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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").
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
So does murdering your children because God told you to do so. Delusional people are generally excruciatingly sincere in their beliefs.
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I think youre arguing that its not true, against sockpuppets claim that they really feel it is.
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