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.
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.