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Notes -
I'm curious about how you're using "folklore" here. Do you consider any of the following to be folklore in the sense you've used here:
Fiat currency
The concept of debt
National borders
Adoptive parenthood
The line between a species and a subspecies
The line between a genus and a species
The concept of species
Laws
Rules of etiquette
Social hierarchies
Race
Skin color
Nationality
Citizenship
If you don't consider any of the above "folklore", do you consider them "real"? Until I understand exactly how you're using the term "folklore" here, I don't know if I can really say one thing or the other of the exercise you've done here. Do you believe that the "folkloric illusion" is stupid in other domains, or just in redneg? Do you believe that folklore requires evidence, or can cultures simply create castles in the sky that are locally relevant but seem strange to those outside those cultures? Do you think folklore can be important and useful, even if it isn't "real"?
Similarly, you make the assertion that "half the humans on this planet believe themselves to be the folkloric entity called 'namow'", but I'm curious how you would get to that assertion. Do you mean that if we properly map all folkloric entities in all cultures in some n-dimensional space, we would find a cluster somewhere that every culture would recognize they more or less have in common, and that in our field of redneg studies is called 'namow', and that each culture would independently identify the beliefs of 50% of humanity as being non-different from the proposition "I am a namow"?
Could we train a neural network for "namow" and "nam" and input empirical information we collect about individuals and train it to reliably classify people into these categories, in such a way that there would be broad agreement that the classifier accurately tracks namow-ness and nam-ness? Can a human brain be reliably trained to recognize namow-ness and nam-ness in at least some cultures?
No you are definitely either male or female biologically. Your internal feels aside. And although nationhood is a social construction by and large you can’t escape ethnicity either.
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Please tell me how you touch numbers in a bank account. And taking the money out and touching the notes isn't touching "currency", it's touching a physical representation of it that only holds value because society agree it does. It's no different to a case where a society gave every man a trinket and said manhood was defined by having the right to own that trinket. Sure, you can touch the trinket but what you aren't touching is the "male gender".
Suppose instead of offering you $10, I gave you BCC 10 (BurdensomeCount Coin) for a bunch of apples instead. Now you're probably less likely to make this trade, given that nobody else values BCC at all. So what's the difference between BCC and USD? The only difference is people feel that USD has value while people don't feel that way for BCC, hence you can trade USD for apples but not BCC. The reason this trade happens is because of the way people feel about USD. If there was a sudden collapse in confidence then 1USD would still be 1USD but people would be will to exchange a lot less tangible stuff for it. This difference in how much tangible stuff you can get per USD is all to do with how people feel about USD.
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You can touch the object we call "dollar bills" or "coins", but the idea that these things hold value is an "illusion" or "folklore" as you put it. Do you consider the idea of fiat currency to be a religion? You seem to have it out for redneg in particular, when, as you say in your post, there are a number of things on my list you consider "all in one's mind", yet you don't seem to consider these "religions" the same way you do "redneg."
I would argue you're not thinking very clearly about this. What you call "real authority" of a president is on just as shaky a ground as redneg. I think there are pragmatic arguments why having a president is useful, and there are descriptive statements one can make about what will likely happen if a president gives a particular person an order, but the idea that either of these means that a president has something that could be called "real authority" is a bit separate. Don't confuse your oughts and your is'es - a president is just a collective illusion, but that doesn't mean that a president isn't very important to everyday life or worth factoring into your decision making process.
My overall point is that many collective illusions are absolutely central to how people think about their lives and navigate the world. They might not be "real", but I would contend that they are often (not always) useful abstractions.
I haven't been doing that. I've been arguing something more along the lines of The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for Categories.
I make a sharp distinction between categories that more-or-less cut reality at the joints (like "dog", "male", "water") and man-made categories (like "science fiction", "pop music", "president", "American", "goth", etc.) Like you, I don't believe that I have a redneg identity. I'm fully on board with calling all man-made categories "illusions" or "folklore" if you want. What I have objected to in your presentation of your position is the fact that you seem to believe that redneg identity is different from other man-made categories or illusions. I don't actually think it's all that special - it's just more salient because of the modern political climate.
You brought up religion, and that is a good example of what I mean. I'm an atheist. I don't really have a "religious identity" as an atheist - I know that I don't believe in God, but it's much less of a "thing" than being a Christian or Jew would be, because those two identities involve positive beliefs, social groups, traditions, etc. However, I've evolved from being the New Atheist I once was, and have grown to have a much greater appreciation of the power of religion to act as a social glue to hold communities together. Books like "Legal Systems Very Different From Ours" and the concept of metis and signalling have helped me to appreciate the role that religion can have in a life, and how useful it can be to maintaining order and trust in society.
If you re-read what I have written throughout this thread, I think you will find that I've never said that man-made categories are "real" - I've always used words like "useful", "important", etc. And I do believe that they can be those things in certain circumstances. I have nowhere conflated real and non-real things, nor have I blurred distinctions between the real and the socially useful.
Maybe redneg identity isn't useful to you. In the same way a Jewish identity isn't useful to me because I'm not ethnically or religiously Jewish. But it would be silly to say that just because Judaism is made up (as I believe all religions are), that it's not an important part of many Jewish people's lives, and hasn't helped them stay together as a community for more than 3000 years. So too, I don't think we can discount that redneg identity is important to a number of snart people - I have seen first hand the community and joy in the snart community, and in the same way I can "justify" religious mutilation like circumcision through the lens of it being a form of expensive signalling, I think I can "justify" snart medical treatments in part as something that might help a person belong to the queer community (even apart from the possibility that it might alleviate psychological discomfort in some snart people.)
The problem I had with you calling redneg a "religion" is that I think that by that standard almost every man-made social category is a "religion." Sure, not every social group demands that you believe impossible absurdities, but plenty of them ask you to believe social facts that aren't part of material reality, like "there is a country called America, and its borders end here" or "100 cents equals a dollar" - facts that we made up, and which could have been otherwise if history had taken a different turn. India made up the concept of a caste system, Britain made up the idea of the British royal family, etc., etc. I think the main difference between you and I, is that I think these kinds of social fictions are extremely common, and "redneg ideology" isn't even a particularly strange or unusual example. The belief that "I was born a man, but I'm actually a namow" is no more absurd to me than "I have no biological relationship to this child, but I want to take care of them and be treated as their parent in all circumstances - please call me their 'adoptive father' or just 'father' for short."
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That's just normal, it doesn't set you apart from the general public. It's only unusual in that most people who encounter the concept of gender identity aren't introspective enough to think about whether they actually have an internal sense of such a thing and don't have enough contrarian tendencies to call bullshit. To quote a comment I made a year ago:
They know they're women because they remember looking at their body and they remember being taught that growing up, but do they think they have some internal sense of womanhood that is separate from those two things? Let alone one strong enough that they would make sacrifices on its behalf? As I mentioned in this comment, do you think the average person would turn down an offer like "everyone calls you the wrong pronoun for the rest of your life but you get $5,000", provided it didn't have any side-effects like messing up your romantic life?
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I mean, I could try to steel man the concept.
If you're a typical person, you probably have a good sense of where your body is in 3d-space. Even if you're not looking, if you're in a familiar environment you can reach your hand towards different objects like furniture and have reasonably good odds of getting within the ball park of those objects. This capacity to have a sense of where your body is and how it's moving in 3d-space is called proprioception.
Most people have an accurate proprioception about the world. But some people don't. One example is amputees, who sometimes experience phantom limbs which can include a proprioception that they have an arm somewhere in 3d-space that they do not.
It is possible that some people have genital-related proprioception disorders that make them feel like they have "phantom genitals" that they do not have. On this model, one form of gender dysphoria would be "phantom cross-sex genital proprioception" and cis people would be those who have correctly functioning "genital proprioception."
In this situation, the idea that one's proprioception is an "identity" would be a simplification used for others. After all, how do you explain the idea of "phantom genitals" to other people who haven't experienced this thing?
(Even if I allow for the possibility that this covers one kind of gender dysphoria, I tend to think there are many different kinds. Basically, being trans can be described behaviorally as seeking out cross-sex hormones, "cross-sex" cosmetic surgery and attempting to live a cross-sex social role. There are probably several causes of this kind of behavior.)
I find this comment extremely interesting - I actually am not a typical person with regards to proprioception. Specifically, in this domain, I am blind and have no sense of proprioception at all. I completely lack any sense of where my physical body is located in space, though I do still have a sense of touch and can get some approximation from that.
And for the record, not having any actual genital proprioception whatsoever didn't have any impact on my gender identity as far as I can tell. I remain cis, even though I actually do not have correctly functioning genital proprioception and hence would fall outside that category in your proposed classification (though I am of course aware that I am an extreme edge case).
Hm, what does that mean, exactly? If the proprioception information wasn't finding its way to your brain, [maybe i'm wrong but i doubt it] you wouldn't really be able to move in a coordinated way at all, or be able to walk. I guess by 'lack any sense' you mean a relative lack?
I have no conscious sense of proprioception and cannot tell where parts of my body are in the absence of other perceptions like touch or sight, and based on the accidents/mistakes I make, it seems that my subconscious also lacks this information. My brain is capable of processing a lot of this information visually - I'm ok as long as I can visually see my body, and I can vaguely approximate the location of a limb based on movement ( but not for long or consistently, any incidental movement induced by the environment doesn't get accounted for and throws me off balance). I have a lot of trouble performing certain body movements and I can't actually write or draw beyond a child's level, because slight shifts in the position of my elbow mean that I can't co-ordinate properly when it is out of sight and have to rely entirely on my wrists.
Okay, thanks, suppose my guess was wrong.
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Most of the focus is on social stuff like "misgendering" though. Which combined with the "everyone has a deeply-rooted gender identity but cis people are just fortunate enough to match it" model makes some predictions that are noticeably false. For instance it seems pretty common for trans activists to try to use "How would you feel if people were referring to you with the wrong pronoun all the time?" as an argument. This makes sense from their perspective but doesn't really work because normal people don't care that much, certainly not enough to become suicidal or the like. Women on the internet sometimes correct people who assume they're men, but it's not a big deal. At worst someone might take it as an insult (e.g. in cultures where calling a man a woman is a way to call him a coward who is failing to live up to his martial responsibilities as a man, or feminists who think assuming people are men is reflective of sexism).
If someone could press a button saying "everyone calls you the wrong pronoun for the rest of your life but you get $5,000", I think most would be happy to take that option. (Provided this was some sort of mystical change that didn't have side-effects like messing up your romantic life or making your friends think you've gone crazy.) Indeed, even "everyone thinks you're the opposite sex" wouldn't be a big deal if it wasn't for side-effects like messing with your romantic life, and of course nontransitioning trans people don't have those side effects (on the contrary, quite a few trans people end up blowing up their marriages). Which doesn't fit with the "cis people are mirror images of trans people" model, since gender identity is presented as being more important than that.
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Yes, I remember wondering if I was non-binary when I was about 25, simply because I didn't have this sense of "gender identity" that trans people apparently had. I just have my biological sex, which manifests in various ways and interacts with society in various ways. I'm comfortable my male sex organs/secondary sexual features in the same way I'm comfortable being tall, having two eyeballs, having feet etc. - they're familiar and useful (because women's sex organs/secondary sexual features are an awful lot of work/money: tampons, bras, wiping the right way, periods, back pain etc.).
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Uh, I think the answers to the questions in your last few paragraphs are generally "yes".
I assume OP had something in mind they were trying to say with this new terminology, so I'm not taking for granted that that is the case. In fact, they make the claim that:
So we are told:
namow and nam are "folklore" and also that they are illusory categories without precise divisions (is being folklore the same as being "illusory" or is a distinction intended here?)
That being snart is an "abnormal illusion", which confirms that the illusory nature of namow and nam
That this "folkloric illusion" is "stupid" because no one can come up with any evidence for it beyond sexual dimorphism
I think one issue is that the referent of a few phrases is a little ambiguous in OP's short post. If the "folkloric illusion" does indeed refer to the redneg-related ideas of namow and nam, then I don't know if I agree that the only evidence for redneg is "sexual dimorphism." To me, the evidence for redneg is the same as the evidence for htog(!) or ome(!) fashion - sure, the exact boundaries of htog and ome are hard to define, but that doesn't mean they're not real enough for people to form a social identity around. They really need to connect the dots of why they think "sexual dimorphism" proves anything one way or the other about redneg, since it seems to be a term related to sex and not redneg?
And given their final statement, are we to understand that OP is a redneg abolitionist? That they want to eliminate the concepts of namow and nam? What would that mean in practice? How would we treat snart people in a redneg-less society? Are snart namow namow, in a society where namow exist? If redneg is a "religion" are other concepts like noihsaf(!) and swal(!) religions as well?
I mean, I assume you could find neurons in someone's brain that correspond to their belief that "That girl hates my guts." Those neurons are real.
If you mean, 'does the proposition "That girl hates my guts" as believed by someone represent an accurate belief about the world?' That would depend on the empirical facts about whether the girl did, in fact, hate that person's guts. If the girl does hate that person's guts, then that belief is a true belief, and I would call it a reality, or at least an accurate reflection of reality. (The map is not the territory, after all.)
I would like to propose a different sentence, that I think better represents what I believe you mean by illusion. Please tell me if I'm on the wrong track. The sentence is: "I am an employee at McDonald's."
I think this gets at your idea of "illusion" because you could grind down the universe to its atoms, but you would never find "McDonald's" or "employees" anywhere. McDonald's is a fiction that allows large groups of people to coordinate their actions towards a common goal, and an "employee" is an abstraction describing a social relationship (always illusory) between two or more people. Similarly, if someone believes that, "I am a namow", they are declaring something about their internal sense of sex role (per your statement.) A sex role is an abstraction, like "McDonald's" or "employee" which describes a set of social relations, and I think people can be right or wrong about their internal sense of sex roles in a society. That is, a person's belief about their sex role can be an accurate reflection of reality. If someone believes "I am a namow" and they are a "namow" then their belief is an accurate reflection of reality.
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