The “trans people tend not to have great introspective clarity into their own motivations for transition” in the earlier post bugged me a bit too. It’s been a bitter thought of mine for a while: I tend not to get into lot of these conversations because, in this phrasing, cis people seem to have much shallower introspective clarity into their motivations for gendered aspects of their lives than I do.
That suggests the following (broad-strokes) thought experiment: take a bunch of people and expose them to the same kind of day-to-day pressure to justify/shift their relationship to gender/sex that trans people seem to experience. Then
See how many of them respond with something akin to “gender transition” and how many remain stable in their gender identity.
See what comes out in terms of introspection/explanation/justification.
Possible takes one could have:
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” or “Chesterton’s fence”: even if we find that cis people also exhibit poor introspective clarity, who cares. It is natural to set a higher bar for introspective clarity about doing something “extreme” or “weird” and a lower bar for doing something “normal”.
We’re doing this experiment right now, and a lot of people are “cis by default”, and the resulting “gender transitions” are a bad thing, and we should hit the brakes. (“transgender ideology is harmful social contagion”.)
If there are “cis” people who respond to this with something akin to “gender transition”, that seems fine. They learned something about themselves.
And anyway the current state of “transgender ideology” is nowhere near this kind of experiment.
The first two don’t really resonate with me, and I guess they might resonate with others. The third one kind of resonates with me.
And of course as written this “experiment” is pretty underspecified, and what one thinks about it should be sensitive to the details. What’s the nature of this “day-to-day pressure”? How much are we talking about? Digging into that ambiguity might open up some cruxes.
Arguably a lot of “gender studies” is basically people experiencing some kind of pressure to justify/shift their relationship to gender/sex, and writing about it.
As an aspect of my gender transition, my views shifted from “a lot of this ‘men’/‘women’ stuff seems pretty crazy to me, but ‘normies are gonna normie’ and my social filters are selecting for people who have a ‘sane’ relationship to it” over to “no, the usual filters don’t seem to be doing that… maybe I am picking up on a thing about me?”.
I still don’t know, that’s still a tension that I feel. If we believe in some version of “cis by default”, it’s not out of the question that I’m one of those people, a “previously-cis-by-default” person who opened a Pandora’s Box to inspect what they’re doing with sex and gender so deeply that it shifted their outward relationship to it. But there’s something that led me to the Pandora’s Box.
Accuracy in introspection is hard. Accuracy in introspection in the face of cultural pressure is especially hard. I think marisa’s “double bind” articulates one way in which it is hard for trans people. But to me it appears to be also very hard for cis people, partly because they’re exposed to quite different (arguably more insidious) cultural pressure around a lot of the same things.
I feel like I don’t have a great read on where the actual level of introspective clarity is for trans people. All my trans friends are introspective, I don’t really know if I’m really capable of being friends with someone who isn’t. I can’t imagine not being curious about why I’m like this. So I was really surprised to read in Fiora’s post “none of my friends have ever really put forth a parsimonious theory of what their actual motivations may have been”.
Most of my impressions of not-my-friend trans people comes from social media and support groups I went to early in transition and just observing these community dynamics. I think people have the potential to be a lot more introspective, but they are held back by trauma and the stress of political doomerism. Which like, is genuinely stressful. Maybe we’re gonna lose healthcare. People will post about this while also not doing anything behavioral in the real world to prepare for it. Basically I think the transes need to get off social media.
The other toxic dynamic—and I am not the first one to describe this—is that community spaces for babytrans (online and support groups) tend to be filled with two kinds of trans: (1) babytrans (2) trans who is no longer baby but also never really graduated from that stage, again, usually because of trauma or addiction. So often there aren’t a lot of healthy role models or elders around for the young ones who need that.
The “trans people tend not to have great introspective clarity into their own motivations for transition” in the earlier post bugged me a bit too. It’s been a bitter thought of mine for a while: I tend not to get into lot of these conversations because, in this phrasing, cis people seem to have much shallower introspective clarity into their motivations for gendered aspects of their lives than I do.
That suggests the following (broad-strokes) thought experiment: take a bunch of people and expose them to the same kind of day-to-day pressure to justify/shift their relationship to gender/sex that trans people seem to experience. Then
See how many of them respond with something akin to “gender transition” and how many remain stable in their gender identity.
See what comes out in terms of introspection/explanation/justification.
Possible takes one could have:
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” or “Chesterton’s fence”: even if we find that cis people also exhibit poor introspective clarity, who cares. It is natural to set a higher bar for introspective clarity about doing something “extreme” or “weird” and a lower bar for doing something “normal”.
We’re doing this experiment right now, and a lot of people are “cis by default”, and the resulting “gender transitions” are a bad thing, and we should hit the brakes. (“transgender ideology is harmful social contagion”.)
If there are “cis” people who respond to this with something akin to “gender transition”, that seems fine. They learned something about themselves.
And anyway the current state of “transgender ideology” is nowhere near this kind of experiment.
The first two don’t really resonate with me, and I guess they might resonate with others. The third one kind of resonates with me.
And of course as written this “experiment” is pretty underspecified, and what one thinks about it should be sensitive to the details. What’s the nature of this “day-to-day pressure”? How much are we talking about? Digging into that ambiguity might open up some cruxes.
Arguably a lot of “gender studies” is basically people experiencing some kind of pressure to justify/shift their relationship to gender/sex, and writing about it.
As an aspect of my gender transition, my views shifted from “a lot of this ‘men’/‘women’ stuff seems pretty crazy to me, but ‘normies are gonna normie’ and my social filters are selecting for people who have a ‘sane’ relationship to it” over to “no, the usual filters don’t seem to be doing that… maybe I am picking up on a thing about me?”.
I still don’t know, that’s still a tension that I feel. If we believe in some version of “cis by default”, it’s not out of the question that I’m one of those people, a “previously-cis-by-default” person who opened a Pandora’s Box to inspect what they’re doing with sex and gender so deeply that it shifted their outward relationship to it. But there’s something that led me to the Pandora’s Box.
Accuracy in introspection is hard. Accuracy in introspection in the face of cultural pressure is especially hard. I think marisa’s “double bind” articulates one way in which it is hard for trans people. But to me it appears to be also very hard for cis people, partly because they’re exposed to quite different (arguably more insidious) cultural pressure around a lot of the same things.
hey thanks for the comment :)
I feel like I don’t have a great read on where the actual level of introspective clarity is for trans people. All my trans friends are introspective, I don’t really know if I’m really capable of being friends with someone who isn’t. I can’t imagine not being curious about why I’m like this. So I was really surprised to read in Fiora’s post “none of my friends have ever really put forth a parsimonious theory of what their actual motivations may have been”.
Most of my impressions of not-my-friend trans people comes from social media and support groups I went to early in transition and just observing these community dynamics. I think people have the potential to be a lot more introspective, but they are held back by trauma and the stress of political doomerism. Which like, is genuinely stressful. Maybe we’re gonna lose healthcare. People will post about this while also not doing anything behavioral in the real world to prepare for it. Basically I think the transes need to get off social media.
The other toxic dynamic—and I am not the first one to describe this—is that community spaces for babytrans (online and support groups) tend to be filled with two kinds of trans: (1) babytrans (2) trans who is no longer baby but also never really graduated from that stage, again, usually because of trauma or addiction. So often there aren’t a lot of healthy role models or elders around for the young ones who need that.