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’m curious to explore this concept from the other side too. Sometimes you are (seen as) a hostile[1] telepath. How does this affect one’s place in a social dynamic? What are one’s options/strategies around that?
My sense is that on some level we are aware of this, and broadly speaking sometimes hamstring or don’t develop our own telepathic abilities in order to manage some of these dynamics. E.g. I try not to speculate too much about other people’s inner lives. I feel weird about working on the social skill of telling what other people are thinking/feeling based on their body language and facial expressions.
Being telepathic feels like a privacy violation, on some level like a defection, like participating in a race-to-the-bottom that raids the privacy commons.
That’s also its own hostile telepath problem. If I had that skill I’d be afraid of people finding out, so I’d be incentivized to exclude it from my conscious self, etc.. I have an impression that a lot of socially successful people are basically this: telepaths who are good at managing/navigating other people’s impressions of their telepathy. Perhaps by consciously hiding it, perhaps hiding-from-themselves, perhaps revealing only in certain circumstances, all of which could be operating on a conscious or a subconscious level.
But putting aside the angle of deception and self-deception around “hostile” and “telepath”, I guess one has four options:
(A) Just be a hostile telepath.
(B) Don’t be a telepath.
(C) Don’t be hostile[1].
(D) Be neither hostile nor a telepath.
I think pushing directly for honesty and self-honesty in one’s social circles often comes across as, and in many cases is (A). But I do think a culture that values honesty and self-honestly and looking at truths even when they hurt is a culture that does a certain amount of (A).
(B) feels like leaving knowledge on the table. However, I think there’s truth to the “privacy commons” framing. E.g. I think when people turn away from others self-deception, as in this comment, they’re doing (B) in order not to do (A). In some contexts that’s adaptive.
(C) is a matter of trust. It’s a healthy characteristic of high-trust social environments that people are a lot more willing to read each others’ minds. I think “when you find yourself doing (B), consider (C)” might be really productive in a lot of contexts. I guess the main obstacle is that it’s often hard compared to (A) or (B), perhaps prohibitively hard.
(D) is there for completeness, it seems worse than either (B) or (C) under most circumstances.
alt. adversarial, misaligned.