I am genuinely curious about how biological gender dysphoria is comparable with quickly slipping genders and genders outside the binary.
so, obviously there is a lot of nonsense on tumblr/tiktok. But I have also hard from people who—based on my general impression of their character and language when interacting with them—should be taken intellectually seriously—who report kinds of trans identification outside the standard medical dysphoria model. I don’t understand this myself but I’ve seen it in enough other credible people at this point than I think I need to take their self-reports seriously.
i have no proof that this model makes sense but imagine that a brain has both strongly “male” and “female” patterns in different regions. it’s not that these are getting switched on and off necessarily but there seems to be a lot of complex stuff going on psychologically in how “brain sex” gets turned into behavior. And if the “male” and “female” regions are both signaling strongly and/or in conflict that could produce a nonbinary/genderfluid phenotype.
I find the Gender Mosaic theory (cf Daphna Joel) to be the most plausible, but I see it as a Sex Mosaic where there are male-typical and female-typical neural wirings for different brain regions. It’s very high-dimensional and the sex of each region can vary independently and (mostly) continuously based on the prenatal hormone wash. This easily explains the vast phenotypic variation in gendered behavior, and why it seems like we have every different possible combination of person.
when I say “not inherently politically harmful” I mean “try to avoid trying to explain or justify them to most regular americans but this is a liberal society and in general we should be respectful and welcoming of diversity in contexts where people are enlightened enough not to take it the wrong way”.
Anyway, it’s easier to cis-pass (i.e be “invisible”) as an FtM than an MtF but what I mean by political salience is if you look for example at Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier—a lot of the rhetoric focused on banning HRT for minors is about FtMs, and positive examples of FtMs who transitioned young or knew young and were harmed by not being allow to transition sooner—can help fight this.
all good :)
so, obviously there is a lot of nonsense on tumblr/tiktok. But I have also hard from people who—based on my general impression of their character and language when interacting with them—should be taken intellectually seriously—who report kinds of trans identification outside the standard medical dysphoria model. I don’t understand this myself but I’ve seen it in enough other credible people at this point than I think I need to take their self-reports seriously.
i have no proof that this model makes sense but imagine that a brain has both strongly “male” and “female” patterns in different regions. it’s not that these are getting switched on and off necessarily but there seems to be a lot of complex stuff going on psychologically in how “brain sex” gets turned into behavior. And if the “male” and “female” regions are both signaling strongly and/or in conflict that could produce a nonbinary/genderfluid phenotype.
for the general model, see my comment: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rt2yai8JkTPYgzoEj/why-i-transitioned-a-response?commentId=nHYdFcmBqjnpWZize
when I say “not inherently politically harmful” I mean “try to avoid trying to explain or justify them to most regular americans but this is a liberal society and in general we should be respectful and welcoming of diversity in contexts where people are enlightened enough not to take it the wrong way”.
Anyway, it’s easier to cis-pass (i.e be “invisible”) as an FtM than an MtF but what I mean by political salience is if you look for example at Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier—a lot of the rhetoric focused on banning HRT for minors is about FtMs, and positive examples of FtMs who transitioned young or knew young and were harmed by not being allow to transition sooner—can help fight this.