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I was listening to a podcast with Michael Bailey, an OG researcher on trans issues and a guy who was at the front-lines of the conflict 20 years ago, long before this was a mainstream flashpoint.
Bailey talked about the autogynephilia model of male-to-female transexuals. I had heard some of it before: that many start off by having a fetish of being aroused by the idea of themselves as a woman. But historically since doctors would not prescribe sex reassignment for a sex fetish, they could only claim that they "were really a girl inside." Even though m-t-f's like McCloskey hit every male brained stereotype.
But then Bailey went to say that over years of cross-dressing to get off on themselves, many create an identity for themselves as a woman, an identity which may come to seem like the "real" them. Hence the eventual desire to transition and really become this character.
This got me thinking that to extent that something like "gender identity" exists in the brain separable from biological sex, I think wonder if it is really the matter of an entire personal identity that gets molded and created over time.
Question: are there documented examples of this kind of thing happening outside of sex/gender? Like an actor who becomes so caught up in role he thinks that role is the "real" him.
(Perhaps some of us can feel this way, our psued life can feel more like the real us...)
I think the concept of parasocial (self) relationships applies here. People, disproportionately those with an underdeveloped sense of self, can develop "relationships" with characters or other mediated personalities. Almost be definition, this is a very imbalanced relationship as the viewer / audience has strong feelings of attachment, connection, and attraction to the character. This can range from a relatively benign situation ("Beyonce and I would be best friends) to crippling dependency (camgirl addicts who over-invest into the parasocial camgirl relationship to the level of personal financial ruin).
In terms of your alternate definition of "gender identity" I think there's a case to be made that trans/non-binary folks have created a parasocial relationship with an idealized version of themselves. Falling in love with who they think they want to be. To me there's some circumstantial evidence to support this; the disproportionately higher rate of schizophrenia and other psychotic features in the trans population etc. When the sense of self is severely warped or underdeveloped, bad, bad things happen. Remember, simple isolation and prolonged solitary confinement is recognized as torture. To remain healthy and mentally stable, humans need reinforcement loops with other humans. If you've substituted your own self-perpetuating and idealized feedback loop within your own head ... wearing funny clothes is the least of your concerns.
This is going to sound mean but one of the reasons I've largely stopped participating in conversations about sex, gender, relationships, etc... is that so many of the surrounding it is so, for lack of a better term, "autistic". Someone who doesn't seem to unterstand the concept of food preferences will turn around and argue the primacy of self-identification over empirical observation. Or alternately the inverse where you get idiots arguing that a trait is either 100% masculine or 100% feminine and then they tie themselves in knots arguing that men who display qualities that are traditionally coded as feminine are secret [redacted]/[redacted] and women who assert themselves are secretly men and It's all so fucking tiring to argue against.
That said, I think you're on to something in that I think a lot of it really does down to an underdeveloped sense of self. People who have a reasonably healthy sense of self and who are comfortable in their own skin don't need to make their weird sex thing their whole identity.
Some of this propably is a lack of social understanding from the people involved, but I think a good bit also comes from arguing in a formalistic way. Where, instead of "being reasonable", and using your common sense to grease the understanding, they try to be very literal about everything. Theyre doing this on purpose, not because they dont have common sense, but because, to stick with the metaphor, greasing well might let you get work done even with a mistake in the gears that you dont notice.
Potentially finding that mistake is prioritised because you dont particularly care about getting to the "practical" outcome. Theres propably many cases of red- and blue-pillers arguing with each other who handle their real-life relationship very similarly. The goal is to understand "what things really are", in some sense. To nerdy liberals, whether men or women are "really" treated unfairly in relationships is such an abstract question, not necessarily related to practical recommendations for anyone, but very important morally. And I think its clear why such a "reality" could be interesting on the trans topic.
This isnt intended to convince you such arguments are a good use of time, they propably mostly arent, but you might appreciate knowing it.
Those are all really good points actually. I appreciate you putting it out there.
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