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A common argument in trans discourse is "who are you to say someone isn't the gender he says he is? No one would know better than the person himself."
I've spent years operating on the opposite assumption about myself, that I'm a bad judge of myself. Furthermore, everyone has dissatisfaction with themselves and the world. Personally, I flip-flop, get dissatisfied about my life and direction, but most people tell me "that's life, get over it". But if I had a trans-like belief that "I know what I am, but the world won't let me be it," with tons of people telling me over and over that I'm right and there are evil people out to get me, I think I'd have latched onto it hard. Not because it's necessarily true, though. It converts vague restlessness into a clear enemy and a fixed identity, and that provides false stability and obsession for a feeling of listlessness.
So I don't buy that conviction is evidence of accuracy. If anything, the more invested I am in a belief about my identity, the less I honestly should trust it. I think it's at least possible that having an outside view is more accurate than one's own personal beliefs.
Is having skin in the game a reason to trust your self-read more, or less?
Let's talk about your penis. How do you feel about it on a scale from 1 to 10 where
1 is "An appendage I associate with great fun and joy especially when it's very hard and having an orgasm and ejaculating inside of a female"
and 10 is more like "A fleshy ugly cockroach-like thing sticking out of my body that I would cut off at the first opportunity if I could find and afford a doctor willing to do it"
Do you find yourself flip flopping much between those? Do you think you should trust your belief less if you are firmly at #1 rather than scoring your penis a more even and sober #5?
There are a lot of narcissistic tourists to trans stuff that cloudy the discourse considerably but there are honest to goodness people that are at #10 and have been for as long as they can remember.
To borrow some lefty terminology, a lot of people carry around a lot of emotional trauma. The idea that you should leverage that via threats of suicide to get other people to rearrange their lives around you or otherwise directly pay for cosmetic surgeries for you to get you over your trauma isn't the positive argument trans advocates think it is.
Following that is the simple fact that you don't need to exist as a sexual entity. Plenty of obese people turn asexual because they understand on some level that their obese body will never be what they want. Even if they lost weight, it would be a disaster of lose skin and morphed body parts requiring surgeries they can't afford. They don't want to have sex with their body anymore so they just don't. It's sad, it's traumatic, they still wake up and face the day.
The line between being a sad but relatable human being and being a narcissistic sociopath gets crossed by most trannies when they huddle together and start demanding privileges for their group and not others. They don't campaign on changing the classification of a lot of cosmetic surgeries from cosmetic to necessary. No, they just want those things for the trans. No consideration for anyone else but them.
On top of that, white men have held the high score on the suicide charts for a long time now. Did any tranny advocate ever allow that fact to sway them one way or another when it comes to the anti-white political projects they seemingly all participate in? No. Not once ever. So why should any white man be swayed by the argument when we change suicide victims? Trans people invoking suicides are not invoking an objective standard but their own ingroup preference for themselves.
Trans-advocacy exists as a group entity hostile to practically everything that allows trans people to exist in the first place. It's woven itself together with nigh every nihilistic anti-white political ideology that exists. If they had any semblance of kindness for the other they would not advertise their transness as anything other than a disease to be avoided. But as has been the case with the many chat groups that form around their identity, they are more interested in spreading their ailment than preventing it. Like a 'health at every size' advocate that presents obesity as healthy right up until the day they die from their obesity.
Maybe some people are obese because they genuinely have medical issues that cause them to gain an absurd amount of weight. And maybe some trans people are a #10. But the idea that this is what the trans identity advocates are representing, just like the idea that HAES is presenting healthy big boned folks, is an obvious falsehood.
And two centuries ago, people saw half their children die. It was sad, it was traumatic, they still woke up and faced the day.
We have overcome many things that were seen by previous generations as unalterable realities of life, giving the common person in today's world at least some benefits that were out of reach in earlier ages even to the mightiest kings. This process must continue at an increasing rate.
I do not put triumph over sickness, infirmity and hunger in the same box as deciding that you don't need to consider fellow humans either.
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Well, I certainly don't think 1 is in absolute and completely direct conflict with 10. I do think penises are ugly and weird, and I envy the smooth sleek female form sometimes.
When I was going through puberty and slightly before, and a bit afterward too, I had beliefs and hatreds about my body and penis, that I know now to be completely untrue, that I thought would mean that I would never find anyone who could love me in my life. Things changed for me eventually, but there were times when my feelings in that regard were stably different from what they are now. I've been firmly wrong before, and so has everyone.
As for "as long as they can remember", I don't take that at face value either. I'd have said the same thing at the time about my own beliefs. What counts as "long enough" to trust it? At very minimum, I don't think a belief formed before adulthood is a reliable basis for a permanent decision, whatever the belief is.
Also, I don't think I ever said that I trust someone's beliefs about himself specifically if they are more in the middle of a spectrum. I simply don't trust anyone's beliefs about himself.
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But statistically, everyone has to deal with this. It's called "having excess adipose tissue". You feel your stomach bunch up around you when you're sitting down. It's not particularly comfortable. I'd slam a knife into it and remove the offending tissue myself if it wasn't going to kill me or leave an absurd scar.
Now yes, sensory considerations mean I'm reminded of this fact more than other people, and is probably why the autism-trans pipeline exists considering sensory body-can't-forget-itself issues and autism are comorbid. (Actually, I bet the same is true of eating disorders. If I felt that happen to my body, yes, I'd absolutely try to eat as little as possible and/or throw up.)
It's kind of like the "gayness is evil, but some are tempted more than others" question, complete with the modern response of "well, it's everyone else's problem if they don't like it, just do whatever you want all the time". You can't just decide to keep the productive parts for whatever reason.
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If the pope followed that advice, he would need to question his identity as a Catholic a lot.
I think that a gender identity (as used by pro-trans people) is not something falsifiable. Other unfalsifiable beliefs might be the belief that you are a good person or that you are among the elect. Or more mundanely, that you prefer strawberry to vanilla ice cream -- which is technically not something unfalsifiable, but very few people would care to quantify that objectively and correct people who claim the wrong flavor preference. ("Actually, we have analyzed your ice cream buying behavior and EEG responses and you are definitely a vanilla-lover.")
That's an interesting point. If being the Pope is like being the best at any other profession, he probably DOES question his identity as a Catholic a lot. The Dunning kreuger effect; anyone who's really good at something feels like they're not good (even if they consciously know they are) because they pay so much attention to the nuance of their skill that they can see every little mistake.
Being the Pope, you're probably in constant war with yourself seeing all the sin in your own heart that you must overcome all the time. Just a guess.
If the pope has only little grain of actual faith, he knows that nothing happens by accident (at least at such spiritual pinnacle of the world as Vatican), he knows that Pope is not picked by fallible sinful men, but Holy Spirit personally.
(sometimes as inspiration and reward, sometimes as warning and chastisement)
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I would say that's true, at least for a lot of people. Here are some mundane thought experiments:
Suppose you went to one of those "sign and drive" used car lots which cater to people with marginal credit. And you surveyed potential buyers, asking them what they thought the likelihood was that they would make the payments on their car on time and avoid all the ridiculous interest, penalties, repossession, etc. I'm pretty confident that most of the buyers, perhaps all, would self-report a high likelihood of success. Something that's demonstrably at odds with reality.
It's the same phenomenon at gyms in January. People sign up for year-long memberships, genuinely believing that they will make use of them. But the gym's owners know better. They know that they simply don't have the capacity to serve everyone who signs up. But they aren't worried because they know that the majority of the people who think they will use their memberships will simply stop showing up after a few weeks.
And if you think the issue is peoples' statements about future intention are unreliable, how about this: You ask people to rate their vocabulary on a scale of 1 to 10 with 5 being average. Then you give them a vocabulary test. Or you ask people to self-report how good they are at driving a car. (I recall reading that most people report themselves to be well above average in driving skills). I think it's worth emphasizing that when someone self-reports to be a good driver, it's very likely that they are being sincere. At least that's my impression.
I think the basic rule is that a large percentage of people don't know themselves very well. And that very frequently, others know them better.
So yeah, I would say that if someone self-reports to be a woman trapped in a man's body (or vice versa), it's unreliable.
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The loathsome worm whose idealised conception of himself is grossly at odds with the reality is a stock comic figure. When an adult male insists that he is a woman, but behaves in a manner entirely consistent with an entitled and pornsick man, that's funny to me in the same way that I find it funny when Michael Scott from The Office thinks (contrary to all evidence) that he's a great screenwriter, or Joey Tribbiani from Friends thinks he's a talented actor. Our conception of ourselves can never (perhaps should never) be entirely accurate, and yet extreme examples (wherein a person's self-conception is enormously out of step with the objective reality) are intrinsically funny.
What behaviour, if exhibited by a trans woman, would you concede is not 'entirely consistent with an entitled and pornsick man'?
Crocheting.
So, if Alice née Alan crochets, you would conclude that she is not 'an entitled and pornsick man'?
If that is not your meaning, than I might not have been clear exactly what I was asking.
The question I am attempting to ask is: Is there any pattern of behaviour by Alice née Alan that you would consider sufficient to establish that Alice is not 'an entitled and pornsick man', while also not accepting your previously expressed Views on men, women, and the distinction therebetween, or is this a Kafka-trap wherein the mere fact of Alice claiming to be a woman while being AMAB is proof of her being 'an entitled and pornsick man'?
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Being obsessed with soap operas instead of military science fiction would be a good start.
A dizzying amount of transpeople are autistic, but I never met a single one whose associated obsessions didn't follow their birth sex very strongly.
But is that downstream of natal biology, or of assumed gender during childhood and adolescence?
(Also, I'm not so sure 'autistic person' and 'primary plot driver is the sort of petty social status competitions found in a high-school lunchroom' really fit that well together, even if the autistic person is a cis-woman. Does anyone have stats on the distribution of interests in autistic versus not autistic cis-women?)
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Most of it just comes down to basic self-awareness/self-control, so stuff like:
But having basic self-awareness/self-control is negatively correlated with being visibly trans (and accusations of porn-brainedness are derivatives of that), so even if there is a dark mass of ex-men/ex-women who are doing this, it's significantly harder to observe attributes of someone who doesn't want you to see them. (I suspect this is far less common for ex-women simply because the male uniform is unisex.) At least the more self-aware types tend to wear masks as an anti-jawline measure.
Then again, "being an obnoxious attention whore" is a stereotypically feminine trait. So maybe I do indeed err by failing to take them at their word that they're a walking minstrel show and a loudly-ticking social time bomb. I'm not sure which is better.
In other words, yielding to others' belief that she is a 'delusional man in a dress'?
A name like that isn't doing any heavy lifting trying to force pronouns, be they deserved or not.
Being [able to be] at the mercy of external actors evaluating what gender they believe you are is kind of the point; forcing the issue is the root hostile action.
As opposed to actively imposing the belief that he isn't, which is the same problem from the other direction.
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If people were able to be real and honest with themselves and their self-intuitions were reliable, we would not have such a booming therapeutic/self-help industry. No, in my opinion most people are actually pretty bad at knowing themselves. Of course they think they do. Who wants to admit that their self-image bears no resemblance to reality, or that how other people see them might be more accurate than how they see themselves?
Intelligent, assured, and emotionally stable people don't have to worry about this much, and may not understand just how many people are not all of those things.
This doesn't mean there are no trans people who really and truly experience gender dysphoria and an internal sense that their gender is different than their biological sex. Whether or not that is "real" in the sense of being a thing that exists outside their mind, it's real enough to cause genuine distress and I'm sympathetic. But no, I don't think every one of them is really and truly what they perceive themselves to be and the best judge of what their "real" sex is just because they feel it.
There was a time, many years ago, where one of my weird fascinations was the fat acceptance movement (this was early days, when they were still pretty fringe). I was into health and fitness at the time, after having lost a considerable amount of weight myself. I started reading the forums of people who initially fell into this subculture because, well, they were fat, they were unhappy about it, but losing weight is hard. As you might imagine, the levels of cope and rationalization would give trans people some serious competition. Every pseudo-scientific and psychological theory under the sun to explain why losing weight and keeping it off is absolutely and totally impossible and never works, which leads to elaborate theories of socialization to explain that actually, being fat is sexy and normal and it's just our modern society that's stigmatized fat.
Anyway, as you might imagine, many, many people would cruise by and ("helpfully" or otherwise) tell them they were delusional and/or there are actually ways to lose weight. A common refrain from the FA people was essentially what trans people say: "How dare you presume that you know more about our bodies than we do?"
Thing is, yeah, a lot of people actually did know more about their bodies than they did, because the things they thought about their bodies were mostly unscientific cope that flew in the face of reality. Plus the mundane things, like I can't count how many times I've read about someone who weighs 300 or 400 pounds insisting that they literally ate 800 calories and did 2 hours of exercise daily for weeks and physically could not lose weight. No, I am not exaggerating, I have seen those literal numbers quoted. And sometimes much less extreme, but still clearly unrealistic, figures. The degree to which all of these people really believed this, I cannot say, but I'm sure some of them did somehow manage to convince themselves that the bags of chips and bottles of soda and extra whip mocha frappucinos didn't "count."
I think in many ways they are very similar to trans people: they feel something is wrong about their bodies, they would like to change it, but change is hard and difficult, especially when it's your own thinking that needs to change, so instead, they decide it's other people's perceptions that should change.
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Gender identity immediately breaks down outside the context of the narcissistic modern west. Everyone else who's ever lived has lived in direct relationship to those around them. Placing the onus of deciding the gender for ourselves leads to strange or ridiculous outcomes some percentage of the time. Traditionally you are just whatever gender the people around you assign to you which would correspond to genitalia nearly all the time.
If someone asks for my pronouns I am irritated that I have to decide for myself because I think it should be designated by someone outside of myself in relation to the averages and experiences of society. If they assign an exogonous gender to my imagined self then it will tell me something about me, or them, but at least it relieves me of the pressure of having to assert something about myself.
Picking your own gender and asserting its correctness is dumb and ridiculous but completely consistent with the dumbness and ridiculousness of the modern west.
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I think the issue is that most trans people don't feel that the outside view is operating in good faith. If there was a society wide consensus that transness was value neutral and all we were after was diagnostic accuracy then it would be easier to trust the outside view, but outside of particular social microclimates transness is stigmatized and so if you really are trans the outside view is going to be wrong. It's true that this oppositional relationship can polarize people into false certainty, but that seems like an inevitable consequence of the stigma, the more costly a decision is the bigger the sunk cost, the more people are going to dig in and defend their decision. Make the decision less costly, build trust that the outside view is a neutral diagnosis, and people may be more willing to reconsider it.
I'd also say that the opposite error, excessive trust of the outside view or not transitioning because of the cost, is very common. I felt that I was trans as a teenager and didn't transition for over a decade because I felt that if there was any uncertainty I should avoid the social/material costs of transitioning. This is not an uncommon story and I feel I would have been better off transitioning younger. Whatever the metaphysics of identity transition itself is a decision and subject to social incentives, and outside of certain social microclimates those incentives are overwhelmingly against transition.
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Most things are a negotiation between you, reality, and the rest of society.
You can have limitless belief in the fact that you're smart. You can truly believe it in the deepest recesses of your soul. You can proclaim yourself a genius and fully believe you aren't lying. But if you have an IQ of 85... are you a genius?
Or for a more subjective example, you can truly believe that you're the most gorgeous creature on planet Earth. You can be completely in love with yourself, and carry yourself with limitless confidence. But if nobody else is actually attracted to you... are you actually attractive? (This works in reverse, too, you can believe you're hideous, but if everyone wants to fuck you, nobody is going to believe you saying you're ugly.)
You can't give yourself a nickname, you can't decide that you're cool. Some things have to be bestowed by others. Most things require tacit agreements from others.
Trans activists actually do recognise this, which is why they push so hard on enforcing your validation of their beliefs. A trans activist that truly believed that internal ID was all that mattered would not care what pronouns others used.
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On the meta subject of skin in the game:
In terms of the object level of transgender, I think it comes down to how skeptical you are that gender identity and their definitions describe a real thing that exists; or if they are just mouth noises to obtain a particular outcome. For example, if trans agenda is just a "give into my desire" policy, it's not coherent to talk about correctness.
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Here are some relevant definitions via Google:
You hear this argument:
so much because, by those definitions, that is what gender / gender identity is. If you accept those definitions then its not even an argument, its an extension of the definition. You cannot by those definitions have any input on that person's gender / gender identity as it is solely that own person's feeling.
If this was any other form of identity then maybe, but again it comes down to the premises accepted. If you accept the definitions the conclusion is foregone, it is smuggled in.
As with everything trans related you will get a much clearer picture by questioning the premises and definitions set forth by the troons than by arguing within them. Don't argue within a frame that is incoherent and solely made up to bamboozle you, reject the premises.
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If you flip flop from one thing to another, with every time it being something new, like a kid who doesn't know what he wants to be when he grows up then I don't think that's reliable.
But if you consistently think about something but then find a reason not do to do it, until it comes up again in the future, then I would say that counts. If you want to be a girl as a kid, a teen, a young adult, and an adult, and is a persistent nagging that you can never get rid of, only suppress temporarily then it can be something else.
But really the biggest factor is also simply doing something. Not just wishing to be a girl, but going about doing that. Actually learning makeup, how to dressing well, and voice training to speak more femininely.
Obviously there's persistent thoughts that should be suppressed for the social good, but in general, transitioning doesn't harm anyone else, so if it improves your quality of life, it's fine.
I mean, factually people are out to get you if you're trans. It is a choice that will lower your future life prospects in many ways. People will shit on online far more than if you're just a man. As a man you're invisible, as a transwoman you're a living example of the culture war.
If you don't pass, you will be judged for it, and will likely get less/worse jobs and worse dating prospects as a result. Some things like professional sports will essentially be cut off for the rest of your life.
In general, considering the cost of the act, if you feel bad enough that it outweighs all these risks, I see no reason why I would be against transitioning, and calling people by whatever pronouns they want.
The same is true if you cover yourself with tattoos, or get a billion piercings and blue half-shaved hair. The reason this happens isn't because you're trans, it's because you look ridiculous. It used to be trivially understood that, in polite society, you should put some effort into making yourself presentable. It's doing trans people a disservice to pretend that this norm shouldn't apply to them (when it always will - it's human nature).
Okay, I'll bite. Why are tattoos, numerous piercings, or a dyed undercut inherently ridiculous? Genuinely.
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