David Halperin’s How To Be Gay is an insightful work of queer theory by the only queer theorist who understands how to write a coherent English sentence.
It's a good argument, and yes, queer theory has struggled with the term queer since the dawn of time. This is why certain queer scenes work much better than the generalistic high school GS Alliance, because it's about want: wanting leather, wanting to write slash fiction in peace, wanting to hang somebody up by their feet.
However, the beautiful umbrella of 'gay identity' or 'queer identify' is a way of operating on a path before you know your desires. Desiring is hard, pitching tent in an identity is easy. I suppose you could say that this in itself is the desire for something other than straight cis Ness. However, I feel that falls short.
On the other hand, it actually allows for a mass to spring up that has not historically existed: we're making up 14-25% of the population, I hear! Who are we? No idea, but we're killing the numbers game - which is in large part, an exercise in empathy. Like, I think I rarely desire the same thing some straight trans woman do, we almost desire the opposite. Except we both desire to break free from an oppression by the straight cis majority. And that's a good desire to share. Thus, queer as an identity does work, in certain cases.
Ah, I actually ment the book itself, I wasn't trying this shade ;) Also, since you're here - thanks for the blog! Have been reading you for years back in the beginning of the thing of things days and you actually answered one of my advice questions - it was good advice, thanks again :D
Okay, but, like… men can in fact wear makeup and dresses and gossip on the phone with female friends. Transitioning just for those things isn't unethical or anything, but it's silly, like summiting Everest when you just want a stepladder. And of course most trans people's reaction to "but that's silly, just do those things" is that those things aren't enough, they want transition itself.
Now, sure, you could say that you want some feminine behaviours (makeup etc.), and some parts of the social role in mainstream society (bank tellers etc.), and some physical traits of an oestrogen-dominant hormone balance (breasts), and that transition is the easiest way to get that combo. But most trans people seem to want (indeed, often to very badly need) to be seen as their target gender — for example, trans women often feel happy about being harassed outside abortion clinics or about being catcalled, because it's proof of being seen as women, even though they would prefer not to be treated that way. You yourself have some posts about wanting to be read as non-binary.
It's also not a coincidence that wanting to be seen as a woman, wanting female sex traits, and liking feminine things like bikinis (or more complicatedly feminine things like being butch in a lesbian way rather than a manly way), tend to go together: this points to a single "gender identity" cause of all 3.
Also: there are socially inappropriate occasions for sundresses?! I thought they were suitable for all occasions, like button-down shirts.
Yeah, I agree - this is about identity, not desire.
I think by "gossip on the phone with female friends," the trans woman who wanted that was referring to the specific way women gossip among themselves, which is part of being seen as a woman and being treated as one.
This post made me think a bit again of how i didnt figure out that im gay untill a few years ago.
Im raised mormon and super used to fighting against my human nature and desires.
Despite having more teen experiences about attraction to men being positive, it never occured to me that i might be gay. I never even googled “gay porn” until i was 21
You have to in a sense want to want something to allow yourself an identity.
"Soon after the thrill wore off, I realized that Magic is a colossally boring game."
<overly dramatic>
Oh my god, you poor child, what happened to you? Did someone play Stax or Storm Combo against you too many times? Did you get stuck with a small collection and found yourself unable to do anything but play the same slightly modified starter decks against each other? Oh, never to feel the excitement of the game-winning topdeck at the last possible moment, the validation of seeing the plans you made during deckbuilding pay off, the tension of testing your intellect, skill, and preparation against worthy opponents - that would be a truly tragic fate indeed...
</overly dramatic>
I've loved Magic since I first played it in the mid 1990s, and one thing it's never been to me is boring; I've had many extremely intense experiences, both positive and negative, as a result of playing Magic. I wonder what made your experience so different?
I think gender identity is useful in a purely scientific sense.
Until quite recently, it was standard practice to transition infant males into females if their genitals were very small or absent. The thought was that it was better psychologically to be a normal, though infertile woman than a guy without a dick. You may have heard of the infamous David, but he was far from the only one.
Thing is: a very large part of such people have ended up "de-transitioning". Often they declare themselves boys at an extremely young age. They were overwhelmingly attracted to women.
If that's not "gender identity", I don't know what it is. I don't think everyone has one - I can believe some people could be transitioned at birth and be completely fine - but I certainly think "it" is a psychological thing that exists.
You might like Ozy's posts on "Cis by Default" where he talks about this phenomenon, points out about half of the people who had this happen suffered greatly while the other half seemed fine, and theorizes that about half the people out there have no gender identity at all and are just cis by default.
Multiple commentators have alluded to it, but are you now walking back your position from "Cis by default"? You then described gender identity as "the subjective internal sense of oneself as male, female, or nonbinary" implicitly assuming it's a real thing, but now you're saying it's "almost entirely epiphenomenal, affecting nothing except maybe pronoun choice."
You're acknowledging a core objection levied by those (myself included) who did not believe gender identity to be a real or coherent phenomenon.
Yeah, it really seems like Ozy is walking that back, which is a shame.
I'm confused why you are saying gender identity is not a real phenomenon. Some people do describe themselves as having a subjective internal sense of themselves as a man, a woman, or nonbinary, so it is an actual phenomenon, even though it's probably more complicated than "male brain" vs "female brain."
So you seem to not understand gender identity. It's an experience that some people have, and it's an internal feeling. It has nothing whatsoever to do with gender stereotypes.
Example: a feminine trans man who feels a very strong sense of identifying as a man, but is very feminine in every way, and wants to stay very feminine in every way.
I really liked your "Cis by Default" post where you point out that about half of people don't have any gender identity. I think that makes more sense than this one, where you seem to completely deny gender identity for everyone.
I don't think this is denying gender identity. It's suggesting that what gender identity is is a bundle of desires that can seem silly when you list them in plain english. It's politically useful to use a more bloodless term to describe those desires, and to make it seem like the identity is a primitive unit of a person's psychology.
If I had to explain my male identity to a group of hostile radical feminists, I probably wouldn't say "I really strongly want to fuck hot girls, win arm wrestles, and be dominant" even if that's true
Saying that it's a bundle of desires, rather than a primitive unit, is denying gender identity.
I realize that some people, like Ozy, don't have a gender identity, but instead have a bundle of desires... but that doesn't mean that people who actually do have that primitive unit don't have a gender identity.
For many people with a gender identity, it's not a bundle of desires at all. It's just that, an identity, a feeling about who you are.
Comparing this with "gay" is silly because "gay" is not an identity at all, it's just a description of a man who's attracted to men.
When did Ozy start taking hormones? The last paragraph here reads to me someone with a lot of testosterone talking about someone (their previous self in this case) who didnt have a lot.
> It’s scary to want, even at the best of times. Scarier if, as Andrea Long Chu says, you don’t want what you should. It feels safe to retreat to an identity that’s almost a tautology, to not stand in front of an uncaring world and say that you will take what you want, because you want it and you can.
I wouldn't normally bother to comment, but "And—to be perfectly frank—many straight people, even quite tolerant straight people, want to throw up when they think too hard about what two men do together in bed" seems like such a intellectually lazy way to characterize anyone.
There are ample quantities of weirdo (or kinky or or or) straight people whose bedroom activities make normie gays blush (or vomit). Unless "straight" is meant to be a synonym for "staid" or "homophobic" or "people who attend megachurch services"?? Any "gay" sex act is certainly enjoyed by a certain segment of any other demographic. Even - gasp - by straight women.
There are merely people with varying levels of tolerance for sex acts they themselves don't participate in.
The status of gender identity in this view does not justify medical treatment except if gender dysphoria would lead to serious harm which transition would resolve, and neither of those claims is backed up, despite popular opinion. I know this is only your perspective and I think it's an honest one, but I also wish allies would engage with such posts because with all due respect it gives a very wishy-washy and confused outlook. You seem to be arguing for some consumer choice transhumanist model of trans. I think medicine should have a normative stance of not treating people without good evidence, which includes a coherent model of what trans is. Can you take the big step and say maybe lots of adolescents are confused about identity and should be encouraged to accept themselves within medical treatment? I don't mean to seem harsh but I think we need the floaty edges to be sharpened up to be able to discuss coherently.
> I think medicine should have a normative stance of not treating people without good evidence, [...]
yes (as long as you have some kind of plan for new treatments, where you necessarily won't have perfect evidence that they work without at some point treating people with them)
> [...] which includes a coherent model of what trans is.
no! All you need evidence of is that trans people suffer when you don't treat them, and stop suffering when you do. I would argue that for many, maybe nearly all medical phenomena we have a pretty inadequate explanation of what's "really going on" biologically, but we have treatments that have been verified to work and that's really the most we can hope for.
Trans is incoherent in a different way than medical science not really knowing why Prozac works but having some empirical evidence it does. Trans is confused between an idea that we have a gender identity essence/soul, or that it's a human rights choice to be trans, or it is gender dysphoria (psychological) that for some reason we treat with medicine as a last resort. Prozac is known to affect the brain, and serotonin is known to be related to depression so the medical model is not entirely relying on empirical well being to justify it's use. Trans doesn't even have this basic sketch of aetiology. It is treating a psychological condition with endocrinology which is very weird. Notably there is also no good evidence for it's success.
First of all, a consenting adult does not need justification to put a chemical into their body, especially ones as safe as testosterone and estrogen.
Second, it's not the case that "trans is confused" - trans people have all different reasons for transitioning. But why are you assuming that it's a "psychological condition"?
The medical model justifies treatment as trying to resolve gender dysphoria, a psychological condition under DSM. There is nothing wrong with the body but rather a mental state of incongruence or dissatisfaction or obsessive thoughts. That is how medical insurance is justified, even for adults.
Presumably you might consider it a cosmetic change based on preference of appearance, but I would argue a person trying to be something they are not is already a psychological problem. It's not like making a nose smaller or adopting a tattoo identity.
Also estrogen and testosterone have health risks including increased risk of heart problems and osteoporosis and conditions like vaginal atrophy for women taking testosterone.
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with wanting to be like your favorite celebrity but actually transitioning for it seems like a case of "over-fitting". Like one should learn what are the relevant aspects of what makes one's heros heros and emulate that. Otherwise it's like trying to become a billionaire by following a billionaires breakfast routine. It becomes cargo cult. Now I think kids are supposed to engage in cargo cult emulations of their desired activities but part of the maturation process is separating the incidental details from the effective ones (and that's difficult, but it's also what lets you actually do the thing, assuming the thing is what you actually want to do)
I would disagree that gender identity being almost epiphenomenal is more defensible. A lot of anti-trans rhetoric that I've seen targets that. I've encountered a lot of people who argue that trans identities are ridiculous because having an epiphenonmenal identity is unfalsifiable and meaningless. Epiphenomenal identities might protect from some attacks, but they open you up to other attacks that are probably even worse.
The relative defensibility of gender identity vs desire seems less straightforward than how you present it here. I feel like one needs to draw out three distinct issues:
1. The "On Liking Women" paragraph is somewhat ambiguous about what it means to transition "for" these things. The simplest interpretation would be that each of the listed things give some constant utility benefit. (I'm kind of trying to get away from the habit of modelling everything in Bayesian decision theory, but in this case it still seems like crispest language for it.) But if they each give some constant utility benefit but vary a lot on costs (e.g. lipstick is a cheap product whereas HRT comes with fertility and health issues), then it is natural to try and focus on the options that have lower costs, or in other words "you don't have to be a woman to cry at movies".
Two major complications here:
* The utility benefits might *not* be the same for each option, for instance if breasts are much more important than lipstick, then the cheapness of lipstick isn't very helpful. However, this also means that the lower-utility options are much less of an explanation for why one transitions.
* Treating the utility linearly from the listed things might not even be accurate at all. If e.g. these are more meant as proxies that can help unlock certain activities or themes (such as "being like Gerard Way"), then many individual things like testosterone can be necessary-but-not-sufficient, meaning that maybe a proper explanation would include them all, but one cannot talk about their cost/benefit ratio per item.
2. "Gender identity" isn't exactly defensible so much as it is uninformative and subtextually rejecting any option for discourse in the area. For instance, for a lot of "gender identity" talk (not all of it), if you take it literally it ends up referring to something like a delusional disorder. Now educated people know that you are not supposed to take it literally, or at least that you are supposed to pretend not to notice the literal meaning, and that it is rude to call trans people delusional, so you wouldn't do that explicitly. Plus once the delusional disorder framing comes in, it's very easy to jump to a different framing that's less based on "I feel that I am a woman" and more based on "I want to be a woman & don't want to be a man".
So in a sense I agree that the gender identity framing is indicative that the conversation will not let attacks land, but I don't think it's because that framing is particularly defensible but rather that the people who take that framing have dug in their heels against attacks from the beginning, whereas your desire framing instead opens up the discourse and dumps lots of information into it.
3. The "attacker" often has an etiological theory, a political fish to fry, a neurotic psychodrama, or similar. Rather than defending by attempting to explain oneself, it would often be more relevant to prompt the attacker to lay out their theory, and then say "no, that doesn't apply in this case" (assuming they don't have any strong argument for this).
I feel like it's got to be wildly nonlinear utilities. Wearing lipstick with breasts is much nicer than without breasts, I reckon. Crying at the movies while looking like a woman is probably a nicer experience than crying at the movies while looking like a man, etc.
Note that for the nonlinearity, it's not the niceness of the experience that matters, but rather the niceness of the experience-difference. Like if wearing lipstick with breasts is much nicer than without breasts, but not wearing lipstick with breasts is also much nicer than not wearing lipstick without breasts, then that's just that the utility benefit from having breasts is big.
If you stare directly at the sun, you will go blind, but if you stare directly at the "The sun is a giant ball of hydrogen that is constantly undergoing fusion and emitting light", you will not go blind. Therefore there is a difference between the sun and a description of the sun.
In most situations I feel there's reward in presenting a gender-congruent package. This goes both for appearance (not that there's androgenous presentations that work) and then for behaviors consistent with what people expect from your appearance.
I'd expect that when walking around an average city adding lipstick makes people generally friendlier to you if you have breasts and no beard, and generally less friendly if you have a beard and no breasts. Similarly I expect crying in public to elicit more favorable reactions the more you present as a woman, etc.
For lipstick, that is true. And here we kind of get into the attacker's fish to fry, because a classical fish is the idea that sex-atypical people are forced to transition by societal gender norms. This basically induces a directionality to it, where there's one set of gender nonconforming desires that one has because of some reason unrelated to this dynamic, and then these desires presumably induce more general desire to transition.
There's kind of a Piranha theorem/complexity penalty thing going on, where it is exponentially improbable for this original set of gender nonconforming desires to be both independent of each other and sufficiently numerous that there's not a small number of key factors for the person.
If there's a small number of key factors, then the relevance of the attacker's fish really depends a lot on what these factors are. For instance if one *really* cares about wearing lipstick and transitions fully medically etc because of that, that seems very different from if one *really* cares about having female hormones, accidentally boymode fails, and then transitions socially to reduce friction.
Though my general impression is that these are typically very much not independent of each other, and instead a substantial part of the pool (e.g. wearing lipstick, being someone's girlfriend, using female sex toys, wearing dresses, and having breasts) are highly correlated, beyond that which comes from gender norm concerns. In such a case, the gender norm issue doesn't really seem helpful for the center of what's going on.
Now, as for crying in public, I think it also depends because there is a distinction between crying at funerals vs crying at movies vs crying because one is facing adversaries vs crying because one's life is going nowhere. The gender discrimination seems bigger to me later in the list than earlier in the list (possibly with the exception of the last item, which I'm not sure where to put).
I think most people don't transition because of gender norms, but because of gender identity - that is, they'd still want to transition if they were on a desert island, or completely nongendered society.
It's a good argument, and yes, queer theory has struggled with the term queer since the dawn of time. This is why certain queer scenes work much better than the generalistic high school GS Alliance, because it's about want: wanting leather, wanting to write slash fiction in peace, wanting to hang somebody up by their feet.
However, the beautiful umbrella of 'gay identity' or 'queer identify' is a way of operating on a path before you know your desires. Desiring is hard, pitching tent in an identity is easy. I suppose you could say that this in itself is the desire for something other than straight cis Ness. However, I feel that falls short.
On the other hand, it actually allows for a mass to spring up that has not historically existed: we're making up 14-25% of the population, I hear! Who are we? No idea, but we're killing the numbers game - which is in large part, an exercise in empathy. Like, I think I rarely desire the same thing some straight trans woman do, we almost desire the opposite. Except we both desire to break free from an oppression by the straight cis majority. And that's a good desire to share. Thus, queer as an identity does work, in certain cases.
PS: horrible boom title from a marketing perspective, this thing is almost non - Googleable
Substack is poorly indexed by Google regardless, sadly.
Ah, I actually ment the book itself, I wasn't trying this shade ;) Also, since you're here - thanks for the blog! Have been reading you for years back in the beginning of the thing of things days and you actually answered one of my advice questions - it was good advice, thanks again :D
Okay, but, like… men can in fact wear makeup and dresses and gossip on the phone with female friends. Transitioning just for those things isn't unethical or anything, but it's silly, like summiting Everest when you just want a stepladder. And of course most trans people's reaction to "but that's silly, just do those things" is that those things aren't enough, they want transition itself.
Now, sure, you could say that you want some feminine behaviours (makeup etc.), and some parts of the social role in mainstream society (bank tellers etc.), and some physical traits of an oestrogen-dominant hormone balance (breasts), and that transition is the easiest way to get that combo. But most trans people seem to want (indeed, often to very badly need) to be seen as their target gender — for example, trans women often feel happy about being harassed outside abortion clinics or about being catcalled, because it's proof of being seen as women, even though they would prefer not to be treated that way. You yourself have some posts about wanting to be read as non-binary.
It's also not a coincidence that wanting to be seen as a woman, wanting female sex traits, and liking feminine things like bikinis (or more complicatedly feminine things like being butch in a lesbian way rather than a manly way), tend to go together: this points to a single "gender identity" cause of all 3.
Also: there are socially inappropriate occasions for sundresses?! I thought they were suitable for all occasions, like button-down shirts.
Yeah, I agree - this is about identity, not desire.
I think by "gossip on the phone with female friends," the trans woman who wanted that was referring to the specific way women gossip among themselves, which is part of being seen as a woman and being treated as one.
This post made me think a bit again of how i didnt figure out that im gay untill a few years ago.
Im raised mormon and super used to fighting against my human nature and desires.
Despite having more teen experiences about attraction to men being positive, it never occured to me that i might be gay. I never even googled “gay porn” until i was 21
You have to in a sense want to want something to allow yourself an identity.
I wonder if theres something here.
Hm
Sorry for a very incoherent comment
"Soon after the thrill wore off, I realized that Magic is a colossally boring game."
<overly dramatic>
Oh my god, you poor child, what happened to you? Did someone play Stax or Storm Combo against you too many times? Did you get stuck with a small collection and found yourself unable to do anything but play the same slightly modified starter decks against each other? Oh, never to feel the excitement of the game-winning topdeck at the last possible moment, the validation of seeing the plans you made during deckbuilding pay off, the tension of testing your intellect, skill, and preparation against worthy opponents - that would be a truly tragic fate indeed...
</overly dramatic>
I've loved Magic since I first played it in the mid 1990s, and one thing it's never been to me is boring; I've had many extremely intense experiences, both positive and negative, as a result of playing Magic. I wonder what made your experience so different?
I just don't like competitive games!
...
Story checks out...
I think gender identity is useful in a purely scientific sense.
Until quite recently, it was standard practice to transition infant males into females if their genitals were very small or absent. The thought was that it was better psychologically to be a normal, though infertile woman than a guy without a dick. You may have heard of the infamous David, but he was far from the only one.
Thing is: a very large part of such people have ended up "de-transitioning". Often they declare themselves boys at an extremely young age. They were overwhelmingly attracted to women.
If that's not "gender identity", I don't know what it is. I don't think everyone has one - I can believe some people could be transitioned at birth and be completely fine - but I certainly think "it" is a psychological thing that exists.
You might like Ozy's posts on "Cis by Default" where he talks about this phenomenon, points out about half of the people who had this happen suffered greatly while the other half seemed fine, and theorizes that about half the people out there have no gender identity at all and are just cis by default.
Desire, huh...
I can't quite explain why, but I have the feeling that this is one of these posts that I will still be thinking about, four years from now.
Multiple commentators have alluded to it, but are you now walking back your position from "Cis by default"? You then described gender identity as "the subjective internal sense of oneself as male, female, or nonbinary" implicitly assuming it's a real thing, but now you're saying it's "almost entirely epiphenomenal, affecting nothing except maybe pronoun choice."
You're acknowledging a core objection levied by those (myself included) who did not believe gender identity to be a real or coherent phenomenon.
Yeah, it really seems like Ozy is walking that back, which is a shame.
I'm confused why you are saying gender identity is not a real phenomenon. Some people do describe themselves as having a subjective internal sense of themselves as a man, a woman, or nonbinary, so it is an actual phenomenon, even though it's probably more complicated than "male brain" vs "female brain."
Because unless it is anchored upon confirming to gender stereotypes, it's otherwise an empty referent: https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/in-this-house-we-believe-in-gender
I just don't think it is. Plenty of trans people don't match with gender stereotypes.
This is unresponsive
It's not, but I'll explain further:
So you seem to not understand gender identity. It's an experience that some people have, and it's an internal feeling. It has nothing whatsoever to do with gender stereotypes.
Example: a feminine trans man who feels a very strong sense of identifying as a man, but is very feminine in every way, and wants to stay very feminine in every way.
There are plenty of people like that.
I really liked your "Cis by Default" post where you point out that about half of people don't have any gender identity. I think that makes more sense than this one, where you seem to completely deny gender identity for everyone.
I don't think this is denying gender identity. It's suggesting that what gender identity is is a bundle of desires that can seem silly when you list them in plain english. It's politically useful to use a more bloodless term to describe those desires, and to make it seem like the identity is a primitive unit of a person's psychology.
If I had to explain my male identity to a group of hostile radical feminists, I probably wouldn't say "I really strongly want to fuck hot girls, win arm wrestles, and be dominant" even if that's true
But that is denying gender identity!
Saying that it's a bundle of desires, rather than a primitive unit, is denying gender identity.
I realize that some people, like Ozy, don't have a gender identity, but instead have a bundle of desires... but that doesn't mean that people who actually do have that primitive unit don't have a gender identity.
For many people with a gender identity, it's not a bundle of desires at all. It's just that, an identity, a feeling about who you are.
Comparing this with "gay" is silly because "gay" is not an identity at all, it's just a description of a man who's attracted to men.
When did Ozy start taking hormones? The last paragraph here reads to me someone with a lot of testosterone talking about someone (their previous self in this case) who didnt have a lot.
Last paragraph? You mean:
> It’s scary to want, even at the best of times. Scarier if, as Andrea Long Chu says, you don’t want what you should. It feels safe to retreat to an identity that’s almost a tautology, to not stand in front of an uncaring world and say that you will take what you want, because you want it and you can.
How? I don't understand.
The truth is never transphobic but trans are homophobic !
I wouldn't normally bother to comment, but "And—to be perfectly frank—many straight people, even quite tolerant straight people, want to throw up when they think too hard about what two men do together in bed" seems like such a intellectually lazy way to characterize anyone.
There are ample quantities of weirdo (or kinky or or or) straight people whose bedroom activities make normie gays blush (or vomit). Unless "straight" is meant to be a synonym for "staid" or "homophobic" or "people who attend megachurch services"?? Any "gay" sex act is certainly enjoyed by a certain segment of any other demographic. Even - gasp - by straight women.
There are merely people with varying levels of tolerance for sex acts they themselves don't participate in.
The status of gender identity in this view does not justify medical treatment except if gender dysphoria would lead to serious harm which transition would resolve, and neither of those claims is backed up, despite popular opinion. I know this is only your perspective and I think it's an honest one, but I also wish allies would engage with such posts because with all due respect it gives a very wishy-washy and confused outlook. You seem to be arguing for some consumer choice transhumanist model of trans. I think medicine should have a normative stance of not treating people without good evidence, which includes a coherent model of what trans is. Can you take the big step and say maybe lots of adolescents are confused about identity and should be encouraged to accept themselves within medical treatment? I don't mean to seem harsh but I think we need the floaty edges to be sharpened up to be able to discuss coherently.
> I think medicine should have a normative stance of not treating people without good evidence, [...]
yes (as long as you have some kind of plan for new treatments, where you necessarily won't have perfect evidence that they work without at some point treating people with them)
> [...] which includes a coherent model of what trans is.
no! All you need evidence of is that trans people suffer when you don't treat them, and stop suffering when you do. I would argue that for many, maybe nearly all medical phenomena we have a pretty inadequate explanation of what's "really going on" biologically, but we have treatments that have been verified to work and that's really the most we can hope for.
Trans is incoherent in a different way than medical science not really knowing why Prozac works but having some empirical evidence it does. Trans is confused between an idea that we have a gender identity essence/soul, or that it's a human rights choice to be trans, or it is gender dysphoria (psychological) that for some reason we treat with medicine as a last resort. Prozac is known to affect the brain, and serotonin is known to be related to depression so the medical model is not entirely relying on empirical well being to justify it's use. Trans doesn't even have this basic sketch of aetiology. It is treating a psychological condition with endocrinology which is very weird. Notably there is also no good evidence for it's success.
First of all, a consenting adult does not need justification to put a chemical into their body, especially ones as safe as testosterone and estrogen.
Second, it's not the case that "trans is confused" - trans people have all different reasons for transitioning. But why are you assuming that it's a "psychological condition"?
The medical model justifies treatment as trying to resolve gender dysphoria, a psychological condition under DSM. There is nothing wrong with the body but rather a mental state of incongruence or dissatisfaction or obsessive thoughts. That is how medical insurance is justified, even for adults.
Presumably you might consider it a cosmetic change based on preference of appearance, but I would argue a person trying to be something they are not is already a psychological problem. It's not like making a nose smaller or adopting a tattoo identity.
Also estrogen and testosterone have health risks including increased risk of heart problems and osteoporosis and conditions like vaginal atrophy for women taking testosterone.
Should be 'without' not 'within' above...
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with wanting to be like your favorite celebrity but actually transitioning for it seems like a case of "over-fitting". Like one should learn what are the relevant aspects of what makes one's heros heros and emulate that. Otherwise it's like trying to become a billionaire by following a billionaires breakfast routine. It becomes cargo cult. Now I think kids are supposed to engage in cargo cult emulations of their desired activities but part of the maturation process is separating the incidental details from the effective ones (and that's difficult, but it's also what lets you actually do the thing, assuming the thing is what you actually want to do)
I would disagree that gender identity being almost epiphenomenal is more defensible. A lot of anti-trans rhetoric that I've seen targets that. I've encountered a lot of people who argue that trans identities are ridiculous because having an epiphenonmenal identity is unfalsifiable and meaningless. Epiphenomenal identities might protect from some attacks, but they open you up to other attacks that are probably even worse.
After loving your "Cis by Default" posts, this feels like a step backwards.
Saying that gender identity is a bundle of desires, rather than a primitive unit, is denying gender identity.
Some people, like you, may not have a gender identity, but instead have a bundle of desires.
But for many people with a gender identity, it's not a bundle of desires at all. It's just that, an identity, a feeling about who you are.
Comparing this with "gay" is silly because "gay" is not an identity at all, it's just a description of a man who's attracted to men.
The relative defensibility of gender identity vs desire seems less straightforward than how you present it here. I feel like one needs to draw out three distinct issues:
1. The "On Liking Women" paragraph is somewhat ambiguous about what it means to transition "for" these things. The simplest interpretation would be that each of the listed things give some constant utility benefit. (I'm kind of trying to get away from the habit of modelling everything in Bayesian decision theory, but in this case it still seems like crispest language for it.) But if they each give some constant utility benefit but vary a lot on costs (e.g. lipstick is a cheap product whereas HRT comes with fertility and health issues), then it is natural to try and focus on the options that have lower costs, or in other words "you don't have to be a woman to cry at movies".
Two major complications here:
* The utility benefits might *not* be the same for each option, for instance if breasts are much more important than lipstick, then the cheapness of lipstick isn't very helpful. However, this also means that the lower-utility options are much less of an explanation for why one transitions.
* Treating the utility linearly from the listed things might not even be accurate at all. If e.g. these are more meant as proxies that can help unlock certain activities or themes (such as "being like Gerard Way"), then many individual things like testosterone can be necessary-but-not-sufficient, meaning that maybe a proper explanation would include them all, but one cannot talk about their cost/benefit ratio per item.
2. "Gender identity" isn't exactly defensible so much as it is uninformative and subtextually rejecting any option for discourse in the area. For instance, for a lot of "gender identity" talk (not all of it), if you take it literally it ends up referring to something like a delusional disorder. Now educated people know that you are not supposed to take it literally, or at least that you are supposed to pretend not to notice the literal meaning, and that it is rude to call trans people delusional, so you wouldn't do that explicitly. Plus once the delusional disorder framing comes in, it's very easy to jump to a different framing that's less based on "I feel that I am a woman" and more based on "I want to be a woman & don't want to be a man".
So in a sense I agree that the gender identity framing is indicative that the conversation will not let attacks land, but I don't think it's because that framing is particularly defensible but rather that the people who take that framing have dug in their heels against attacks from the beginning, whereas your desire framing instead opens up the discourse and dumps lots of information into it.
3. The "attacker" often has an etiological theory, a political fish to fry, a neurotic psychodrama, or similar. Rather than defending by attempting to explain oneself, it would often be more relevant to prompt the attacker to lay out their theory, and then say "no, that doesn't apply in this case" (assuming they don't have any strong argument for this).
I feel like it's got to be wildly nonlinear utilities. Wearing lipstick with breasts is much nicer than without breasts, I reckon. Crying at the movies while looking like a woman is probably a nicer experience than crying at the movies while looking like a man, etc.
Note that for the nonlinearity, it's not the niceness of the experience that matters, but rather the niceness of the experience-difference. Like if wearing lipstick with breasts is much nicer than without breasts, but not wearing lipstick with breasts is also much nicer than not wearing lipstick without breasts, then that's just that the utility benefit from having breasts is big.
A woman is just a collection of symbols. And so is everything else technically, but we're fixating on gender here
Wouldn't the collection of symbols be the *description* of reality rather than the reality itself?
In the modern conception of identity there's no difference between the thing and a description of the thing. Also see Baudrillard
If you stare directly at the sun, you will go blind, but if you stare directly at the "The sun is a giant ball of hydrogen that is constantly undergoing fusion and emitting light", you will not go blind. Therefore there is a difference between the sun and a description of the sun.
In most situations I feel there's reward in presenting a gender-congruent package. This goes both for appearance (not that there's androgenous presentations that work) and then for behaviors consistent with what people expect from your appearance.
I'd expect that when walking around an average city adding lipstick makes people generally friendlier to you if you have breasts and no beard, and generally less friendly if you have a beard and no breasts. Similarly I expect crying in public to elicit more favorable reactions the more you present as a woman, etc.
Interesting - are people generally friendlier to cis women when wearing lipstick? I'd be surprised.
And I suppose some of that depends on the color of lipstick...
For lipstick, that is true. And here we kind of get into the attacker's fish to fry, because a classical fish is the idea that sex-atypical people are forced to transition by societal gender norms. This basically induces a directionality to it, where there's one set of gender nonconforming desires that one has because of some reason unrelated to this dynamic, and then these desires presumably induce more general desire to transition.
There's kind of a Piranha theorem/complexity penalty thing going on, where it is exponentially improbable for this original set of gender nonconforming desires to be both independent of each other and sufficiently numerous that there's not a small number of key factors for the person.
If there's a small number of key factors, then the relevance of the attacker's fish really depends a lot on what these factors are. For instance if one *really* cares about wearing lipstick and transitions fully medically etc because of that, that seems very different from if one *really* cares about having female hormones, accidentally boymode fails, and then transitions socially to reduce friction.
Though my general impression is that these are typically very much not independent of each other, and instead a substantial part of the pool (e.g. wearing lipstick, being someone's girlfriend, using female sex toys, wearing dresses, and having breasts) are highly correlated, beyond that which comes from gender norm concerns. In such a case, the gender norm issue doesn't really seem helpful for the center of what's going on.
Now, as for crying in public, I think it also depends because there is a distinction between crying at funerals vs crying at movies vs crying because one is facing adversaries vs crying because one's life is going nowhere. The gender discrimination seems bigger to me later in the list than earlier in the list (possibly with the exception of the last item, which I'm not sure where to put).
Later in what list?
I think most people don't transition because of gender norms, but because of gender identity - that is, they'd still want to transition if they were on a desert island, or completely nongendered society.
I'm not familiar with any of the aquatic terminology in your post. Would you mind giving me a pointer on where I could read up on it?