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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15833 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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In 1979, Playboy published a 15 page feature/interview with musician Wendy Carlos. Carlos had been a minor celebrity for a few years around 1970, known for being a pioneer of musical sound synthesis (she and collaborator Rachel Elkind recorded the "Switched-On Bach" series of albums and much of the soundtrack for Kubrick's film adaptation of "A Clockwork Orange" and Carlos had performed with the St. Louis Symphony, as well as doing a handful of televised demonstrations of sound synthesis), before becoming a recluse. The motivation for Carlos to sacrifice her privacy and Playboy to devote 15 pages to a relatively obscure musician was sharing Carlos's experience of gender dysphoria sexual transition, something few had previously done. (A transwoman named Christine Jorgensen had shared her experience with a magazine in 1953 and published an autobiography in 1967, but she did so after being involuntarily outed by the New York Daily News and having difficulty supporting herself. Playboy assumed their readers to be so unfamiliar with the topic that two of the introductory questions are "Let's start with a basic question: What is a transsexual?" and its followup question, "So transsexuals aren't necessarily former homosexuals?") I recommend reading it as a now-historical primary source.

Carlos is an interesting case, because she has traits that would trigger incredulity among critics of transgender medicine, if she were transitioning today (exemplifying many elements of the male nerd archetype), but she was born in 1939 and had transgender feelings as a child (page 4, though I strongly recommend reading the full interview). Historical cases aren't dispositive of present-day sociogenic gender dysphoria, but how do skeptics of "endogenous" transgender feelings explain historical cases? A "critical mass" of cases sufficient for self-sustaining sociogenesis may be possible, but how could it come to exist, absent any "genuine" cases?

(Here's a pdf of the book Carlos mentions on page 5, in case anyone is curious about it.)

how do skeptics of "endogenous" transgender feelings explain historical cases?

Do you have someone in mind, here? Like, I vaguely recall an essay by Alex Byrne suggesting that the notion of "feeling" a certain gender seems incoherent, under the rubric of socially constructed gender. But that kind of thinking, with gender distinct from sex, is very mid-20th century (Simone de Beauvoir) on. Historical cases don't really deal in gender differences without also addressing sex and sexuality; individual cases differ, but the text confirms my expectation that a 1979 Playboy reader would naturally assume transsexuals to also be homosexuals. Why imitate the dress and behavior of a sexually available woman if you were not trying to attract sexual attention from men (or, perhaps homosexual women)? The endogenous feeling there would be homosexuality, of which transsexuality would be a symptom. Autogynephilia would also qualify as endogenous without being a gender feeling. Historical examples aren't hard to explain with just-so stories either way. Noticing, say, the boom in rapid onset gender dysphoria in adolescent girls is not the same thing as committing oneself to the position that transsexuality is strictly a social contagion. So it seems like you need to be more specific about which argument you think you're undermining, here.

she was born in 1939 and had transgender feelings as a child

I have never heard anyone make a claim like this in a way that seemed really believable to me--much like my expectation that people who claim to have seen miracles are more likely to be either foolish or lying, than to have actually seen miracles, no matter how honest they seem to be. I find it far easier to believe that "I had trans feelings as a kid" is a retrospective gloss, or even deliberate self deception, than that a child has specifically "transgender" feelings. Children often reject the gender roles imposed upon them, but part of the problem here is--how do you know you "feel like a girl" if you've never been one? Wanting to fill a cultural role assigned to the opposite sex is something many, maybe most people experience on occasion. Cranking that all the way to "no, I just am fe/male" simply elevates such feelings to the level of an insistent delusion. The addition of social "support" for that kind of thinking probably makes it easier to sell the obvious lie to oneself, or to sort of emotionally sanitize homosexual or autogynephilic drives.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but sexual psychology is really screwy. Humans have sex with animals. Humans have sex with trees. Jeff Bezos, a human billionaire, left his attractive and long-suffering wife for sex with a second-rate journalist made mostly of plastic. Why wouldn't there be people out there who get off on cross-dressing or whatever; that may be one of the least weird things humans have done, sexually. The trans advocacy community works really hard to insist that gender isn't a sex thing, but I think that is ultimately just empirically false. Your brain does not contain separate wiring for sex and gender. It's all one big, thoroughly interconnected mess. That is how "trans" cases can come to exist even in the absence of social contagion: the same way every other psychosexual phenomenon comes to exist! Through the interaction of reproductive drives (normal, pathological, or otherwise), personal circumstances, and cultural norms.

I think the rest of your comment deserves a full response, but for now:

Why wouldn't there be people out there who get off on cross-dressing or whatever;

Does this pass the sniff test? Are there enough crossdressers out there to explain the phenomenon?

The first study I found with numbers on crossdressing prevalence was this one. 2.8% of men, 0.4% of women. I pointedly did not take the first source for transgender prevalence, as it looked quite opinionated, but I grabbed this likely-looking one which suggests something like 0.2% of the population. I suppose it’s possible that 1 in 16 crossdressers move on to the hard stuff.

On the other hand, these numbers are much lower than I expected from media coverage. 0.5%, 1.6%. If those numbers are more accurate, and there aren’t many non-crossdressing trans people, then the correlation would have to be huge.

I’m not sure what to think here.

The trans advocacy community works really hard to insist that gender isn't a sex thing, but I think that is ultimately just empirically false. Your brain does not contain separate wiring for sex and gender

How, then, do you explain the existence of large numbers of asexual trans people? (I mean, you could argue it's still a particular configuration of a single "sex-and-gender" neural knot in the brain, rather than two unrelated phenomena. But when people say "trans isn't a sex thing" they mean "it isn't a kink pursued for sexual gratification". Brain wiring isn't really the point.)

Fucking with hormones does a number on sex drives.

Do you mean asexual as in no sex with people, or no masturbation either?

I mean, you could argue it's still a particular configuration of a single "sex-and-gender" neural knot in the brain, rather than two unrelated phenomena.

Yes.

But when people say "trans isn't a sex thing" they mean "it isn't a kink pursued for sexual gratification".

I regard this as far too narrow a sense of "sexual gratification." The archetypal case for autogynephilia is something like "imagining yourself as a woman helps you achieve orgasm." But then stuff like penectomies or even HRT are known to make orgasm more difficult, or even impossible, to achieve, so you might expect autogynephiles to avoid those things, given that "achieve orgasm" was the whole point of the exercise. But there are other forms of "sexual gratification" than just orgasm; there is for example sexual gratification in simply being perceived as sexually desirable. For someone who is for whatever reason averse to sex, or indifferent to it, not being perceived as an object of sexual desire is a strictly sexual form of gratification.

All forms of sexuality, a-, trans-, homo-, hetero-, or otherwise, are by definition sexual in nature, and gratification does not refer exclusively to orgasm or even to specifically coital pleasure, but to gratification that is sexual in nature. If we accept the (questionable) move of separating them from "gender" and making that word refer only and exclusively to the sociological phenomena that supervene on sex, those phenomena still supervene on sex. Many 20th century feminists understood this, which is why they advocated for the abolition of gender distinctions, rather than merely the decoupling of gender from sex. By reifying traditional gender norms through dubious metaphysical claims about one's "real" gender, today's trans advocacy routinely operates directly against its own intellectual foundations.

Which ones do you mean? FtM asexuals are, in my experience, mostly very average women with feminine personalities, who first mistake the normal & expected unpleasantness of puberty as gender dysphoria, and then it's easy to further mistake the normal low feminine sex drive as anomalous, both due to being consistently misinformed about the nature of sex and sexual development.

MtFs, similar to furry asexuals, posting habits and behaviour clearly seem to imply them deriving sexual pleasure from their interactions, it's merely that they don't like the act of sex itself. Which is not unusual for strong fetishes, think findom or other variants of the more elaborate sub-dom relationships. Excluding the cases that simply lie about or downplay their impulses, of course, which also isn't particularly rare.

Edit: Also, there additionally is the increasingly large number of people who treat their LGBT+ identity as a social club offering them a safe space, affirmation and simple slogans to live by in a world that only gets more complicated. From this PoV, it just means they want to belong to both these social clubs instead of only one.

FtM asexuals are, in my experience, mostly very average women with feminine personalities, who first mistake the normal & expected unpleasantness of puberty as gender dysphoria, and then it's easy to further mistake the normal low feminine sex drive as anomalous, both due to being consistently misinformed about the nature of sex and sexual development.

What is your experience?

Short story is, me and my wife are both PhDs (me applied math, her psychology), so we have both met quite a few different varieties of nonbinary and trans individuals. Even back when studying we noticed that it's my spaces and in particular Computer Science that has several MtFs (and I've made the same observation in ultra-male online spaces such as mech-themed games or esoteric linux open source projects; they may be 10% female, but it's all G.I.R.L.s), while FtMs are mostly in her circles, particularly the social sciences. Standard gender theory would predict the opposite; And further, my wife (who is, ironically, one of the least feminine woman personality-wise I know) noticed in her interactions in her circle of friends that the majority of FtMs and nonbinaries have virtually no male hobbies, no masculine behaviour patterns, nothing.

When asked how they knew, they talk about how they disliked their growing breasts and how cumbersome they are (my wife does as well), how unpleasant the period is (duh), how scary the thought of pregnancy is (again, duh) how they don't want to be pressured into caring for kids and having to abandon their career (my wife, too), sometimes even how cismen are dirty and gross and they don't want to have sex with them (literally every women ever). It's basically a laundry list of all realisations and fears that many if not all girls get during puberty or slightly later, but instead of having to come to terms with it, they took the easy way out: Just reject it all. Their male identity, meanwhile, consists of superficialities, such as literally wearing lumberjack shirts, or even doing female-coded hobbies but with a male twist, such as really liking to cook, but they cook steaks. They're basically what women think men should be like, not what real men are actually like. Not rarely, they downright detest almost everything about real men as "toxic masculinity", such as competitiveness, dominance, playful insults, not talking about feelings, hierarchies, etc.

The same goes for students I'm teaching now, although it's obviously more distanced so I'm less confident here, but as far as I can see there is virtually no connection between their outward presentation of male-ness and actual masculine behaviour (or vice versa for MtFs).

I find it far easier to believe that "I had trans feelings as a kid" is a retrospective gloss, or even deliberate self deception, than that a child has specifically "transgender" feelings.

I definitely wanted to be a girl in some capacity as a child. But that's a desire, not an identity. I didn't "feel like a girl". That would be an incorrect interpretation of the feeling. I agree, someone of one sex cannot have any idea of what it feels like to be the other one.

Do you have someone in mind, here?

I was motivated by this comment, but I don't want to target a specific user with a question.

I have never heard anyone make a claim like this in a way that seemed really believable to me--much like my expectation that people who claim to have seen miracles are more likely to be either foolish or lying, than to have actually seen miracles, no matter how honest they seem to be...

How confident are you that you're not falling into a typical mind trap? (Scott references phantom sensations and "body maps," and phantom limb syndrome researchers found ~60% of transmen reported experiencing phantom penis sensations, when surveyed. I can't comment on brain scan interpretations, but there's a fair amount of evidence there's something neurological going on.) I can't relate to the experience described, but I disagree that it's more worthy of disbelief than any other internal experience.

The trans advocacy community works really hard to insist that gender isn't a sex thing, but I think that is ultimately just empirically false. Your brain does not contain separate wiring for sex and gender. It's all one big, thoroughly interconnected mess.

How was it empirically disproven?

there's a fair amount of evidence there's something neurological going on

No, there isn't.

I'd be happy to know of any evidence that hasn't been discredited, if only because it'd be a first lead as to the cause of GD, but as far as I know there is no such thing. Brain scan studies cannot be used because there simply isn't enough datapoints available to produce anything but noise.

No, there isn't.

Thanks for the paper.

phantom limb syndrome researchers found ~60% of transmen reported experiencing phantom penis sensations, when surveyed.

And why would you think that these self-reports prove anything to someone sceptical of gender self-reports? Do you think trans people dont understand that such phantom sensations would make them sound more "valid"?

I don't consider any one piece of data "proof," but the more evidence there is that's consistent with a claim, the greater the probability you should assign to the claim being true. I'm underwhelmed by that study, but transmen reporting phantom penis sensations in roughly the same proportion as post-penectomy cismales (as opposed to an overwhelming majority or small minority) is noteworthy, and could only be explained away as trans people fabricating evidence too sound more valid, if you thought the survey respondents coordinated to figure out which questions in the survey were testing the hypothesis, what would be a "positive" finding, and answer in the correct proportion.

You didnt mention the matching, I agree that is some evidence. Though they also find that 30% of mtf have phantom penises after bottom surgery, what do you think is happening here? If the phantom penis is caused by a body image where it should be there, then shouldnt the mtf be at ~0? They dont report any other results, but in my experience these things get a lot more complicated.

Though they also find that 30% of mtf have phantom penises after bottom surgery, what do you think is happening here? If the phantom penis is caused by a body image where it should be there, then shouldnt the mtf be at 0?

Again, I'm underwhelmed by the study/paper (which is a shame, because it's an interesting topic, which hasn't gotten much systematic study), but A) one also wonders why phantom limb or cismale phantom penis sensation rates aren't either 0% or 100% and B) I'm guessing that stumbling blocks in the brain "remapping" nerve endings after anatomy is transformed is different than the brain's response to amputation, making post-vaginoplasty phantom penis sensation worthy of study, but not dispositive of some sort of "latent female internal body image." (After all, the claimed rate is half that of cismen.) Low rates of transmale post-mastectomy phantom breast sensation (10% of transmen the study, vs 1/3 or more in ciswomen) would be more significant.

For another perspective on vaginoplasty and phantom penis sensations, here's a case report from the same year (pdf - includes surgical photos), in which Japanese vaginoplasty surgeons claim phantom penis sensations are sometimes experienced in the first few weeks after surgery, but one patient needed a revision surgery to remove excess erectile tissue. Ramachandran and McGeoch didn't include how long their MTF survey responders experienced phantom penis sensations, increasing the possibility of that finding being a red herring.

Im not sure I understand the things remaining after strikethrough, or at least the justification for it. "one also wonders why phantom limb or cismale phantom penis sensation rates aren't either 0% or... half that of cismen." Why is the half expected? "Low rates of transmale post-mastectomy phantom breast sensation (1/3 or more in ciswomen) would be more significant." Was that number supposed to have a cite?

Ramachandran and McGeoch didn't include how long their MTF survey responders experienced phantom penis sensations

We also dont know how long cis males getting penectomy experience them - if it fades over time, then its presumably a different phenomenon from the pre-op trans version, and the similar number just coincidence.

The strike-through is unintentional, due to me using the "approximately" symbol.

I don't know, but I'd default to guessing that post-penectomy phantom penis sensations are as persistent as any other post-amputation phantom sensation, absent a reason to think otherwise.

How confident are you that you're not falling into a typical mind trap?

Pretty confident, because I'm not asserting something about my own experiences as any kind of baseline. I'm making a claim about the trustworthiness of internal claims for which there is overwhelming external counterevidence ("I feel like I really am a man" -> "This is not the body of a man").

~60% of transmen reported experiencing phantom penis sensations, when surveyed

This would be a more interesting result to me if scientists and society proceeded to then tell the other 40% of transmen "it would appear you are not actually trans." If "phantom penis sensations" are neither necessary nor sufficient to the definition of transsexuality in females, what's the difference? Trans identity is doubly vague, with both "gender" and "trans" subject to constant motte-and-baileying. To give a different example, if essentially all AIS-afflicted genetic males experienced serious gender dysphoria prior to receiving AIS diagnosis, that would weigh heavily, I think, in favor of the brain being "in tune" with sex and gender. But such results do not appear extant; AIS diagnosis often comes as a complete shock.

I disagree that it's more worthy of disbelief than any other internal experience.

Returning to this, then: I'm the one asserting that we should treat such claims the same as any other report of internal experience. You believe yourself to be Abraham Lincoln, or to be wolfkin, or to be talking to God? Okay, let's see some external evidence of that. Even our emotional states, which philosophers often treat as incorrigible and original, are often subjected to doubt: have you ever been told by someone, "I'm fine," when you could see on their face that they were definitely not "fine?" Psychology makes a nod to this in many diagnostic processes, look for words like "persistent" and "insistent" and "recurrent" in discussions of when to approve physician-assisted suicide, for example. See also: chronic pain! How can we know you are or are not hurting, when you come seeking drugs? "Internal experience" is very hard on medical practice! But we do at least somewhat insist on interrogating it in almost every context--in theory, even this one, though the weight of social pressure against that interrogation seems to only continue to grow.

Ultimately, I can think of ways you could, say, convince me that you're Abraham Lincoln, actually. But even if you walked me into your time machine and gave me a tour of history, it would be a goodly while into that tour before I accepted that I wasn't being fooled, somehow. Trans advocacy, meanwhile, seems entirely committed to the idea that proof is neither necessary nor sufficient for valid gender claims, even as they cherry-pick those studies which seem conveniently aligned. I have seen similarly cherry-picked studies proving the existence of miracles. In both cases, it's entirely possible that I'm wrong to doubt!

But I doubt it.

This would be a more interesting result to me if scientists and society proceeded to then tell the other 40% of transmen "it would appear you are not actually trans." If "phantom penis sensations" are neither necessary nor sufficient to the definition of transsexuality in females, what's the difference?

According to the paper's authors, 60-40 is also the approximate rate of cismale post-penectomy phantom penis sensation. Would you tell a penis-less cismale without phantom penis sensation "it appears you are not actually male?"

I don't claim there's definitive proof an individual claiming to be transgender can be proven to have the neurologic features of their self-identified gender (bailey), but rather that the known-unknowns of neurology don't allow us to disregard their claims (motte).

I'm the one asserting that we should treat such claims the same as any other report of internal experience. You believe yourself to be Abraham Lincoln, or to be wolfkin, or to be talking to God? Okay, let's see some external evidence of that.

External evidence of an internal experience seems impossible, unless you accept the subject's behavior as evidence, but getting sexual reassignment surgery seems like compelling evidence of a sincere belief.

Would you tell a penis-less cismale without phantom penis sensation "it appears you are not actually male?"

This is a non-sequitur. My point is that phantom sensations do not appear to tell us anything about the way the world is, and so cannot tell us anything about someone's "real" gender, which is what you appeared to be offering the example to do.

I don't claim there's definitive proof an individual claiming to be transgender can be proven to have the neurologic features of their self-identified gender (bailey), but rather that the known-unknowns of neurology don't allow us to disregard their claims (motte).

Yes, so far it does appear that your actual claim is "well they're self-reporting their feelings, who are we to disregard their internal experiences?" And my answer has been, and continues to be, that we make reasonable judgments about people's internal experiences all the time. You are just holding transsexuals to a lower standard on this metric than you appear willing to hold, well, apparently everyone else.

getting sexual reassignment surgery seems like compelling evidence of a sincere belief

So does murdering your children because God told you to do so. Delusional people are generally excruciatingly sincere in their beliefs.

Returning to this, then: I'm the one asserting that we should treat such claims the same as any other report of internal experience. You believe yourself to be Abraham Lincoln...

I think youre arguing that its not true, against sockpuppets claim that they really feel it is.

I can't comment on brain scan interpretations, but there's a fair amount of evidence there's something neurological going on.

At least one of these much-touted studies was hopelessly confounded by the fact that it was examining the brains of deceased trans women postmortem, all of whom had been on HRT for years if not decades prior to their deaths. Ergo, impossible to determine if genetics or hormones was the cause of their atypical brain structures (if indeed they had them, given that the study in question failed to replicate).

How was it empirically disproven?

I don't put much trust in brain scan studies so I never bookmarked it, but there's a regular conversation between trans/anti-trans that goes something like:

- Here's a study that shows trans people's brains are literally more similar to the average of the gender they identify with.
- That study has failed to account for sexuality. A follow up that included it as a variable found that cis gay people also have brains more similar to the opposite sex, and that "trans brains" are indistinguishable from "cis gay brains".

How confident are you that you're not falling into a typical mind trap? (Scott references phantom sensations and "body maps," and phantom limb syndrome researchers found ~60% of transmen reported experiencing phantom penis sensations, when surveyed.

After more than a decade of masturbating to exclusively trans-porn, I did sometimes experience a "phantom vulva" sensation while masturbating, cross-dressing, and getting high on weed and whippets. But the power of repeated fantasy is probably enough to do the job on its own for a number of people. Autosuggestion is a hell of a drug.

Personally, I view the trans phenomenon as more of a disorder of desire than identity. The dominant social script confuses desire for identity

Nowadays I don't even masturbate. I just have sex with my wife and I never get any sensations or desires anywhere in the ballpark of this.

What anatomy and sex acts are you describing as "trans-porn" and how did the "phantom vulva sensation" manifest? I'm doubtful we should take your n=1 experience while "masturbating, cross-dressing, and getting high on weed and whippets," which have not persisted after you discontinued those behaviors, as applicable to others' lifelong experiences of gender identity and body incongruity, but I'm not too squeamish to continue the conversation...

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