Cisspecies representatives of nonhuman creatures have not stepped forward to speak about what their internal experience is like such that humans claiming to really be those species on the inside may be shown not to be making shit up.
If they did, it would be an empirical question whether your human-shaped Klingon-minded person reported experiences relevantly similar to regular Klingons.
If transgender people were found to report experiences and emotions significantly different from those of people born in the gender they were trans-ing to, would that convince you that transgender people are “making shit up” and so do not deserve to be taken seriously?
I’ll bite the bullet and say it would convince me if the experiences and emotions were much closer to the gender they were transitioning from than to.
What I do expect are experiences that are significantly different (general weirdness) and slanted toward assigned gender (education), but still firmly within the target gender’s cluster.
If a small subset of transpeople were found to report experiences and emotions significantly different from most transpeople’s, and the similarity cluster went (cispeople of target gender + majority of trans people) versus minority of transpeople, then it would definitely convince me than this subgroup was making shit up.
However, I still don’t know what to do if I learn I’m deluded in this way.
It may still be worth taking those “making shit up” seriously; among the possible social norms:
A: people are treated as belonging to the gender that matches their visible hardware (the traditional default)
B: people are treated as belonging to the gender they choose
C: people are treated as belonging to the gender that best matches their internal experiences
… I see no reason to prefer C; A and B are simpler to enforce, and C doesn’t even seem to lead to greater happiness than B. C may be result in more “authenticity” than B, but then A even more so.
… so I’m seconding Yvain: the question of “Which internal experience do they have?”, even if interesting, doesn’t tell us the answer to the original question. (Well, I’m extrapolating Yvain’s position)
Okay, time for me to ditch Postel’s law because it’s generating nonsence like if I get clustered with ciswomen then I can’t be a man but if lucidfox gets clustered with cismen she’s a woman anyway.
Reasons for C > B:
People sometimes regret transitioning. If transitioning becomes easy (by removing stigma), this is less of a problem, but I don’t think people can quickly and effortlessly shift categories (when someone comes out to me I have an adjustment period before I really think of them as ), and if there are physical modifications that’s mostly irreversible.
For some reason I can’t figure out well, the thought of learning I’m more like a woman than a man and transitioning anyway causes a Wrong reaction, Gendlin-style.
I agree—after writing my comment, reading the other bits of the thread made me think that “matches internal experience” probably correlates with “won’t regret transition”. It can be worth having norms that reduce the incidence of people making choices they’ll regret later on.
The best approach to the problem might be to look at the experiences of those that have transitioned, and see which factors predict a greater improvement in happiness—at least, that would seem more conclusive to me than reasoning about subjective experience and emotion being more or less like that of the destination gender (though as you say, that has it’s importance too).
(By the way, I’m not sure I see what Postel’s law has to do with this—“whooosh”, as they say)
look at the experiences of those that have transitioned, and see which factors predict a greater improvement in happiness
You’re brilliant. Bask in your elevated status.
what Postel’s law has to do with this
Criteria I use to say someone is trans (therefore brave and awesome to transition) or not (therefore deluded and stupid) are much stricter when applied to me.
You seem to have conflated two different questions here. The original question was about how people should be treated, not whether people should (be allowed to) transition. B seems like an obviously correct answer to the original question, to me.
Suppose I believe myself to be a unicorn. This has two major parts: I have a self-image with several psychological characteristics; and I believe those characteristics to be unicorn-y.
Is there any reason to expect that discovering physical unicorns living in a forest somewhere might decrease our estimate of the validity of my self-image?
Presumably it wouldn’t affect your estimate of the validity of your psychological characteristics, but it could quite easily affect your estimate of those traits’ unicornosity. It seems reasonable for that to affect or even invalidate your unicorn-identity, even if it doesn’t affect your model of how your mind works in any quantifiable way.
But what I’d actually expect to find is more complicated than that: if unicorn-identity works like, say, political identity, it carries not only descriptive but normative components. If you conclusively break the mapping between unicorn-identity and actual unicorn behavior out in the wild, you haven’t just invalidated a label; you’ve also wiped out a bunch of social motivations. I’d expect that to be rather upsetting, and I’m not at all sure how to parse out all the ethical implications.
It may all be stuff that people are making up in any case. I believe I’m Jewish. I believe I’m American. These have personal and (especially for the second) political implications because people would generally agree with me about both.
I’m not sure there’s a huge qualitative difference between that sort of belief and believing that one is a unicorn.
Actually, there’s a difference I didn’t think of last night. I believe I’m Jewish and American because people kept telling me I am, and I wasn’t immune.
However, there are people who aren’t Jewish who feel they are really Jewish, and convert.
Huh. Now you mention it, it does feel eerily similar. I won’t convert unless everything goes obscenely well, but I keep having to remind myself I’m a Gentile.
It’s evidence for my “what group do you want to affiliate with?” theory of the social part of gender dysphoria, which I’ll post about soonish.
See also Jews for Jesus who look a lot more like evangelical Christians, and Christian Identity who are apt to believe that they are descendents of the lost ten tribes who ended up in Britain, and that the other people who think they’re Jewish aren’t Jewish.
Cisspecies representatives of nonhuman creatures have not stepped forward to speak about what their internal experience is like such that humans claiming to really be those species on the inside may be shown not to be making shit up.
If they did, it would be an empirical question whether your human-shaped Klingon-minded person reported experiences relevantly similar to regular Klingons.
If transgender people were found to report experiences and emotions significantly different from those of people born in the gender they were trans-ing to, would that convince you that transgender people are “making shit up” and so do not deserve to be taken seriously?
I’ll bite the bullet and say it would convince me if the experiences and emotions were much closer to the gender they were transitioning from than to.
What I do expect are experiences that are significantly different (general weirdness) and slanted toward assigned gender (education), but still firmly within the target gender’s cluster.
If a small subset of transpeople were found to report experiences and emotions significantly different from most transpeople’s, and the similarity cluster went (cispeople of target gender + majority of trans people) versus minority of transpeople, then it would definitely convince me than this subgroup was making shit up.
However, I still don’t know what to do if I learn I’m deluded in this way.
It may still be worth taking those “making shit up” seriously; among the possible social norms:
A: people are treated as belonging to the gender that matches their visible hardware (the traditional default)
B: people are treated as belonging to the gender they choose
C: people are treated as belonging to the gender that best matches their internal experiences
… I see no reason to prefer C; A and B are simpler to enforce, and C doesn’t even seem to lead to greater happiness than B. C may be result in more “authenticity” than B, but then A even more so.
… so I’m seconding Yvain: the question of “Which internal experience do they have?”, even if interesting, doesn’t tell us the answer to the original question. (Well, I’m extrapolating Yvain’s position)
Okay, time for me to ditch Postel’s law because it’s generating nonsence like if I get clustered with ciswomen then I can’t be a man but if lucidfox gets clustered with cismen she’s a woman anyway.
Reasons for C > B:
People sometimes regret transitioning. If transitioning becomes easy (by removing stigma), this is less of a problem, but I don’t think people can quickly and effortlessly shift categories (when someone comes out to me I have an adjustment period before I really think of them as ), and if there are physical modifications that’s mostly irreversible.
For some reason I can’t figure out well, the thought of learning I’m more like a woman than a man and transitioning anyway causes a Wrong reaction, Gendlin-style.
I agree—after writing my comment, reading the other bits of the thread made me think that “matches internal experience” probably correlates with “won’t regret transition”. It can be worth having norms that reduce the incidence of people making choices they’ll regret later on.
The best approach to the problem might be to look at the experiences of those that have transitioned, and see which factors predict a greater improvement in happiness—at least, that would seem more conclusive to me than reasoning about subjective experience and emotion being more or less like that of the destination gender (though as you say, that has it’s importance too).
(By the way, I’m not sure I see what Postel’s law has to do with this—“whooosh”, as they say)
You’re brilliant. Bask in your elevated status.
Criteria I use to say someone is trans (therefore brave and awesome to transition) or not (therefore deluded and stupid) are much stricter when applied to me.
You seem to have conflated two different questions here. The original question was about how people should be treated, not whether people should (be allowed to) transition. B seems like an obviously correct answer to the original question, to me.
But would it be a relevant question?
Suppose I believe myself to be a unicorn. This has two major parts: I have a self-image with several psychological characteristics; and I believe those characteristics to be unicorn-y.
Is there any reason to expect that discovering physical unicorns living in a forest somewhere might decrease our estimate of the validity of my self-image?
Presumably it wouldn’t affect your estimate of the validity of your psychological characteristics, but it could quite easily affect your estimate of those traits’ unicornosity. It seems reasonable for that to affect or even invalidate your unicorn-identity, even if it doesn’t affect your model of how your mind works in any quantifiable way.
But what I’d actually expect to find is more complicated than that: if unicorn-identity works like, say, political identity, it carries not only descriptive but normative components. If you conclusively break the mapping between unicorn-identity and actual unicorn behavior out in the wild, you haven’t just invalidated a label; you’ve also wiped out a bunch of social motivations. I’d expect that to be rather upsetting, and I’m not at all sure how to parse out all the ethical implications.
I think we can all safely agree that humans who think they’re staple maximizers are simply having delusions.
Right. Likewise with humans who think they’re paperclip maximizers, and blow “1000 USD” trying to prove it.
No, those humans are superintelligent and/or at a reflective equilibrium.
It may all be stuff that people are making up in any case. I believe I’m Jewish. I believe I’m American. These have personal and (especially for the second) political implications because people would generally agree with me about both.
I’m not sure there’s a huge qualitative difference between that sort of belief and believing that one is a unicorn.
Actually, there’s a difference I didn’t think of last night. I believe I’m Jewish and American because people kept telling me I am, and I wasn’t immune.
However, there are people who aren’t Jewish who feel they are really Jewish, and convert.
Huh. Now you mention it, it does feel eerily similar. I won’t convert unless everything goes obscenely well, but I keep having to remind myself I’m a Gentile.
It’s evidence for my “what group do you want to affiliate with?” theory of the social part of gender dysphoria, which I’ll post about soonish.
That sounds more like a whole theory of identity (and it’s pretty much mine).
There are also people who feel they are Jewish, but other Jews would probably disagree …
See also Jews for Jesus who look a lot more like evangelical Christians, and Christian Identity who are apt to believe that they are descendents of the lost ten tribes who ended up in Britain, and that the other people who think they’re Jewish aren’t Jewish.