy cross-dressing.
For example, consider this German guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4-hrKBrIc4, in America he would be regarded as transgender, and then he would be forced to have to choose between being a stereotypically masculine man or "transitioning into a woman" because of his desire for looking in a stereotypically feminine manner. To force a person to choose between these artificial boxes is what creates anxiety and unease, and it is what most cases of "gender dysphoria" are.
In a modern enlightened society, we should accept that not everybody conforms to their sex-related stereotypes (as the German guy above), and there is no need for them to feel like they are not really real men or real women. They can do anything, including any kind of cosmetic procedure, without society requiring us to suspend disbelief regarding the fantasy that people can change sex. That is better for them, as they can live as themselves without being forced to choose between boxes, and for us, who do not need to pretend that people can change sex.
There are certain mental conditions that are universal and not culturally constructed: anxiety, rage, sadness, hunger, etc. Gender dysphoria is not one of these conditions.
This is such a bizarre and dishonest reading of history and transness, but if it all comes out to "people should be able to have the interventions that they want" then okay I guess.
Well, fine, call it that.
Sex is 1:1 with reproductive strategy, highly correlated with size and strength, and highly correlated with crime patterns. Gender identity a nebulous notion that is important to the individual but doesnt correlate with anything that impacts others in any meaningful way.
Let policy and law reflect that and you'll find that all the heat in these conversations go away.
But yeah, adults can have whatever interventions they want. Most people, outside of ones own loved ones don't care what any of us does.
Flowers of virtue - just to add: yes, it was written 1411, but printed first in 1486 (no printed books before 1450 as we all know) . - https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Vintler has more content than the English entry ;) - The illustration might have been used for this book anyways. Or not. Nice pic. Weird? Well, I remember a SF-novel I bought because its cover showed a sexy robot. And no such robot in the novel. Weird, in der Tat.
The illustration can be found on this page of the 1486 print https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/en/view/bsb00032399?page=328,329 I find blackletter kind of hard to read so here's the corresponding page of the 1874 edition: https://archive.org/details/diepluemendertu00maxigoog/page/n311/mode/1up The spelling is different, but the content seems to be the same.
> wenn si den orenwützel han,
> so nemen si ain chus in die hant
> und slahends an den slaff zehant
> und spricht: „fleuch, fleuch orenwützel,
> dich jaget ain chuszipfel.
Which I think translates to
When they have the ear-pig [1],
they take a kiss into the hand,
and hit it against the limp at hand
and say: flee, flee, ear-pig
you're being chased by a kiss-tip [2].
[1] orenwützel seems to be "Ohren" ("ears") + a diminutive of "Wutz", which is a dialectal German word for "pig" but also a slang term for "penis", so I think the "ear-pig" is a penis. Or maybe it's an earwig ("Ohrenwusler") that crawled inside someone's penis and made it go limp, who knows.
[2] "Zipfel" means the the corner or tip of a piece of cloth. It's also a slang term for "penis"... But I think "chuszipfel" might be a poetic word for "tongue." Or maybe the author just made up a word to rhyme with orenwützel.
So this might be a description of someone having their penis stolen or getting a handjob or whatever.
And at this point I hit upon the dictionary entry for "ohrenwützel" in the Brothers Grimm's German dictionary https://www.dwds.de/wb/dwb/ohrenw%C3%BCtzel where this exact stanza is being quoted for the meaning of "ear pain" (with another meaning being "earwig") and my interpretation changed completely:
When they have the earwig [believed to cause pain by crawling inside the ear],
they take a pillow into the hand,
and hit it against the temple at hand [i.e. the side of the head that hurts]
and say: flee, flee, earwig
you're being chased by a pillow corner.
Actually, if you carefully look at the woodcut, the man is holding one hand to the side of his head, as if his ear hurts. Maybe those "penises" are actually badly-drawn earwigs and it only looks like there's a scrotum because of the way it merges with the woman's hand?
Conclusion: it's easy to see evidence for penis-stealing witches if that's what you expect to see. And medieval poetry is more interesting when you interpret unknown nouns as slang for "penis".
Lol. Thank you for the link! I am no real expert in the German of the time, but I think you are on the right page, but got the wrong part of the text. Some Ear-treatment it is alright, but that refers to the right half of the illustration, where ear-pain is treated by applying a pillow ("chus"-kissen). To see the text in a more readable print - exact page here: https://archive.org/details/diepluemendertu00maxigoog/page/n311/mode/1up
After the ear-piece comes sth, I do not get at all: "manig zaubrerin die sein - die nement ain hacken und slahent wein" - Many a witch there is who taketh an ax and slays/beats YEAH, but then "wein" (as wine??) "aus ainer dorren aichenseul", from a dry oak-stem?? - a bit later (illustration next page on your source - what does that lady take from the hanged guy?) sth "even" more penis-theft like: "etleich stelen aus der pruech dem man sein geschirre gar" sounds like "quite a few steal the guys his harness". We really need someone who knows. ;) Anyway I adjust - yes the pic is from the "Flowers of Virtue", and it does say sth about witches being very interested in penises. Who is not? ;) Penis theft 1411 - I say: Jawohl! - And I do not think this was in the Italian version that inspired Vintler (full of moral anecdotes from bible and classics).
Just made the same mistake. The axe in oak stem is on the pic at the very right. As all other illustrations are really about the text (at least, where i can get the meaning) it might be those words: "etleich machent mit dem cleul vadeo manigerlai troflferei. so nimpt maniger gerstprei für den affel, hör ich sagen." wtx, no idea. Belief in "penis-theft" existed, though Vintler frames it "as some ppl say, some ppl do" - Kramer agreed it was an illusionary theft (but the penis really not to bee seen or felt anymore also by other persons). it's complicated, I guess. An even older pic of penises having a separate life - spot the weenies: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Albero_della_Fecondit%C3%A0_(Massa_Marittima)_01.jpg Further reading in German: https://heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/index.php/mial/article/view/24452/18303
> etleich stelen aus der pruech dem man sein geschirre gar
Good catch. The Grimms have "die Bruch" with long u (rhymes with Totentuch in the line above) as a kind of underwear:
https://www.dwds.de/wb/dwb/bruch#GB11715
> cleul vadeo
I think this is "Knäuel Faden" and refers to the second woman from the right.
> nimpt maniger gerstprei für den affel
I think "affel" could be "Abfall" (offal) and it's talking about people who throw perfectly edible barley porridge away.
The final point regarding fear-induced penis shrinkage has even been argued to be an intentional feature of Michelangelo's David:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/jan/22/science.highereducation
> This article claims the first mass shooting in US history was in 1949, and that the initiating factor seemed to be advances in gun technology; there have been violent sprees since forever, but semi-automatic weapons raised the death count to levels that made national news.
I linked previously to Paul Harrell debunking that idea: the 1911 semi-automatic pistol dates back to 1911, well before the 1949 German Luger rampage discussed in the link.
> I’m realizing I have only Ethan Watters’ account of how unknown anorexia was in pre-1994 Hong Kong
How often were young women winding up in hospitals from malnourishment?
> In 21st-century America, women are less enthusiastic about sex, often unsatisfied by it; therefore, it's only natural that men initiate most sexual encounters. In ancient Athens, women, the irrational sex, were slaves to their desires, and part of the humor of the Lysistrata was the idea that the women took their protest so seriously that they could restrain their sexual appetites.
I don't buy that. The fundamental difference between males & females, across species, is that sperm is cheap & eggs are expensive. Thus males are always more on the lookout for mating opportunities, as it costs them essentially nothing.
"the 1911 semi-automatic pistol dates back to 1911".... and mobsters in the prohibition-era US seemed to have no technological problems mowing down people with submachine guns, but they usually had a tangible motive to do it.,
"I don't buy that." - it deserves a closer analysis of the claims. I find it plausible that sexual desires of women *in the context of their marriage* were more accepted, and taken more seriously, in other times and places. Women who initiated sexual encounters with strangers were probably frowned on pretty much universally (moreso by other women than by men).
Mass violence at schools goes back at least as far as 1927. The Bath School Massacre (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster) was conducted using bombs instead of guns, but it resulted in the same kind of media attention the Columbine mass school shooting did.
I noted on the previous thread as well, that Columbine was supposed to be mostly a bombing - but the bombs failed.
Bombs and arson can be very effective weapons, and it does seem culture bound that we’ve ended up mostly with “semi automatic rifle” as the preferred weapon of “lone wolf on a rampage” type terrorism.
Regarding 'David Chapman writes about the “choiceless” nature of traditional societies; if you were born in a peasant village in medieval England, you would be straight, cis, Christian, monarchist, and a farmer - neither because you loved those things and chose them voluntarily, nor because evil outsiders forced you to do those things which you secretly hated, but because you couldn’t conceive of doing anything else.' - many ancient societies had a third gender, and this third gender had to come from somewhere (some people were clearly different enough that they were put in another category).
Additionally, there are many accounts of non-cis or non-straight people in ancient, 'choiceless' societies (e.g. Sappho). It seems much easier to imagine most people ignored their urges because they had no other choice, than say that they didn't even think of having those urges.
He said they lacked choice, not urges, which is kind of his whole point. We can't strictly compare people by their choices if those choices are limited by cultural factors.
I'd argue that's not all he said. He said they couldn't *concieve* of anything else, whereas we have many examples of people concieving of other options even when they didn't grow up with them. I agree that they still were limited by the choices they had (but they could still have felt unhappy about it, which Chapman seems to imply they wouldn't).
He's saying people wouldn't make choices they couldn't conceive of, not that it's impossible to conceive of those choices without the requisite urge. The end of the paragraph is "if they didn’t realize that was a choice, the pressure might come out some other way, or just fizzle out" which explicitly acknowledges that the urges exist irrespective of the available choices.
It is definitely true that there hasc always been sexuality and gender-ality diversity, and there's probably some biological component of that.
But that doesn't mean culture doesn't shape the form that takes. I recall an article by an anthropologist who studied the "third gender" of a culture--male-bodied people who dressed like women, took women's names, did women's work. According to him, these people did not think they "were women" and even got offended at the suggestion. When he described the gay male community in the US to one person he was told "I'm like that."
I think it's very possible that someone with the same hormones and brain could be a "gay man" or a "third gender person" depending on where and when they were born--and maybe that same person could also be a "trans woman" or "nonbinary" or "gender fluid" in other circumstances.
Agreed! I think the quote in question is really overstating it, though (and in doing so giving support to ideas like 'my kid would never have turned out gay if those darned tv shows didn't keep showing gay people'). The exact form certain things take vary a lot by culture, as you said - one can imagine feeling like you don't identify with the usual genders, but what you conceive of as a 'new' gender depending entirely on your culturally-influenced ideas of gender.
This whole idea of a choiceless society can only appear in the mind of someone who knows the Middle Ages only in stereotypes. Let's start with agriculture - did you have to be a farmer? Of course not. You could be a monk, a bandit, a vagabond, you could go to the city, or into the wilderness, the forest, or the steppes (in Eastern Europe, the flight of peasants from the farms was one of the leavens of the revival of Ukraine, after the Mongol invasions). As for monarchism being the only conceivable political stance for a medieval peasant - that's nonsense. Countless revolts, utopian social movements, bloody revolutions against the hierarchy took place in England and elsewhere. The nobility put them down bloodily and not without effort. Now it is the turn of the alleged lack of choice in the matter of religion. In fact, there was a multiplicity of varieties of Christianity in medieval Europe, a multitude of sects and cults competed for people's minds, especially in the countryside, where religions that preceded Christianity did very well, sometimes continuing in "public secrecy" until today. Many sects had ideas about sex that differed from the church of priests, bishops and the Pope. Not forgetting, of course, that the choice of a clerical career, especially in a monastery, was sometimes combined with the possibility of practicing homosexuality in a way that society for centuries, despite its stated values, accepted throughout Europe.
Most people were farmers , though.
>There is a contingent of people who think of tendonitis, repetitive stress injury, carpal tunnel, etc as somewhere between 50% and 99% cultural.
But there is a real, physical, carpal tunnel thing, right?
I had it at round 30 from bagging potting soil on a production line. You could put your hand on my wrist and feel the internal grinding. The doctor I saw asked if he could call in an associate so he could learn how to feel for it and diagnose a patient.
It went away with a week of rest.
What about those panic attacks that people used to have the first time they were on a high speed train? Thinking the speed prevented them from breathing. Then after a few trips, they notice no one else has them, and are fine.
One of my dogs has a similar panic attack during a car ride, but not the other. Can animals have culture bound diseases?
>In 21st-century America, women are less enthusiastic about sex, often unsatisfied by it; therefore, it's only natural that men initiate most sexual encounters. In ancient Athens, women, the irrational sex, were slaves to their desires, and part of the humor of the Lysistrata was the idea that the women took their protest so seriously that they could restrain their sexual appetites.
The evolutionary arguments for why men should be more interested in sex than women seem very good. Are there any modern societies where women seem more interested in sex?
If Athens actually is an example of women seeming more interested in sex, I wonder if the high prevalence of homosexuality among men is the cause?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_ancient_Greece
I notice that Wikipedia page discusses men hiring women for sex much more often than the reverse. That suggests ancient Greece was not an exception.
Maybe women were more enthusiastic about sex *with their spouses* or the high status men who wrote Athenian literature, whereas men were more enthusiastic about sex with low status people like slaves and prostitutes.
I think the question isn't what the Wikipedia entry says about ancient Greeks, but what a Wikipedia entry written -by- ancient Greeks would say.
Scott, context implies you are (entirely reasonably) reading antimemetics division as "against memes", but it is in fact referring to "antimemes" and the excellent SCP wiki series "There Is No Antimemetics Division" (https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub , apparently also now a book published on Amazon).
Unless of course reading antimemetics as "against memes" is an extremely subtle bit and/or unsettling inevitability when attempting to discuss that concept. What was I talking about again?
This isn't the first time we've had this conversation, is it...
But no seriously it's an extremely niche reference and I didn't even realize at the time how relevant it was to the post at hand.
I remembered something from a class back in college about Shiva trying to preserve semen, and saw references to it when looking it up, e.g. "It explains that the loss of bindu, the vital force of the semen, causes death, while its retention causes life." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajroli_mudra
So I guess the Indians might be in on the NoFap too.
when I saw you mention NoFap, I instantly thought how awesome it would be if you did a “NoFap: Much More Than You Wanted To Know”, given how both medically and culturally it’s quite a double-edged sword
Don't anorexics turn up at hospitals with malnutrition, i.e. anorexia rate should be measurable indirectly via rate of malnutrition cases?
> There is a contingent of people who think of tendonitis, repetitive stress injury, carpal tunnel, etc as somewhere between 50% and 99% cultural.
n=1 observation on this - I had carpal tunnel on my mind due to it being a topic I ran into several times for coincidental reasons, and soon started to feel more-than-usual (I work a job that has me typing for several hours per day so some is normal) soreness in my wrists.
I eventually came to realize that I was feeling some stiffness, then vigorously flexing my wrists to "loosen them up", and after doing this many times per day, *making them sore by doing so.*
So... Psychosomatic -> genuinely physical due to screwing around with the issue too much?
I keep commenting on CT, but I had almost the opposite experience. Both my parents had CTS and needed surgery, so my whole life I was kind of scanning the horizon, doing little things to prevent myself from getting it. I always used a weird ergonomic computer mouse, and even switched between different models. I wanted to catch it early, unlike my mother, who waited too long and lost a lot of sensation in her hands.
But it snuck up on me anyway! I didn’t have numbness except when doing certain activities. And I didn’t have pain until pregnancy aggravated the problem. I saw a hand doctor and had a nerve test thinking I might be catching it early, but apparently my nerves had slowly been checking out and I already had some damage. My brain worked around a lot of it, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I had slowly been changing my behavior to cope with a problem that didn’t register. It had been a long time since I could hold a pen long enough to write a letter or draw a picture, but it’s not like I tried very often. It had never sunk in that I really *couldn’t do it* and that this wasn’t normal. After CT surgery, I realized how many things had been making my hands go numb for God knows how long. Luckily, it seems like I still have most of my nerves, and I can draw again.
> Aella also has written about her own experience with trauma - and how it changed once she left her culty upbringing, learned what trauma was, and understood that other people expected her to have it - here.
After reading the article, I think there are essentially three possible reactions to other people's bad experience, and people often conflate two of them.
a) what happened to you is no big deal, and you are a bad person for whining about it;
b) what happened to you was bad, but it only reflects negatively on the perpetrator, not you;
c) what happened to you was bad, and by contagion, it makes you a bad person.
I understand why (a) could be preferable to (c) even for the victim. If you are a bad person for whining about something what is not a big deal, you still have the option to... stop whining. If you are a bad/broken person by association with the bad things that happened to you, there is nothing you can do about it.
The problem with (b) is that people who claim/try to do it, often do (c) instead. They may say "it does not reflect negatively on you", but if they afterwards start avoiding you, or behave weirdly and uncomfortably in your presence, they are de facto punishing you for being hurt in the past and mentioning it.
I still think that (b) is in theory the correct reaction, but if your experience is that people usually do it wrong, the objection makes sense.
I think another insidious factor is that (b) can often turn into “what happened to you is the WORST POSSIBLE THING and you are surely deeply traumatized - if you have completely moved on from it or think it wasn’t a big deal, you are broken and wrong”.
In trying to be sensitive to trauma, it’s possible to treat severe trauma as the only “right way” to feel after certain experiences. I could certainly see that causing anxiety or trauma where it would not otherwise exist.
Yeah. Either way, the current social *expectations* are what makes the trauma worse.
It distracts you from processing your memories naturally. Like, maybe one day you want to cry, and another day you just want to forget it completely. Instead, every day you need to do what the others expect of you. (In some sub/cultures, they may expect you to cry every day, in others to pretend that nothing happened, or even act heroically every day.)
Plus there may be other costs, such as if you are socially expected to cry all the time, people will stop inviting you to fun activities.
The proper way is to react *without* expectations, not even the expectation of consistent reaction every day.
Yeah this is my biggest problem with “modern” methods. We train people to be debilitated by pretty overcome-able obstacles.
We also provide them an excuse for failure/sloth/etc. Life is enough of a struggle without people telling you “you deserve to be a mess”.
"The other culture-bound illness I mentioned on the post was shenkui, a Chinese condition where people who believe in yin and yang feel like orgasming depletes them of vitality."
Hasn't that been a trope since forever? Indeed, don't many people feel sleepy after orgasm.
General Jack D. Ripper: [somewhat embarassed] Well, I, uh... I... I... first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love.
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Hmm.
General Jack D. Ripper: Yes, a uh, a profound sense of fatigue... a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I... I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence.
"Maybe this is an argument for gender dysphoria not being like culture-bound mental illness; I don’t think there’s any sense in which, given a choice to believe that a witch stole your penis, some people are going to choose yes."
I think there's a sense in which this could happen. I imagine the following scenario: first, you feel discomfort and unhappiness, maybe vaguely penis-themed. Then, you are given a choice (maybe not a conscious one) to attribute this to a witch stealing your penis. Then, some people choose yes (over not having an explanation at all), and then the magic of human psychology rounds off as many other symptoms as it can to fit more closely with the witch theory.
Re: "Romans didn't get PSTD": r/AskHistorians quoted by HN comment quoted in the comments of the linked ACOUP post, now quoted by me in ACX:
> Cross-cultural psychologists have observed that, regardless of cultural background, people who suffer persistent emotional disturbances in the wake of a traumatic event exhibit intrusive memory symptoms in some form. Here in the US, these are closely related to what we commonly call “flashbacks.” For the Romans, people experiencing intrusive memories were said to be haunted by ghosts. These individuals show up in historical, philosophical, and even medical texts.
> Josephus, who was an outsider to Roman culture, also describes this phenomenon in his history of The Great Revolt. Those haunted by ghosts are constantly depicted showing many symptoms which would be familiar to the modern PTSD sufferer. Insomnia, depression, mood swings, being easily startled, frequent eye movement, alertness all day and night, paranoia, avoidance of crowds, suicidal thoughts/attempts, loss of appetite, shaking/shivering, self-hatred, and impulsive violence have all turned up in association with these individuals.
> Since in almost every case the person experiencing these things had made himself an object of public shame, the “ghosts” in question often came in the form of those he had killed or wronged in the past. These would either appear spontaneously to the sufferer, or would come in the form of vivid, frightening nightmares.
> The key component to these experiences, as with modern cases of PTSD, was that the sufferer had no control over his own symptoms. Thoughts or vivid memories would occur unexpectedly and uncontrollably. It is easy to see why the Romans, who were religiously superstitious to begin with, would attribute such things to the foul play of malicious spirits.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j6ssm/are_there_any_indications_of_combat_ptsd_in/cbbvfib/
Previously on SSC, related concepts were discussed in the posts Going Loopy
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/11/going-loopy/
and Can It Be Wrong To Crystallize Patterns?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/15/can-it-be-wrong-to-crystallize-patterns/
How it relates to Geography of Madness: The mechanism by which penis-stealing fears or certain sudden hysterias may appear could be a fearful feedback loop, discussed in Going Loopy as somewhat speculative accounts of how OCD and anxiety disorders work.
The question of whether it can be wrong to crystallize patterns, relates to whether the introduction of the language and concepts of western medicine can indirectly cause people to find ideas with negative side effects, i.e. anorexia and disorders which previously could not be comprehended in your culture.
I almost made the same comment about bouffée délirante being brief psychotic disorder! Though in my case I would have merely raised the question, being far from an expert, and I decided not to. (I only know about the condition due to researching it for a novel. Very relatedly, thank you to Scott and to Thomas Reilly for providing me with the most culturally appropriate translation of "brief psychotic disorder" for the French version--and just in time before we send in the translation to the publisher.)
Maybe we culturally resolved the fear of losing the penis by systematically maiming the penises of most infants in our society
I'm skeptical that the concept of a culture bound mental illness is particularly useful.
Ok, so if you are going to worry/panic about something it's more likely to be something that seems plausible to you. Sure, that's not surprising but I don't really see how much follows from that. True, there are the cases of social contagion but that doesn't really seem very different from the general issue of rumors or disinformation (what's different from accepting the election was stolen based o. shaky evidence)
Especially in the trans case it seems like what we really want to know is something more like: is there reason to suspect that taking the feeling at face value isn't likely to be the most cost/beneficial way to improve lives. That's almost certainly true in the case of penis thefts but PMS is likely better dealt with by just treating symptoms (even tho perceived severity is increased by cultural acceptance you can't practically hide the existence of the real effect or make everyone treat it as no biggie by fiat).
And here I expect the fact that the culture bound concept packs together different things causes trouble. I mean is it true that there are probably a fair number of 'trans' teens who are really just having normal sexual worries/exploration? Sure, but they are probably much less likely to be getting surgery or taking medications with truly serious side effects. They are just applying a different name to the same gender non-conformity we've seen forever. They are just projecting their worries/concerns onto culturally relevant notions and, unlike those who help stoke witch panic, there isn't much cost.
So it's really all back to the empirical question about cost/benefit to high cost transitioning and this doesn't seem to throw much light on the topic.
Hey Scott, quick comment that I'm leaving here because you're probably more likely to see it: You have used the "the the" example so many darned times that my husband and I have a prior for it the size of an elephant. It no longer works for your loyal readers! Please stop, we always role our eyes when we get to that example yet again.
No mention of the two most topical and controversial cases of (potential) social contagion: Havana Syndrome and Long Covid…
There is a non-invasive treatment that is better than a placebo: time! It takes no more than about 9 months to work.
I suspect PTSD isn't so much culture bound as it is the product of changing warfare, when it came unto existence it was under the name "shell-shock", because it was suspected to be the result of repeated concussions and loud noises that come from being shelled, as it was one of the main changes in the way warfare was fought. It was renamed PTSD afterwards when it became clear being shelled was not a necessary requisite, but I think the idea that it came into existence as war changed to be on the right track, reading war memoirs from men on the front lines you really get the sense that being constantly at risk of death at any second with not much you can do for extremely extended periods of time really does a number on a man in a way that didn't happen prior to the invention of accurate firearms, plus engagements are much deadlier overall, with old wars ending in routs after a much lower percentage of casualties and after much shorter engagements.
Modern war straight up sets your stress levels so high and for so long it's no wonder your body can't return to baseline at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDNyU1TQUXg Here's a video on the topic, although I don't like Lindybeige's propensity to theorize wildly, the comments are very elucidating.
A particular highlight: In the ancient world, if you try to sell a slave, you didn't by law have to declare if he had participated in war, but you did have to declare if he had been attacked by a bear or lion, presumably because it'd cause some sort of... lingering stress after the traumatic experience.
Basically, our brains have "maps" of our bodies that are based on an expectation of an internal body map. When people lose a leg they have phantom leg syndrome, or sometimes an arm will feel like an alien part of their body. We've discovered there are parts of the brain that have different average sizes in males and females. Transgender people tend to have a brain of the opposite sex in this sense to their physical bodies. They have a brain map for a sex that doesnt match their actual sex, hence the dysphori and the comfort provided when their bodies more closely match their internal map. the description of having a different gender "spirit" is probably a primitive attempt to describe this.
Concerning "Bouffée délirante", in German and Scandinavian context a similar rare condition is named "psycloid psychosis" that is characterised by a sudden onset of disorganised psychosis, confusion, motor agitation, with full remission even if the episodes are sometimes recurrent. It's debated whether it should be considered as more on a bipolar spectrum, maybe partly since it seems to respond to ECT.
https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2017.17030282
Lyman Stone claims that researchers into TikTok tics are seeing them 4x-40x more often in trans kids. If true does that point to the idea that some teenagers are more suggestible than others? https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1633118263990276101?s=46&t=Z89FS5K_L6mX5SqGXceuCw